March 17, 2017
Want to know why Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan says ideas are easy, or Facebook VP Carolyn Everson thinks you should embrace failure? Curious how other bold-face business leaders, entrepreneurs and impresarios would tell you to shape your own future? Look no further.
“Inspire <GO>,” Bloomberg’s digital-exclusive video series, asked an impressive range of guests what sparks success in its first season – and with a second season underway, expect many more intimate nuggets of wisdom to surface.
Here’s a look at some of our team’s favorite answers, from leaders including Moynihan and Everson to celebrity chef/restauranteur Wolfgang Puck, philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and more. Shot in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Green Room at Bloomberg Television’s studios, each piece can also be watched in its entirety at the links included below.
We hope their words inspire you as much as they did us!
Bank of America Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan
“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. The bigger company you are, the more you have to remember that. You have to be able to visualize what’s going to happen at the point of customer interface, where the action is going to take place – not the concept and the ideas. To bridge those, you have to have smart people who can visualize the future and ideas and can drive them, and at the same time understand what it’s going to be like to do them. Otherwise it’s just an interesting idea.”
Chef and restauranteur Wolfgang Puck
“Be patient and learn the basics. Get the good foundation. Then you can go in many different directions. Today, people don’t have patience anymore. They want to be a chef after six months.”
Facebook Vice President for Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson
“Everyone has setbacks. Everyone has failures. I recently did a commencement speech and I outlined some of the most famous failures. Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school basketball team. Walt Disney was fired for lack of creativity early on in his career. Oprah Winfrey was told she couldn’t do television. There are so many examples! So everyone deals with failure.”
Philanthropist and Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates
“Some very poor countries do things like getting vaccines to children extremely well, because they get down to the local level and measure the activity. They make sure the inventory is there, they make sure the workers are showing up. So for me, I always look at: ‘how can we do better measurement, and use that to drive the very best practices?”
Citi Private Bank North America Head Tracey Warson
“I asked her about her compensation package. She told me what it was, and then she quickly said: ‘You don’t have to pay me that much.’ That was just a big mistake. I told her then, ‘Whether or not this works out, please promise me never to say that again.’ People have to know their own value, and be confident in that. Always live in possibility versus probability.”
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell
“Work hard. Figure out ways of creating value for the people that you’re working with, and for the organization that you’re working for. Always find ways to challenge yourself, learn and grow. The quality for me that has been the most successful in my career is the passion for what I’m doing.”
Next: See all the Inspire <GO> videos
– Compiled by Linda Kuehn and Jen Robinson | March 17, 2017