From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The world is lying to you. It tells you that in 10,000 hours you can become excellent at what you do and that your strength will never wane. That is a complete, utter, falsehood. At some point, the greatness that came to define who 'you' are will wane.
The smallest male can be dominant based on his social skills. Think about it; nobody walks into a big store in London and assumes the biggest person is the boss! It might be the old man; it might be the young woman!
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.
If this wasn't a huge opportunity, I wouldn't waste my time- most of our investors wouldn't. If we were producing luxury meat that is only aimed at Michelin Star restaurants. The number of people that can afford to eating Michelin star restaurants is relatively few, you're not going to make an impact on the climate, you're not going make an impact on the future of our kids.
Small companies will get an idea and try to scale up. Big companies have to decide when to extend, when to extend and scale, and when to do something new. They need to build capabilities in terms of insight and execution to do the new thing.
I think the silver lining of this pandemic in the last couple of years is we have realised that culture is not relegated to an office, it's agnostic of a physical office. It is how we work with each other. We have gotten a little lazy by thinking it is all these fun and games.
Countries trade with each-other, and trade is in the context of goods, services, labour and many other things. They trade with each other because they're different, and have different tastes and preferences, different attitudes towards risk, different technological frontiers, different resources, different climate and ecologies and so on. It's differences in tastes and preferences, resources and technology together with ways of thinking (manifesting in managerial and design differences) which are the reasons countries benefit when they trade with each other in goods, services, finance and labour.
The area under the curve over time is greater if you keep your prices low than if you jack them up to maximise revenue. I'd get kicked out of a business school for saying something like that, but it's true.
The most common is deferring action and getting stuck in paralysis... The second most common is finance... Investing too much in unproven concepts for example. People can, and should, start their businesses as micro-enterprises to test their concepts and reduce risks.
We need a change from managers to leaders. We need people who can understand the political and moral structure of their companies, and who can motivate and bring people to go in the direction of those values. That's true leadership.
Bureaucracy may be humankind's most important innovation. Whether it's scientific innovation, the invention of the steam engine, locomotive, electric-motor, semi-conductor or antibiotics, none of these would have been possible without the understanding of how to work precisely and repeatably at scale; bureaucracy.
Instead of saying 'I'm a technology entrepreneur…' you might say, 'well, I run a technology business, but I love philosophy and playing the piano…' the person you're speaking to now has a few more dots to connect!