From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you go into a business and see an organisational handbook... you're in trouble. When people spend too much time drawing up organisational rules and charts, they're spending less time with customers. Hierarchical structures are the death of flexibility, they are the death of agility and remove the distributed leadership needed to make business work.
The only value that government paper provides you at this point is, basically, the fact that if everything goes to 'hell in a handbasket' that you have some assets of value.
Most fundamentally, the subprime bubble was created by- a surfeit of global liquidity due to large current account surpluses in China and other emerging economies and easy global monetary policies; a flawed private mortgage securitization process that funnelled the liquidity into poorly underwritten mortgage and other loans; and weak regulatory oversight that failed to catch and rectify the problems in the securitization process.
Love it or hate it, we live in a furiously competitive world- and being just another face in the crowd simply won't help you get ahead.
Managing a hedge fund as a value-investor is a dream come true!
You need to hire people who are smart, ideally smarter than you. There's a reason Google, Apple and their peers are filled with PhD's. The smarter your team (whether academically, or in experience) the more they will deliver.
They don't just dive into a project; they begin by exploring its purpose. If they're working with a client, their first question is often, 'Why are you undertaking this project?' They don't move forward until they have a clear understanding of this 'why', dedicating considerable time to uncover its various facets.
The oral care industry and oral products is mainly made out of three or four companies that control 90% of oral care products in the world. All multibillion-dollar, multinational companies. I don't think these companies are stupid. They are run by very intelligent people, but I think the premise has been wrong.
There is a problem with business leaders and the economics profession where we have celebrated the gains from neoliberal policies whilst only paying lip-service to compensating those left-behind.
My first ask in any meeting wasn't for money or to put their name on something; it was simply for a second meeting, an opportunity to show them what we're doing and what we're building.
I feel it is the duty for every human and company to do something to either make their community, their city, their state, their country or the world a better place to live. You don't have to contribute financially, but rather your time, smile and good wishes to start the ball rolling. Time is a very valuable thing, when you contribute your time to others- you've contributed something of great value
Since 1998, the effective return to hedge-fund clients has only been 2.1% a year... never in the history of Finance was so much paid by so many for so little.