From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you look at the notional value of trading on our exchanges in any given year, they range from $600-700 trillion to a quadrillion (1000 trillion) dollars in total value. People can use these markets very effectively, not just for bona-fide risk hedging and transfer and risk management but also for asset allocation, portfolio management and trading strategies as well.
From day one, we said that we wanted to create value, create impact, and create inspiration. We're not going to build a business that just creates impact—we're not a nonprofit. We have to create value. As long as we're doing all three, we're never going to lose.
If you look at the balance sheets of Fortune 500 companies 50 years ago and today, you can see that 50 years ago, 80% of the value was physical stuff. Today, more than 85% of the value consists of intangibles. Companies must become so much more now that their value comes from their ability to inspire, drive and organise human beings.
Free trade, openness, security, and a stable government framework have been the key factors behind the emergence of Dubai as an international business hub.
People don't know what it is that they're negotiating over… If you don't, then it's hard to know if you've gotten a bad deal, a fair deal, or a great deal! That's going to lead us to the negotiation pie, and with the negotiation pie comes the extra value that negotiators create by coming together.
Investors are always looking for something different, where they can get Alpha… where they can get diversification… where they can get non-correlation. It's not necessarily linked to them being 'US Assets' but more that they are unique assets regardless of domicile and they have not previously had access to them.
Design is the great 're-configurer' of problems for business… for example design takes an engineering solution for transmitting signals called a phone and reconfigures it into a hyper complex problem of glass and metal shapes, etc.
Tai Chi is the physical manifestation of the Taoist philosophy. It represents the union of yin and yang. It allows one to embrace the seeming contradictions in the world, and in business. How do you become a profitable business while also doing good for society? How do you embrace ambiguity while also using scientific thinking?
We've actually gotten rid of all people managers. We don't have a single person whose job it is to manage or tell someone else what to do. Instead we've organized the entire company around work that needs to get done, and then people can have multiple roles across multiple circles, and there's a bunch of other rules and processes.
Governments are keen to levy brutal taxes on the very engines that create the market for goods and services; lowering their propensity to spend and invest by removing the surpluses they would normally use to do so.
Today, we are asking the opposite question – will luxury brands continue to be sold offline? 20 years after we started, when people were suspicious about whether luxury brands could be sold on the internet, the opposite question is now the big consideration!
This is an ultra-competitive category, and that means that there's real value being created. If nobody shows up to the party, it's probably not a great party. When it comes to staying competitive, I've always focused on the customer and worked backwards from there.