How a small act of leadership brought down a $billion hedge fund

How a small act of leadership brought down a $billion hedge fund

We look at the GameStop story from a leadership angle.

I just wanted to talk to you really briefly about a story that's been in the news that I found really interesting. It's about the GameStop business in the states that was heading for bankruptcy. A hedge fund decided to short it and help it on its way, the actions of several thousand Redditors have managed to save the GameStop business, increasing its share price massively, and causing the hedge funds to lose out. Now, I wanted to talk to you about this because it disproves the theory that people often have that they're too small a cog in a machine to make a difference.

If loads of small cogs make a small change, then massive change can happen. And that's what happened with with GameStop. Thousands of people just bought a few shares and instead of the share price dropping, which the venture capitalists had banked on, the share price rose drastically. So it's really, really important that we think about this, what's the small change that we can make in our business that if everybody made, it could make a massive difference. So it might be just bringing in 10 more people per week, or just improving our efficiency or our effectiveness by 5%, if everybody did it, then we'd get through a whole lot more work, and we'd be able to invoice a lot more quickly and we'd be able to help our cash flow. On a whole company basis, obviously, it'll make a massive difference. But you can do it on your individual team too. So ask yourself that question. What is it that if we all did this little change this week, how could we make a big change as a team? So just have a think about that.

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