From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Fundamentally, we must slow-down the process of change. We should recognise that most change is not progress- and therefore, it is in our interests to slow down without interfering too much with actual solution making.
More important than picking specific industries, what matters is ensuring competitive and innovative companies that are able to compete in international markets.
What I've learnt is you can only do your best work when you're at the frontier. This is the space where I'm going to do my best work. Whether I succeed or fail, I am going to be the most creative, the most engaged, the most inspired when I'm at that edge.
What is especially compelling for us at Nissan with Formula E is that developing these cars generates a wealth of technical insights that benefit the future of electric vehicles—and vice versa. The flexibility inherent in electrification technology allows for a robust exchange of learnings between the sport and our core business.
In some ways, emulating birds would have held us back – yes it would have given us the drive and motivation, but we had to forget about flapping to develop the combustion engine driven plane!
At the level of individuals, teams, or even firms, knowledge grows and then saturates. It has a finite 'carrying capacity.' What is interesting is that while these individual units are finite, society at large looks infinite because of changes in the teams—the incumbents—that perform best.
Everyone on the team strongly believes in the mission. This is the one thing we want to work on in our lives, and multiple people share that same sentiment. We've fallen in love with a very stubborn technical challenge. Convincing others is always hard—it requires conviction on both sides. What we've demonstrated is small-team speed: speed in hiring, speed in getting strong results, and speed in refining our intellectual understanding.
Upon inquiry, I learned that we were using American technology, suitable for American roads but not Indian ones. So, the next step was understanding the market, and we went to the field, spoke to the truckers and understood their requirements and expectations.
Growing up in West Virginia, we were at the forefront economically— the chemical and coal mining center of the world. However, due to an inability to adapt to changing market dynamics and transitions, our position plummeted to the bottom ranks among the US states... I firmly advocate the idea of reinventing oneself every 5 years.
In December 2020, we published in the journal nature that we could turn on 3 genes in mice, that are normally only switched on in embryos. By doing this, we could reverse the age of complex tissues in adult mice. We used this system to restore eyesight to blind, old, mice!
For instance, while AI can generate images that appear real, it cannot create convincing backgrounds that can be geolocated, since they do not correspond to actual places.
Our core belief is in the immense potential of technology as a force multiplier, particularly when it's rendered accessible and intuitive. From the onset, we have viewed the internet through the lens of software, rather than merely brochureware.