From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Simply put, a great business will understand its customers, have a clear, sound strategy and a business plan that can deliver against it.
One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.
You cannot just say to people, 'oh be creative' and then there will be a waste of time. You have to be very clear in what you are looking for and listen to people.
When I came back, it didn't take me and my brother long to see that this was a failing business. It had been making the same product since the 1930s. The business was dying.
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.
Most great sellers and leaders figure out the things they love about their job – what they would do for free – and set up the infrastructure to intentionally avoid the parts that force them to show up inauthentically.
This is transforming the whole of our economy and we are seeing more companies making decisions across those dimensions of risk-return-impact and being judged on the basis of the profit and impact they create. It really turns our economies away from risk-return (where they create profit without counting the huge damage they cause) to risk-return-impact.
Corporations find themselves in a bind, torn between clinging to the notion of solely enhancing shareholder value and making vague promises to cater to all stakeholders, which can be perilously misleading.
You cannot run a business without great people, who are incentivised to be great; and so, you must protect them, and pay them appropriately.
I'm 65 years old, and one of the things that amazes me is the number of people who work to get to a certain level of success in showbusiness, and then quit to go play golf?! There is nothing else I would want to do in this world.
You must surround yourself with great people, and as you grow, never forget the generosity gene. Building a great team is what this business game is all about. The team with the best players working together wins.
We tend to see two scenarios that come up time and time again. The first and most common scenario is that security prices become inefficient or show large departures from intrinsic value when there are few investors paying attention to the company. The second is a crisis situation. Uncle John always had a desk-plate in his office that said 'trouble is opportunity' and that's very much how we see the markets.