Speaking with some entrepreneurs recently, I noticed something interesting. They were energetic, deeply knowledgeable about their businesses and quick to act on opportunities. But many of our conversations remained anchored within the boundaries of their own industries. It made me wonder whether, in focusing so intensely on building a business, we sometimes limit the very experiences that lead to our best ideas.

It also made me reflect on how my own thinking has changed over the years.
For many years, I believed learning was largely about going deeper; reading more about a subject, meeting the right people, attending conferences and listening to experts. I assumed that if I accumulated enough knowledge, better ideas would naturally follow.

I am no longer convinced that is how it works.

When I look back over my own career, the ideas that have influenced me most rarely came from a single source or conversation. They usually appeared unexpectedly when two or three seemingly unrelated experiences suddenly connected.

A boardroom discussion regarding strategy reminded me of something I had learnt years earlier while leading a business. A conversation about institutions changed the way I thought about organisational culture. An article on psychology shed new light on leadership. More recently, ideas from philosophy have influenced how I think about management.

None of those experiences seemed particularly significant at the time. Their value only became apparent later, when they unexpectedly connected with something entirely different.

The value of thinking widely is not simply that we acquire more information. It is that we gradually build a richer internal landscape of ideas. Every worthwhile conversation, success, failure and experience adds another perspective. Over time, those perspectives begin to interact in unexpected ways.

The most valuable ideas often arise not because we know more than others, but because we see connections that others have not yet noticed. That has made me rethink what learning really means and my advice to those entrepreneurs was to try to always think beyond their respective industries.