From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I invested most of our money, not in marketing, but in service. That was crucial to our early growth- starting in Europe, but then in America, Japan and the USA.
If you asked most people to categorise good trades and bad trades, you would find the answers to be quite simple… If it makes money it's a good trade, and if it loses money, it's a bad trade. That's not true at all… There's a very simple test to see whether something was a good or bad trade. You have to ask the question: 'If I was faced with the exact same information and circumstances again, would I still make the same trade?'. If the answer is yes, then it was not a bad trade.
It's really complicated to work-out how much of our wealth came from empire, it's like trying to take the egg out of a baked cake.
I had a brand who said to me 'You shouldn't name your book wonderhell, nobody is going to buy a book they don't know what the word on the front cover means', and I replied, anybody who's in wonderhell will know what that word means the second they see the word.
Navigating complexity and uncertainty requires long-term thinking, not long-term planning. Long-term thinking requires accepting, even enjoying, the challenges of unpredictability, builds the flexibility required to navigate it, and rejects simplified narratives that lose the nuance of this reality.
For every example I could give you of regulations causing problems, I could give you two of regulations creating opportunities. I think this notion that regulation is causing problems is a real red herring.
This decade, their GDP will increase by about $12 trillion, i.e. they will create another one of themselves! More importantly, the share of consumption in this decade's growth will be bigger and this is where the big opportunity lies. I am especially optimistic about the Chinese consumer.
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....
In large organizations, a small group of leaders can hold the organization's capacity to change hostage to their own personal willingness to adapt and change – they are the gatekeepers – and even if they have the best will in the world, there simply will not be enough of them to deal with the complexity that we have in the environment around us.
You become an entrepreneur, not by intent, but by accident. Those for me are the true entrepreneurs- people that just start building, perhaps even without a plan, they just do it. Look at the most famous ones…. Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, they never went to shows or to training, they just got on with it.
The platform of business is one of the most amazing ways to change society, but I am telling you this as someone who grew up not liking the platform.
If you have a national or multinational brand, your customers are as diverse as the human population. If you're smart, you realise that you need people in your business who can relate to all those different kinds of people. This is actually one of the smartest supports for diversity and inclusion in the workplace.