From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Silence is not an option. Businesses have an obligation to make sure their products and services meet the needs of humanity in a way that is not damaging, but healthy.
It's clear to me that small businesses, particularly micro-enterprises, have been responsible for the majority of the gross job creation in the last five years... particularly through the recession....
The luxury industry is built on heritage, craftsmanship and relationships – we have spent a decade building those relationships and nurturing and caring for the brands' heritage.
What is the value of asking the right question to prompt the right answer? It would be difficult to find a sector that design and/or design thinking cannot impact.
It is vital that you never, ever, ever stop pursuing excellence. And that is elusive. It's very elusive. It calls for a lot of honesty. A lot.
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!
Early customers are animated by belief, not utility. They buy for aesthetic reasons, not practical ones. There's an aesthetically superior future they co-create with the founders. You only want to talk to people who are primed to move to that different future with you.
I looked at it and thought, 'How can something this simple be so compelling?' It was compelling enough for me to take time out of the Consumer Electronics Show to go back and play over and over. I mean, I was hooked from the first time I played it.
Running a business is a challenging job, but until relatively recently, that job was simplified to the extent that you had one target – make as much money as you can for the shareholders. Now, you have to balance a multitude of targets which makes it much more challenging.
For businesses to survive, let alone brands, you need a secure and stable base. You need secure economic and social conditions to reduce risk.
My own twist on that is that the bigger they come, the exponentially harder they fall! Banks are so bent at using expanded balance sheets, using derivatives, pretending that risk is in the net when it's really in the gross, pretending that risk is a linear function of scale when it's an exponential function of scale.
Once you're able to reduce the human element, and automate the reporting of these statistics- you will be greatly reducing the potential for misbehaviour. This is where regulators can leverage technology, reduce their burden.