'Oscar Hartman's interview with Mikhail Fridman: Champion among champions. A Billionaire.'

Even when you were closing a $55 billion deal (the purchase of TNK-BP by Rosneft)?

I’ve faced far worse and more dangerous situations. God has blessed me with the power to fall asleep very quickly, even if I don’t sleep for long, and to easily switch off and stop worrying about a problem entirely. Then I get up and am immediately ready to run or do some other activity – I don’t need a long time to get going. These are entirely genetic phenomena, and are something like a trick of the trade. It seems to me that many successful businessmen are very similar in this.

Another crucial quality of people in business, which I also often talk about, is a tolerance for conflict. You can derive a kind of additional stimulation – in a positive sense – from participating in conflicts.

Business means constant competition and struggle, and often a very tough battle for survival. Either you win, or you are defeated and forced out. In ordinary life, people don’t really like to participate in conflicts and try to avoid them by finding some kind of peaceful solution, coming to an agreement, or simply not entering into confrontation in the first place. This is very difficult to imagine in business. At the same time, businesspeople can behave in a calm, sweet and charming way. The willingness to fight, to defend one’s competitive positions and to capture the market, however, is an intrinsic quality for any successful person in business.

Under the surface, businesspeople are often “charged up” for potential conflicts and they enjoy competition and the need to mobilize all their resources, capabilities and strengths. This is a rare quality. It could be compared to perfect pitch and musical memory for a good musician. Business also has its own sense of hearing.

What role does ambition play? Is it possible to wake up as the owner of a ten-billion-dollar company or do new goals need to be set constantly?

I might be voicing an unpopular and even unpleasant perspective here, but I believe that 80% of it is determined by genetics, while 20% is down to other factors. Ambition is a very powerful phenomenon. There are those who want to be politicians and presidents from the very outset, while there are also a lot of people who don’t think about it at all.

Looking at something like happiness, however, the picture is different. It seems to me as though everybody wants first and foremost to live a happy life. I’m not convinced at all that qualities like ambition, willingness to engage in conflict, and the ability to work in uncertain circumstances are the road to happiness. For example, ambition creates a huge number of problems for a great many people, especially when it comes to unfulfilled ambitions. This is because not everyone with ambitions has the qualities necessary to realize them.

Of course, waking up and becoming the owner of a huge company is almost impossible without ambition. It provides the first impetus and is the root cause of success. On the other hand, ambition without the other necessary properties and abilities can be a rather tragic combination. Many people’s ambitions clearly don’t correspond to their personal abilities, and these people can be desperately unhappy.

Looking more generally at the question of working on yourself, I would say that you need to evaluate yourself correctly both in life and in business. Even when listening to others, you need to draw conclusions about yourself independently and regardless of what they think. It is only by correctly and sufficiently assessing your qualities and abilities, your strengths and weaknesses, your inclinations and talents – which is to say relying on the solid ground of adequate self-esteem – that you can really change something within yourself. This may be unpleasant or contrary to those ambitions, but it’s better to be honest with yourself that you are not capable of something. Otherwise, working on yourself will be pointless. There are natural limits that are imposed on us by nature, and it’s impossible to go beyond them.

Some people feel that there is untapped entrepreneurial potential in Russia. Do you agree with this?

There will be a certain number of people who have business talent among the population of any country. Russia also has its share, of course. It’s no worse in this regard than any other population.

When we talk about an individual, the dominant factor is their personal genetic qualities. When we are talking about a country or a society at large, we begin to look at the average of its population’s genetic properties. Social and societal factors also come to the fore, such as how society itself contributes or does not contribute to the development of business talents. Clearly, Russia is far from being the most favourable environment for the development of entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, it’s not the worst. Underlying the situation are centuries and millennia of history, religion, traditions and customs, a kind of historical memory, the social structure, and our worldview.

As we know, the history of entrepreneurship in Russia has always been very difficult and thorny. Entrepreneurship, the idea of business acumen and wealth as an institution have been received extremely negatively by people. Russia is an Orthodox country in which wealth is considered, if not vicious by definition, then at least not a virtue. At one point, entrepreneurship itself was outlawed, and the word “entrepreneur” was criminalized. It’s extremely difficult to create a highly favourable environment for entrepreneurship in a society like this.

There is a view that the Protestant mindset is inherently much more favourable to entrepreneurship. This is because Protestantism itself as a conceptual system of views was formed at the same time as bourgeois society. In this kind of environment, wealth acquired legally and legitimately is perceived as a person’s property, a reason to respect that person and an indicator of their talent, which was bestowed upon them by God and must be revered to the fullest. In such societies, entrepreneurs are perceived as talented and intelligent people who society should respect and support in every possible way.

Of course, public attitudes and social norms also have a big impact on the development of entrepreneurship. In this regard, Russia has enormous room for improvement. Treating entrepreneurship as the vanguard of social development in multiple directions and taking a business-focused approach to various aspects of life bring phenomenal results. We see this in the example of western countries, and even these newer “Asian Tigers”. Entrepreneurship as a way of thinking and a values-based conceptual system of ideas is a gigantic driver in the development of social relations.

We’re currently seeing a shift in our country, with massively increased interest in entrepreneurship.

There is a very complex and contradictory attitude towards this in Russia. On the one hand, we have a very materialist consciousness, contradicting the Soviet understanding where a person is divorced from any material interests. On the other hand, we can see that this materialism has become completely dominant, I would even say excessively so.

I think this is a reaction to the fact that they tried to impose a completely different concept on us, which is contrary to the biological nature of man. That concept holds that we don’t need material interests, and instead we work in the name of an idea. As it turned out, no one is going to work for an idea. Now, however, people have a certain bias in favour of working for material interests. This is probably a temporary phenomenon, because the optimum solution lies in striking a balance between the two.

I would actually say that interest in entrepreneurship as a source of material wealth in Russia is now at its peak. Everyone thinks about entrepreneurship as a way of meeting their material needs. This is a kind of cognitive dissonance you often see in Russia. At some point, public consciousness must reconcile these different elements and find a healthy, balanced approach. Material wealth is important, but it’s not the only important thing, though legitimate entrepreneurship is a worthy occupation.

Based on your experience, what are the easiest ways to fail?

I can’t provide a precise formula for achieving success, because there are many different ways of finding success. There are a number of factors that lead to failure, such as inconsistency, stupidity, inflexibility, the inability to work in a team or build good teams, and a lack of strategic thinking with no understanding of where trends are going. The list could go on for a long time, but if you don’t know how to do these things, then 99% of the time you won’t succeed as an entrepreneur.

Can entrepreneurs operate within major companies?

Any large organization begins to become more bureaucratic at a certain point, but the word “bureaucracy” is positive in this situation. When an organization employs 10, 20 or 100 people, the presence of a leader figure or several leaders sufficiently compensates for the lack of any formal procedures. As long as it’s possible to constructively reach almost all the key employees in the company, the entrepreneurial spirit will be very strong. This is because the company’s leader is able to create an entrepreneurial spirit through personal participation and advice.

When an organization grows beyond a size at which its leaders and founders can meaningfully reach everybody, some degree of bureaucracy becomes necessary. Rules are needed so that a new person coming in, who will not have access to the company head simply by virtue of their position, can read instructions or be given them by an immediate supervisor or colleague, and then follow them.

As an organization grows, these regulations, rules and procedures begin to play an increasingly important role. Because the number of people who are not reached by the all-seeing eye of the boss – the entrepreneur in question – increases, so too must an increasing number of people be guided by formal rules and laws. At this moment, when people begin to operate according to rules rather than their common sense and business logic, the spirit of entrepreneurship shrinks.

On the one hand, you actually do need to follow these rules. If you don’t, you’ll be in violation of procedure and could be disciplined. On the other hand, business logic tells you that you need to do something different and act outside of these rules. This is a typical conflict that can arise. Unfortunately, in a large organization, bureaucracy is inevitable and keeps the engine running. You can only combat it by trying to build a flexible system of rules. The extent to which an organization is able to adapt its internal legislative system to the current challenges while ensuring stability, and the degree to which this system is universal is proportional to the viability of the organization and its entrepreneurial spirit.

This is the difference between a better organized entrepreneurial culture and a less entrepreneurial one. You develop principles that are more universal and tenacious. They allow people to think and reflect like entrepreneurs, rather than dumb mechanical executors of formal regulations. I think that at some stage, entrepreneurial talent is defined not by the skill of closing deals, but by the ability to formulate rules that allow large numbers of people to be proactive and entrepreneurial. This way, people can keep the spark of entrepreneurialism alive within themselves, while still following the rules.

I recently read that you’ve decided not to leave an inheritance to your children. What's the logic behind this?

I made this decision a long time ago. It’s not for some altruistic reason where I feel a huge need to give everything to charity. I actually care more about my own children in this regard. My view is that having large amounts of money presents a very difficult test for any person, especially if you didn’t earn the money yourself. I’ve even seen lots of people who earned money themselves fail to survive this test, changing a lot and not for the better. I think it's sad.

My job is to ensure that my children are happy, not rich. These are completely different concepts. My task as a father is to give them a good education, the opportunity to see the world and develop ideas about life that I believe in, and to help them better understand the values that I consider important and true. Then it is only my children themselves who can determine what will bring them satisfaction in life. For most of them this has nothing to do with money – it’s about finding the road to happiness.

If, God forbid, one of them needs emergency financial assistance, I hope that I or their mothers will be able to help them. At the same time, however, I would like them to build lives beyond the shadow of their father, who had a lot of money and decided from the very beginning that this would be his life path. I really hope that they don’t become objects of desire or interest on the part of greedy people. Wealth inevitably attracts a lot of base and vicious intentions from others. While we, the people who built and did all of this ourselves, are immune to this – and even then not completely – our children are completely unprotected.

I believe that if I can give all of these things to my children – notwithstanding the good biological characteristics they’ve inherited – it will be more than enough for them to decide for themselves how to build a happy life.