From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It doesn't matter how successful you are, how much market share you have, if you're in your comfort zone you will leave yourself exposed. Courage also links to decisiveness, which is one of the key attributes of great leaders. Cowardice pushes the day of reckoning out, decisiveness brings it closer.
If you take a trade that follows your process exactly and if that trade loses money, that was not a bad trade. It's only a bad trade if you deviate from your process and lose money. I would go further and say that if you deviate from your process and make money, it's still a bad trade.
It's very clear that the sole purpose of business is not just to make money for shareholders, but actually to look after their employees, their communities and their society. Businesses play a role in society, and they have a voice which they have to use. Silence is not an option.
You know what else is immoral? 700 million people who have no electricity. We need to have actual conversations about how to solve problems – and hold the uneasy tension of who pays for it, and how.
We are unapologetically at the high-risk, low-return sweet-spot of agricultural finance. We choose to address geographies and sectors where there are real market failures or at least deep market imperfections.
I don't micro-manage, I give them enough rope to hang themselves. If I trust you, I'll let you find your way, because that could lead to something I hadn't thought of. Lastly, I don't work with anyone I don't like.
I've met many entrepreneurs who feel it's almost cheating themselves to have time-off, relax, or indulge things which are not directly profit-generating- but then the overwhelming majority of those I meet who have really made it are also the ones who do actively make time to feed their interests, have periods of mental space, and allow their brains to work creatively.
This is transforming the whole of our economy and we are seeing more companies making decisions across those dimensions of risk-return-impact and being judged on the basis of the profit and impact they create. It really turns our economies away from risk-return (where they create profit without counting the huge damage they cause) to risk-return-impact.
People think these founders are all brilliant and can't make mistakes, we've found that; there's a sense that they can fix everything or have the answers for everything… they don't, and they can't.
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of hiring a table of yes-men. This is great for ego, bad for business. You need to hire people who are smarter or more experienced than you in those specific roles. They may often challenge you and re-structure your thoughts, but this is important for good governance.
Scaling any business is about creating a model, debugging the model, making sure you understand the ingredients that need to be scaled up, and making sure you have a process to scale. All of this needs to be wrapped-up in a financial model that allows the scale to be funded.
You have to get under the skin of every employee, becoming a chief meaning officer, giving your team purpose, getting everyone on the same page. You have to make sure your entire team knows where they're going, how they're going to get there, and what's in it for them.