From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
My primary design philosophy involves putting the tools into the hands of the community, and thinking really hard about avoiding bottlenecks which require some 'top-down' intervention.
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.
I remember at Netflix, after we went public, the parking lot changed from old Volvos and station wagons to Mercedes' and BMW's. That really made me happy; not the cars per-say, but the fact that all those families could now send their kids to school and college.
If you don't empower your team, you are doing them a disservice and it's not about working long, long hours but working smartly, productively, and sharing the workload with others who you are able to empower.
Silence is, by definition, an absence—an absence of voice, opinion, and life. It begins so subtly that it often goes unnoticed. We start by withdrawing or withholding our genuine thoughts from conversations, replacing them with what we presume others want to hear. As it continues, silence essentially means we cannot fully be ourselves. We find ourselves editing parts of who we are, censoring our thoughts and feelings—and we do this to each other, often without realizing it.
When you're involved in conflict, you're not sane. You may start out being sane, and in those early stages it's certainly possible to mediate and arbitrate.
99.9% of the time, you are not in a burning building- and that is precisely the time to think about what you would do in that 0.1% of time when it is on fire. A lack of information and preparedness in an emergency or crisis can be the difference between carrying yourself through, and sometimes, catastrophic outcomes.
Alibaba's vision statement includes a mention of how long it wants to last, and that is specifically 102 years. 100 years sounds like a cliché, it doesn't sound special or memorable… 102 years sticks in your mind, and the reason for this specific figure is that Jack Ma wanted Alibaba to be the only internet company that spanned three centuries.
If you go into a new situation where you don't know anybody and you want to be more influential, don't look around the room and say hmmm… who can most help me here?… instead, look around and say hmmm…. Who can I most help here? You will put that person in a position where they will be standing on the balls of their feet to help you!
As founder(s) you cannot be scared of making tough decisions for the good of your business; the longer you let things lie, the tougher (and more expensive) it can be to resolve them.
What failure really means is that you are trying to live life, and the fact that you fail means that you are trying. As soon as you try to avoid failure, you are facing the wrong direction.
Success are not determined by who is the smartest in the room- it's determined by who's willing to make the sacrifices to succeed. When most people have an adversity they think, 'oh, I can't do this anymore…. I'm not good enough…' what we are taught to think is, 'oh hey, there's a brick wall, what's my way through, over, around or under it…'