When I was a therapist in private practice, specializing in short-term therapy for behavioral change, I wasn’t always successful in my attempts to help people whose doctors wanted them to stop smoking, whose spouses wanted them to lose weight, or whose managers wanted them to increase productivity.
We focus a lot on what leaders can do to improve, but we often forget to analyze our current actions and which behaviors we need to stop doing. Most likely, you aren’t an awful leader, but there are definitely some things you don’t want creeping into your relationships with your employees.
Below is my abridged translation of a short speech given by Tencent president Martin Lau at the Tencent Investment’s ‘Insight & Forecast Conference’ held in Beijing. The speech not only reveals some very impressive statistics on Tencent’s investment track record it also gives some insight into the organization’s overall investment philosophy. Finally, it provides some color regarding the wider market sentiment amongst startups and investors that China is entering a winter period.
In 1997 an IBM computer called Deep Blue famously defeated the world chess champion, Russian Gary Kasparov.
We often display a natural tendency to put our own needs before others'...This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. As Psychology Today's Lisa Firestone notes, "Maintaining a certain regard for ourselves and engaging in self-compassion and self-care are actually fundamental to creating a good life for ourselves and the people who matter most to us."
Right now, as you read this, depression is the single greatest burden on health worldwide. Suicide kills more people than war and natural catastrophes put together. Anxiety is the fastest-growing illness in teens. Middle-aged people are dying from “deaths of despair’ and 40% of US adults say they are lonely, up from 20% in the 1980s. Loneliness is twice as dangerous as obesity to health. In some post-industrial towns in the West, there are half the jobs of a century ago. Wage stagnation in the West has meant that, for the first time in human history, many children will not out-earn their parents, driving deep dissatisfaction with the current social contract as well as mass populism: one quarter of all Europeans voting for a populist far-right party in the last elections.
Every profession goes through changes, especially sales. A certain sales technique may have worked in the past, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work today. To be a top-performing salesperson today and in the future, you must continuously adapt to both market and social conditions.