Every fiber in my being was screaming at me to get out of this building. Every second that we wasted was one second closer to us not getting out of the building. But that's not what firemen do. We were there to save people's lives. And that culture, that firefighter culture, overtook whatever personal need I felt to get out of the building.
If rules are an issue, we can change them for you. We can connect you with any relevant decision maker to break those rules. We will not be upset if you make mistakes, and we will support you on every winning bet you make.
The most dangerous thing in a company is when people start managing up instead of managing the truth. Once that happens, you lose your ability to course correct, because the information flowing to the people who need to make decisions is filtered through what people think those decision-makers want to hear.
The thing that's really changed for me is I used to think that the most important thing was finding the right answer. And what I now believe is the most important thing is creating the conditions for truth to emerge. Because if you create the conditions for truth to emerge, the right answer will find you.
Most people think about incentives as financial. The real incentive is truth. If you create a culture where people can tell you the truth, you will make better decisions than your competitors. And making better decisions than your competitors over a long period of time is the only sustainable advantage.
Most people think that the way you build a company is you hire great people and then you tell them what to do. But the most successful companies I've seen are ones where you hire great people and then you create the conditions for them to tell you what to do.
Calm is when you get radical clarity around the mission and the vision and you get everybody lined up and bought in and have them help build that vision.
Real optimists are not cynics. You want critics in the organization, you don't want cynics because cynics don't trust you. Critics want to challenge the logic, they want to challenge the thinking, they want to interrogate, but it's not distrustful.
What I'm talking about is the same thing that we hear from CEOs around their energy that they get from change. Um their vision that things can be better for employees and for citizens.
For the last several years, we've basically gently ceded market share to the other players in the industry. And I came in and said, that's a no-go. That is unacceptable. We're going to win in the marketplace.
I looked close more closely at the opportunity and my view was how nice would it be to have a group of the best schools around the world that maintain the ethos and values of the schools that are part of the group, but yet share global best practices.
Getting a 2x over a decade is not what I think people were expecting from Uber under Travis's leadership. Uh, it and Lyft has fallen to just five billion. like he won the capital war and Dar has done a great job managing the business, but I feel like a lot of the success of Uber has been built on the foundation that Travis set up.
We have made a sustained and very deliberate investment over a very long period of time in original independent journalism. That's in journalists, and in the support system structure around them to make sure they can do extraordinary work.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
