From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you have a national or multinational brand, your customers are as diverse as the human population. If you're smart, you realise that you need people in your business who can relate to all those different kinds of people. This is actually one of the smartest supports for diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
As a collective, we tend to look at progress as being linear, especially where it concerns women's rights. This is a huge mistake and breeds complacency because we risk losing the hard-won gains.
They had a philosophy that we are not here to accumulate, but rather to provide a service to the world- to live a life of service- a service which included education.
I often emphasise that etiquette is highly contextual, varying significantly depending on the cultural backdrop and the company you're in. These nuances highlight that etiquette isn't about rigid right or wrongs; it's about sensitivity to the context, the people you're with, and the prevailing cultural norms.
People also lose sight of the fact that technology driven globalisation has been extremely beneficial for a lot of people outside the US. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted above the poverty line in India, China, Africa and elsewhere.
People are now talking of a new 'Cold War' with China. This is a very misleading use of history. If you look at the relationship between China and the US today, there is half a trillion dollars of trade, and some 350,000 Chinese students and 3 million Chinese tourists are in the US. It's more complex than the Cold War.
So many things in life divide us – the colour of our skin, the language we speak, the god we worship, but when we run, we're the same. When we run, we're united, it's a commonality across our species like nothing else. You feel deeply connected with other people when running together.
The gap between the situation of people caught in conflict and the rest of us is growing, not narrowing. The gap is not going to be narrowed by trying to change the words on paper, we have to live up to them.
More girls have been killed in the past fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine 'gendercide' in any one decade, than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.
Taxes are the price of civilisation.
Truth be told, fatherhood was never a role I envisioned for myself, never an ambition I pursued. Yet now, I consider it the most defining aspect of my identity and my place in the world.
There's no sensible definition of people without technology. Our relationship with technology is complex and helical. As technology changes over time, so do we, and we have a situation therefore where we develop technologies, adapt, and then need new technologies to solve the side-effects of the first.