From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you look at the balance sheets of Fortune 500 companies 50 years ago and today, you can see that 50 years ago, 80% of the value was physical stuff. Today, more than 85% of the value consists of intangibles. Companies must become so much more now that their value comes from their ability to inspire, drive and organise human beings.
Every business makes money as a secondary purpose. It's the coincidental result of creating customer value and changing the world in some way that people are willing to pay for and find valuable. That is the primary activity of a business – and you happen to get paid for it.
Most of the venture backed businesses, and venture capital firms, are a mirror-tocracy not a meritocracy! Senior executives are disproportionately drawn from a narrow stratum of society – in the US, this means Ivy-League Schools such as Stanford. They tend to be overwhelmingly white (and increasingly now Asian) but certainly overwhelmingly male.
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.
The sleep revolution is finally hitting the workplace. The business world is waking up to the high cost of sleep deprivation on productivity, health care, and ultimately the bottom line. I expect the nap room to soon become as universal as the conference room.
Excellence means you do the absolute best you can in every situation that you face. It's an aesthetic concept, a performance concept, and helps you create the most perfect balance for success.
In markets like books, art, music, and Hollywood, it's extremely hard to predict which products will become runaway hits. In the early days, if a high-status person embraces a product, it can have an enormous impact on its trajectory. Influential people adopt and endorse a product, which gives it an initial push.
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.
Studies show that to get an MBA and to be a high-level executive you need to be a standard-deviation above the norm (have an IQ of 114 or more). After that, it turns out there's a negative relationship between IQ and leadership effectiveness. Perhaps because at that point people become narcissistic or egocentric.
Scaling any business is about creating a model, debugging the model, making sure you understand the ingredients that need to be scaled up, and making sure you have a process to scale. All of this needs to be wrapped-up in a financial model that allows the scale to be funded.
In a geopolitical recession, suddenly the biggest macro risks are by their nature political. And you focus less on growth and more on stability and resilience, and that's a problem because the free market model tells you 'don't focus on resilience and stability, focus first and foremost on growth and everything else will take care of itself'.
The lucky person walks down the street, sees the £5 note, picks it up, goes into the coffee shop, and sits next to the businessperson, they have a conversation, exchange cards, and leave thinking they've potentially had a great opportunity. The unlucky person ignores the money, and sits next to the person without making conversation.