From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Nobody should ever feel isolated, or like they have nowhere to turn. Whether it's at school, home, or in the workplace. Nobody should ever feel a cultural burden of silence around mental health challenges.
I've described celebrities as being 'double agents of the patriarchy,' and whilst things are getting better- and language is changing, we are still not always calling out those who fat shame or age shame women.
All the market research we have done shows that consumers use diamonds to mark special moments in their lives because they are timeless, have been in the ground 3 billion years and are unique.
We really overvalue work, and undervalue fun, play and life. We've made work our highest calling and made hours worked rather than output the key performance indicator.
Without the internet and globalization, Ai Weiwei, as you know him, would not possible. My art comes from those influences and the persistent struggle to understand our time.
When you're behind a camera, you have this incredible power to freeze a moment in time. But with that power comes responsibility. You're not just taking a picture, you're creating a narrative, you're telling a story.
I start by asking: How will our customers benefit from this acquisition? I tend to shy away from companies that don't share a similar cultural ethos. Even if an acquisition seems financially sound, if there's a stark cultural mismatch, I'd usually reconsider.
I have always believed in the principle that what comes easily can leave just as easily. Instead of merely 'buying' talent, which could later be 'bought' by another company, it is more impactful to create opportunities for potential talent. We need to see talent in more humanistic terms.
There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me... And there are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.
You can have many great actors but you have very few who really become movie stars. It is that indefinable quality of someone who becomes iconic that people want to come and watch regardless of the type of film they're in.
About ten years, a guy told me about his father's death. He had to send twenty seven people on different buses and trains to inform relatives all over the country because phones didn't work. When his mother died, there were STD/PCO facilities in most-all villages. He had to only make twenty seven calls, and they were all informed in under half an hour.
The efficiency trap is very modern, but it's now become a holdover from the Industrial Revolution. If you only relate to time, as if it were a certain kind of 'thing', like a natural resource… something that you could maximise, then you're going to be in a perpetual state of psychological struggle because you won't be using the right conceptual tools to live in time.