The #1 Thing That Makes or Breaks Businesses

25 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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1:01

In this segment, the speaker explains his practice of gathering the entire team in a single physical location once a year (previously quarterly) to foster deep relationships. He recounts doing this at Samsung and describes the week as an intensive, holiday‑like experience filled with meals, workshops, and collaborative activities. The explicit objective of the week is not to produce immediate deliverables but to spend time together, build empathy, and create lasting connections that improve teamwork throughout the year. He argues that, even in an AI‑driven world, physical relationships cannot be replaced and must be nurtured for long‑term business success.

Chapters

I bring everyone into one place physically once a year. And I used to do it once every quarter, but now once a year is kind of what I've been doing for a long time. Even at Samsung, we used to do that. We maintained that. And when I first told them that we're going to fly everyone to a location that from an Asian Korean perspective sounded like a holiday destination because they're like capitals of European cities usually, which from a Korean perspective is like, oh, you're all going on holiday for a week. And I was like, no, no, no, it's not holiday. It's like, yes, we do go for dinners and lunches and stuff together for a week. And it's an intense week of spending time together. But actually we talk, we do a lot of workshops, we do a lot of things that are productive. The first thing I always do in those weeks is I stand up in the beginning and say, hey, look, the objective for this week is not— you don't have to produce anything useful. What you need to do is just spend time with each other. I want you to build relationships because those relationships that you do build when you're physically together, they will last and help you for the rest of the year, work better with people, have more empathy for what they're asking for, give them that extra yard when they've messed up or whatever. So like, it's still to have like physical connection and like relationships with people are so important. Yeah. And that's one thing that I don't think— in the world of AI, whatever, I don't think you can give up relationships with people. It's so important to spend time nurturing those. And I think it's so valuable.