casey_brown_know_your_worth_and_then_ask_for_it

00:12

No one will ever pay you what you're worth. No one will ever pay you what you're worth. They'll
only ever pay you what they think you're worth. And you control their thinking, not like this,
although that would be cool.

00:34

(Laughter)

00:36

That would be really cool. Instead, like this: clearly defining and communicating your value are
essential to being paid well for your excellence.

00:48

Anyone here want to be paid well? OK, good, then this talk is for everyone. It's got universal
applicability. It's true if you're a business owner, if you're an employee, if you're a job seeker. It's
true if you're a man or a woman.

01:04

Now, I approach this today through the lens of the woman business owner, because in my work I've
observed that women underprice more so than men. The gender wage gap is a well-traveled
narrative in this country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a woman employee earns just
83 cents for every dollar a man earns. What may surprise you is that this trend continues even into
the entrepreneurial sphere. A woman business owner earns just 80 cents for every dollar a man
earns. In my work, I've often heard women express that they're uncomfortable communicating their
value, especially early on in business ownership. They say things like, "I don't like to toot my own
horn." "I'd rather let the work speak for itself." "I don't like to sing my own praises."

01:51

I hear very different narratives in working with male business owners, and I think this difference is
costing women 20 cents on the dollar.

01:59

I'd like to tell you the story of a consulting firm that helps their clients dramatically improve their
profitability. That company is my company. After my first year in business, I saw the profit increases
that my clients were realizing in working with me, and I realized that I needed to reevaluate my
pricing. I was really underpriced relative to the value I was delivering. It's hard for me to admit to
you, because I'm a pricing consultant.

02:25

(Laughter)
02:27

It's what I do. I help companies price for value. But nonetheless, it's what I saw, and so I sat down to
evaluate my pricing, evaluate my value, and I did that by asking key value questions. What are my
clients' needs and how do I meet them? What is my unique skill set that makes me better qualified
to serve my clients? What do I do that no one else does? What problems do I solve for clients? What
value do I add? I answered these questions and defined the value that my clients get from working
with me, calculated their return on investment, and what I saw was that I needed to double my
price, double it. Now, I confess to you, this terrified me. I'm supposed to be the expert in this, but
I'm not cured. I knew the value was there. I was convinced the value was there, and I was still scared
out of my wits. What if nobody would pay me that? What if clients said, "That's ridiculous. You're
ridiculous."

03:30

Was I really worth that? Not my work, mind you, but me. Was I worth that? I'm the mother of two
beautiful little girls who depend upon me. I'm a single mom. What if my business fails? What if I fail?

03:48

But I know how to take my own medicine, the medicine that I prescribe to my clients. I had done the
homework. I knew the value was there. So when prospects came, I prepared the proposals with the
new higher pricing and sent them out and communicated the value. How's the story end? Clients
continued to hire me and refer me and recommend me, and I'm still here. And I share this story
because doubts and fears are natural and normal. But they don't define our value, and they
shouldn't limit our earning potential.

04:27

I'd like to share another story, about a woman who learned to communicate her value and found her
own voice. She runs a successful web development company and employs several people. When she
first started her firm and for several years thereafter, she would say, "I have a little web design
company." She'd actually use those words with clients. "I have a little web design company." In this
and in many other small ways, she was diminishing her company in the eyes of prospects and clients,
and diminishing herself. It was really impacting her ability to earn what she was worth. I believe her
language and her style communicated that she didn't believe she had much value to offer. In her
own words, she was practically giving her services away. And so she began her journey to take
responsibility for communicating value to clients and changing her message.

05:26

One thing I shared with her is that it's so important to find your own voice, a voice that's authentic
and true to you. Don't try to channel your sister-in-law just because she's a great salesperson or your
neighbor who tells a great joke if that's not who you are. Give up this notion that it's tooting your
own horn. Make it about the other party. Focus on serving and adding value, and it won't feel like
bragging. What do you love about what you do? What excites you about the work that you do? If
you connect with that, communicating your value will come naturally.
06:00

So she embraced her natural style, found her voice and changed her message. For one thing, she
stopped calling herself a little web design company. She really found a lot of strength and power in
communicating her message. She's now charging three times as much for web design, and her
business is growing. She told me about a recent meeting with a gruff and sometimes difficult client
who had called a meeting questioning progress on search engine optimization. She said in the old
days, that would have been a really intimidating meeting for her, but her mindset was different. She
said, she prepared the information, sat down with the client, said this isn't about me, it's not
personal, it's about the client. She took them through the data, through the numbers, laid out the
trends and the progress in her own voice and in her own way, but very directly said, "Here's what
we've done for you." The client sat up and took notice, and said, "OK, I got it." And she said in
describing that meeting, "I didn't feel scared or panicky or small, which is how I used to feel. Instead
I feel like, 'OK, I got this. I know what I'm doing. I'm confident.'"

07:17

Being properly valued is so important. You can hear in this story that the implications range far
beyond just finances into the realm of self-respect and self-confidence. Today I've told two stories,
one about defining our value and the other about communicating our value, and these are the two
elements to realizing our full earning potential. That's the equation. And if you're sitting in the
audience today and you're not being paid what you're worth, I'd like to welcome you into this
equation. Just imagine what life could be like, how much more we could do, how much more we
could give back, how much more we could plan for the future, how validated and respected we
would feel if we could earn our full potential, realize our full value.

08:08

No one will ever pay you what you're worth. They'll only ever pay you what they think you're worth,
and you control their thinking.

08:16

Thank you.

08:17

(Applause)
christoph_niemann_you_are_fluent_in_this_language_and_don_t_even_know_it

00:12

I'm an artist. Being an artist is the greatest job there is. And I really pity each and every one of you
who has to spend your days discovering new galaxies or saving humanity from global warming.

00:26

(Laughter)

00:28

But being an artist is also a daunting job. I spend every day, from nine to six, doing this.

00:37

(Laughter)

00:39

I even started a side career that consists entirely of complaining about the difficulty of the creative
process.

00:45

(Laughter)

00:47

But today, I don't want to talk about what makes my life difficult. I want to talk about what makes it
easy. And that is you -- and the fact that you are fluent in a language that you're probably not even
aware of. You're fluent in the language of reading images. Deciphering an image like that takes quite
a bit of an intellectual effort. But nobody ever taught you how this works, you just know it.

01:15

College, shopping, music. What makes a language powerful is that you can take a very complex idea
and communicate it in a very simple, efficient form. These images represent exactly the same ideas.
But when you look, for example, at the college hat, you know that this doesn't represent the
accessory you wear on your head when you're being handed your diploma, but rather the whole
idea of college. Now, what drawings can do is they cannot only communicate images, they can even
evoke emotions. Let's say you get to an unfamiliar place and you see this. You feel happiness and
relief.

01:53

(Laughter)

01:55

Or a slight sense of unease or maybe downright panic.

02:01

(Laughter)

02:03

Or blissful peace and quiet.

02:07

(Laughter)

02:08

But visuals, they're of course more than just graphic icons. You know, if I want to tell the story of
modern-day struggle, I would start with the armrest between two airplane seats and two sets of
elbows fighting. What I love there is this universal law that, you know, you have 30 seconds to fight
it out and once it's yours, you get to keep it for the rest of the flight.

02:30

(Laughter)

02:32

Now, commercial flight is full of these images. If I want to illustrate the idea of discomfort, nothing
better than these neck pillows. They're designed to make you more comfortable --

02:45

(Laughter)

02:47

except they don't.

02:48

(Laughter)

02:52

So I never sleep on airplanes. What I do occasionally is I fall into a sort of painful coma. And when I
wake up from that, I have the most terrible taste in my mouth. It's a taste that's so bad, it cannot be
described with words, but it can be drawn.

03:09

(Laughter)

03:15
The thing is, you know, I love sleeping. And when I sleep, I really prefer to do it while spooning. I've
been spooning on almost a pro level for close to 20 years, but in all this time, I've never figured out
what to do with that bottom arm.

03:31

(Laughter)

03:34

(Applause)

03:36

And the only thing -- the only thing that makes sleeping even more complicated than trying to do it
on an airplane is when you have small children. They show up at your bed at around 4am with some
bogus excuse of, "I had a bad dream."

03:53

(Laughter)

03:55

And then, of course you feel sorry for them, they're your kids, so you let them into your bed. And I
have to admit, at the beginning, they're really cute and warm and snugly. The minute you fall back
asleep, they inexplicably --

04:06

(Laughter)

04:08

start rotating.

04:09

(Laughter)

04:12

We like to call this the helicopter mode.

04:14

(Laughter)

04:16

Now, the deeper something is etched into your consciousness, the fewer details we need to have an
emotional reaction.
04:25

(Laughter)

04:28

So why does an image like this work? It works, because we as readers are incredibly good at filling in
the blanks. Now, when you draw, there's this concept of negative space. And the idea is, that instead
of drawing the actual object, you draw the space around it. So the bowls in this drawing are empty.
But the black ink prompts your brain to project food into a void. What we see here is not a owl
flying. What we actually see is a pair of AA batteries standing on a nonsensical drawing, and I
animate the scene by moving my desk lamp up and down.

05:08

(Laughter)

05:10

The image really only exists in your mind. So, how much information do we need to trigger such an
image? My goal as an artist is to use the smallest amount possible. I try to achieve a level of
simplicity where, if you were to take away one more element, the whole concept would just
collapse. And that's why my personal favorite tool as an artist is abstraction. I've come up with this
system which I call the abstract-o-meter, and this is how it works. So you take a symbol, any symbol,
for example the heart and the arrow, which most of us would read as the symbol for love, and I'm an
artist, so I can draw this in any given degree of realism or abstraction. Now, if I go too realistic on it,
it just grosses everybody out.

05:57

(Laughter)

05:59

If I go too far on the other side and do very abstract, nobody has any idea what they're looking at. So
I have to find the perfect place on that scale, in this case it's somewhere in the middle. Now, once
we have reduced an image to a more simple form, all sorts of new connections become possible.
And that allows for totally new angles in storytelling.

06:24

(Laughter)

06:27

And so, what I like to do is, I like to take images from really remote cultural areas and bring them
together. Now, with more daring references --

06:38

(Laughter)
06:41

I can have more fun. But of course, I know that eventually things become so obscure that I start
losing some of you. So as a designer, it's absolutely key to have a good understanding of the visual
and cultural vocabulary of your audience. With this image here, a comment on the Olympics in
Athens, I assumed that the reader of the "New Yorker" would have some rudimentary idea of Greek
art. If you don't, the image doesn't work. But if you do, you might even appreciate the small detail,
like the beer-can pattern here on the bottom of the vase.

07:16

(Laughter)

07:19

A recurring discussion I have with magazine editors, who are usually word people, is that their
audience, you, are much better at making radical leaps with images than they're being given credit
for. And the only thing I find frustrating is that they often seem to push me towards a small set of
really tired visual clichés that are considered safe. You know, it's the businessman climbing up a
ladder, and then the ladder moves, morphs into a stock market graph, and anything with dollar
signs; that's always good.

07:53

(Laughter)

07:55

If there are editorial decision makers here in the audience, I want to give you a piece of advice. Every
time a drawing like this is published, a baby panda will die.

08:05

(Laughter)

08:06

Literally.

08:07

(Laughter)

08:09

(Applause)

08:13

When is a visual cliché good or bad? It's a fine line. And it really depends on the story. In 2011,
during the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan, I was thinking of a cover. And I went through the
classic symbols: the Japanese flag, "The Great Wave" by Hokusai, one of the greatest drawings ever.
And then the story changed when the situation at the power plant in Fukushima got out of hand.
And I remember these TV images of the workers in hazmat suits, just walking through the site, and
what struck me was how quiet and serene it was. And so I wanted to create an image of a silent
catastrophe. And that's the image I came up with.

08:59

(Applause)

09:00

Thank you.

09:02

(Applause)

09:05

What I want to do is create an aha moment, for you, for the reader. And unfortunately, that does
not mean that I have an aha moment when I create these images. I never sit at my desk with the
proverbial light bulb going off in my head. What it takes is actually a very slow, unsexy process of
minimal design decisions that then, when I'm lucky, lead to a good idea.

09:31

So one day, I'm on a train, and I'm trying to decode the graphic rules for drops on a window. And
eventually I realize, "Oh, it's the background blurry upside-down, contained in a sharp image." And I
thought, wow, that's really cool, and I have absolutely no idea what to do with that. A while later,
I'm back in New York, and I draw this image of being stuck on the Brooklyn bridge in a traffic jam. It's
really annoying, but also kind of poetic. And only later I realized, I can take both of these ideas and
put them together in this idea. And what I want to do is not show a realistic scene.

10:09

But, maybe like poetry, make you aware that you already had this image with you, but only now I've
unearthed it and made you realize that you were carrying it with you all along. But like poetry, this is
a very delicate process that is neither efficient nor scalable, I think. And maybe the most important
skill for an artist is really empathy. You need craft and you need --

10:39

(Laughter)

10:41

you need creativity --

10:42

(Laughter)
10:44

thank you -- to come up with an image like that. But then you need to step back and look at what
you've done from the perspective of the reader.

10:53

I've tried to become a better artist by becoming a better observer of images. And for that, I started
an exercise for myself which I call Sunday sketching, which meant, on a Sunday, I would take a
random object I found around the house and try to see if that object could trigger an idea that had
nothing to do with the original purpose of that item. And it usually just means I'm blank for a long
while. And the only trick that eventually works is if I open my mind and run through every image I
have stored up there, and see if something clicks. And if it does, just add a few lines of ink to connect
-- to preserve this very short moment of inspiration.

11:40

And the great lesson there was that the real magic doesn't happen on paper. It happens in the mind
of the viewer. When your expectations and your knowledge clash with my artistic intentions. Your
interaction with an image, your ability to read, question, be bothered or bored or inspired by an
image is as important as my artistic contribution. Because that's what turns an artistic statement
really, into a creative dialogue. And so, your skill at reading images is not only amazing, it is what
makes my art possible. And for that, I thank you very much.

12:27

(Applause)

12:30

(Cheers)

12:36

Thank you.

12:37

(Applause)
george_steinmetz_photos_of_africa_taken_from_a_flying_lawn_chair

00:12

I have to tell you, it's more than a little intimidating being up here, an old American guy trying to tell
Africans something new about your own continent. But sometimes, an outsider can see things in a
different way, like from the air. That's what I found by flying low and slow all over the African
continent as I photographed the spectacle of its diversity. And I wasn't always an old guy.

00:37

(Laughter)

00:40

This is me in 1979, a kid from California backpacking his way through the Ituri Forest of Zaire. I was
on a yearlong hitchhiking trip. I had just dropped out of Stanford University, and I went from Tunis to
Kisangani to Cairo and learned how to live on 10 dollars a day. It was an amazing experience for me.

00:58

I spent about a week in this Dinka cattle camp on the banks of the Nile in South Sudan. The Dinka
taught me how to tie papyrus into a shelter, and also I observed how they had adapted their way of
life around the migratory needs of their beloved cattle. It was a like a graduate course in ecological
ethnography, and I got busy taking notes with a camera.

01:20

With no money for rides, they often made the Mzungu ride on the roof of the trucks, or in this case,
on the top of the train going across South Sudan. I felt like I was riding on the back of an insect going
across the enormous tapestry of Africa. It was an incredible view from up there, but I couldn't help
but think, wouldn't it be even more amazing if I could fly over that landscape like a bird?

01:43

Well, that notion stayed with me, and 20 years later, after becoming a professional photographer, I
was able to talk National Geographic into doing a big story in the central Sahara, and I came back
with a new kind of flying machine. This is me piloting the world's lightest and slowest aircraft.

02:00

(Laughter)

02:01

It's called a motorized paraglider. It consists of a backpack motor and a parachute-style wing, and it
flies at about 30 miles an hour. With 10 liters of fuel, I can fly for about two hours, but what's really
amazing about it is it gives me an unobstructed view, both horizontally and vertically, like a flying
lawn chair.

02:21
My hitchhiker's dream of flying over Africa came true when I spotted these two camel caravans
passing out in the middle of the Sahara. The one in the foreground is carrying salt out of the desert,
while the one in the background is carrying fodder for the animals heading back in. I realized you
couldn't take this kind of picture with a conventional aircraft. An airplane moves too fast, a
helicopter would be too loud with too much downdraft, and it dawned on me that this crazy little
aircraft I was flying would open up a new way of seeing remote parts of the African landscape in a
way that had never really been possible before. Let me show you how it works.

04:35

(Applause)

04:39

Thanks.

04:40

(Applause)

04:43

This may seem a bit dangerous, but I am not some kind of adventure dude. I'm a photographer who
flies, and I only fly to take pictures. My favorite altitude is between 200 and 500 feet, where I can see
the world three-dimensionally, but also at a human scale. I find that a lot of what I'd done over the
years in Africa, you could try to do with a drone, but drones aren't really made for exploration. They
only fly for about 20 minutes of battery life and about three kilometers of range, and all you get to
see is what's on a little screen.

05:13

But I like to explore. I want to go over the horizon and find new things, find weird stuff, like this
volcanic caldera in Niger. If you look at the altimeter on my left leg, you'll see that I'm about a mile
above takeoff. Flying that high really freaked me out, but if you talk to a pro pilot, they'll tell you that
altitude is actually your friend, because the higher you are, the more time you have to figure out
your problems.

05:38

(Laughter) As a rank amateur, I figured this gave me more time to scream on the way back down.

05:44

(Laughter) To calm myself down, I started taking pictures, and as I did, I became rational again, and I
was getting buffeted by a Harmattan wind which was coming out of the upper right hand corner of
this picture, and I started to notice how it had filled the entire crater with sand.

05:59
When I got to the north of Chad, I found a different kind of volcano. These had had their entire
exteriors stripped away, and all that was left was the old core, and in the middle of the Sahara, I felt
like I was seeing the earth with its living skin stripped away.

06:12

Much of the Sahara is underlain by an enormous freshwater aquifer. When you go to the basin,
sometimes you can see it leaking out. If you were to walk through those palm groves, you could
drink fresh water out of your footsteps. But that green lake water? Due to extreme evaporation, it's
saltier than seawater and virtually lifeless.

06:30

In Niger, I was amazed to see how the locals learned how to exploit a different kind of desert spring.
Here, they mix the salty mud with spring water and spread it out in shallow ponds, and as it
evaporated, it turned into a spectacle of color. My rig is also amazing for looking at agriculture. This
picture was taken in southern Algeria, where the locals have learned how to garden in a mobile dune
field by tapping into shallow groundwater.

06:55

I also loved looking at how animals have adapted to the African landscape. This picture was taken in
Lake Amboseli, just across the border from here in Kenya. The elephants have carved the shallow
lake water up into a network of little pathways, and they're spaced just enough apart that only
elephants, with their long trunks, can tap into the most succulent grasses.

07:13

In Namibia, the zebra have learned how to thrive in an environment that gets no rainfall at all. These
grasses are irrigated by the dense coastal fog that blankets the area every morning. And those bald
patches out there? They call them fairy circles, and scientists still struggle to understand what causes
them.

07:29

This is Mount Visoke, with a small crater lake in its summit at 3,700 meters. It forms the roof of the
Great Rift Valley and also the border between Rwanda and Congo. It's also the center of the reserve
for the fabled mountain gorilla. They're actually the big money-maker in Rwanda, and on this side of
the border, conservation has become a huge success.

07:49

Rwanda has the highest rural population density in Africa, and I saw it in almost every corner of the
country I went to. I've heard it said that competition for land was one of the things that led to the
tensions that caused the genocide of the 1990s.

08:04

I went back to South Sudan a few years ago, and it was amazing to see how much things had
changed. The Dinka were still in love with their cattle, but they had turned in their spears for
Kalashnikovs. The cattle camps from above were even more spectacular than I could have imagined,
but things had changed there too. You see those little blue dots down there? The Dinka had adapted
to the new reality, and now they covered their papyrus shelters with the tarps from UN food
convoys.

08:28

In Mali, the Bozo people have learned how to thrive in the pulsating rhythms of the Niger River. As
the rainy season ends and the water subsides, they plant their rice in the fertile bottoms. And that
village in the lower right corner, that's Gao, one of the jumping off points for the major trade routes
across the Sahara. At the end of the harvest, the Bozo take the leftover rice straw and they mix it
with mud to reinforce their roofs and the village mosque. I must have flown over a dozen villages
like this along the Niger River, and each one was unique, it had a different pattern. And each mosque
was like a sculptural masterpiece, and no two were alike.

09:02

I've flown all over the world, and nothing can really compare to the cultural diversity of Africa. You
see it in every country, from Morocco to Ethiopia, to South Africa, to Mozambique, to South Sudan,
to Mali. The array of environments and cultural adaptations to them is really extraordinary, and the
history is pretty cool too.

09:32

From the air, I have a unique window into the earliest waves of colonial history. This is Cyrene on the
coastal mountains of Libya, that was founded by the Greeks, in 700 BC, as a learning center, and
Timgad, which was founded in what's now Algeria by the Romans in 100 AD. This was built as a
retirement community for old Roman soldiers, and it amazed me to think that North Africa was once
the breadbasket for the Roman Empire. But 700 years after Timgad was built, it was buried in sand,
and even then, the African climate was wetter than it is today.

10:02

The African climate continues to change, and you see it everywhere, like here in the Gorges de Ziz,
where a freak rainstorm came barreling out of the Sahara and blanketed the mountains in snow. I
never thought I would see date palms in snow, but the kids that day had a great time throwing
snowballs at each other. But it made me wonder, how are Africans going to adapt to this rapidly
changing climate going forward?

10:26

In a continent as dynamic and diverse as Africa, sometimes it seems that the only constant is change.
But one thing I've learned is that Africans are the ultimate improvisers, always adapting and finding a
way forward.

10:38

Thank you.
knut_haanaes_two_reasons_companies_fail_and_how_to_avoid_them

00:13

Here are two reasons companies fail: they only do more of the same, or they only do what's new.

00:23

To me the real, real solution to quality growth is figuring out the balance between two activities:
exploration and exploitation. Both are necessary, but it can be too much of a good thing.

00:41

Consider Facit. I'm actually old enough to remember them. Facit was a fantastic company. They were
born deep in the Swedish forest, and they made the best mechanical calculators in the world.
Everybody used them. And what did Facit do when the electronic calculator came along? They
continued doing exactly the same. In six months, they went from maximum revenue ... and they
were gone. Gone.

01:11

To me, the irony about the Facit story is hearing about the Facit engineers, who had bought cheap,
small electronic calculators in Japan that they used to double-check their calculators.

01:27

(Laughter)

01:29

Facit did too much exploitation. But exploration can go wild, too.

01:34

A few years back, I worked closely alongside a European biotech company. Let's call them
OncoSearch. The company was brilliant. They had applications that promised to diagnose, even cure,
certain forms of blood cancer. Every day was about creating something new. They were extremely
innovative, and the mantra was, "When we only get it right," or even, "We want it perfect." The sad
thing is, before they became perfect -- even good enough -- they became obsolete. OncoSearch did
too much exploration.

02:17

I first heard about exploration and exploitation about 15 years ago, when I worked as a visiting
scholar at Stanford University. The founder of the idea is Jim March. And to me the power of the
idea is its practicality.

02:35

Exploration. Exploration is about coming up with what's new. It's about search, it's about discovery,
it's about new products, it's about new innovations. It's about changing our frontiers. Our heroes are
people who have done exploration: Madame Curie, Picasso, Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, etc.
I come from Norway; all our heroes are explorers, and they deserve to be. We all know that
exploration is risky. We don't know the answers, we don't know if we're going to find them, and we
know that the risks are high.

03:18

Exploitation is the opposite. Exploitation is taking the knowledge we have and making good, better.
Exploitation is about making our trains run on time. It's about making good products faster and
cheaper. Exploitation is not risky -- in the short term. But if we only exploit, it's very risky in the long
term. And I think we all have memories of the famous pop groups who keep singing the same songs
again and again, until they become obsolete or even pathetic. That's the risk of exploitation.

04:00

So if we take a long-term perspective, we explore. If we take a short-term perspective, we exploit.

Small children, they explore all day. All day it's about exploration. As we grow older, we explore less
because we have more knowledge to exploit on. The same goes for companies. Companies become,
by nature, less innovative as they become more competent.

04:31

And this is, of course, a big worry to CEOs. And I hear very often questions phrased in different ways.
For example, "How can I both effectively run and reinvent my company?" Or, "How can I make sure
that our company changes before we become obsolete or are hit by a crisis?" So, doing one well is
difficult. Doing both well as the same time is art -- pushing both exploration and exploitation.

05:05

So one thing we've found is only about two percent of companies are able to effectively explore and
exploit at the same time, in parallel. But when they do, the payoffs are huge. So we have lots of
great examples. We have Nestlé creating Nespresso, we have Lego going into animated films, Toyota
creating the hybrids, Unilever pushing into sustainability -- there are lots of examples, and the
benefits are huge.

05:39

Why is balancing so difficult? I think it's difficult because there are so many traps that keep us where
we are. So I'll talk about two, but there are many.

05:51

So let's talk about the perpetual search trap. We discover something, but we don't have the patience
or the persistence to get at it and make it work. So instead of staying with it, we create something
new. But the same goes for that, then we're in the vicious circle of actually coming up with ideas but
being frustrated. OncoSearch was a good example. A famous example is, of course, Xerox. But we
don't only see this in companies. We see this in the public sector as well. We all know that any kind
of effective reform of education, research, health care, even defense, takes 10, 15, maybe 20 years
to work. But still, we change much more often. We really don't give them the chance.
06:42

Another trap is the success trap. Facit fell into the success trap. They literally held the future in their
hands, but they couldn't see it. They were simply so good at making what they loved doing, that they
wouldn't change. We are like that, too. When we know something well, it's difficult to change. Bill
Gates has said: "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces us into thinking we cannot fail." That's the
challenge with success.

07:19

So I think there are some lessons, and I think they apply to us. And they apply to our companies. The
first lesson is: get ahead of the crisis. And any company that's able to innovate is actually able to also
buy an insurance in the future. Netflix -- they could so easily have been content with earlier
generations of distribution, but they always -- and I think they will always -- keep pushing for the
next battle. I see other companies that say, "I'll win the next innovation cycle, whatever it takes."

07:55

Second one: think in multiple time scales. I'll share a chart with you, and I think it's a wonderful one.
Any company we look at, taking a one-year perspective and looking at the valuation of the company,
innovation typically accounts for only about 30 percent. So when we think one year, innovation isn't
really that important. Move ahead, take a 10-year perspective on the same company -- suddenly,
innovation and ability to renew account for 70 percent. But companies can't choose. They need to
fund the journey and lead the long term.

08:32

Third: invite talent. I don't think it's possible for any of us to be able to balance exploration and
exploitation by ourselves. I think it's a team sport. I think we need to allow challenging. I think the
mark of a great company is being open to be challenged, and the mark of a good corporate board is
to constructively challenge. I think that's also what good parenting is about.

09:02

Last one: be skeptical of success. Maybe it's useful to think back at the old triumph marches in
Rome, when the generals, after a big victory, were given their celebration. Riding into Rome on the
carriage, they always had a companion whispering in their ear, "Remember, you're only human."

09:29

So I hope I made the point: balancing exploration and exploitation has a huge payoff. But it's
difficult, and we need to be conscious.

09:40

I want to just point out two questions that I think are useful. First question is, looking at your own
company: In which areas do you see that the company is at the risk of falling into success traps, of
just going on autopilot? And what can you do to challenge?

10:03
Second question is: When did I explore something new last, and what kind of effect did it have on
me? Is that something I should do more of? In my case, yes.

10:18

So let me leave you with this. Whether you're an explorer by nature or whether you tend to exploit
what you already know, don't forget: the beauty is in the balance.

10:33

Thank you.