From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I'd never even heard the word 'entrepreneur' growing up – I didn't know what that meant. If I go back to my grandfather – he was the real entrepreneur. He developed things… he made spiked running shoes when he was only 15 (in 1895!). My grandfather died in 1933, I was born in 1935 and my grandmother insisted I brought his name with me – so I became the next Joe Foster.
Firstly, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena. Secondly, the Phillips curve is dead and buried. US employment, and domestic measures of capacity utilization didn't even work 40 years ago! We stuck a stake in the heart of such measures about 15 years ago.
Delegation is about giving the right people in your organisation the ability to excel at what they do, and in turn- to help you (as a company leader) to achieve the objectives of your enterprise.
If you asked most people to categorise good trades and bad trades, you would find the answers to be quite simple… If it makes money it's a good trade, and if it loses money, it's a bad trade. That's not true at all…
If corporate profits are high, it suggests performance has been terrific… you can't then complain that governance is broken! You can't have it both ways…. if corporate governance was better, profits would be even higher!
Elizabeth Holmes is the product of a culture that has brought up young entrepreneurs to say, and believe, that 'moving fast and breaking things' is cool, that disrupting now and worrying about the consequences later is fine and that breaking laws and regulations is something to be proud of.
Good attention is very valuable. In 2017 unlike 2007 when I was yelling about this stuff, people now understand that personal brands are leverage. When you have people's attention, and especially if they think you have value, you can do amazing things.
Status hierarchies help us navigate choices which would otherwise be impossibly complex. It dramatically reduces the cognitive load we face in making decisions.
I typically think impact investing, on the whole, can generate better risk-adjusted yields than the alternatives.
There is a problem with business leaders and the economics profession where we have celebrated the gains from neoliberal policies whilst only paying lip-service to compensating those left-behind.
Self-awareness—the ability to emotionally self-regulate, which is the number one skill of the world's best negotiators. It's about tapping into your red centre and asking, 'What's really showing up for me right now?' It's about recognizing your biases, unhelpful thinking, or negative intentions.
To my mind, the essence of capitalism is that decentralised economic decisions can be taken in firms that compete against each other in structured markets, and do so under strong incentives for growth and the increase of productivity. It's the only system we've ever hit-on that appears to be capable of driving mass prosperity.