All businesses and jobs depend on a vast number of people, often unnoticed and unthanked, without which nothing really gets done. They are all human and deserve respect and gratitude.
Building businesses takes tremendous stamina, and success isn’t achieved without it.
Certainty is no guarantor of correctness.
Openness isn’t the end; it’s the beginning.
When we confront facts and fears, we achieve real power and unleash our capacity for change.
We have to see conflict as thinking and then get really good at it.
Many CEOs and leaders think that silence is indeed golden, that consensus is bliss. It is – sometimes. But more often what it signifies is that there are no respected processes for surfacing concerns and dissent.
There is no more powerful weapon for change than honesty.
Companies don’t have ideas. Only people do.
Phones and soundtracks and Muzak and fountains replace genuine and unpredictable human contact with a seamless soundtrack from a bad movie and a cliche that makes us believe we must all be happy.
If we aren’t going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.
I don’t think a true company – one that builds sustainable value – can ever only exist online or remotely.
Everyone I know feels harassed by email which has invaded their waking and sleeping hours.
Every organization has issues and concerns which are known about by many people who choose to remain silent.
Customers who have to come back and spend, or customers who just don’t want the hassle of leaving – those are the ones who are most worth attracting.
Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.
Those in powerless positions aren’t about to complain about bullying bosses, abusive supervisors or corrupt co-workers. There is no safe way to do so and no process that promises redress.
I regularly take my entrepreneurship students out walking because I want to get them in the habit of noticing and thinking about what they notice. They have to leave their phones behind to learn the basic lesson: Be where you are.
It is nobody’s right to be waited on and nobody’s fate to do the waiting.
British innovation in design, in the creative arts, in engineering and manufacturing is world class.