The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life

your most important beliefs should not be binary; lean-in people can see the merit of the old way and the new way at the same time, without the compulsion to reject or condemn either.

Under the kaizen system, your supervisor is your idea coach. It remains the employee’s idea, but through working with someone who is more experienced with a deeper understanding of the art of the possible, 99 per cent of ideas are accepted and collaboratively developed into something that could work.

‘It helps this channel more than you know, and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests get.’ (This is a promise of a future reward – if you subscribe, you’ll be rewarded with bigger guests.)

Under the kaizen philosophy, you need lots of ideas, very often, to make meaningful progress over time. And in order to get lots of ideas, you need people to be driven by their own curiosity, motivation and care.

These suggestions may sound insignificant in nature, but the kaizen philosophy believes that it is in fact the smallest of improvements that will cumulatively push the business forward and keep it ahead of competitors that don’t care about sweating the small stuff.

Indifference to your words, your message or your calls to action is the surest path to the dreaded habituation filter mentioned in the previous law.

To be considered the best in your industry, you don’t need to be the best at any one thing. You need to be good at a variety of complementary and rare skills that your industry values and that your competitors lack.

In the world of business, teams like ours often devote months to meticulously outlining how and why their ideas will succeed. Yet they seldom allocate the same level of time to examining the potential reasons why their ideas might not work. This is where the power of a simple question – ‘Why is this a bad idea?’ – comes into play.

‘Skin in the game’ works because across several global studies it’s been demonstrated that human behaviour is more strongly driven by the motivation to avoid losses than to pursue gains, which is what scientists call ‘loss aversion’. Give yourself something to lose.