From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There is no business without creativity. Creativity for me is the first condition to establish yourself as a leader in whatever you do in life.
We are now at the same crossroads, with impact. There is an interesting parallel here with 1933, when we introduced the GAAP. Until then, there had been no real transparency on profit! After the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929, investors sat-up and said 'hey, this is crazy!' and they got transparency through the adoption of GAAP.
At Dyson our philosophy has always been to invest in the long term. To power our 25 year pipeline of technology we have just announced a further £1.5 billion investment into new research and development on top of our current spending of £3 million a week. You cannot create disruptive technology without investing heavily in the long term.
The biggest challenge is a lack of confidence. Confidence is preventing businesses from investing significant amounts of their balance sheet strength, they simply do not feel they will get returns on that investment, and so they're holding cash.
What's remarkable about Israel's economy is that in the last few years we have situations which, in any other country, would have been totally disruptive. In the last couple of months alone we have seen literally hundreds of missiles and mortars fired at us from one of our neighbours... The incredible thing is that none of these threats have a measurable impact on our economy!
We have open and transparent pricing through our futures exchange- that means price is determined by buyers and sellers and not an 'official' selling price set by a producer.
For large corporations, globalization opened up opportunities without the correlate responsibilities which usually travel with that- so things that banks must do at home (in terms of being carefully regulated) they didn't have to do abroad... This took globalization out of balance, into a vicious cycle – and we're now dealing with the consequences of that.
Passion matters… It's rarely a straight-line to success, usually it's a roller-coaster.
When I was a journalist, you had to always have three sources, or they would not run the story. Now, according to 'sources', not even on-the-record, is good enough. Everyone wants to be first and often that leads to mistakes.
If you make it easy to steal from you, someone will. Every breach I've been involved with comes down to the fact that someone in the company did something they weren't supposed to or failed to do something they should have done.
There are individuals within organizations who seem untouchable, be they extraordinarily successful salespeople or powerhouse CEOs. These individuals often appear to be above the rules, even above the law. They're given latitude due to the exceptional value they bring to the organization.
Instead of looking at hoarded cash as being a 'rainy day fund' we need to view these balances as stores of economic growth. This cash represents potential investments, new jobs, new innovations and the potential for significant wealth creation and diffusion.