From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Entrepreneurship is not for everybody, and it's also worth noting that you're not entitled to be a great entrepreneur. You're not entitled to be successful if you start a company, in fact the most likely outcome is that you won't be. Sometimes I meet founders and entrepreneurs who complain about how hard their fundraising or engineering challenges are… Guess what… yes…. It's really f***ing hard. That's the truth.
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.
Firstly, it's crucial to adopt a bold mindset right from the start. I advocate for setting almost unrealistic targets. This approach might seem counterintuitive, but it's essential for enabling substantial change. If we only aim for realistic targets, our efforts will be limited to minor tweaks rather than significant transformations.
75% of people won't purchase from a brand they don't inherently trust.
We have to start breaking the toxic hyper-masculine alpha male attitude that has become the norm across businesses that you should always be hustling, never sleep, that rest is for wimps.
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.
Rich, sometimes you treat a wisp of intuition as though it were a four-lane highway. It's not that you shouldn't trust intuition — it's that you need to validate it.
A foreign power using financial resources to create hedge-funds or other anonymous players who would gain leverage and trust and be viewed as just another hedge-fund with a funny name based out in the Cayman islands. People would be unaware of their true attentions and then on a certain day, they could act in co-ordination and flood the market with sell-orders.
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.
We spent a lot of time explaining to our dealers who not to sell the bike to. Their mindset was just 'sell, sell, sell.' But we told them: no, don't sell it to people who don't need it, because they'll never love it.
Diamonds are rare, there haven't been any major finds for over 20years, and there are no major mines on the horizon. Demand- particularly in China and India- is growing rapidly, and in the very near future we will see demand outpace plateauing supply.
The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated yourself. You should treat your employees like the smart and capable adults they are. Give them the choice to make informed decisions and you will cultivate an environment in which everyone can flourish.