From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We've never met anybody that has changed the world without moving people. We've never met anyone that changed their own world without moving people. Moving people is not a 'yucky' thing. Martin Luther King Jr. moved people.
Emotional intelligence however is a skill that is learned and learnable. We learn it in life- and we can be trained in it. It's not enough to have someone come and talk to your team about why it's important however, it's something that needs practice, something that you have to work at.
In order to fix bias you have to admit to them, you have to admit they exist and bring them out of the shadows. Then you can call them out. We have to stop pretending that there's no adversity, or that we can't do anything about the adversity we face.
I always tried to run my business in a humane way. I had this idea of business being tough and harsh, and thought I could build a business that was humane and kind. Performance metrics and KPIs are relatively straightforward to follow, but doing the 'right thing' is not nearly so clear cut.
In the business world, we need to focus on the 4-Cs. Firstly, Customer. Secondly, Competition. Thirdly, Comfort. 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. Fourth, Courage. You have to be prepared to take tough decisions. Cowardice pushes the day of reckoning out, decisiveness brings it closer.
We have to constantly evolve how we make an impact, and make sure that we're doing what the communities we work in want us to support rather than enforcing some kind of model. Our work has to be led by the leaders of communities telling us what will work.
We advocate for a 'feminist moonshot' approach, symbolized by the dandelion. The dandelion, a resilient flower and weed found on all continents, symbolizes our efforts. Despite its reputation as a nuisance, it's a plant I've grown to admire for its beauty, deep-rooting ability that rejuvenates the soil, and its edible qualities. Its seeds, spread by children, represent the spreading of our positive narrative towards a cleaner, healthier, more equitable world.
I believe that the more we trust the 'gold' within ourselves, the more we are able to see it in others. When we interact with others, we can either fixate on their anxieties or performance concerns, or we can attune our receptors to truly sense the genuineness, curiosity, and care within them.
You need to master the basics and do the little things right. If you want to do something well you do it 1,000 times, if you want to do something great you do it 10,000 times. There's an old warrior saying, the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle.
Changing the mood has an economic impact superior to many measures because companies and families, when they have more confidence, they act differently.
You can't force people to change- you have to find their passion and implement based on that. The economist, Dambisa Moyo, showed that even though $2.5trillion has been invested in aid, Africa is now net-poorer than 50 years ago.
It made perfect sense to me that to infuse new life into Savile Row, they needed to perceive themselves more as couturiers than mere tailors. That's the perspective I brought to Savile Row.