From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You need to know the reason you're there at that surgical table with a knife in your hand. You have to be clear that you are using these sophisticated tools (tools which can cause a lot of harm) to fundamentally and primarily help that entity, that child in front of you.
You must surround yourself with great people, and as you grow, never forget the generosity gene. Building a great team is what this business game is all about. The team with the best players working together wins.
The only real competitive advantage that's durable is cost and innovation – as long as innovation happens along the trajectory that takes into account stakeholders, not just shareholders.
We need to challenge the notion that if you don't feel like a superhero, then you must not be the right person for the job. Today's most important challenges are met by teams of people, as opposed to a single superhero.
When you are a public company, you are all-but forced to think on a quarterly basis. That's how long people hold you on average, between 2-3 months is the average hold period for equity investors. It's therefore much more difficult to think in a long-term strategic way and increase value.
Success is different for everyone, but for me success has always been about finding meaning and personal fulfillment. While that may have meant different things at different times in my life, learning, making meaningful connections with people and helping others achieve this same level of satisfaction has been a sign of success for me.
It's not success we should be seeking but consonance, alignment, flow. When what we do actually matters to us. We are being called upon to solve a problem at hand, to use what we do best in the world, and in turn being rewarded for in a way that is meaningful to us.
We need to shift our thinking about what government does, and what civil servants do, away from this relentless focus on policy and ideology and onto project management and problem solving.
I don't think about myself as a woman in these contexts, I think about myself as a human. I feel like role model for all young people who wants to do science – not only girls.
Steve Jobs forced me to figure out what was important to me, and who I was. He demanded that everybody in the room had to be at the top of their game, the best in their field… He was challenging people every day to do their best work and rise above their own talents. He hired the most brilliant people and pushed them to go further.
We need companies to play by a different set of accountabilities, not just those that are related to performance. It's about creating legal accountability around the creation of value for stakeholders, not just shareholders. That's what changes the conversation in the boardroom.
We need to change our hearts and minds, not just our behaviours. Forget even the moral argument, discriminating is such a waste. It is from our diverse cultures and communities that we could find the cure for cancer, where we could find all of the solutions for some of our most pressing problems.