From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We have to create systems that make people think twice before they behave badly. People need to credibly believe that there will be consequences to their actions if caught in random stings. If you are in a position where you are uniquely able to wield power- politics, police, corporate leadership- you should be randomly subject to attempts to see if you behave badly when offered the opportunity to do so.
War teaches you that there are many different types of people, good and bad, and you have to understand that good and evil co-exist, and it's up to you to calculate your way through the world, understanding where people are rooted.
The enemy has to be outside the building, not inside. If the enemy is outside the building, whether you're working on innovation or your quarterly sales-target, you're on the same team… you're playing for the name on the front of the jersey, not the back.
Top-tier companies, Toyota being a prime example known for its operational excellence, are well-acquainted with the value of slack. A fundamental lesson taught to MIT Sloan students in operations classes is that in any system with variability, it's not ideal to operate at 100% capacity utilisation.
To me, success is balancing your personal life and your work life. It's also being content and satisfied with what you accomplished so you can let it go and move forward.
A resilient position means that you are not always on the brink of war. The cost of war is so great that being on the brink is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. We have to make leaders and societies pay more attention to the costs of conflict.
On a personal level, the best defense against materialism and greed is to give money away. You need to be charitable, engage in philanthropy.
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!
To change motivation, it is important to give hope and make people believe. But also to give concrete results. It is important to value the positive instead of only highlighting the worst.
My learnings came not only from our successes, but a lot of the key learnings came from failures. When you do experience failure rather than to run away from it, you have to sit down and do a good post-mortem and learn from your failures.
I give all of you permission whereby, if I change the way I behave, my beliefs, the way we are going, I give you permission to hit me in my face, you need to bring me back to reality.
Our story, our fight, the story of President Zelenskyy… these all come together in the story of how everyone is capable of more than the world expects of them, and what we expected of ourselves. It's only when we were asked what price we were prepared to pay that we found the truth; we were prepared to pay with our lives.