Frontline employees have the most information about customer needs, while leaders have all the authority. To deliver exceptional service, empower the people interacting with customers to make decisions in the moment. This closes the gap and allows the organization to be truly responsive.

To stay connected to frontline operations and customer sentiment, former EasyJet CEO Caroline McCall made it a ritual to help cabin crew collect trash on every flight. This simple, repeated act provided invaluable, unfiltered feedback from both employees and passengers that she couldn't get in the office.

A new CEO’s first few months are best spent gathering unfiltered information directly from employees and customers across the business. Avoid the trap of sitting in an office listening to prepared presentations. Instead, actively listen in the field, then act decisively based on those firsthand insights.

Jensen uses a "Top 5 Things" email system where any employee can send him their priorities and market observations. He reads around 100 of these daily to get unfiltered information directly from the "edge" of the organization, allowing him to spot trends before they become obvious.

To break down natural information silos in hierarchies, leaders must flip the cultural default from punishing unapproved sharing to demanding proactive oversharing. The new rule is: "You are responsible for informing other people." This creates a shared context that enables decentralized, autonomous decision-making.

Effective leadership in a fast-moving space requires abandoning the traditional org chart. The CEO must engage directly with those closest to the work—engineers writing code and salespeople talking to customers—to access unfiltered "ground truth" and make better decisions, a lesson learned from Elon Musk's hands-on approach.

Huang eschews traditional hierarchy, engaging directly with employees at all levels and delivering feedback publicly. This "parallel processing" management style ensures rapid, simultaneous learning across the organization, mirroring the architecture of the GPUs his company builds and creating a uniquely flat structure for a company of its size.

Barry Diller's key lesson from failure is that experience breeds cynicism, which corrupts good decision-making. He advises leaders to constantly fight this tendency and "scrub their instincts clean." Maintaining a degree of naivete is crucial for accurately judging new ideas without being biased by past negative experiences.

At Crisp.ai, the core value is that the best argument always wins, regardless of who it comes from—a new junior employee or the company founder. This approach flattens hierarchy and ensures that the best ideas, which often originate from those closest to the product and customers (engineers, PMs), are prioritized.