From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
A lot of business leaders were watching all this and seeing it as a warning call… they felt that they had to figure out how to operate better or risk losing their operating license.
Most leaders are running human organisations, not financial organisations. This means they need to understand how to motivate, inspire and organise people first rather than capital first. This requires a set of skills that traditionally have not been taught in business schools.
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.
I believe businesses need to move away from having profit as their primary reason for existing, that's why we built Kickstarter as a public benefit corporation and encoded our mission into our fiduciary responsibility. Profit primacy can be replaced by mission primacy.
The brand must not only convince prospective customers and draw them to the brand but also be deeply believed in by the employees and other stakeholders of the company. We say that for the brand to work, employees must live the brand promise.
In crises, people need to hear one or two simple messages to act on – not a confusing list. Through your communication, you also need to project certainty – and the fact that you have a plan (even if it's not fully formulated). Your team need to believe that they, and you, are going to get the job done.
We're choosing brands like we choose friends. And that is a huge responsibility because they've got to be a real friend, not a false friend.
It certainly plays a much bigger role than was ever intended to. A number of financial institutions and contracts rely on LIBOR as the benchmark by which other rates are set. I don't think it was ever intended that LIBOR would play such a central role between so many institutions and contracts.
You have to empower your board to make their own decisions, follow their instinct, and execute. Think of your board in many ways as a team of entrepreneurs that you're investing in, rather than as employees that you manage.
there are no good musicians who do not have a good ear, no artists without a great imagination, no writers without an excellent command of the language. The same goes for our trade. It is not enough to know how to use a calculator or build sound financial models. You need to have vision. You should look at a business process as if it were a living thing; you need to sense its music.
We can prove, with over 150 companies we've invested in – that you can simultaneously create value for the investor, and society. The reality is this- you can create value economically and socially in parallel – there isn't a contradiction.
The first thing to do for our ecology is not to use less electricity, it's to cease buying things that are not useful.