Any given diary

Donofrio:


I'll never forget when I first met the prime minister of Vietnam. He said to me, "What can you do to help me? My people work incredibly hard. We're incredibly capable of doing a number of things. We're 80% literate. Eighty-four million people, 80% literate. The only thing that's wrong is my people work for too little money. The only work we have is the work no one else wants. Can you help me get the work that everybody else wants?"

It's the thing we should all worry about, because as we mature, the lower our capacity for change becomes. The more we have to lose, the more we want to protect, the more we don't want to change, the more we want to hold on to things, the more we don't want to let go of things.

Do you become too complacent? Do you become too comfortable? We have to find ways to motivate people. This whole idea of innovation – enabling people to innovate, encouraging them, fostering collaboration – it's the best approach. Each of us must grind away at where value is. Why are we doing this? What's the value? Does the market care? Answering those questions will feed success.