From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Perhaps the most critical element is the cultural integration. The distinct cultures of the two companies present a significant challenge, consuming 80-90% of our efforts. Our goal is to forge a unified team culture, permeating from senior leadership to the deepest levels of the organization.
It is precisely because of all those years of anticipating and designing for failure that they are alive today.
Looking back, I am now firmly convinced that young people are the most potent forces for social change. However, our initial focus on this demographic wasn't a calculated decision but rather a matter of convenience—these were the people I had direct access to.
STS-93, the mission where we launched the Chandra telescope, was conceived 25 years before we launched it. Someone had that vision long before it became a reality. This long-term perspective is essential.
We don't fail because we make mistakes; mistakes can be fixed. We fail because we quit. And we quit because belief collapsed, not because the strategy was wrong.
When Google (a very high IQ place!) looked into their highest performing teams, they found the hallmark of those teams was a sense of psychological and emotional safety.
Having negotiation skills means that you can weaponize emotional intelligence. If you want people to cooperate with you… if you want to connect with people who you don't share any common-ground with…. If you want to get a deal done without regrets…. That's where negotiation techniques can work, across all cultures.
Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood. We look at information coming in from the external world, determine what is useful, determine how we understand it, build a fuller picture and effect change. A surgical mindset is very much that.
Other enterprises understand design for what it is, the backbone of their corporate culture as well as the summation of all experiences their clients will have with their services and products––and as such well worth the investment of time and resources.
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.
One of the simplest but hardest things to do is to be honest with ourselves. We are works-in-progress from the day we're born, till the day we die. You should never, ever, stop working on yourself.
The silence we've adopted, along with the habits, behaviours, and patterns we've established, don't have to dictate how we proceed today or tomorrow, even if they characterized our yesterdays. It's challenging, to be clear. Changing behaviours is difficult. But on the other side of that challenge lies the opportunity for us to meet our needs, to build the teams we truly intend to build.