From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Success, in my view, should be a state we inhabit, not just a distant goal we chase. If success is narrowly defined by tangible metrics like money, power, or fame, the benchmarks constantly shift, and satisfaction remains elusive.
Businesses, or rather their leadership, is often saddled with a set of problems and daily issues that prevents them from taking an objective view of their realities…forget the trees, often there is too much leaf watching to notice they are in a forest.
Culture is not aspirational, it's observational. It's not something you and your co-founders sit down, dream-up, put into PowerPoint, and create some posters from, for the break-out room. Culture, simply, is how you behave and how you treat your co-founders, employees, and customers.
The starting point is to realise that brand, in whatever type of organisation, is the most important and sustainable asset you've got. People may leave or die, buildings may dilapidate or fall down, products and services may become obsolete… The thing that lives on is brand.
Slowly, over the course of a decade, we built relationships by proving we weren't there to destroy luxury's heritage and its 'unspoken codes of conduct,' but actually to protect them and enable this industry to thrive. We were fashion insiders, and we just happened to be coders too!
Systems change is slow because it requires consensus that there is a system failure to start with, as well as the presence of a viable alternative. This requires a combination of culture shift, behavioral change, and structural change to ultimately change the rules of the game.
One of the greatest myths in the lives of the people I coach is, 'I will be happy when…' as if there is some place to go to. There's only one book that ends with the phrase happily ever after, that's a fairy-tale.
One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.
If you make everything you do data driven, it's an inherent limitation on experimentation. Most PLCs are so driven by the finance department that they've lost the capacity to get lucky.
Until now, we had an insolvency problem – but we didn't have a liquidity problem that could trigger that insolvency because interest rates were so low. Now they're rising, and the mother of all debt crises is going to occur.
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.
A lot of negotiation is teaching people tricks or verbal games, as opposed to providing a framework for thinking about negotiation. People want to come up with a solution that's fair. But what they think of as fair is often proportional division, and that just arises because they don't really understand what they're negotiating over.