From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Many people say that if you're the brightest person in the room, you're in the wrong room – that's totally right. You need to bring in people with much more expertise than you to take the business forward. I started out making shoes by hand – I'm a shoemaker, not an intellectual.
I believe that the entrepreneurial life, even when running a large company, is a dual experience of joy and pain—two sides of the same coin. The joy lies in putting yourself out there and leading an organisation in a specific direction, but with that comes the burden of responsibility.
Power is the ability to affect others and get the outcomes you want – and that's true whether on the individual, national or international level. You can exert power in three ways. You can do it with coercion (sticks), you can do it with payments (carrots) and you can do it with soft power – through attraction.
Don't make the mistake of confusing net worth and self-worth.
Success for me has been the ability to change my life, change my family's life and help a lot of other people. Athletics has brought me fame and fortune and I enjoy using it to help those around me and those less fortunate.
The most common mistake is to stop challenging when things are going well. I recognise failure as not having made a business better than when you were first involved.
The plan is the lists, milestones and responsibilities- not the document that describes them.
The court is primarily interested in the effort made, in the attempt. That is what truly counts.
Endurance stays with you across everything, if you do it one place, you can do it anywhere. You're able to sustain because you've already trained your brain to do that.
It's very clear that the sole purpose of business is not just to make money for shareholders, but actually to look after their employees, their communities and their society. Businesses play a role in society, and they have a voice which they have to use. Silence is not an option.
As a team captain, you have to figure out how people work, you have to make sure you say the right thing to the right person… you have to know when to shout, when to listen, when to be tough and when to be kind. You have to realise that being captain does not give you a license to order people around; if people follow you, they follow you because they've decided to, not because they have to.
The idea that you will sit down with someone who's had 30 or 40 years of lived experience and then somehow get them to change their mind in one sitting is implausible.