President Barack Obama: When the moment chooses you, part 1

It might seem simple, but learning to listen is something every entrepreneur needs to do. You can't identify a launch window if you haven't even identified your mission. But listening to your customers—or in this case, your community—can make that mission clear.

It was both a lesson for me in that politics isn't always quite as smooth and exactly the way you'd want it to be. But it also gave me a lot of respect for the fact that politics, like everything else, requires attention to detail and execution. And that a lot of times, we think of politics and social change, generally, as a matter of vision and inspiration, but a lot of it ends up being preparation and perspiration.

I believe that the moment almost always chooses you, but to seize that moment, you have to move fast.

The precise reason why culture is a theme that we come back to again and again within 'Masters of Scale' is because when you're scaling, if you don't have the horizontal culture, your culture will not scale. And then that will become a competitive disadvantage because it's very hard and takes a lot of energy to refactor culture. And that's part of the reason why everyone tends to [say] 'get culture right' from the beginning.