The Popped Kernel

Writing an Article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review - Stay Tuned

2010-11-26T10:45:00.000-08:00

We recently teamed up with Perla Ni, founder and former managing editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), to write an article on the social purpose movement. Specifically, we aim to:

Uncover the drivers of the movement's recent growth
Explore its long-term prospects
Determine the corporation's role in driving and sustaining it

Currently, we're interviewing innovators in the social purpose space - both inside and outside of the corporation. The article will be published in the 2011.

When complete, we'll post a link to the article here... and get back to our regularly scheduled posts for The Popped Kernel.

Nando Parrado: Survival is a Choice

2010-10-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

Nando Parrado blew us away on Wednesday at the World Business Forum. His speech caught most everybody by surprise – amidst talks on leadership and management from some of the world’s brightest luminaries, Nando’s incredible story of survival (as captured in the movie Alive (1993)) and powerful lessons on humanity, put the entire Forum in context.

“I’ve run companies,” he said, with a seasoned levity, “but there are no challenges in business – only issues.” The audience responded with enlightened chuckles. “This,” he continued, referring to his 72 days in the Andes – hungry, freezing, and left for dead – “was a challenge.”

On Friday the 13th, October 1972, a plane - carrying Nando, his rugby team, and loved ones - crashed into the Andes mountains – 14,000 feet high, deep in snow. Nando survived the initial impact – he was in row 9, the last row still attached to the plane. His mom, his sister, and his three best friends were sitting behind him - they did not survive. Over the next 72 days, the survivors rationed food (in one three day period, each survivor had only one chocolate-covered peanut to keep them from starving); they heard on a radio that the search for them had been called off; and they lived through an avalanche that took more lives. Temperatures would reach as low as 35 degrees below zero.

Two months into the 72 day ordeal, Nando could no longer sit still. “I’m not going to die here,” he would say. He knew it would be up to them (really, him) to get out alive. He wanted to summit the mountain they crashed into, in the hopes he would see the green fields of Chile on the other side, and find a path to rescue. He took a friend with him. In three days they reached the top. From the summit, they saw nothing but snow-covered mountain ranges in all directions. His friend cried: “We’re going to die, Nando.” Again, Nando said, “I’m not going to die here.” He then “took the biggest decision of (his) life” – he decided to just walk, walk until he took his last breath in search of rescue. Nando and his friend proceeded to trek 65 miles over 10 days. Nando lost 90 pounds. Finally, they ran into a man near a river, who took them in and helped facilitate the rescue of the others. In all, 29 would die; 16 would survive.

What is it about Nando that drove him to trek 65 miles across the Andes mountains in 10 days, losing 90 pounds along the way, after having already spend two months stranded and starving and freezing, without hope of rescue, hovered in the small space of the fuselage of the crashed plane that his mom, sister, and three best friends perished in? Simply put, what drove Nando to survive?

In a word: commitment. A commitment to survive; a refusal to die. “I’m not dying here,” Nando would say, “Not now.” When others lost hope, he chose to keep going until death or rescue. His fellow survivors have said that it was Nando’s confidence in their survival that kept them alive.

This experience helped Nando understand what was truly important in life – the love of those around him. As he told the audience: Never lose connections. Embrace those around you. Love is the reason for living.

He ended with: “Life is not measured by number of breath you take, but the moments that take your breath away… and those moments are connected to love.”

He walked off stage to a roaring standing ovation – the only one in our two years at the Forum.

Steven Levitt: Find your niche

2010-10-06T18:42:00.000-07:00

Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics and celebrated economist, kicked off the second day of the World Business Forum inside New York's Radio City Music Hall. He engaged us with his Malcom-Gladwell style of storytelling (“I want to start by telling you story about a man named John Salvaggio…”) and self-effacing humor (“I’m an irrelevant economist.”). He told entertaining stories that ranged from the IRS to prostitution to convey his key messages – innovative ideas are simple and obvious, admit you don’t know when you don’t know, people in business need to think more, social incentives are usually more effective than financial incentives. But it was his personal story about how he got to where he is today – and the key learning we can all pull from it – that most grabbed us.

Steve had dreamed of becoming an important economist – an economist like Alan Greenspan who could move markets with mere words. But there was one problem – he wasn’t good at math. His high school teacher told him that his AP math score was the lowest of any of her students… ever. (He still doesn’t know how he got into MIT’s graduate economics program, having only taken Math 1A at Harvard as an undergrad). Soon after entering MIT, he knew he was in over his head. He seriously considered a different path.

His father gave him an inspirational talk, Steve said, “for the first and only time” of his life. His father said that when he began his own career as a medical researcher, his boss, a well-renowned doctor in medical research, told him he didn’t have what it takes to be a medical researcher. Then, the renowned doctor advised Steve’s father to focus on an area of research that nobody else was focusing on – intestinal gas (true story). Steve’s father did just that – and became the world’s foremost expert on intestinal gas (when Steve was in high school, GQ featured his father in a two-page spread entitled, much to Steve’s chagrin, “The King of Farts.”).

With that, Steve received the moral of the story from his father: “I have no talent. You have no talent,” to which the audience erupted in laughter. Steve, channeling his father, continued, “If you want to succeed, you’ve got to find topics that are so embarrassing, so undignified,” the crowd roared again, “that other more talented people in your field wouldn’t do it.”

As entertaining as Steve’s story was, it contains a powerful message – to be successful, you’ve got to find your niche. In fact, the message was similar to one of the many insights Jim Collins highlighted the day before. Jim had described the hedgehog concept, the idea that a fulfilling career is one in which you:
* Do what you love (What do you love?)
* Can be the best in the world at it (When you do it, do you feel you are made to do it?)
* Drive our economic engine (Are you useful in a way society values (not necessarily profit)?)

Steve Levitt, while not Alan Greenspan, has become famous for making economics mainstream with accessible language and engaging stories. He’s also a lot smarter than he gives himself credit for. He found his niche, and he’s an incredible success because of it.

World Business Forum: Themes from Day One

2010-10-05T20:55:00.000-07:00

Wendy Kopp, CEO of Teach for America, was the breakout star today at the World Business Forum inside New York’s Radio City Music Hall – and she wasn’t even presenting. Jim Collins and David Gergen, independently, called Wendy out as one of the best leaders of a generation. Coming from these two men – Jim Collins, who has researched a combined 6,000 years of history in business leadership, and David Gergen, a witness to four decades of political leadership serving presidents Nixon through Clinton – that’s quite an endorsement.

And that leads us to the first of three main themes of the day:

1. Social enterprise

Jim Collins, former faculty at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and author of classic business books Built to Last and Good to Great, set the tone early in his speech when he asked members of the audience if they were involved in a social organization, a charity, a group outside of work that helped the community. He stressed the importance of being involved. “We have come to believe,” he said of himself and his staff, “that if all we have is great companies, we may have a prosperous nation, but not a great nation.” He continued by implying that what makes a great nation is the success of building society outside of the board room – the need to build and deliver social good, the need for “great K-12 education… and not just for some.”

David Gergen, former advisor to four US presidents and now a CNN analyst and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, made clear his optimism for the next generation of leaders – the Millennial Generation (those born between 1977 and 1998) – the generation of young people who are more concerned with serving their country than any generation since the WWII generation, what Tom Brokaw calls the “Greatest Generation.” And while these Millennials aren’t necessarily as interested in serving in uniform, they are very interested in serving nonetheless in the social and civic sphere. (Bill George, professor at the Harvard Business School and former CEO of Medtronic, shared a similar point with us in Davos, Switzerland earlier this year at the World Economic Forum).

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, in a wonderfully direct interview with Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal, raved about Waiting for Superman, the new documentary, made by “this Liberal producer” of An Inconvenient Truth, which highlights the plight of public education in the US. Asked by an audience member (a Millennial who used to work in finance and is now a teacher) what he would do to fix the education system, Welch said he would challenge the tenure system, reward teachers on merit, and weed out the weak. He reminded us that in education, students are the product, not the teachers. (The audience applauded).

Overall, the trend toward social enterprise will likely only grow as Millennials come of age and take on more leadership roles.

Which leads us to the second theme of the day:

2. People

Jim Collins, with mounds of business leadership research behind him, said the single-most important skill of a great leader – hands down – is the ability to pick people… and put them in the right seats. In fact, he said that 6 to 7 of a great leader’s top 10 career decisions will be people decisions – or should be.

Jack Welch put it another way: “You gotta hire people smarter than you are.” He also took a shot at the Hewlett-Packard board for not developing leadership within the company (HP has had a recent history of shuffling through one outside CEO after another). He went so far as to say, “The Hewlett-Packard board has committed sins over the last 10 years. They have not done one of the primary jobs of a board, which is to prepare the next generation of leadership.”

David Gergen talked about President Obama’s senior team and suggested the need to include people outside his Chicago inner circle, particularly to add some business “heavyweights” to the team.

Charlene Li, social media expert and co-author of best-selling book Groundswell, framed it in terms of relationships – with employees and customers. She cited companies like Best Buy that understand the true purpose of social media – to create new relationships that didn’t previously exist and to strengthen ones that already did.

People are critical. Our ability to choose and place them will color our own and our company's success.

And if people color our success, then passion drives it, which brings us to the third theme of the day. Not only was it talked about by today’s speakers, but also on display by them:

3. Passion

Jim Collins speaks as if he’s on fire. With big eyes that buldge in moments of excitement and precise body movements that struggle to control a fierce internal fire, Collins cited one of the key traits of a great leader – not just regular ambition, but extreme passionate ambition for the cause (or company), not oneself.

Jack Welch talks with an energetic and snapping wit. He spoke about the importance of "nuts with ideas." In not so many words, he said that passion drives enterpreneurs, and entrepreneurs will drive us out of this economic rut. What logically follows is that passion is the spark of the economy.

Charlene Li speaks with a constant smile and impassioned calm, as she shares how companies can leverage social media. She told a story about a Best Buy employee who responded personally to a tweeted question of hers. The employee was going to be at Charlene's nearby store in a few days and offered to meet Charlene there in person to discuss her product inquiry further. She was blown away by this employee's ownership of her question. That ownership comes from somewhere - passion for the customer.

These speakers are all at the top of their game, and they’re all passionate about what they do. That's not a coincidence.

Come back tomorrow to find out what emerges from the speeches of Steve Levitt, Al Gore, James Cameron and others, as our coverage of the World Business Forum continues.

World Business Forum: Here We Come!

2010-10-02T15:05:00.000-07:00

We are thrilled to be a featured blog of the World Business Forum again this year.

*Impressive is the lineup of speakers: Al Gore, Jack Welch, Jim Collins, David Gergen, and James Cameron, just to name a few.

*Spectacular is the setting: Radio City Music Hall in New York City (See picture at right).

*Relevant are the themes: Leadership, Strategy, Innovation.

Visit us on October 5 and 6 for live coverage. We’ll share insights from luminary leaders and buzzing bloggers.

This year, we will be blogging alongside The Wall Street Journal and other major news outlets. We’ll also be joined by some of the best blogs in cyberspace. A few bloggers I’ve been following since meeting them at last year’s Forum include:

Braden Kelley at Blogging Innovation
Jim Estill at CEO Blog
Andrea Meyer at Working Knowledge
Steve Todd at Information Playground
Ken McArthur at Impact Blog
Stu Miniman at Blog Stu
Jonathan Fields at Career Renegade

Be sure to check them out.

For a complete list of speakers at this year’s Forum, you can visit the World Business Forum website. As you enter the site, you’ll also get a multi-media flavor for the event.

The World Business Forum never fails to wow. Simply put, it's one of our favorite events of the year.

A Conversation with Parag Khanna, Foreign Policy Wunderkind

2010-09-18T03:36:00.000-07:00

We recently sat down with Parag Khanna to kick start our “Up and Comers” interview series, in which we talk to up-and-coming luminaries in business and politics. They aren’t yet household names but one day will be.

As we spoke to Parag at New York’s Science, Industry and Business Library, he had just finished an 8,000-mile trek from London to Mongolia – it took him one month to complete. Within the week, he was headed to China, for another month. Parag gets around. And he’s able to do it while married-with-kid, leading the New America Foundation’s Global Governance Initiative, running his own consultancy, and writing an international best-seller (The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century). He’s also advised the US Military and Barack Obama, as well as held stints at renowned think tanks - the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution.

At 31, Parag was named one of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century, alongside Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, David Petraeus, and Jon Stewart (Esquire magazine, 2008). We wouldn’t be surprised if he one day occupies a top post at the US State Department. Needless to say, Parag is an “up-and-comer.”

Watch our interview in full, when we post it (soon). In it, you might be struck by the same things we were:

How he deflected the pressure to enter the world of high finance and follow his passion for travel and government
What city he thinks is the most dangerous in the world - more dangerous than Iraq in 2005
How he thought through an opportunity to work in the Obama administration (and ultimately turned it down)

Up and Comers: A New Interview Series with Young Influentials

2010-09-09T07:02:00.001-07:00

Today we’re launching “Up and Comers” - a series of interviews with young influentials (think Crain’s Business 40 under 40) in business & politics and arts & entertainment. These “up and comers” are people who might not yet be household names, but will be in time.

Check back in soon to watch our interview with Parag Khanna, one of Esquire magazine’s 75 Most Influential People in the 21^st Century, who at 30 published best-selling book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. In the interview, you’ll find out why he chose the less trodden path of foreign policy over the more proven (and lucrative) one of high finance. You’ll also hear about some of his favorite – and most harrowing – moments traveling the world, while on his two-year research tour for The Second World.

Clay Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life?

2010-07-28T04:57:00.000-07:00

Here at The Popped Kernel, we aim to humanize leaders in business and government by understanding who they are as people. So when we heard that famed Harvard Business School (HBS) professor, Clay Christensen, uses his last class of the semester to urge his students to apply theories from class to better find out who they are as people, we took notice.

Professor Christensen recently repurposed his lecture for an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) entitled "How Will You Measure Your Life?" We recommend that you read it in full - it's fantastic.

Christensen's message is partially premised on the fact that "more and more of (his HBS '79 classmates) come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children" because "they didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy."

To avoid the same fate, students in Christensen's class are asked to reflect upon three questions:

1. How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Hint: it's less about money and more about people. As Christensen puts it, "More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people."

2. How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Here, Christensen alludes to the theory of resource allocation. That is, students must invest the appropriate amount of time into the things in life that are most important to them in order to yield fulfillment in the long term. Christensen even suggests to his students spending an hour each day reflecting upon their purpose - reading, thinking, experiencing (and in Christensen's case, "praying" as well). Afterall, as he says of his students, "Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of (business concepts)."

3. How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Put another way, "How can I ensure that I do the ethical thing in business and in life?" Christensen advises his students to not compromise personal values on the little things, as doing so will snowball into compromising values on the big things later on, which can - and often does - get you in trouble. (Two of the 32 people in Christensen's Rhode Scholar class ended up in jail - so did one of his HBS classmates, Jeff Skilling, former CEO of Enron - all of whom Christensen calls "good guys," but "something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.")

How will you measure your life? Comment below or write us at ThePoppedKernel@gmail.com.

A Conversation with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia

2010-07-17T17:50:00.000-07:00

We recently sat down with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the fifth most popular website – only Google, Facebook, Youtube, and Yahoo are bigger. We talked about Wikipedia’s role in society as well as how and why Jimmy “made it.”

Watch the interview below, OR read the interview in its entirety – the transcript of the interview is below. (We’re trying this out for the first time. If you like the transcript idea, let us know, and we’ll look to do this for future interviews).

Before we go to the interview though, we’d like to highlight a few takeaways from our conversation with Jimmy, as it relates to failure.

As with the luminaries we’ve previously interviewed, Jimmy Wales is no stranger to failure.

In 1996, he tried to launch an internet-based lunch ordering system in Chicago, but it went nowhere. The people who needed to buy into his vision simply didn’t. As Jimmy put it, “If you (told a restaurant owner in the Chicago Loop in 1996 that) you were from the Internet, you might as well be from Mars. They had no idea what I was talking about at all. Nor did they care.” Jimmy still believes “ it’s a brilliant idea, it just didn’t work.” Well, not in 1996, it didn’t. But the idea is, empirically, a brilliant one – it’s made an incredible success out of Seamless Web in New York. Jimmy was simply ahead of his time (we joked about that in the interview, but it’s true.)

Later, he launched Nupedia, a precursor to Wikipedia. Jimmy readily admits that it failed. He also recognizes that this particular failure was a requirement for Wikipedia’s success. When Wikipedia launched, Jimmy already had an existing community in Nupedia, a group of loyalists to Jimmy’s vision – “a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet” – a group that would not only help create Wikipedia’s content but also evangelize on its behalf.

Again, through Jimmy’s story, we see that not only was failure important to his success, but so too was his approach and attitude towards it. As Jimmy tells others, “I just say, ‘Follow your passion. Do something you think is super interesting. And if it fails? Hey, whatever. You spent a year doing something you loved.’"

Watch (or read) the interview to find out:

* whether the urban myth of Wikipedia’s Britannica-like accuracy is true

* how Jimmy stays relaxed in job that would drive most people crazy

* what he found when he entered a school unannounced in the Dominican Republic

* who the smartest person he knows is

TRANSCRIPT

The Popped Kernel (TPK): Today, we’re talking to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.org. Jimmy, Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today.

Jimmy Wales (JW): Sure. Great.

TPK: What role do you see Wikipedia playing on the internet and on society overall?

JW: On the Internet, we’re now the fifth most popular website and have been in the same slot for a couple of years. We’re probably the most linguistically diverse site. We’re in over 175 languages that have at least 1,000 articles. And we’re really focused on our role in the developing world, in the languages of the developing world, and in that space online in many cases we’re going to be one of the first major websties to be there because we’re so supportive of that part of the world, and we can afford to be supportive whether that makes economic sense or not.

TPK: What do you mean by supportive?

JW: Our software’s translated into multiple languages. We have volunteers who are out there working to try to find people to work in those languages. I would say in a lot of the languages, there aren’t that many websites available. Some smaller local content but your Microsofts, Yahoos, Googles of the world, they – you know, it’s not a criticism of them – they really can’t afford to pay that much attention to smaller languages in a way that our community can, so that’s a part of the role that we play on the Internet.

And then in society more generally, I think everybody who is likely to see this video has had their life affected by Wikipedia and uses it on a regular basis. But I think that there’s a second wave of impact that I think we’re going to have that is kind of interesting, so if you’re speaking English or German or a European language or Japanese, Chinese, the biggest problem that you face with information is actually an overload of information. You go to a search engine and you type “Washington, D.C.” and you get back millions of things when maybe you just need the basic summary. And that’s what Wikipedia really can give you is a quick orientation to the subject.

But in a lot of languages the real problem that they face is lack of access to information at all. Just one statistic that I’ve heard, and I don’t know if this is still true but a few years ago it was said that the number of books translated into Arabic every year is about the same as the number of books translated into German every day. Even though it’s a much larger population of people speaking Arabic, there’s just a real lack of flow of information into Arabic. It gets much worse when you think about a language like Swahili or Wolof – one of my favorite small Wikipedias now. We have 1,000 articles in Wolof, which is a language in Senegal. And in these languages, the access to information that people have in their mother tongue is just incredibly small.

So as we build Wikipeida in those languages, in many cases, it’s going to be the first opportunity that people have to get access to information about whatever a topic that they might be interested in. You can imagine that in Swahili, it’s probably not that hard to find information about London or New York, but it may be hard to find information about the USB standard and so your trying to learn technology, your trying to learn computers and you just have no information unless you learn English or French and that’s a big barrier to getting people online, getting people integrated with the global conversation, so I think that linguistic diversity is something we bring to the table that’s really important.

TPK: And is Wikipeida really more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica?

JW: (Laughs) Well, it varies…. The best academic evidence we have is, unfortunately, more than three years old now, and this was a study that was published in Nature. They sent a group of articles out from Britannica and from Wikipedia of similar length, similar topic. Experts reviewed them. And they found that Wikipeida had, on average, around four errors per article and Britannica had, on average, three. So three years ago we weren’t quite as good as Britannica. I think for a lot of people what was surprising about that wasn’t that there were four errors per article in wikipedia but that there were 3 in Britannica. Because people thinkg of britan as somehow handed down from on high and perfect. But it isn’t. and it’s a great encyclopedia but it’s full of errors, as all reference works are. That’s just the nature of the difficulty of doing good, quality reference work. These days I think with certain topics we’re definitely better than Britannica just because we cover the topics in a much more comprehensive way. But you know there’s still errors in wikipeida unfortunately and we’re doing our best to fix them but it takes time.

TPK: How did the idea for Wikipedia start?

JW: I was watching the growth of the free software movement - open source software, as most people know. And I saw that groups of programmers were coming together online to collaborate to build really largescale software projects, very successful, very high quality software. And I put a lot of thought into that. How is it possible? What makes that work? And as it turns out, the free licensing model is really important. You have to deal with certain incentives issue. When you have a group of people working on a project, they want to make sure that their work doesn’t get locked up and that it’ll always be free, so they need that license structure that gives everybody a comfort contributing to the commons. So that’s a big part of it. I was thinking well what – seeing this and seeing that it was really an important phenomenon in software made me realize that this could be apllied more broadly than just software. And realized that it makes sense that collaboration would start first with programmers because if they need a tool to be able to collaborate, they just build their own tools which is what they did. So they built CVS – converter versioning system – where they can check in and out code, and so different people can be working on the same project globally in different time zones. Those kinds of tools and coordination they built for themselves and I realized, "Hey, if I look at those kinds of tools, we could work together on all kinds of things." And that was kind of the early beginnings of the idea.

TPK: Now, you could have applied that to a lot of different contexts. What made you think of the online encyclopdia?

JW: Well, I think the main things is that encyclopedias seem easy to collaborate on and I still think that’s true. In fact, when I first had the idea, I was in a panic because I thought it was so obvious that everybody was going to do it, and two years later, nobdy else was doing it still. But the main thing about it is - if I say - encyclopedia article about the Eiffel tower, pretty much everybody knows what that is - what it’s supposed to be like at the end of the day. I mean we can quibble over the details but you pretty much have a good idea of what you’re trying to create and that gives you certain inherent standards, quality standards, direction. It just seems like a very easy thing. And also it’s a defined unit. It becomes useful very quickly. As opposed to if I said, "Let’s collaborate on wirting a novel" Right? A novel isn’t very useful until it’s done. It’s also a long sustaining road. It’s also - if I tell you that it’s a novel about pain and redemption, we have no guidance whatsoever. we have no idea what we’re doing. And so it’s just a fairly straightforward thing to write an encyclopedia article. So that was kind of it.

TPK: And then how did you go from this idea of open-source-software-meets-encylcopedia to making it happen? and then from making it happen to making it big? Because those are two big jumps.

JW: Well, the first attempt to build the free encyclopedia was a failure. This was called Nupedia. It was a project that Wikipedia grew out of later. And basically, the issue was - I didn’t really understand about communities. There were a lot of things that nobody really knew at the time and so Nupedia was a very top-down, very highly structured, very academic project and one which in the end didn’t work because it was such a burden for the contributors to be able to participate. Wikipedia grew out of that - once we had the idea of the "wiki," which had actually been around since 1995 - invented by a guy name Ward Cunningham - and Wikipedia started in 2001. So for 6 years, wiki’s were a small underground phenomenon – this idea of website that you would then edit had been out there but nobody had really harnessed it into a big thing. So once I gave up on the Nupedia concept and launched the wiki, then it actually took off very quickly. We had more work done in two weeks than we had done in two years - still a very small community but it was pretty evident pretty early on that this was actually a great tool – you’re able to write; you’re able to correct each other’s mistakes; you’re able to expand. Somebody could start something by writing two sentences and somebody else could write two more sentences and someone else would look up the references and pretty soon we started to see something take shape. After that, it just was really a long, continuous road. Basically, our traffic was doubling every three or four months for a few years. We would see occassional spikes, when we grew fast, and occasional slowdowns, depending on school holidays and things like this. But overall, it was pretty steady. People always want to know, “What was the tipping point?” There wasn’t really a tipping point that I can identify, unless you say the day I put it on the web.

TPK: So you just put it on the web and sat back and said, “Let’s see what happens with this?” and it just took off?

JW: We were’t sitting back, no. We already had the existing community, the Nupedia community, so this was actually – when I say Nupedia failed, I should say it didn’t really fail, it grew into something else in the sense that we had a couple hundred people active on the mailing list who were excited about the prospects of building a free encyclopedia. And so essentially, we spent two years talking about how to make an encyclopedia and what it meant, what kinds of tools we would need, before we actually got started with Wikipedia. And so there was already an existing great community of people and then it just grew - it grew over time.

We got a lot of early press from the free software community. Sites like Slashdot covered us and sent us a lot of traffic. We were very active in terms of meeting volunteers and talking to people and evangelizing even in the early days. And then also, as the content grew, we would get more organic traffic from the search engines. They would crawl the site and find us and we would start to have kind of obscure topics that nobody else really had much on.

And other little things that I think we did right – the URL structure is super simple, so everybody knows exactly how to write down a URL for a wikipedia page. If you’re a blogger, I mean it’s really easy for you to link into us. You can say, “I’m going to mention Thomas Jefferson, so how do I link to that?” Well, you pretty much know how to write that URL, boom you’re there and that brought in more traffic.

TPK: What did you do before Wikipedia? Before Nupedia?

JW: Well, I used to be a futures trader in Chicago. Befre that, I was an academic in finance. So, pretty obvious.

(Laughs)

TPK: So how did you go from being an options trader to then making a pretty big jump into something so different and doing quite well? What was that like? Can you take us into the psychology of what making that kind of jump is like?

JW: Yeah, well, that jump’s a little stark because I did – I was doing different things on the Internet and it grew organically, and so it wasn’t like one day I just walked off the trading floor and said let’s start an encyclopedia. But there actually are a fair number of things that did carry over. So in my academic career, I was very interested in game theory and modeling interactions. And that’s actually the way I think about the world in many cases, in a game theoretical way, so when I think about people coming together to collaborate - what are some of the incentives that people face individually? How do you harness those incentives in a healthy way? All the kinds of things when you think about institutional design and things like that. Some of it’s very basic economics – just as – we know in economics that just because you pass a law against something doesn’t mean people stop doing it – it’s the same thing - we can say, “Well, you have to cite your sources.” Right? But just saying you have to cite your sources doesn’t actually lead to sources cited. You have to have incentive structures in place and whole mechanisms for making sure that happens. So there’s a lot of overlap in the economic way of thinking about the world and human interactions.

TPK: So you started in the academic world, then you became an options trader, then you started Wikipedia. How did you come to the conclusion that you would stop what was probably a more secure gig in the options trading world to pursue something that was a lot more unpredictable in Wikipedia?

JW: Well, I mean, I was doing stuff on the internet by this time.

TPK: And was it for a job or was it for personal interest?

JW: No, I had a company, an internet company, a search engine that wasn’t very successful but it did ok and, you know, in the Boom, everything did ok. But it’s funny – I just don’t think in those terms. I never have. I just get up everyday and do whatever seems like the most fun thing to do. So once Wikipedia started, I was pretty obsessed with the idea. And Nupedia – I was obsessed with it, but I didn’t know what to do. Once Wikipedia started I was pretty obsessed with the idea and pretty much devoted myself to it in a really serious way, but just because that was the most interesting thing I could think of to do each day, and I just trusted I would find someway to make a living of it somehow.

TPK: So you just decided, “This is fun. I’ll figure out a way to make a living from it”?

JW: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, I actually think if - I’m asked by young people, “What should I do?” I just say – it’s the cheesiest, the most cliché advice possible but it’s actually true – I just say, “Follow your passion. Do something you think is super interesting. And if it fails? Hey, whatever. You spent a year doing something you loved, and now, you can always get a job at Procter & Gamble or wherever" – no offense to Procter & Gamble; it’s a lovely place to work, but it wouldn’t be many people’s first choice if their dream was something entrepreneurial.

And I think one of the great things – and I see this actually culturally in different parts of the world, it’s different. So one of the great things – there’s many things we can criticize about American culture – but one of the great things about American culture is this high tolerance for failure, this idea that you can step off a career track and do something interesting, entrepreneurial, (and if) it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t really damage your long-term prospects. Whereas in Korea, for example, I was meeting with some young entrepreneurs in Korea and they said it’s completely terrifying to them because if you start a venture, first of all, everybody is against it when you start it and then if it fails, it’s a huge black mark on your record. And people think it’s horrible, especially your mother-in-law or what have you. Families don’t necessarily support in the same way. And so I think it costs in a lot of places, it costs innovation.

TPK: What do you tell those Korean entrepreneurs? Because I’m sure there are some folks in America who have the same mindset towards entrepreneurship and failure.

It’s a spectrum everywhere, right? I mean everywhere there are going to be people who want to do something and they don’t feel like they’re going to get support from their family, their friends. Their current employment is going to look down on it. They’re going to risk a certain career track, and those are tough things. I mean you have to respect that. People have very tough decisions to make. Still for me, I just say, “At the end of the day, you only have so many years on the planet. You got to spend them somehow.” And if you try something, it might succeed and be something you’re really proud of or it might fail and be something you’re really proud of. Then you did it at least. I don’t know, that’s just my ethic.

TPK: You mentioned Nupedia before as being a failure or the perfect step in creating Wikipedia. Outside of that, do you consider yourself having ever failed at anything?

JW: Oh yeah.

TPK: At what? And why?

JW: Well, my internet company. We went from 16 employees at the height of the Boom and then when the crash came, I did the classic young entrepreneur thing, which is I didn’t recognize reality for too long. I should have laid off half the staff immediately when we lost our first big ad contract, which was supporting us. Instead, I just kept believing it was going to come back. I didn’t want to face up to the fact that the Boom was over and that it was actually a real crash. And so I ended up a year later essentially running out of money and having to go from 16 people down to 4, put the thing on bare bones. That wasn’t a good idea actually. But then even within that, different projects, different things that we attempted that even today – we attempt stuff all the time that fails. I mean I just –

Recently, I was giving a talk to some teenagers from junior achievement. They’re all interested in starting businesses and things like this. And so I just decided that the most inspirational talk I could give was a series of slides of all these different projects that I had tried and failed. I remember I had a website – my first commercial website was – I still think it’s a brilliant idea, it just didn’t work – was called Loop Lunch. So I was working in Chicago and the downtown area of Chicago is called The Loop. And I saw all these people eating lunch everyday and there should be an online ordering system and so started setting it up. Did the programming. Contacted restaurants. This was back in 1996 or so I think. And let me tell you, small restaurant owners in the Chicago Loop in 1996 – if you said you were from the internet, you might as well be from Mars. They had no idea what I was talking about at all. Nor did they care. And it was just a tough slog. And basically, we couldn’t get customers; we couldn’t get traction. Even the software we wrote was pretty bad and didn’t work. And it failed. And now – I don’t know about Chicago – but in New York, there’s Seamless Web which is fabulous. You go on; there’s hundreds of restaurants; you order; they bring the food to you. It’s perfect. It makes perfect sense. I invented that idea (said with sarcastic smile) .

TPK (Laughs): You were ahead of your time.

JW (Laughs): Ahead of my time. Right. I also had no clue what I was doing. I actually think we failed not because it was ahead of its time, but also just because the thousand things we did wrong at the time. So, whatever - I’m proud of Loop Lunch. It was a cool failure. But I mean I think that’s - for me, that tinkering, experimenting, trying something fun, interesting, new – that’s always more interesting than – so I’ve, in recent years, started a search engine project that we had to close down, mostly because of the economy – I was actually happy with the progress of it. But when the economy went to hell, there was just no – it was not obvious how we were going to raise the money to continue to fund the research for two more years, so we closed it down, and some different critics of mine, giving grief on the internet, “Ah, yet another failed project.” I’m like, “Hey, I tried. I didn’t see you start a search engine.” So, whatever.

TPK: Have you noticed a theme that through failure comes some moniker of success?

JW: Yeah, sometimes. I mean, sometimes it just sucks. I think there’s always an opportunity to learn something. And many things – I think that – also a very common cliché, but whatever – you sometimes learn more from a failure than a success. So, you know, there’s a lot of things that worked about Wikipedia that we’re not – even to this day, nobody quites knows everything about why it worked, right? What degree this factor and that factor played in the whole thing. Because it worked, we just kept doing what was working. Some of it was probably just pure superstition. It’s like, “This is working. Let’s keep doing it.” And meanwhile, it’s going for some unrelated reason we don’t even understand. But then, when there’s a failure, you often know exactly what went wrong and you can kind of say, “Oh, OK. This doesn’t work because the restaurant owners don’t know about the Internet yet. They just don’t care. And we can’t convince them to pay us anything to do this." So, it just depends.

TPK: If you don’t mind switching gears a bit – and just ask some questions about you.

JW: Mm Hmm.

TPK: Some might be a bit quirky, but just to get at who you are…

JW: Mm Hmm

TPK: When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

JW: Oh, a scientist. Maybe that or an astronaut, but scientist seemed more interesting. I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, which is where the space program was headquartered. That’s where the rocket scientists were, inventing the rockets to go to the moon, and things like that. And when I was a small child, sometimes the windows would rattle on the house when they were testing the rockets, which was pretty inspirational in a way – this idea of astronauts going to the moon – it’s a big deal. So I was also very excited about science and technology and things like that. So, yeah, scientist.

TPK: And you ended up following that path.

JW: Kind of. Yeah.

TPK: You’re a computer scientist at heart, it sounds like.

JW: Yeah, I’m a really bad programmer (Laughs), which is as close as I got to computer scientist.

TPK: What are you passionate about?

JW: Well, these days I’m really passionate about the growth of the Internet, Wikipedia in particular, in the developing world. To me, that’s a really exciting development that’s going to be – I think we don’t even really understand all the ramifications of what’s going to happen as the next billion people come online, partly because, right now, so far, the first 1.8 billion people who’ve come online, well, increasingly they’re from places we don’t interact with and cultures we don’t know much about but in the first wave, it was, you know, US, Europe, Japan. And now we’ve got hundreds of millions of people coming online – China, in South America, all over the world. And I think that’s really interesting. And I think we don’t really know all the dynamics of what that’s going to imply in terms of culture, the transmission of ideas across cultures. I mean it’s really interesting. I’ve traveled a lot all over the world. And just had some really amazing and interesting experiences.

Just not long ago, I was in the Dominican Republic and they took me out for a school tour with the Minister of Education, which was a fairly ridiculous show. We went to the best high school and the poor kids – they made them stay after school the day before until 6pm working on a presentation about wikis for me, and then I came in; they gave the presentation; a girl sang; and it was ridiculous. And I was like – it was very sweet of the kids, but I mean basically I didn’t learn anything about education there.

So then I went sort of unannounced with someone from the First Lady’s office who took me, and we just drove out to one of the slums just outside the city where they’re building computer labs. And there’s a computer lab there where the kids come after school, and they can do their homework, and they can get on the internet. And they just built this. And, it’s an area with – they’ve had electricity – legal electricity – for a couple of years now. It’s tin roofs, shacks, and so on. And, I walk into this computer lab completely unannounced and there’s [sic] the kids online doing IM, and they’re on Google, and they’re on YouTube, and they’re on Wikipedia. And talk to some of the kids – they were completely gobsmacked that I was there. They loved Wikipedia - they use it everyday for their homework and things like that. And you start to realize, “Hey, there’s this whole generation of kids who, 40-50 years ago - they would have been sitting with no text b--- you know, very little of anything, and now they have - the world is open to them. And yeah, they don’t have a computer at home; they don’t have a laptop. But hey, every afternoon, they can go onto the computer and they can find out about the world. I think that’s really powerful. They also all have cell phones, of course, and wanted to take pictures with their cell phones.

So that kind of penetration of IT throughout the world – I’ve seen the same kinds of things in India, the slums of India. You’ll see people who are online. Maybe it’s slow, but it’s coming there very quickly. And I think that’s pretty transformative in lots of ways that are very subtle. You can’t really say exactly – simple things, “Well they can get an education, get a better job.” Yeah, sure, but they can also just have a level of learning and actually get the idea that there’s something really amazing about reading and learning stuff about the world and getting excited about that. That’s really powerful in ways I think that are hard to predict.

TPK: Did you ever think that Wikipedia would be as big as it is today – the fact that you can go into a village in the Dominic Republic unannounced, and the kids are on Wikipedia?

JW (laughs): It’s funny because I was very optimistic. You know, the big picture vision is a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet – in their own language. So, that’s a pretty big concept. But I thnk it never – it’s not real to you until you’re there and can see it and realize that you go into a college class in India or in a computer lab in the slums in the Dominican Republic and see that people are using it. That’s pretty powerful. That’s pretty amazing. And even today, I get a kick out of it. And I actually get a bit of a funny kind of – interesting thing, so in China, we were banned for three years. So whereas most places around the world we’re like in the top 10 anyway, but normally we’re like number four, number five in terms of the popularity of the website, in terms of the number of people who come on in a month. In China, we’re still – we’re number 60.

TPK: What relaxes you? What allows you to unplug and recharge?

JW: Well, I’m a pretty relaxed guy, so I don’t really get stressed.

TPK: You never get stressed.

JW: Not much.

TPK: Is that right?

JW: I mean, of course, everybody does but – I mean I have to have certain zen-like calm to live my life the way I do, which is in airports a lot, which is – you know, if you can’t let go and sort of go with the flow in an airport, you’re just going to kill yourself, so –

TPK: So where does that come from – the ability to – because I think a lot of people in your position would be stressed pretty often and the fact that you’re not is admirable. If someone wanted to tap into that, how would you...

JW: Well, part of it, for me, I think is, I’ve been pretty good about realizing what kinds of stuff I really suck at and I try not to do those things, so, in terms of both my – Wikipedia, the nonprofit, Wikimedia, the for-profit, there’s a CEO who actually runs things on a day-to-day basis. So nobody’s reporting to me. I try not to be a bottleneck in any process. This gives me the freedom to go out and evangelize. These are things I’m good at - talking to people and getting people excited about our work and what we’re trying to accomplish. And that’s kind of important. That means that most of the headaches belong to somebody else – thank – there are people who are actually good at these things. So that’s a part of it. And I think that’s applicable more generally than just me.

I think everybody should assess what they’re doing and if something’s causing you a great amount of stress, try to find a way to rearrange it, so you’re doing a different part of the work, or something, that doesn’t freak you out. I mean a lot of people just beat their heads against the wall for decades of their life doing something they pretty much hate, when they could make some modification and probably have a much happier life.

TPK: Are there certain things that clear your head – a good book, a good movie, a good glass of wine, a hike?

JW: Yeah, I mean you’ve listed a few things there. I do like a good glass of wine.

Well, my daughter is actually – so I go to Florida where I live, and my daughter lives there with her mom, and I have her on the weekends, every other weekend, so I go and spend time with her and talk to her and we do projects together. She’s learning programs, so we do programming, which is fun for me; I never get to code anymore, so that’s kind of fun teaching her programming – we’re doing that together. And so, things like that are pretty good.

And hiking. We just went this summer. We went into the woods. We went deep into the back country. We were there for five days. No cell phone access, no nothing. Just hiking through the woods with backpacks and the whole thing. And she’s a real trooper; she’s only – 8 at the time – she’s 9 now, but had her backpack, did a great job. So that was good, getting offline for a little while was good.

But I, I also just – I’m really lucky, in a sense, that I’m addicted to the internet and somehow turned that to good purposes. So I avoid things like – I don’t play World of War Craft or anything like that because I know that would be – I have actual work to do in the world – I’d be sucked in for a year, so I just avoid that. But the things I enjoy doing are getting online and talking to people and that’s my job, so it works out pretty well.

TPK: Now, since you’ve become “Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia”…

JW: (Laughs)

TPK: … has anything changed in terms of the interaction you have with people?

JW: Umm. Not really. I mean, there is [sic] some aspects of life that are different – you meet somebody and they’re like, “Oo, wow” - but mostly no. I mean, people get used to me pretty quickly. I’m just a guy – some guy from the Internet.

TPK: Some guy from the Internet who has the top 5 website in the United States.

(Laughs)

JW: Yeah, well.

TPK: Do you think that is a result of hard work or luck or skill?

JW: Which is?

TPK: The face that Wikipedia is what it is.

JW: All three. All three. I mean, I can say with no false humility that there was a lot of luck involved, right? And I would be an idiot if I didn’t think that, right? It’s absolutely true. At the same time, I think it’s ok for me to say, “You know what? I actually had a good idea and I worked really hard on it. And I’m proud of that.” Lots of things could have gone wrong, but some of the things that could have gone wrong, I fixed, right? And I’m proud of that. Some of the things that could have gone wrong did go wrong because I didn’t fix it, right? So, I mean, I think it’s really all of those things. I’m proud of my work, but at the same time, I’m not dumb enough to think I did anything super powerful or anything. I mean, I did a decent job.

TPK: When you wake up every morning, what’s the first thing you do? Do you have a particular routine?

JW: Well, I check email. That’s probably the first thing I do

TPK: On a Blackberry or…?

JW: No, I normally get on my computer. I don’t have – my work email doesn’t come to my phone. My personal email comes to my phone. And a few people have that for work purposes, if they really need me, but – yeah, I find that having my work email put on my phone would be a bad idea. You know, it’s just too much. No, I hop on my computer and check email. Lately I’ve been trying not to do that as much. I actually think it’s a bad idea to check your email first thing in the morning. I think you should do something else for a little bit.

TPK: Why is that?

JW: Because the next think you know it’s noon and you’re just doing email and whatever it was you planned to do, you didn’t actually do, so – and a lot of it can wait; a lot of it doesn’t need doing. There’s a lot – email is very dangerous; it can really suck you into all kinds of time sinks. And I’ve actually gotten much better over the years at things like - things I recognize as a procrastinator several years ago I don’t do anymore, so getting involved in long, philosophical discussion and debate on a mailing list, I just don’t do that anymore. Actually, that’s part of the benefits of having become “Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia” is that I can’t just go onto a public mailing list and start yapping with people because then it ends up in the newspaper. So, it’s like, at least I don’t waste time with that anymore. So I do private emails, but even then I’m much more resistant and resilient than I used to be about getting sucked into things that are just super interesting, really valuable, but not actually on point of what I’m trying to accomplish.

TPK: How do you determine…?

JW: Judgement.

TPK: Judgement.

JW: Yeah, just over time – sometimes – you still want to have – I mean, I would foolish if I didn’t engage in any kind of philosophical discussion or debates. I’m just more choosey about them now.

TPK: So when you don’t go to the Internet first thing in the morning, what do you do? however mundane or ordinary.

JW: (Laughs) Yeah. I do actually go on the Internet. Well, I do go on my computer anyway, but I just shouldn’t be doing email. I should be working on a project, reading something important that somebody has sent me, and things like that.

TPK: Do you eat breakfast?

JW: Yeah, yeah. I eat breakfast.

TPK: Religiously?

JW: No. So when I’m in Florida – I guess we have to divide my lifestyle up into when I’m at home which is a rarity and when I’m on the road. So when I’m in Florida. I do. I get up. I have my daughter. We make breakfast. We sit out – we live in Florida, so we can sit outside on the patio and have breakfast and plan our day and things like that and drink coffee. I drink coffee; she doesn’t drink coffee, but – when I’m on the road, it’s very – it’s highly volatile. I just depends on – sometimes I have to get up – well, you met me in Davos, where it’s like basically, you get up and you’re rolling to some breakfast, lunch, dinner, night cap – you know, the whole thing is an intense period of time. But other things are like that too – I’m somewhere. I get up. I have a speech at 9am, so I’ve got to get up and get ready and review my slides, and things like that. It just varies. My favorite thing to do it sleep, so...

TPK: Is that right?

JW: Whenever I can.

TPK: Do you actually get more than 8 (hours) a night?

JW: I try. Yeah.

TPK: Really?

JW: Yeah, I mean, I really – I often do – I mean, this is one of the techniques I have for dealing with jet lag is that I’m really, really lazy, so just sleep a lot.

TPK: Jimmy, you’ve been gracious with your time – just have one last question.

JW: Yeah.

TPK: And that is: What inspires you? What gives you great ideas?

JW: Umm. I would have to say my daughter actually. Yeah, she’s – I’m famous for the neutrality of Wikipedia. I’m very, very neutral - and she’s the smartest person I know. She’s not well-educated yet – she’s only 9 – but it’s really interesting watching her as a – I consider myself a digital native, if you want to talk about that term. I’ve been on the Internet since – I’ve been on the computer since I was 13. I consider myself a native. But 13’s not really native, right? When I was her age – and she’s 9 – I had never touched a computer. We didn’t have computers then. And so watching her and the way she uses her computer and the way she expects things. She blogs. She’s composing movies on iMovie. She’s doing all kinds of things that are completely natural and normal to her. And she’s 9 years old. I mean she’s not a normal person; she’s like super smart, but – still, part of it is she’s had a computer since she stole her mom’s laptop, when she was about four, and she never gave it back. So she’s been online basically her whole life, and that’s a part of it. But that’s also part of why she’s so smart I think. She really is exposed to technology and information and loves to really deep [sic] into things. So it’s always interesting talking to her. She always has a bunch of great ideas.

TPK: Excellent. Well, we’ll leave it there.

JW: Super.

TPK: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.

JW: Yeah. Great.

A Conversation with Alex Counts of Grameen Foundation

2010-03-27T09:40:00.001-07:00

We recently sat down with Alex Counts, President and CEO of Grameen Foundation. If "Grameen" sounds familiar to you, that’s because it is (or, at least, should be). Grameen Bank was started by Muhammad Yunus, the oft-credited forefather of micro-finance. In fact, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his founding of the bank. Because of Yunus and many others – including Alex – who helped him along the way, people who live in poverty now have access to money (or, credit) to start their own businesses. They also now have access to the hope it grants.

Alex loves what he does. He’s curiously both measured and impassioned when he talks about it. We asked Alex what drove him to go into this line of work.

His Path

At age 20, Alex’s life path was taking shape. As a junior at Cornell University, he took to heart some advice from a college mentor: “all problems have a solution… that solution just isn’t getting to all problems.” Alex was on a mission – to scale solutions globally, so that they reached localized problems. So, he wrote a letter to Muhammad Yunus to better understand Grameen Bank. Really, he wanted to understand if he could play a role in scaling Yunus’ approach to poverty reduction. He wanted to see firsthand whether Grameen’s impact was possible in countries other than Bangledesh.

His Fulbright scholarship, post graduation, took him to Bangladesh for six of his first nine years out of college. He worked closely with Muhammad Yunus for many years (In Alex’s office hangs a framed picture of Yunus and a post-grad version of himself sitting at a table in conversation with others. The photo smacks of collaboration and impact). In 1997, Prof. Yunus funded Grameen Foundation – with $6,000 (interest from prize money Yunnus had previously won). Convinced of micro-credit’s global potential, Alex now had a platform of his own – as head of Grameen Foundation – to scale an impactful solution to poverty reduction. In the process, he became a full-fledged social entrepreneur.

Key Lessons

Today, Alex Counts is a force in the non-profit world. The risks he took to become a social entrepreneur have paid dividends. We can learn a lot from his path, its uncertainty, and his ultimate success.

The work of a social entrepreneur is truly noble. But how difficult it must be to start your own (non-profit) business if you can’t promise returns to investors… or even yourself (in the traditional sense of “returns” anyway). How did Alex do it?

He talked to people. Lots of people… for funding. The more he talked, the more he was rejected. But the more he also stumbled upon others willing to pony up. His persistence paid off. As he put it, “The more you talk to people, the more you get of both” (‘no’s AND ‘yes’s).

He also took a leap of faith. When he and Yunus started Grameen Foundation, they didn’t know how they were going to get the necessary funding and resources to launch and sustain it. They simply believed that if they started it, then the money and people would follow. That's exactly what happened.

A steadfast belief in their work sustained them. That belief, and the passion that it stirred within them, breathed constant life into their idea and their work.

When asked where that faith, that confidence, came from, Alex again quotes a mentor who once told him, “Even if you play and lose, you’re still in paradise.” In stark contrast to the people whom Grameen Foundation helps, Alex was lucky at birth to have been born where he was (as are most of us who read (or write) blogs).

Grameen Foundation had setbacks, but Alex looked at the silver lining of every dark cloud that came his way. The organization learned. It improved. In short, Alex used the Foundation's failures as “springboard(s) to achievement.” (How many times have we seen this theme of ‘failure as springboard’ emerge? Hint: every time).

One exchange from our conversation, seemed to capture Alex's formula for success. That is, if you “work hard,” use the “gifts” you’re lucky enough to have, and do it all with “ethics,” then “it’s only a matter of time” before your work starts yielding results (“beyond what [you] could have [ever] imagined”). Alex added: Only two things get in the way of this. Either, you’re doing something you’re not good at. Or, you’re not doing what you love.

Listen to the interview in full - You’ll find out:

* What Alex wanted to be when he grew up (and why)

* What Alex does to unwind and detach from his work’s stress

* Who he credits with granting him the freedom to pursue his true calling

Interview, Part 1 of 6

Interview, Part 2 of 6

Interview, Part 3 of 6

Interview, Part 4 of 6

Interview, Part 5 of 6

Interview, Part 6 of 6

Success: Gold Medal v. Happy Heart

2010-02-23T13:27:00.000-08:00

There's quite an uproar in Canada right now. A lot of Canadians disagree with their country’s Olympic motto: “Own the podium.” Behind the slogan is a stated desire to win more medals at the 2010 Games than any other country. Many Canadians – including former Olympians – find the approach too aggressive. This is not surprising in a country where “doing your best” has been the historical measure of success. Other Canadians, however, believe the slogan’s more aggressive tone is precisely why it’s effective. These are likely the Canadians who can’t stand the fact that their country is the only one in the history of the Games to never have won a Gold while hosting (Ottawa ’76 and Calgary ’88).

On the surface, the controversy appears to be nothing more than fodder for inconsequential chat around the Canadian water-cooler. But below the surface lies a fundamental question – for Canada as a country and for us as individuals:

What kind of success do we value? Put another way: What should success look like – A Gold medal? Or being content with doing our best?

Kevin Hall, in his recent book Aspire, recalls the story of Henry Marsh. In 1984, Henry Marsh was poised to win Gold in the 3,000-meter Steeplechase. Heading into the Olympics, he was ranked #1. For the previous seven years, he finished first at the US Championships. He was the hands-down favorite in the event. Nobody questioned it. Then, everything changed. Days before the race, he contracted a serious virus. He didn’t take medication for fear of failing Olympic drug testing. In bed is where he spent the days leading up to the race. He was in no shape to compete. Nevertheless, he willed himself onto the track on race day. In breathless anticipation, people watched the race begin. Henry was doing fine. He and another competitor led the pack… until the final stretch of the race, when his competitor pulled away, and two others passed him. Henry finished fourth – no medal.

This year’s Canadian slogan does not shed a winner’s light on Henry Marsh. But when you talk to Henry, a different story emerges. As Kevin Hall tells it: “Henry had a talk with himself before the (race) and promised that if he gave the race everything he had, then he wouldn’t be hard on himself, no matter where he placed…. (After the race,) he received thousands of sympathy cards and letters … for what (people) saw as colossal bad luck. But to Henry it was a triumph…. He had entered a race and given it everything he could give…. He saw it as a personal victory.”

Olympic Gold eluded Henry Marsh. So did Silver and Bronze. But he seemed to be at peace with the outcome. His mind was strong. And his heart was happy.

It just so happens that the following year was the best of his career. He won another US Championship and set a Steeplechase record that would not be broken for another 20 years. Today, he’s reached enviable levels of business success as a speaker, trainer, and marketer.

So, what kind of success do you value: a Gold medal regardless of circumstance or a happy heart regardless of outcome?

Nature v. Nurture

2010-02-09T05:17:00.000-08:00

One thing we often ponder – and that our conversation with Dominic Barton surfaced yet again – is the question of nature vs. nurture. These luminaries – Are they born with "it"? Or is "it" learned? Our hunch is a bit of both. But to what degree is each at play?

Here’s the thing – it might not matter. What if success is simply a conscious choice? What if being born with “it” doesn’t matter, but choosing to believe that you can attain “it” does?

We plan to explore this further in subsequent posts. For now, it's an emerging thought born of meaningful conversations with captains of industry who have reached heights of success that many of us aspire to.

A Conversation with Dominic Barton of McKinsey & Company

2010-02-06T12:55:00.000-08:00

We recently sat down with Dominic Barton, the Worldwide Managing Director of consulting firm McKinsey & Company (that’s the firm’s de facto title for CEO). We spoke to him on topics ranging from the 2010 World Economic Forum to what he does first thing every morning to his personal experiences with success and failure.

The complete interview is embedded below. Before we get to it, we wanted to highlight some things from our conversation that we found particularly striking.

It boils down to one question: How did a small-town Canadian farm boy grow up to lead the world's most influential consulting firm?

There’s a “special sauce” to Dominic’s success. And while we don’t have the complete recipe (nobody does), we did uncover a few key ingredients. First, let’s set the context – Where did Dominic come from?

Growing Up
Dominic was one of only six people in his high school (of 200 students) to attend college. Early on, almost as if by natural selection, he was part of an elite group. It was a small group of driven individuals who “helped push each other.”

There was also that one teacher who saw potential in Dominic and told him so. She was one of what would become many mentors in Dominic’s life. She convinced him to join the debate team, where Dominic honed his communication and analytical skills. It was also his first real opportunity travel, exposing him to different people and places – it really “opened up [his] aperture.”

He must have done something right because he eventually received a coveted Rhodes Scholarship, which “made a big difference in terms of where [he] went to university (and) the path [he] took.” He attributes some of it to luck. But he also believes “you can make your own luck.” With characteristic Canadian humility, he quickly added, “[It’s] a strange thing to say.”

While he didn’t say much more on making your own luck, there seems to be a common belief, among the luminaries we speak with, that luck can be made. As Oprah put it, luck is simply “preparation meeting opportunity.” What Oprah’s quote does not include though is an important pre-requisite: knowing what you want. Having a clear sense of what you want allows you to prepare with focus and recognize an opportunity when it arises.

Dominic’s father, a clergyman, was influential in clarifying for Dominic what he wanted to do (or not do, in this particular case). Dominic considers his father to be one of his most important mentors and “the smartest person” he’d ever met. But Dominic didn’t want to be like him – a man offering brilliant perspective on the sidelines. No, Dominic wanted “to get stuff done, not talk about what other people [were] doing.” Something in Dominic’s DNA, ironically, rejected his father’s approach to life. Dominic, unlike his father, wanted to “get into the arena.”

He is very much there now; and he likes it. It wasn’t a linear path, and there have been bumps along the way. How he’s dealt with those bumps is particularly telling. Whether innate or nurtured, he’s demonstrated particular characteristics that have largely contributed to his success.

These characteristics become clear when we ask him how he found his way to Asia more than a decade ago – in retrospect, a defining moment in Dominic’s career (many consider his Asian experience to be chief among the reasons he was elected to the top post of McKinsey in 2009).

Defining Moment
In the late 90’s, Dominic was a partner in McKinsey’s Toronto office and was doing well, but he was in a rut (albeit “a comfortable rut,” as he acknowledges). He thought his growth had reached a plateau. He felt the need “to change it up and push it.” An opportunity came up in Korea – the office there was in desperate need of partners and it was a real chance to build something, do something new.

Sounds like nothing special really, but here’s what’s telling about Dominic and sets him apart.

His mentors told him not to do it! They “thought it was a stupid idea.” They said, “You’re going to kill your career.” “It’s a difficult place.” “Why are you doing this?” “Why would you ever want to think about (this)?”

That only made Dominic “more excited” to go.

Dominic told himself, “I’m going to go. I’m going to be tested like I’ve never been tested. I’ll learn some things. And if it doesn’t work out at McKinsey, I can live with that. But I know I’m going to grow.”

If not for this move, Dominic would not be running McKinsey & Company today.

Key Lessons
Here we have a few key ingredients to Dominic’s success. In addition to personal drive and a passion to grow, on clear display is Dominic’s strong gut feel, comfort with the unknown, and acceptance of potential failure. It sounds trite on the surface. But upon deeper inspection, it’s not.

Dominic needed not only a strong gut feel, but also one that he could consciously tap into and trust. In this case, he knew, or rather he felt, that he needed a change. The Korea opportunity spoke to him louder than any of his mentors – and he listened.

He needed not just a comfort with the unknown, but to be OK with not having all the answers before acting. That is, he couldn’t quite put his finger on why he had to go, but that didn’t stop him from going.

Finally, he needed not just an acceptance of potential failure, but a certain faith that things would work out, even if Korea didn’t. That is, he was OK with the possibility of things not ultimately panning out at McKinsey – he had accepted the potential negative consequences of his decision.

Where did these characteristics come from? What gave him the strength to make such a jump, in the face of strong discouragement, with no apparent upside?

In going against his mentors, Dominic said, “I’ve always had mentors. They’ve been extremely important to me even before McKinsey…. (But) just because you get advice (doesn’t mean) you … have to listen to it.”

He said that two things, in particular, made him more comfortable with the entire situation.

First, he referenced advice that he received from a mentor in the Indonesia office, who told him, “There’s a sixth muscle we all have, and that’s instinct. We don’t play it up enough, but it’s actually a very important piece of our thinking arsenal. ‘What’s your feel? What’s your visceral reaction to something?’”

Dominic continued, “He would literally try to train me on this. He’d say, ‘I don’t want you doing an analysis. I want you to go away and think about this and come back with what’s your feeling about this.’”

Dominic’s initial reaction was “What the hell is this?” He seriously questioned whether clients would appreciate his “feeling” on an issue. He thought clients would look at him and say, “You don’t get it.”

Imitating his mentor, Dominic went on, “‘What’s your feeling? It’s going to be very important, as you get more senior – you’re not going to have time to analyze everything. You’re going to have to have an instinct towards it.’”

Dominic makes clear, “Instinct is something I (started to) consciously (think) about.”

That was the first thing.

“The second one was failure.” Dominic started talking about his experience with failure at McKinsey and how it actually helped him – as a person and as an executive. “It took me three times before I was elected a partner at McKinsey. And it was a very painful process.... I hadn’t experienced a lot of failure. I had worked hard and you know, if you work hard, you do well. Here I was. I was working hard and I was rejected…. ‘You’ve got some serious issues you’ve got to deal with.’ One of them was very painful. It was ‘We’re not sure about your problem solving skills’…. That’s like telling an astronomer they [sic] can’t do math… it was a bit of a slap in the head.

“I got angry. I thought it was unfair.”

But the whole experience had a profound effect on Dominic. In his words, “It gave me the strength to say ‘You know what? I’m not going to define myself by someone else’s standards… or by what other people think.’”

Dominic started seeking value internally rather than externally. He’d ask himself, “What do I want to accomplish in my life, if not in the world?” Then he’d convince himself, “That’s what I should focus on…. There’s going to be times where it works and there’s going to be times when it doesn’t. But I’m going to be comfortable with that.”

The more we talked to Dominic, the more we realized it’s not just his knowledge of Asia that helped him get elected to McKinsey's highest post, but also his zen-like knowledge from there.

Listen to the interview in full to find out more about Dominic, including:
*How he handles bad luck
*What he looks for when recruiting new talent
*What he thinks is just as good as five hours of sleep

Interview, Part 1 of 7

Interview, Part 2 of 7

Interview, Part 3 of 7

Interview, Part 4 of 7

Interview, Part 5 of 7

Interview, Part 6 of 7

Interview, Part 7 of 7

A Lesson in Persuasion at the World Economic Forum

2010-01-31T02:00:00.001-08:00

Persuasion is a key ingredient to success. It’s true whether you're a hollywood screen writer, corporate employee, or international diplomat. In each case, your objective is to influence your audience, your boss, or your enemy or ally to feel or act a certain way. Refugee Run, a one-hour simulation of terrifying refugee life at this year’s World Economic Forum, persuades in a way that is unique and particularly effective.

As we've previously written in this blog, Refugee Run places Forum delegates in the environment and mindset of what it’s like to be a refugee – bare tents, crying women, warring gunshots, barking soldiers, dark silence, and frightening unpredictability. We partook in the experience and realized that it was more intense and jolting than expected. Kudos to Refugee Run for re-creating such an experience so powerfully. But beyond the Run's ability to re-create an experience is its ability to influence the "rulers of the universe" who go through it.

The Run inspired Richard Branson to take over Mia Farrow's hunger strike in 2009. It compelled COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, to reach out to strategic business partners to explore more ways to help. And it's rumored that, at this year's Forum, it compelled Jeffrey Sachs, in concert with UN Global Impact, to bring the Refugee Run to their Leaders Summit in June 2010, a summit that, according to UN Global Impact Executive Director, Georg Kell, will host 1,000 international CEOs.

At the World Economic Forum, an environment in which who is saying something is sometimes more persuasive than what is being said, Refugee Run bucks the trend altogether in how the message is communicated – through experience, not simply discussion or Powerpoint presentation. It's a lesson in persuasion that we can all learn from and is applicable to numerous contexts, whether that context is solving the world's most pressing challenges or dealing with a problematic boss at work.

Business Meets Goodwill at the World Economic Forum

2010-01-30T01:18:00.000-08:00

At Davos this year, there is a lot of talk about humanitarian aid, particularly in light of the recent Haiti disaster. It’s not surprising then that many are applying business principles to the problem. What is surprising, or least interesting to us, is the consistency in applying one particular framework to humanitarian assistance. McKinsey is talking about it. Manpower is participating in it. Jeffrey Sachs is advising about it.

That is: Supply Chain Management. It might sound scary (that's many times what business jargon does: scares us) but it’s actually quite basic.

It starts with a simple question: How do we get aid from the Have’s to the Have Not’s? It’s best to use an example – let’s use the AIDS epidemic in Africa. On the one side, pharmaceutical companies make drugs to combat AIDS. On the other side, millions of Africans are infected with AIDS with no access to the right drugs. How do the right drugs get to the people who need it? Then, we identify what the supply is – either a product or service – in this case, pharmaceutical drugs. (We could even talk about people (that is, doctors) in the recent case of Haiti). Next, we break down, into discrete pieces, the points through which the supply is taken: (1) Pharmaceutical company, (2) Shipping company, (3) Port, (4) Village, (5) Individual. That is our “supply chain.” (The supply chain can look quite different than this – and get complicated pretty fast – depending on context). Finally, we determine how we get from one chain to the next, which is usually a question of who. Who is responsible for moving supply along the chain? The answer, in a lot of successful cases, is “Private-public partnerships.”

In the case of AIDS in Africa, for the most part, big US pharmaceutical companies (#1) have been responsible (sometimes with US government help) for committing a certain amount of drugs to ship (#2) to the appropriate African port (#3). At that point, the private companies’ expertise typcially ends. Another group must pick it up from there. NGO’s (sometimes with UN help), with their local expertise, are typically the best to distribute aid once it’s “on the ground.” From the port, they transport it to the right villages (#4), then get it to the right people (#5).

As a stark reminder of the importance of the supply chain as well as organizations’ roles along it, Jeffrey Sachs, at an intimate panel discussion, recanted that ten years ago, pharmaceutical companies started to realize that their drugs just sat in boxes at major African ports. They weren’t reaching those in need because there was no infrastructure in place to get the drugs to villages. Many died as a result. Some on the panel (which consisted of the CEO of Manpower, Executive Director of UN Global Compact, Deputy Chairman of KPMG, and President of Global Hand) nodded as Sachs mentioned that it was at Davos, that same year, that “Big Pharma” highlighted this challenge. They connected with the UN and international NGOs to link the last few supply chains together, ultimately ensuring that the drugs reached those in need.

It’s exciting to see business and humanitarian causes work handed-in-hand, not just “on the ground,” but also in concept. Transferring knowledge from one sphere to make the other better (in this case, the framework of supply chain management) is one of the World Economic Forum's biggest strengths. Where else do the "rulers of the universe" gather, in such quality and quantity, with so much focus and thought dedicated to combatting some of the world's greatest challenges? We have our criticisms of the World Economic Forum (many do), but it's worth highlighting the great good it serves as well.

Out and About at the World Economic Forum

2010-01-29T03:13:00.001-08:00

The World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, hosts a dynamic, intelligent, and opinionated group of approximately 2,000 international business and political leaders, referred to, in some press accounts, as "rulers of the universe."

As we partake in the broader Davos Experience, we're talking to a large cross-section of participants - leaders of the world's most respected businesses to non-profit practioners at the world's most respected NGOs - for a unique take on this year's Forum. This is what we're hearing after just a couple days (most of this comes from off-the-record conversations with well-positioned Forum delegates, so we are unable to attribute most of it to specific individuals):

Problems and solutions. We spoke with an internationally renowned business leader and seasoned problem-solver, who provided some of his insight and perspective on this year’s Forum:

He bemoaned that too much focus at this year’s Forum is on problems and not enough is on solutions. He thinks the number and nature of agenda topics make sense, but the way they’re being discussed leaves something to be desired.
Continuing on the theme of solutions, he commented on the Goldman Sachs backlash that, as of late, has monopolized press coverage in the aftermath of the financial crisis. (That is, Goldman's profits are skyrocketting, and the company is on the verge of paying out huge bonuses. This, when many have claimed that their financial viability was salvaged by the government’s decision, in the eye of the financial storm, to pay Goldman 100 cents on the dollar for faulty AIG credit, as part of the AIG bailout). He said that Goldman’s is an emotional problem – it represents such a small piece of what’s going on and what needs to be solved in the broader financial crisis context – and as such needs an emotional solution, not a rational one. So we won’t be surprised if in the coming days, weeks, or months, Goldman responds, not with a numbers- or data-driven solution to address the public’s hostility and Congressional concern, but rather with a symbolic or feel-good solution, likely non-profit, or “common good,” in nature (which ironically won’t much touch their bottom line, but will address the hostility).
Of the tone at this year's Forum, this sought-after mind called it “somber.” Whereas last year, delegates were shell-shocked amidst the depths of the financial crisis, this year, delegates are keenly aware of the unprecedented nature of the recovery ahead and their responsibility in blazing a trail out of it.

Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is to the World Economic Forum as Michael Jackson is to 80's pop music. So his presence is cause for great fervor, even among the Forum's elite class of participants.

One off-record-conversation he’s had this year was with a group of promising global talent that the Forum christens its “Young Global Leaders” (YGLs) – a young group of 200-300 promising thinkers, business managers, and political leaders, chosen annually by the World Economic Forum. Clinton spoke to the YGLs about current events including Afghanistan-Pakistan, US Healthcare, Haiti. When we asked one YGL whether the discussion was juicier than what we would read in the papers, this YGL responded, "It's Bill Clinton. He's not stupid. He knows everything he says is on the record.” But while Clinton didn’t vary much from what he’s said in the past, this YGL still thought it somewhat of a coup for him and about 50 other YGL's to get Clinton all to themselves for about an hour.
Bill Clinton is also spending a lot of his time raising funds for Haiti relief, most likely doing a lot of back-slapping and arm-twisting at his Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) party, during the Forum’s first night. “Nightcaps” as they’re officially called by the Forum, this nighttime party was one of the year’s most exclusive at Davos.

Refugee run. Outside the walls of the Forum’s main hall is something called the Refugee Run, a joint effort between UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency) and Crossroads Foundation (a non-profit dedicated to raising awareness of (and support to combat) the plight of the world’s less fortunate through experiential learning) meant to provide Forum delegates with an intimate understanding of the global refugee problem. For one hour, it places delegates in the environment and mindset of what it’s like to be one of the world’s 42 million refugees – bare tents, crying women, warring gunshots, barking soldiers, dark silence, and frightening unpredictability. In only its second year at the Forum, the Refugee Run boasts delegate participation varying from Ban Ki-moon to Richard Branson. According to one of the Run’s organizers, it was Branson’s participation in last year’s Refugee Run that inspired him in May 2009 to finish Mia Farrow’s hunger strike (after Farrow's frail health prevented her from continuing) to protest Sudan's removal of several humanitarian agencies from Dafur, a region known to produce a large number of refugees living in terrifying conditions.

New leadership. We ran into Bill George on the streets of Davos. (He's fast becoming the de facto, resident expert on leadership for The Popped Kernel). In our ten minute walk through the crisp air and snowy sidewalks, he made clear his optimism for the new generation of leaders, slowly taking over key positions in business and politics internationally. He thinks this new group of leaders brings with it an unprecedented consciousness of and for the common good. Remember, this is the man who, in our interview with him in November 2009, told us that the financial crisis of '08-'09 was driven not by sub-prime mortgages, so much as by “sub-prime leadership.”

Banking regulation. Bankers and financiers are uneasy, if not outright worried, about the banking regulation that the Obama Administration proposed a few weeks ago.

The regulatory curbs aim to prevent the "too big to fail" mentality of the recent economic crisis that, in retrospect, incented big banks to take disproportionate risk, whereby if they're right, they reap huge rewards and if they're wrong, taxpayers pick up the tab. There's also an element of disentangling investment activities, whereby banks would not be able to run hedge funds, nor would they be able to trade on their own behalf.
Congressman Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is omnipresent at the Forum (We saw him outside his hotel, inside the Newsweek luncheon, and of course, he's a power center inside the main hall). Congressman Frank is in a position to shape Obama's banking regulation in the House, and as such, participants are clamoring to hear what he has to say as well as influence his committee's ultimate direction on regulation. Of the influence that financiers and their lobbyists are trying to exert, he says, "I don't pay any attention to it. It has no effect on public policy. We have been glad to discuss things with them. They have information, but we have decided to go ahead with this (regulation)." (as quoted in the International Herald Tribune)
Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic adviser, is also at the Forum. In the Forum's main hall, he clarified and defended the Obama regulation with moderator Charlie Rose.

What has become clear, since Obama's announcement two weeks ago, is that there will be regulation - everyone has accepted that as fact (which is a feat in and of itself). What is less clear is what exactly the regulation should or will be.

China. Much hay has been made of the fact that China represents the largest delegation at this year's Forum.

People are starting to talk about the "China consensus" as opposed to the "Washington consensus" - the notion that what comes out of Bejing is more influential to world affairs than what comes out of D.C. Additionally, bets are being made on when exactly China's economy will over-take America's (2020 appears to be a safe bet).
Some Western delegates have been overheard calling China’s presence here "arrogant," not so much for its size as for its attitude. One delegate framed it relative to India’s presence and tone: “India is begging; China’s just being. China's here. They’re listening. But there’s an air that they can manage it all better. But that’s not necessarily true. And that concerns me.”
A seismic shift is happening both politically and economically as the Sleeping Giant awakens from slumber and rises to power. Its ascent is highly controversial in that the implications are far from certain. Where there is uncertainty, there is discomfort. And where there is discomfort, there is a desperate effort to control the situation to regain lost comfort.

This is partially what's happening at the 2010 World Economic Forum. From China to banking regulation, countries and companies, among the chaos of uncertainty, are sizing each other up, both partnering and undermining, at the whim of self-interest, to solve their problems and hopefully, at the same time, the world’s ills. In parallel, from Bill Clinton's fundraising to the Refugee Run's awareness building, the energy and effort behind humanitarian aid is strong and resilient. The question isn't so much about which forces will beat out the rest (financiers vs regulators, self-interest vs public good), but rather how these forces will work harmoniously together.

That is what the World Economic Forum is all about. For an organization that values thought over action, we might end up with more questions than answers by the end of the week, but those questions will hopefully be the right ones, which of course, is the first step to any effective solution.

Live from Davos: The World Economic Forum

2010-01-27T22:14:00.000-08:00

Nestled in the snow-capped Alps of eastern Switzerland, Davos is home to one of the most high-powered events of the year: The World Economic Forum. Attendees are the world's most influential business and political leaders. French President, Nicolas Sarkozy (pictured at right), opened the meeting with a call for international banking regulation.

The feel here is exclusive, yet the Forum's aim is rather inclusive. That is, how to solve the most pressing concerns of our time, chief among them, health and education challenges facing the world's most needy. Also on the agenda: the direction of the global economy, climate change, and international security & coexistence.

We will be covering the Forum through its close on Sunday, Jan 31. And, as is now typical, we will finalize our coverage with a post mortem analysis.

You can also follow real-time action on Twitter, either by using the #WEF hashtag or following the Forum tweeter @Davos.

Additionally, we recommend checking out:
- Live streaming video of the World Economic Forum
- YouTube's World Economic Forum channel
- Wall Street Journal's World Economic Forum coverage hub

Success: Bill Gates v. the Dalai Lama

2009-12-17T09:28:00.001-08:00

The more we study the science of success, the more we realize how critical it is to define it. Only then will we know whether we've reached it... or whether it's the kind we even want.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book Outliers, asserts, unconventionally, that success is not about how hard we work or how much we overcome - sure, those are important - but rather about where we come from, specifically, (1) the year we were born and (2) the status and history of our family. The answers to those two questions will predict stratospheric success more than anything else.

But while Malcolm's explanation of success is unconvential, his definition of it is not. He frames success as does conventional wisdom - along the lines of money, power, fame. Bill Gates is clearly a success. So are the Beattles. Both examples in Malcolm's book.

But what about the Dalai Lama? That is to say, are there not other measures of success, alternatives to money, power, fame? What about happiness? or fulfillment? or inner peace?

Well, those things are simply harder to define. How exactly do we define happiness? How do we use it as a benchmark to determine the degree to which someone has it? With money, it's easy - How much does someone make or have in the bank? But with happiness, it's nebulous at best.

This is a measurement problem. There's no way to measure happiness like there is to measure money. Where there's a measurement problem, there's a credibility problem. And where there's a credibility problem, people don't buy in.

Malcolm could have written a book about success defined as happiness, fulfillment, and inner peace - in fact, we would have loved to have read it - but he might have had a problem with readership buy-in, and ultimately, book sales. In a world - or at least, a country (America) - that defines success as how much money we accumulate, power we amass, and fame we attract, low book sales would have been a problem.

This entry is not meant as a critique of Malcolm's book (we really liked it) or his values (we suspect he's a good person). We simply use his book as a reference point and catalyst for thought and conversation.

We'd love to hear from you. Do you buy-in to this alternative definition of success? Or do you think it's just a rationalization of reality? Put another way: Are you drawn to the type of success achieved by Bill Gates or the Dalai Lama? Comment here or write us at thepoppedkernel@gmail.com.

Book Review: “Dreams from My Father” (Barack Obama)

2009-12-10T16:39:00.001-08:00

(Originally posted by The Popped Kernel on Amazon.com)

“Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.” When the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) made this claim in October 2009, we were suspect. But after reading Barack Obama’s first book, we were not.

“Dreams from My Father” is a powerful book. That it comes from an American president, even more so.

This does not mean we don’t have criticisms of the book. We do. But first, what we liked.

The first part of the book – “Origins” – should be required reading. Period. Beautifully written and insightfully observed, it’s a universally human story about identity – Obama’s own and others’.

An incredibly rich passage of “Origins” – and reflective of the book’s seasoned soul – comes near the beginning. Obama is describing his maternal grandfather, a white WWII veteran from Kansas who decided to move the family out west to Hawaii:

“He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think – the generosity and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make him at once tactless and easily bruised. His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.”

The passage has a human frailty and honesty about it, a certain poetry. That it comes from a politician is both surprising and refreshing. Obama credits his grandfather’s spirit, as described in the passage, for the family’s move to Hawaii, a move leading his mom to his dad and ultimately leading to Obama’s torn existence and storied journey to the White House.

The next (and last) two parts of the book – “Chicago” and “Kenya” – are not as impressive. Obama’s writing becomes tired – what once was profound now feels flowery. (Perhaps it’s all profound but that too much depth fatigues.) The story also strikes us as less engaging – what once was timeless insight is now more descriptive of events. At this point in the book, it’s who Obama is that keeps our attention, not the book itself. If you’re not an Obama fan, or don’t care to be, you don’t have to read these sections. But if you’re interested in knowing how Obama developed his political chops (“Chicago”) and how he uncovered pieces of his identity in Africa (“Kenya”), then do.

Acute observers of Obama have noticed a man torn between lofty ideals and grounded realism, between the glory of greatness and the humility of service. This book is a subtle reflection of that – perhaps an internal tug-of-war between his instinct for full transparency and his ambitions for political office. You get the sense he wants to share an unfiltered version of his story, but also that he’s holding back in some respects – not in the beginning so much as once he reaches “Chicago.” There’s a level of personal depth that he simply loses as he takes us beyond his college years. He begins more to report than to reflect. Perhaps that’s what dries out the book – this shift from insightful reflection with universal implication to deflective reporting with mildly interesting vignettes.

Are we being too harsh on the last two parts of the book? Maybe, but only because the first part is so darn good. Whatever the reason, there’s no denying that President Obama is one heck of a writer, arguably the most powerful – in political and literary terms – since Julius Caesar.

What Prevents Prevention?

2009-12-06T20:30:00.000-08:00

In our last entry, we protagonized the power of prevention, not just in healthcare, but also in strengthening national security. In this one, we identify three reasons why preventionist policies typically fail to gain enough traction to take hold (and ultimately work).

1. It’s invisible. Support is difficult to develop for something that is invisible. Prevention, by definition, addresses a problem that, whether yet developed or not, we certainly cannot see (and one we’ll never see if prevention is effective). Look no further than the climate change debate in America to quickly grasp this concept. We can’t see or hear or feel climate change in any real, personal way, so we debate its very existence, instead of ways to prevent it. Heck, look no further than your own reaction to the following preventionist statement: In 2011, we will need to invest just as much into Indonesia than into Iraq. If that sounds outlandish to you, then you’re part of what prevention is up against.

2. It’s inefficient. Because prevention is invisible, we have to focus everywhere all the time to prevent disaster from striking. For the body, we must focus on all of its parts (i.e., the organs and bones and muscles and other internal tissues), not just the pain points. For national security, we must focus on all the regions of the globe, not just the Middle East. Focusing everywhere, all the time, is simply inefficient. Our resources are better directed towards something “real,” particularly in a world of competing and consequential priorities. At least that’s what is required to get people to agree to spend time and money on it.

3. It’s incomplete. For such inefficiency, prevention is still not a panacea. It will likely always remain just a piece of the solution, not the whole. The capacity for, and willingness to use, force will remain an effective deterrent. It must underwrite any effective prevention campaign. In healthcare, prevention can’t exclusively eradicate cancer once somebody has it. In national security, prevention can’t exclusively fight extremism once it’s developed. In both cases, we have to bring in the heavy artillery to help combat the problem. It’s easy to just believe “this is the way it is” and use that belief as reason not to pursue prevention more holistically than we already do.

Now What
How do we overcome the barriers to effective preventionism? Is it as simple as persuading a critical mass of people to agree to the merits of it? And if so, then how do we do it?

We’d like to hear from you. Do you agree with the notion of prevention as effective policy? If not, why not? If so, why isn’t there more of it? And what can we do to see more of it in official policy? Comment below or email us at thepoppedkernel@gmail.com.

Healthcare and Afghanistan: 2 Problems, 1 Solution

2009-12-01T16:04:00.000-08:00

Healthcare and Afghanistan. We’re on the eve of history for both issues. In fact, they very well could ultimately define the Obama administration. And as different as they are, the approach to bettering both might be more similar than you think. Prevention.

In healthcare, prevention leads to longer, healthier living, at a fraction of the price. This is well documented. But less agreed upon – or even much discussed – is that the same can be applied to national security. That is, the more sustained goodwill we pour into a country, among its people, the more we prevent a costly disaster, in lives and resources, at their hands in the future.

Can you imagine if the US had continued its assistance to Afghanistan in the late '80s after the Soviets withdrew? That is, continued attention, financial and otherwise, not on guns, but on roads and schools and good governance? The Taliban would not have been able to flourish in that environment. Al-Qaeda would not have found safe haven there. 9/11 would not have happened.

And in cases where the US has actually pursued preventionist policies, the outcome has been positive. We see it in parts of eastern and southern Africa as well as Indoneisa.

As we’ve written in this blog before, channeling Bill Clinton: “We can be made more secure by eliminating inequality…. 10-20 countries in eastern and southern Africa… many of them Muslim… love the US.” This, at a time when the US has lost significant credibility internationally. In these countries, nobody has been thinking about Al Qaeda. Why? Because “we have cared whether their kids live or die.” Clinton is referring to America's generous African policies under Bush (that is, America's pledged financial support in the fight against AIDS and other diseases).

Across the ocean into Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, ill-will towards America had reached alarming proportions in 2005. America’s approval rating was 38%. But after the tsunami, American assistance and goodwill blanketed the country, driving the approval rating up to 60%. In the same period, Osama bin Laden’s approval rating went from 58% to 28%.

With such drastic shifts in poll numbers, you can bet that bin Laden’s recruiting efforts amongst the world’s largest Muslim population suffered a major blow. We can only imagine how bin Laden might have gone from salivating over Indonesia as fertile ground for his network to perhaps averting it altogether. Can you imagine if the same thing happened in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Somalia or Sudan?

If prevention has proven effective and less costly (in the long term) than the alternatives, then why don’t we do it? We’ll offer some perspective on that in part II of this entry (in the coming days). But for now, let’s turn our attention to what Obama says tonight about Afghanistan. Might prevention play a role in his plan?

Book Review: "7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis" (Bill George)

2009-11-30T09:10:00.000-08:00

(Originally posted by The Popped Kernel on Amazon.com)

In "7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis," Bill George not only leaves his readers eagerly anticipating their defining moment, but also provides them with an effective blueprint to seize it. That’s the value of the book – it’s proven and practical guidance for a leader amidst crisis. In effect, you’ve got to know what you’re passionate about, pursue it, and have integrity along the way. Only then will you have a chance as a leader to attain legendary success.

Bill cites many companies and leaders to support each of his lessons. With a focus on breadth of examples over depth, Bill’s convincing power is rounded out by his authority in the field. You’ll do well to heed the advice of a man who’s been CEO of the world’s largest medical technology company (Medtronic) and is now a Harvard Business School professor and internationally renowned expert on leadership.

The book is a quick read. It’s simple in language and structured in thought, if not a bit didactic in tone. It seems written for the executive on the go, who wants concepts now and will figure out the details later. It’s a non-intimidating, easy read that begs re-reading over time.

In the end, if you’re looking for Shakespeare, don’t read this book (though that likely wasn’t ever Bill’s intention). But if you’re looking for timeless leadership advice in practical form, from someone who’s been there, then get yourself a copy.

Bill’s 7 Lessons – more detail for each you can find in Jessica Lipnack’s book review – are:
1. Face reality, Starting with yourself
2. Don’t be Atlas; Get the world off your shoulders
3. Dig deep for the root cause
4. Get ready for the long haul
5. Never waste a good crisis
6. You’re in the spotlight: Follow True North
7. Go on the offense, Focus on winning now

Web 2.0: Conference of Insights and Inspiration

2009-11-29T16:21:00.000-08:00

Delightful and inspiring, the 2009 Web 2.0 Conference in New York City was rife with success stories, entrepreneurial spirit, and wicked-cool concepts (Did you know that your email contacts are each worth $948, according to an IBM research team?).

In addition to our previous Conference entries about entrepreneurship and design, we learned about…

… the importance of collaboration,
“Do what you do best, link to the rest.” – Tim O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Radar. As applicable as it is in the context of social media, it’s really applicable to just about anything. Focus on your core competency, partner for the rest. Good leaders do it when they delegate. Obama did it on the road to the White House. It requires a clear recognition of what you’re good at and what you’re not… and the confidence to admit it to yourself and others.

… the difference between an audience and a community,
“The difference between ‘audience’ and ‘community’ is which way you turn the chairs.” – Chris Brogan, Mayor of Twitterville and author of Trust Agents. We love this visual. It reminds us to interact with, not just talk at, our users. Without this understanding, it’s difficult to develop a following.

… what Wal-mart and the mafia have in common,
“What do Wal-mart and the mafia have in common? They conquered distribution!” – Chris Brogan (again). Whether we’re talking about web content or merchandise or, in the mob’s case, drugs, it’s the same. If you want to amass influence, you’re better off running a system, not inputs to it. Run Google or Digg, not Reuters or the AP.

… why the internet is like junk food,
Dana Boyd, PhD, researcher at Microsoft, had some fascinating (if not too many) insights to share as one of the Keynoters (she spoke faster than most people’s brains function to fit a PhD dissertation's worth of content into about 15 minutes). She analogized internet consumption to food intake. Her research shows that people consume content based on stimulation, not necessarily what is best for them. We click on stories and sites about gossip or sex or violence, just as we crave sugars and fats in food. They’re stimulating, if not addicting. If not careful, she warns we’ll develop the psychological equivalent to obesity. There can be such a thing as too much internet stimulus, which in turn is bad for society. Obesity is a drag on collective healthcare costs; internet over-stimulus a drag on collective intelligence. While she didn’t provide solutions, we were left interested in finding some and at the very least thought-provoked... "psychological equivalent of obesity"... brilliant.

… and entrepreneurship some more.
How would Kevin Rose (Founder of Digg) and Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg) start a company today? By being “scrappy!”

They advise doing what you want to do with the resources you have (or are easily available) and go from there (Kevin himself started by renting server space for $99/month). They had more to say on the topic:

Do your own PR. Throw your own parties. Contact press directly.
Hack the press. If you can’t reach a top writer at a top media property, target a junior writer there.
Meet influencers. Don’t be afraid to meet people of consequence for your business.
Prototype on your dime. Everything is so cheap today that you don’t need funding in the beginning. Prove your concept on your own – you can do it with thousands, not hundreds of thousands – then go get funding to take it to the next level.
Partner when time's right. Partner when you can’t do it all anymore.
Release fast and often. Speed is the name of the game. As reinforced by Rashmi Sinha, CEO and Founder of Slideshare, it’s the main advantage small players have over big ones.
Iterate often. Continually improve your product or service. The more it incorporates user feedback, the better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said (as Chris Brogan referenced at the conference): “Go where there’s no road and leave a trail.” Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson did it with Digg, countless and untold others are doing it right now. Are you one of them? (If so, let us know. Comment below or email us at thepoppedkernel@gmail.com.)

Driving Change through Design

2009-11-22T09:04:00.000-08:00

Gentry Underwood, of design stalwart IDEO, spoke to a group of us at the Web 2.0 Conference in New York City about Social Interaction Design, “SxD” as he visually presents it. That’s the official (eye-glazing) description anyway. It’s really about building something that moves people to act.

Of the nine principles that Gentry presented (listed in full at bottom), we found three principles particularly compelling. He was entertaining in presenting them, and we were left thought-provoked and inspired by their implications.

Design for delight
When we’re forced to do something, we do it either begrudgingly or not at all. So, what if what we had to do (or should do) was made fun? That’s the idea behind The Fun Theory. From the global environment to personal health, The Fun Theory is proving that fun, innovative design can make us do those things that make our world and ourselves a better place.

Take the Stockholm subway system. In many stations, the escalator and stairs are right next to each other. Many people take the escalator. The motivator is stronger: easy. But in one station, designers turned the stairs into a piano: Walk one step, play a note (Think classic movie Big). The new motivator – fun – was strong enough to increase the number of people taking the stairs (over the escalator) by 66%.

Just imagine the possibilities. If simple design moved people to take better care of their bodies, what else can it move us to do? What if we applied design to some of our most pressing problems? Terrorism and battlefield insurgencies? Dependence on foreign oil? Healthcare? What barriers might we be able to overcome?

Remember we’re a heard species
At the Sasquatch music festival in George, Washington, a guy danced, by himself, for days. People took video of it. They laughed and scoffed. He continued, unfazed. While many were debating what drug he was on, he danced. He became somewhat of a fixture. He also remained on the fringe. Until something curious happened. After days, another guy joined him – albeit, uncomfortably. In the shadow of his friends’ judging glances, he kept it light, making it clear he was participating in the joke, not becoming part of it, occasionally looking back at his friends, laughing. He left, then came back shortly after, as another joined. Still bare, at three dancers, they continued.

Ultimately, several others joined. Almost immediately, several more. The tipping point reached, screams – of approval – started… and continued. Louder and louder. People started running from where they were to join. Running. What once was uncool, they now couldn't wait to be part of. Within less than a minute, literally hundreds of concert-goers joined, arms in air, reveling in the experience… together. The original guy gets kind of lost, almost forgotten. But there’s no denying he started it all. While people stared, he just carried on, doing what he loved. With that, he started a movement.

Do you ever feel like you’re getting nowhere with your business or your career or your message? This video is a reminder that while it may feel like nobody cares (or perhaps worse, like people are laughing at you), if you believe in what you’re doing – if it just feels right – and you keep at it, then people will likely come around to follow. Seth Godin wrote an entire book on the topic; he called it Tribes.

(Separately, but related, we’re reminded of Gary Hamel’s talk at the World Business Forum: “Explore the fringe,” he strongly advised, “The future always starts there.” Organic foods, personal computers, equal rights – they were all fringe movements until a tipping point was reached and they became mainstream.)

Empower evolution
As humans, we’re creative, resourceful, and adaptive. Whether we have the right tools or not, when we’re committed to making something work, we’ll figure it out and do it... in a way nobody would have thought possible.

Case in point. Bangkok, Thailand. What at first looks like a train rolling through the slums quickly turns into a bustling market. You’ve got to see it to believe it.

This video reminds us that we shouldn't feel discouraged when we lack the tools to do something. It encourages us to figure something out with what we have.

Potential
While we’re a herd species, we shouldn’t be underestimated either. We’re capable of extraordinary things. Gentry’s stories tell us that with a little bit of thought, an understanding of what we love, and strong commitment to it, the potential for design to change the way we behave (for the better) is huge.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gentry's nine priciples in full are:
1. Satisfy key stakeholders
2. Making something mandatory = Bad design
3. Design for delight
4. Simplify as much as you can, but no more
5. Smooth all friction on the path to participation
6. Help the indifferent decide
7. Remember we’re a herd species
8. Watch for unexpected consequences
9. Empower evolution

Social Media Entrepreneurship: A Case Study

2009-11-19T11:54:00.000-08:00

We recently caught up with Rashmi Sinha at the Web 2.0 Conference in New York City. Her company, Slideshare, is an interesting case study in entrepreneurship and social media. It’s also a story of passion, hard work, and adventure. One of our favorite of her quotes: “Never be afraid. Just do it. Fear is the biggest killer.”

Launch
Slideshare was launched in October 2006. 5 half-timers worked on it then. 22 full-timers (and 3 contractors) work on it now.

Stages of Growth
Stage 1. Utilitarian-driven purpose site for people to share slides with others
Stage 2. Online community comments and rates content AND visits those who upload slides
Stage 3. People uploading slides realize Slideshare's power as a distribution channel – a way to get more people to their blogs, websites, etc. The business explodes.

Attracting Users
Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch heard about it (from a well-placed Slideshare contact) and wrote about it. Traffic to Slideshare spiked significantly. If you can’t get Michael Arrington to write you up (he was one of Time Magazine's 2008 most influential people in the world), then, as Kevin Rose (Founder of Digg) said in an earlier conversation, reaching out to a junior writer at Tech Crunch can be effective. (Rashmi agrees.)

11 Lessons Learned

1. Solve one problem. Stay focused. Slideshare was growing fast, but the money-maker was a previous product. The company ultimately had to give up the previous product to focus on Slideshare (even though money-making power of Slideshare was not yet proven - that takes guts and faith).
2. Speed is critical. When you’re small, speed is your advantage against the giants. Slideshare launched in the shadow of Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. Google Powerpoint was next. People asked, “What are you going to do when Google launches Google PPT? They’re going to kick your ass.” Slideshare wasn’t concerned because they were smaller, more nimble… and they were share-based, not author-based like Google.
3. Ideas are dime a dozen. It’s really about the execution. Everyone has the same ideas. Unique ideas are rare.
4. What to build. Products we use ourselves.
5. How to launch. Slideshare put it up, gave it to friends, and collected feedback. They built enough to get concept across, but not so much that it was fleshed out completely.
6. Focus on users, not competitors. Focus. On. Users.
7. Don’t spend too much time on business develop. In year one, Rashmi was advised (and highly recommends) to not talk about business development ideas with other companies. Big companies will come to you and want you to develop something. They will have a team of people on it. You won’t. They will have time to explore ideas on how design and backend will work for their specific company. You won’t. You’ll want to focus on your company, not others' (at least at first).
8. Use metrics to make decisions. For web-based businesses, metrics are abundant. Identify the ones critical for your business, track them, and incorporate into the decision-making process.
9. Hire design engineers. Developers are important, but an intuition of or experience with design is critical, particularly as design becomes increasingly critical to business.
10. Find your community. Who do you care about? Figure it out and get close to them. For Slideshare, there are two main constituencies: People who upload and People who view. Slideshare has decided to focus on the those who view, to optimize the experience of the users. They're already giving distribution to uploaders, so they're focusing on simplicity for the user (e.g., not offering animation on slides, even though uploaders want it, because that would not keep it simple for users)
11. Outsource complexity. Outside of your competencies, outsource when you can.

Other Interesting Tid-bits from Rashmi
- Business media sites are easier to monetize than consumer media sites.
- Hire people, not from school, but from open source community.
- All angel investment came from Slideshare users - the company emailed them and they responded, some of them handsomely. Mark Cuban, internet billionaire and sometimes-controversial owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, was one of them.

At the End of the Day
Rashmi speaks passionately about Slideshare - from that time in the beginning to the things they're working on now. You can tell she is driven by a passion that gives her comfort and confidence in saying things like "Just do it" "Fear is a killer" "We weren't worried about Google." She's clear on who her core audience is: the end-user. It's this passion-driven clarity that has allowed her company to pass up many lucrative business opportunities (e.g., enterprise software) on behalf of their end-user and remain successful, if not moreso because of it. Once again it's clear: Follow your passion, and the rest will follow.

Bill George: Play Your Game, Not Theirs

2009-11-16T13:29:00.000-08:00

We recently spoke with Bill George, widely known for his classic book on leadership, True North: Discover your Authentic Leadership. He's also a Harvard Business School Professor and the former, storied CEO of Medtronics, the world’s largest medical technology company (think pacemaker). You can see him at the World Economic Forum in late January as a panelist on leadership.

Bill is not your typical CEO or Business School Professor. He doesn’t shy away from ideas of vulnerability, self-reflection, or even counseling. In fact, he sees them as sources of power, not weakness.

Bill preaches about the importance of knowing who we are (awareness), being open about it (vulnerability), and sticking to it (commitment) in the choices we make in life and as a leader. It’s when we do these things that we’re strong enough to resist temptations of “short-termism” – that is, the temptation of immediate gratification over the more sustainable long view.

Take the recent economic meltdown. Bill believes it was caused, not by sub-prime mortgages, but by “sub-prime leadership.” Too many people got caught up in the short term, more concerned about keeping up with the corporate Joneses and meeting Wall Street expectations than with the long-term health of their own companies. Bill is convinced that “if you play Wall Street’s game, you will destroy your company.” Look at Citibank, AIG, and countless others.

That said, it’s difficult to not play the game. Does a leader really even have a choice? What can one leader do in the face of such powerful forces as competitive pressure, fiduciary responsibility, and Wall Street expectations?

Bill’s response is simple: “Just don’t play [the game]. Just say no.” Simply say “we are in the business of building long-term shareholder value” and go about doing it. That’s what he did at Medtronic. And the long-term health and strength of the company has benefited greatly. Not right away, but in the end, when it matters.

There’s a personal parable in all of this. In our career choices and lives in general, we’ve got to be strong enough to take the long view over the short one. We’ve got to know who we are, be honest about it, and make decisions from there, decisions that lead to sustainable personal growth, not dramatic falls.

Taken together, Bill’s philosophy is a virtuous assault on conventional wisdom, a wisdom – propagated by mainstream media and corporate culture – that tells us to “[try] to make a good impression and not show them who you really are.”

He is not naïve, however, about the difficulty of defying conventional wisdom. In fact, he says, “If you share your vulnerabilities and weaknesses, you figure you won’t get hired. And maybe you won’t. I think that’s the problem."

So how do we overcome this problem, the powerful forces against being who we are? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t clear. It’s a matter of personal choices and values. Bill admits that we can reach success if we play the short-term game or hide who we are. But the chances of it being sustainable are slim. It will likely lead to a fall, more precipitous and more probable than if we played it right.

Bill’s view on failure is similar to that of luminaries we’ve already spoken to – it’s more a blessing than a curse. The key is whether we learn from it or not. Bill believes, “early failures are one of the greatest learning tools you can have.” We try hard not to fail early in our lives and careers. But the earlier we fail, the earlier we learn and the more we avoid self-destructive behavior later on. Bill reminds us that “the greatest failure of all [is] the failure to take risks to be who you are.”

When we do fail, Bill implores us to not simply blame others and move on, but rather, look internally. Own it. Make the necessary changes. And then move on. Stronger.

Listen to our full interview with Bill to find out more about him, including:
- His personal epiphany
- His relationship to luck
- His view of social media
- His take on Bill Clinton and Sandy Weill

World Economic Forum: High Profile Thought

2009-11-10T10:55:00.000-08:00

The World Economic Forum is the world's premier gathering of the most influential movers and shakers in business, politics, and international affairs. Each year, the likes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Bono, Queen Rania of Jordan, Vladimir Putin, and several other high-caliber personalities descend upon Davos, Switzerland to grace the Forum's stage. The event is exclusive (attendees must be invited) and committed to discussion of and reflection on pressing global issues.

We recently watched Bill Clinton at the 2006 World Economic Forum (You can too, here). Clinton spoke for 50+ minutes, in Q & A format, with the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, Professor Klaus Schwab (in the front row sat Senator John McCain, actor Michael Douglas, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and technology pioneer Bill Gates).

These five quotes caught our attention.

1. “If you['ve] got enough self confidence in who you are and what you believe in, you ought not to be scared to talk to anybody.”

This is helpful advice to anyone looking to succeed: Be confident and connect with people; good things will likely follow. The context of Clinton's words takes it even further... that connection with others, open dialogue is the way out of conflict. He was referring specifically to US-Iran relations when he said this. But it's just as applicable to us, as individuals, in our daily lives whether with our boss at work or partner at home. Human connection, through open dialogue, is the closest thing we have to a panacea for conflict.

2. “Insurance losses from natural disasters in the last decade are three times [larger than in] any previous decade, in common constant dollars, which is another argument for the reality of climate change.”

Climate change is bad for business. Some may say this is nothing new. And perhaps it's not. But it's just as true now as it was in 2006. And perhaps, the more we can present the climate change challenge in stark and real terms such as business loss, the sooner we reach the tipping point for lasting change.

3. “Not every failure is a defeat.”

Time and time again, the successful people we talk to and hear from frame failure positively. Bill Clinton is no exception. At the World Economic Forum, he cited his efforts to reform healthcare not as failure, but as necessary trail-blazing for the next attempt at fundamental reform to be successful. Pat Lencioni talked about failure as a necessary course-adjuster and character-builder, that thing which guided him to his rightful path. The examples go on.

4. “America always does the right thing - after exhausting all other alternatives.”

Citing the humorous Winston Churchill, Clinton propagated the view that America is a source of good in the world, even if we don't get it right the first time, all the time. Hearing this in the wake of Iraq and amidst the current reality of Afghanistan makes Churchill's words particularly resonant.

5. "There is nothing so difficult in all of human affairs than to change the established order of things."

Clinton used Machiavelli's words to call out reality in blunt terms. What interested us even more than Machiavelli's quote was Clinton's follow up as to why changing the status quo is so difficult: "... because the people who will lose are certain of their loss and those who will benefit are uncertain of their gain." Certainty. We know that financial markets place tremendous value in it. But so too do political ones.

In Conclusion

Clinton closed with a recommendation to read Max Weber's 1918 essay entitled Politics as a Vocation. In it we'd find Weber extolling the virtues of pragmatism over ideals, compromise over convictions. Perhaps, it simply reflects Bill Clinton's Machiavellian approach to politics. Perhaps, it reflects reality. Perhaps, it's both.

One thing we know for sure is that there's no higher profile a place to hash it all out than at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Popcorn: The Success Metaphor

2009-11-03T11:58:00.000-08:00

This blog's namesake - "The Popped Kernel" - presumes that we're all kernels. Some of us have popped. Others of us have not. Why? Why are some people successful and others not (yet or at all)? That's the question driving the very existence of The Popped Kernel. One place we can find some answers is in the culinary treat itself.

Type "The Popped Kernel" into Google and the second link asks us Why do some popcorn kernels not pop? The question might as well be: Why do some people not pop? The answer is equally applicable.

Kernels don't pop if the conditions aren't right. The kernel itself must have the right stuff - it can't be too hard (if it is, it can't pop ... unless moisture is added). Kernels must be put under the right amount of heat. Too little heat, they won't pop. Too much heat, they'll burn. Once popped, it must cool down to avoid burning to the touch. Only then can it be enjoyed. If left idle for too long, the popped kernels become stale. Only do they become enjoyable again when conditions for their well-being are reintroduced - warmth, moisture, perhaps some added flavor.

We can draw a few lessons about success from our understanding of what kernels need in order to pop (and stay enjoyable):

1. Set the right conditions - environment is critical.

2. Don't be too hard - approach success with open arms not clenched fists.

3. Turn on the heat - the right amount of motivation drives success.

4. Don't stand idle - Stay active and keep focused, else risk becoming stale.

What do you think? Can you think of other parallels between popcorn and success? Do you completely disagree? We'd love to hear. Comment below. Or write us at ThePoppedKernel@gmail.com.

Commit, and Providence Moves Too

2009-11-02T09:55:00.000-08:00

Today marks our one month anniversary. In the spirit of what The Popped Kernel is all about, we wanted to offer you a quote. It's about passion, commitment, and possibilities. Attributed to Scottish mountain climber, W.H. Murray, it comes from Bill George's latest book, "7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis."

"Until one is committed there is always hesitancy,

The chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness...

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help that never otherwise would have occurred...

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!"

Ideas: The New Widget

2009-10-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

"As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets, up from around 40% in the early 1980's." (The Economist, October 2005)

It's striking. Yes, the Industrial Age is long gone and Information Age well-established, so it shouldn't really come as a surprise. But it does. In stark terms, the data tells us: Ideas drive the economy.

Think about that for second.

Doesn't it just seem too easy, not at all concrete? "Ideas drive the economy." Aren't we taught to believe that the harder something is, the more valuable? Shaping a piece of metal with our bare hands, then using it to build a car, all with Grade-A elbow grease - that's hard, that's valuable. Right?

Well, no, not according to reality.

It's going to be difficult to grasp. And it will be disruptive. It already has been. It likely will continue to be. We're not dealing with tangibles like we used to. Our traditional sense of measurement is becoming more outdated and irrelevant. Even worse, we don't know, or even have, an agreed-upon alternative measure of value.

We do know however that, whether we're ready for it or not, the intangibles are driving businesses and economies forward. Those who figure out a way to measure the intangibles, channel them, and develop them, will win.

What do you think? Some might argue that it takes exponentially more people to implement an idea than it does to come up with one, thereby discrediting the notion of this post - that ideas reign supreme. Join the conversation. Comment below. Or write us at ThePoppedKernel@gmail.com. (We'll post a synthesis of the debate, once critical mass is reached.)

Clinton, Obama, Afghanistan: A Thought Experiment

2009-10-27T13:53:00.000-07:00

With Obama’s decision on Afghanistan imminent and Bill Clinton’s World Business Forum speech still resonant, we thought we’d do something of a thought experiment on leadership and decision-making.

What counsel might Clinton give President Obama on Afghanistan? Specifically, how would Clinton break down the current conundrum, and what advice on leadership and decision-making would he offer?
“Should we escalate in Afghanistan? I have three answers: Yes. No. Maybe.

Yes
September 11 has taught us that an unstable Afghanistan is a direct threat to the American people. That’s what makes this so different from Vietnam. Leaving the country will afford Al-Qaeda the same terrorist haven they enjoyed on September 10... and this time without as much resistance from a Northern Alliance.

No
Victory depends on commitment, and you don’t have it from the American people. Not even from your own Vice President. Americans want jobs, not increasing bloodshed abroad. Escalation without commitment will lead to another Vietnam.

Maybe
The Afghan people will support that group which cares for their children. Currently, they’re supporting the Taliban, but mostly out of fear. If we helped the Afghans build a sustainable country that was safer and more prosperous for their children, the Taliban wouldn’t have a chance.

The Afghan government is corrupt. We can build schools and train laborers, but buildings and skills will be gone or devalued once we leave, unless the Afghan government is there to support them. It’s unclear whether they have the will, or even the capability, to do that.

Pakistan is unstable; it’s also a crucial partner for success in Afghanistan. If they continue to assist the Afghan Taliban as a way to counterbalance India’s influence, or if a coup replaces the current regime with a much more hostile one, then we’ll have no chance of containing the Taliban along the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistan could be our biggest wild card. Their support is and will be paramount.
Leadership and Decision-making
The considerations are many, related, and complex. Regardless of what you decide, make sure you:
- Have a vision of where you want to go
- Lay out a strategy on how to get there
- Develop specific actions to implement the strategy
And underscore these things with an understanding of not just policy but also of people.

Some of the most difficult decisions I ever made as president were not necessarily the least popular – the unpopular decisions were sometimes easy because I knew what the right answer was – no, the difficult decisions were the ones for which I couldn’t know the right answer… those 10% of presidential decisions that can’t come from policy reports or staff recommendations, but rather must come from intuition. You have to listen and feel your way to the answer. If that happens, the best you can do is level with the people and say that if you’re not right you’ll change.

A great leader is a great decision-maker. You have one hell of a decision to make.”

Bill Clinton and the World

2009-10-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

Bill Clinton gave us a treat at this year's World Business Forum: his framework of the world.

Unlike other speakers at this year’s Forum, Clinton did not use a teleprompter or projected slides. And his paper notes? Apparently just for show – he rarely looked at them. This was the stuff of Bill Clinton legend – speaking off-the-cuff about complex issues in understandable terms. Unfortunately, Clinton fell short of legend this time inside Radio City Music Hall in New York; he meandered and had difficulty staying on point. But his content – why we should care about AIDS in Africa, bombings in the Middle East, and climate change – was no less compelling.

Clinton’s worldview starts with the premise of globalization – although he prefers to use the word “interdependence.” While Clinton rejects the idea that interdependence leads to peace and security outright (See The Complete Idiot's Guide to World War I), he believes it’s possible, if we address three persistent global challenges: inequality, instability, and unsustainability.

Challenge #1: Inequality. “The world is too unequal.” One billion people live on less than $1/day; Half the world population lives on less than $2/day. While people in the developed world live a long time, a quarter of the world still dies from either AIDS, malaria, or bad water (80% of them are children aged five or younger). If global warming proceeds at its current rate, water will become even more scarce, and the developing worlds’ problems aggravated.

“We can be made more secure by eliminating inequality,” Clinton said, citing “10-20 countries in eastern and southern Africa… many of them Muslim… who love the US.” This, at a time when the US has lost significant credibility elsewhere in the world. In these countries, many of which Clinton has visited, nobody has been thinking about Al Qaeda. Why? Because “we have cared whether their kids live or die.”

The lesson is simple and powerful. Focus on the basics and see positive results. In this case, the more we care, the more secure we are.

Challenge #2: Instability. “The world is too unstable.” What seems real one day is gone the next – money, health, security.

In cases, small and large, that span the globe, wealth has diminished like at no other time and to such a degree, since the Great Depression. A local police station in England had to fold because their pension investments in Iceland vanished in the country’s bankruptcy. China, in a short period of time, went from having plenty of cash ($2 trillion in reserves) to not enough (post-crisis they “had nobody to sell to”).

In a more interdependent world, a virus in one part of the world can cause more than just isolated deaths, but also widespread panic and disruption. Swine flu has wreaked havoc in both real and perceived terms. It’s closed down school districts in the US, halted the tourism industry in Mexico, and taken the lives of many. The world is, for lack of a better term, freaking out about it. And with every new report of another well-known person contracting it (e.g., President of Costa Rica and Colombia, Tony Blair’s wife, Harry Smith of the CBS Early Show, Landon Donovan of the US National soccer team), the threat feels more real and the worry continues to worsen.

Terrorist organizations remain a major destabilizing force internationally. Post-9/11, they have managed to hit Madrid, London, Bali, and Bombay, not to mention the countless spots in the war-torn regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. At the same time, as counterintuitive as it seems, “we’re more secure because everyone’s working together.” Without collaboration in the intelligence and law-enforcement communities – that is, positive interdependence – several calamities might have occurred: Al-Qaeda in the Balkans, the millennium attack out of LAX, hi-jacked plane(s) from Indonesia to the US, Holland and Lincoln tunnel bombs in New York.

Across the various sources of global instability, the way to address it is the same. The more vigilant and cooperative we are, the more secure we become.

Challenge #3: Unsustainability. “The world is too unsustainable” because of climate change. 95% of “serious scientists” believe that if we don’t cut CO2 or methane, then temperatures will increase, oceans will rise, and 100 million people in coastal regions will become climate change refugees by 2050, having been forced to uproot by Mother Nature and settle elsewhere. In Australia, Conservatives and Liberals are debating, not about whether the problem is real, but rather how to best solve it… everyone agrees it’s a problem.

Clinton also focused on sustainability in the US. He painted a rather dire portrait of where the country is headed if income continues to decline, college costs continue to outpace income growth, and healthcare continues to cost more while covering less (and also outpacing income growth). He cited the need for a new source of jobs every eight years to remain competitive. Solving climate change, Clinton believes, is the way to do that (e.g., “green” jobs and projects). He’s not shy about the size and difficulty of the task at hand, saying that if done right, it “would be the greatest thing since we mobilized for WWII.”

In the challenge of unsustainability lies a significant opportunity for positive change. The country or company or individual willing to invest in it, could save the world’s future, if not own it.

The world in which we now live is vastly different than the one in which Clinton took office. Then, in 1992, there were only 50 websites worldwide. Today, more than 50 new websites were created during Clinton’s speech at the Forum alone. Our world is much more connected. What we do affects others more so now than ever before. The more we understand that, the more willing and able we are to address the challenges of global interdependence… and experience the peace and security associated with it.

Chester Elton: A Carrot a Day...

2009-10-20T22:31:00.000-07:00

We recently sat down with Chester Elton, best-selling author of The Carrot Principle and sought-after international speaker. As one of the world’s leading experts in employee engagement, he’s just as excitable in conversation as he is on stage. Beyond his stage presence though is his story.

Chester is a faithful man. He believes in something bigger than himself and in the service of and for others. Faith, whether religious or not, has become an emerging theme in the success stories we’ve followed thus far. It makes sense when you think about it. Faith is the glue that bridges today's unknown to tomorrow's success.

He’s also family-oriented – another recurring theme. He considers himself “madly in love” with his wife and his boys “exceptional.” His parents were together for 65 years. In fact, he considers them his "first managers." In short, he comes from good family stock.

Chester keeps a detailed journal, so we know (or at least surmise) that he has healthy self-awareness... and discipline. And what does he use to write in those journals? Fountain pens – limited edition and rare. Why? They force him to think when he writes.

Of service, he says, “A life of service is a life well-spent." He even goes further to say, “Learn to serve people. When you do, it’s good for business (too).”

As for luck, he likes to quote Larry Bird, who said “The more I practice, the luckier I get” after having made a game winning shot from the floor, on his back, in a consequential playoff game. Chester does believe that hard work breeds luck.

When it comes to failure, Chester exposes his Canadian roots with a ski analogy: “If you’re not falling, you’re not skiing.” Chester's personal run-in with failure came in Hartford, CT where he worked in TV ad sales and where he “failed pretty spectacularly." Ultimately, he grew stronger as a people leader and is now a renowned expert of it and best-selling author because of it.

As his mom always told him, “It doesn’t matter how you start; it matters how you finish.”

Find out more about Chester and his success story in our audio interview...

World Business Forum: Lessons Learned

2009-10-18T08:26:00.000-07:00

What an experience to blog from the 2009 World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall in New York City (see official Bloggers Hub in photo at right) to bring you insights from the world's foremost thought-shapers and opinion-makers. From Bill Clinton to Pat Lencioni, from George Lucas to T. Boone Pickens, there was no shortage of unique insight or rich perspective. From their powerful speeches and personal stories emerged four main themes.

1. Fail to succeed. Failure is a must-stop on the road to success. Several of this year's speakers failed at or quit something before finding their path and reaching the heights of their success.

T. Boone Pickens quit his job at a petroleum company at 26 years old. He ultimately started his own, shaping not just the oil industry but the concept of "corporate raider."
George Lucas was "up to no good" racing cars, before pioneering filmmaking magic.
Bill George left a potential (and much coveted) CEO position at Honeywell to run a much smaller (and at the time, much less proven) company in Medtronics. He eventually became a storied corporate executive, Harvard Business professor, and renowned leadership expert.
David Rubenstein quit his job as a lawyer in his late 20's without resistance from his bosses. He also failed in the Carter administration where he was responsible for fighting inflation and "got it down to 19%." All before starting one of the world's most successful and influential (if not controversial) private equity firms.
Pat Lencioni felt like he failed at Bain & Company for not being a numbers guy. It's that experience which led him to pursue organizational management and become one of the world's leading experts of it.

Failing and quitting - two things we're taught at an early age to avoid - were not only good, but necessary for these industry titans to, in fact, become industry titans.

2. Be human. Aligning what we do to who we are is critical. How we work must better reflect who we are as human beings - more emotion and creativity, less reason and structure.

Gary Hamel believes we're in the midst of a revolution in corporate management and leadership because corporations aren't human. They're not as adaptive or creative or engaging as we are, as people. They have to be to survive.
Kevin Roberts thinks emotion is actually more important than reason, particularly with customers. Reason leads to conclusion, but emotion leads to action.
George Lucas believes art - to be true art - is about emotional connection; It's about telling a story in a meaningful way. The same can be said of business, specifically the thing at its very core: persuasion. There's no such thing as persuasion if not for telling a story in a meaningful way.
Pat Lencioni believes that the emotional intelligence of an organization is its true competitive advantage. So many companies focus too much on how "Smart" they are and much too little on how "Healthy" they are.

The challenge here is how: How do we become more human as professionals, as leaders? As Jim Estill put it - he's a blogging colleague from the Forum, former CEO, and current Board member of RIM (the maker of the Blackberry) - "Leadership is messy." We want to know it in rational terms but we can't because it's not. Realizing that is the first step.

3. Challenge short-termism. We all know that taking the long term view trumps the short-term one. In fact, this year's World Business Forum opened with a Hollywood-style short film containing sage advice from proven leaders about taking the long-term view. But how do we do it in today's 24/7 world? It boils down to one thing: Leadership. Specifically, three key ingredients: Courage, Faith, and Commitment.

Take the case of Bill George, whose remarks opened this year's World Business Forum. When he was CEO of Medtronics, he did not shy away from telling his investors that if they were looking for a quick buck, they could invest elsewhere.

Courage. He had the courage to take the long-view, sacrificing potential short-term wins for long-term payout.
Faith. He had the faith to believe that, in the end, long-termism would win.
Commitment. He had the commitment to stick with it, even, when competitors with the short-term view might have appeared to be fairing better than his own company.

Ultimately, Bill's leadership paid off. In 10 years with Medtronics, he took the company's market value from $1B to $60B. It's no wonder his book, True North, about authentic leadership, is a critically acclaimed best-seller.

4. Do One Thing. In a more interconnected world, the little things we do have an even bigger impact. Several headliners at the Forum captured the spirit of this concept.

Kevin Roberts started the "Do One Thing" (D.O.T.) campaign at Saatchi & Saatchi where he has challenged employees to commit to doing one thing to positively impact their environment.
Jeffrey Sachs called for global scale cooperation for our global scale problems, particularly in finance. Because one thing that a banker in New York City does can collapse entire economies (see Iceland), oversight needs to be broadscale and shared.
Bill Clinton spoke at length about "shared costs and shared benefits" in an increasingly interdependent world: "No matter how constrained we are, we all have a role to play." He drove the point home with a story about a young man in Haiti who secured excess sawdust and paper from community businesses to make cooking brickettes. In doing so, he was able to sell them at just 1 cent a piece, down from 5 cents a piece. This young man - in collaboration with others - reduced the cooking bill for many by 80%. In a country where the average income is about $1/day, that makes a huge difference.

In the fabric of this year's World Business Forum lie true success secrets... personally, professionally, and as a global community: Be human. Take the long view. Embrace failure. Do one thing.

If we can do that, we can change the world.

Gary Hamel: Management Revolution

2009-10-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

Gary Hamel, “the world’s most influential business thinker” (Wall Street Journal) and author of best-selling book The Future of Management, had something mind-blowing to share at this year’s World Business Forum: we are in the middle of a once-in-a-century management revolution. It sounds like hyperbole, but take heed. His ideas and his examples were compelling. They also challenged us.

Hamel likened our time to that of Frederick Taylor’s, about a hundred years ago, when in 1912, his idea about something called “scientific management” – the model for today’s corporation – was so advanced, so controversial that he was called into Congress to testify. He called for a “mental revolution” among “workmen… and… management” for scientific management to take hold. He gave life to concepts like efficiency and productivity and standardization.

Our modern-day Frederick Taylor, Gary Hamel, tells us that Taylor’s revolution has plateaued and we're ready for another. Hamel’s premise is rooted in employee engagement. No more than 20% of people are engaged at work, which means there’s a lot of latent productivity and untapped innovation in the workforce – in other words, there’s room to get a lot more out of employees. And corporations today – how they’re organized and what they value – will not do it. A revolution is required.

But why must corporations revolutionize to survive? And more importantly, how can they do it?

Why

Corporations aren’t human. And they must be to survive.

Diligence, obedience, and structure will no longer be cornerstone principles of the corporation; Passion, creativity, and innovation will be. Why is Hamel so sure? “... because the upcoming generation will accept no less.” These are young people who grew up in the meritorious world of the internet, not the authoritarian world of the corporation. They derive power from and give power to others based on content, not title. They are creative and passionate. They are the drivers of the participation economy that Kevin Roberts, of Saatchi & Saatchi, spoke of earlier at the Forum. They don’t respond to marketing but movements, not to information but inspiration. They will not put up with only 20% engagement in the workplace.

To engage and retain this next generation, the corporation will have to fundamentally morph the way they manage them.

How

W.L. Gore is a good place to start. The company that brought us GORE-TEX is living proof of what the next-era corporation will look and feel like. No titles. No rules. No assignments.

Sound like a slacker’s paradise? It’s not. This company, started by a DuPont engineer, recognizes over $2 billion in annual sales and has not one quarterly loss in the last 30+ years. They have found a way to create entrepreneurs and collaborators in the workplace.

Here’s how they do it:

1. No titles. Nobody has titles at Gore. When Hamel was on-site, and noticed that nobody had titles on their business cards, he asked a Gore employee, “How do you know who’s leader?” The response: “Well, if you call a meeting and people show up, that’s a good sign.”

2. No rules. There are no rules at Gore. Take for example their travel and expense policy – there isn't one. Employees can travel when they want, however they want, for as long as they want, expensing whatever they want – all on the company’s dime. How can this system work? The company simply posts travel expenses online, where everyone can see. If everyone were to see that you ordered the $1,000 bottle of wine, perhaps you’d be more inclined to buy the $20 one.

At Gore, there’s just one guideline: No “waterline issues.” No employee should take a risk that would sink the company, punch a hole in the bottom of the company’s proverbial hull, nothing that would damage its reputation or get it into legal trouble or ruin the brand. In meetings, it’s not uncommon to hear Gore employees asking each other, “Is there a ‘waterline issue’ here?” (Hamel implored us to imagine what the world would be like if the financial services industry asked the same question before the economic crisis.)

3. No assignments. Nobody at Gore tells employees what to do. They choose what they work on and who they work with. All commitments are voluntary. How do they manage this apparent free-for-all? Peer ratings. An employee rates 20 peers and 20 peers rate that employee – ranked 1 through 20. The rankings are used to determine salary.

The Challenge

It works for W. L. Gore, but how does it, or will it, work elsewhere? Such is the challenge of Hamel’s insight. While he gets us thinking (even excited) about the management revolution, he doesn’t provide all the answers (nor does he have them). What he does provide is advice on how to get there:

A. Challenge dogma. Basic assumptions in modern day management – authority trickles down, change starts at the top, senior executives set strategy, takes crisis to provoke change, freedom and discipline are trade-offs – are false. Unlearn the old; discover the new. Many innovators, including Bill Gore (founder of W. L. Gore), never went to business schools.

B. Explore the fringe. The future always starts there. Tattoos, as a small but telling example, started with sailors and bikers. Now, young women have them as body art. What will become trendy or mainstream tomorrow is at the fringe right now.

C. Experiment. “We need to be revolutionary but nobody is going let you do that,” so today’s managers must be simultaneously revolutionary and evolutionary – How? Experimentation. It’s bounded in time and risk, but allows exploration and discovery. Successful managers should ask themselves, “Am I putting a portfolio of risky projects together?”

D. Recognize natural leaders. Leaders in tomorrow’s corporation will be chosen for fairing well on new types of questions: Whose responses are rated most helpful? Who contributes the most to online forums? Whose advice is sought most often? Who responds most promptly to requests? Who is generating the most external buzz?

Hamel closed with his thesis: “Isn’t it weird that corporations are less human than us, less adaptable, less engaging, less interesting, less creative? (It’s because we apply this arcane) technology of management from 100 years ago – Management 1.0. You cannot create a company for the future unless it’s made for the human being.”

Go make it happen.

T. Boone Pickens: Economics is Boring

2009-10-13T08:36:00.001-07:00

“You know what an economist is, don’t you? An economist is someone who didn’t have the personality to be a CPA.” T. Boone Pickens, clearly known more for his folksy charm than intellectual prowess, took pleasure in poking fun at economists at the World Business Forum last week. Perhaps that explains why The Popped Kernel, in our last two posts, uncharacteristically made no effort to personalize economists Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs.

(Updated below on 11/10/09)
As posted in the comments below, we learned more from and about T. Boone than just his teasing humor.

He quit his job at 26 yrs old with no alternate plan. After complaining about his job, his wife told him to leave it. The day he did, he came home early to his wife asking, "Why are you home so early?" He said, "I quit today." His wife shot back, "Why'd you do that?"

He believes the U.S. should be awarded oil contracts in Iraq, not China (as has been done). His argument is simple: Americans lost over 4,000 lives in Iraq, not China.

He's an environmentalist, albeit not admittedly. While he did acknowledge a friendship with Al Gore rooted in the cause, his driving force is rooted more in national security - to reduce (if not eliminate) America's dependence on oil from hostile regimes. He started the Pickens Plan to influence a fundamental shift in US energy policy - source power from natural gas and renewable energy, not oil. He happens to be heavily invested in natural gas and increasingly in renewable energy.

He believes he's more powerful today than ever before, not because of his wealth but his following (driven primarily online). 1.6 million people have signed onto his Pickens Plan. As he put it, with money he could see anybody in Congress but nothing would happen; with money and 1.6 million supporters he can see anybody on the Hill and now he's a force to be reckoned with. Members of Congress now ask him if he can mobilize his "army."

You may be wondering what the heck that "T" stands for. Well, wonder no more. It stands for... wait for it ... Thomas.

And remember those Swift Boat ads? The ones that "swift boated" the Kerry presidential campaign in 2004 (and augmented the American political vernacular in the process)? T. Boone funded them.

T. Boone Pickens is a complex man. It's difficult to label him, but if anything could describe him, perhaps it's quite simply "self-interested."

What do you think? Are you a fan of T. Boone? The man? The plan? Let us know. Comment below. Or write us at thepoppedkernel@gmail.com.

Jeffrey Sachs: Political Perspective from an Economist

2009-10-13T05:15:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Sachs, Economics professor at Columbia University has made a name for himself as a prognosticator and translator of the very thing that has captured America’s attention for over a year: the economy. But it wasn’t his economic perspective that surprised us last Tuesday at the World Business Forum – it was his clear and direct indictment of money in politics that did.

Sachs went so far as to describe the US as fascist. Without actually using the “F” word, he declared that until the US government stops making law (or lack thereof) at the behest and on behalf of corporations in the financial services and healthcare industries, we won’t be living in the democracy we think we do.

For a well-respected, widely accepted, and quite influential economist to go into the lion’s den and poke it in the eye, things must have gotten – and must still be – pretty bad.

Specific highlights include:
The market for mortgage-backed securities on Wall Street went from $0 to $62 trillion in less than a decade. That’s roughly the size of the entire world economy – and no part of that market was regulated.

Both the Clinton and Bush administrations, as well as the Fed, kept regulators out of that market. Insurance giants like AIG made matters worse when they started insuring these investments against default, with no capital backing. They didn’t need to because regulators weren’t telling them to. Jeffrey called it “pure irresponsibility.”

Here's what the “pure irresponsibility” looked like (in everyday terms): A company like AIG told investors, “Give me $2, and in exchange, if you’re $100 mortgage-backed security defaults or is deemed worthless, we’ll give you that $100.” AIG did this with effectively no money in their bank account (i.e., no capital backing) to actually pay the $100. When mortgage-back securities were deemed worthless because nobody knew which ones contained toxic sub-prime mortgages, investors who purchased them started defaulting on their $100 and went to AIG for their lost money. But AIG didn’t have the money. So Joe Blow taxpayer had to pay. While illegal in other contexts, this activity wasn’t illegal here because there was no regulation.

Sachs rhetorically asked the audience “Why do you think regulators were kept out (of it)?” then turned his speech into surprising territory by answering, “This is about money and power.”

Making a broader point about money in politics now, he brought healthcare into the conversation. “Why do you think we’re no longer talking about The Public Option in the Healthcare debate…. Let me tell you: it wasn’t the townhalls over the summer…. Debates in public are sadly a side show. The real issues are being decided in the back rooms where campaign contributions and vesting interests and lobbying will set parameters on healthcare and the financial system.”

“We do not have a basic change of money in politics yet.” Sachs was clearly calling for one.

Paul Krugman: Recovery Will Last Long Time

2009-10-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman is a brilliant man with thought-provoking approaches to economic questions; he wouldn’t be a leading New York Times columnist (or Princeton University professor) if he wasn’t. On Wednesday at the World Business Forum, he discussed world trade. Not the sexiest topic, but for a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, not a problem either. Some of his more poignant points included comparisons to the Great Depression and predictions on economic recovery:

Great Depression vs. Now. Much has been made of today's economic crisis relative to the Great Depression. Krugman appears to agree with the emerging consensus - that the Great Depression was worse - but that didn't stop him from making comparisons ... or even calling out what was worse about today's crisis vs. Roosevelt's.

1. Run on banks in 2008. What happened during the economic crisis of 2008 was the same as the run on banks in the 1930’s. While mobs didn’t gather outside banks in 2008, they did gather online in the electronic marketplace (to pull their money out of the system) – and with much greater fervor.
2. World trade (or not). World trade has declined more precipitously in this economic crisis than it did at this stage of the Great Depression. Enough said.

Recovery to last long time. Forecasts generally assume economies recover in 5 years – there’s no reason to believe that will be the case this time around. We could be in recovery for much longer. “This looks to be a long siege” for three reasons:

1. No trade surplus. When countries suffer recession from financial crisis, they come out of it by moving into a trade surplus with other countries. The effects of this economic crisis are so widespread and profound that the whole world is in deficit – if the world is in deficit, then it’s that much more difficult for individual countries to get to a surplus.
2. No transportation technology. Steam-engine boats. Containerization of shipping. Airplanes. They all revolutionized transportation, significantly reducing time and cost. Now, there does not appear to be anything like that on the horizon.
3. Higher transportation costs. The cost to transport goods between countries – whether by land or sea or air – will increase as (a) oil prices rise and (b) green policies take effect, taxing emissions of transportation even further.

This last point, we found tremendously telling. Here is a leading Liberal economist making a practical argument against green policies. It became even clearer to us that the depth and intensity of our current economic crisis has affected much more than just world trade.

George Lucas: Rebel, Innovator, Philanthropist

2009-10-08T17:49:00.000-07:00

Film great George Lucas closed out the first day of the World Business Forum on Tuesday to an attentive crowd. We learned that his path to filmmaking was accidental and that from the beginning, he was driven by passion not money. He revealed a number of other interesting tidbits, including his take on Hollywood and friendship with Steve Jobs.

Highlights from the conversation with George:

-Accidental filmmaker. After crashing a car at 17 and getting seriously injured, George opted out of car-racing and went to community college. He wanted to be an illustrator. His dad said no - Lucas, the elder, wasn't about to pay for his son to be an artist. Disillusioned and a bit lost, George said yes to a friend who wanted to ride up to a college together to take an entrance exam. George ended up getting in. He thought it was photography school, but when he showed up, he realized it was cinema school. He didn’t know what cinematography really was. His first class was animation, and his very first assignment became an international sensation at film festivals. We all know what happened from there.

-Success and passion. George believes that “success follows passion, not the other way around.” His story evinces his mantra. When making Star Wars, he negotiated a 40% royalty from the studio. This was unheard of at the time. It ended up being a move worth hundreds of millions of dollars to George, but he didn’t do it for money (nobody knew it would make money). He did it to maintain control of “his” movie, to make it the way he intended. He was passionate about the film and had a vision. He wanted to maintain both. With 40% of the rights, he could.

-Hollywood. In a brief exchange about Hollywood, George was very refreshingly clear – he hates it. He believes that for every honest filmmaker trying to get a story out, there are a hundred Hollywood execs ready to tear it down. But channeling Yoda, George was quick to quip, “Be careful what you hate, for you may become it.”

-Good friend. “Steve jobs is a friend of mine…. He knows what he’s doing…. He’s not into buying companies or synergistic this or that. (He’s all about what I do) – ‘Here’s a good idea, let’s do this.’ ”

-Respected peer. “Peter Jackson is genius…. He did something with Lord of Rings that I didn’t think was possible…. The story was so long and complicated.... I didn’t know how the studios would allow it.”

-Likes and dislikes. What George does most and what he loves most are almost in reverse order: … does most (in order): Writing, Buinsess, Edit, Direct, Camera … loves most (in order): Edit, Camera/Direct, Writing, Business

-Family business. George’s dad owned a small office supplies business. He wanted George to take it over. George said no - he vowed never to go into business.

-Education. George started the George Lucas Education Foundation which aims to influence how students learn, using a variety of techniques including digital media.

-Writing. “Scripts are not about writing. It’s about telling a story.” Perhaps that’s what explains the discrepancy between his panning critics and his wooing audiences. And separately (but related), George still writes longhand. Of it, he says, “I’m not very technical, believe it or not.”

-Delegation. George finds it difficult to delegate the writing of scripts to others. In fact, he can't. The times he's tried in the past, he's ended up discarding others' work for his own. "Others can write (but) I'm the only one who knows the story."

-Art. Art is not literal, it’s about emotional connection... a way of telling stories in a meaningful way. And to create art, there’s a huge amount of technological advancement involved… whether it’s evolving from early SciFi effects to CGI or figuring out how to paint a masterpiece on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the early 1500’s.

-Destiny. Originally, George wanted to do documentary films. But he ended up in feature films. George believes – with striking genuineness – that even if he’d become an illustrator after community college, he would have ended up where he has. With this, and equally as striking, George implies that not only are fate and destiny real, but that his passion drove him there. The force is strong with him.

Kevin Roberts: It's about Emotion, not Reason

2009-10-08T06:55:00.000-07:00

Krass in style and powerful in message, Kevin Roberts, CEO of the one of the world’s leading creative organization, Saatchi & Saatchi, took the stage at the World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall in New York on Tuesday, dawned in all-black, traditional zen garb with a keen interest for The Rockettes and a strong Scottish-versioned New Zealand accent. Needless to say, he made an impression. I can’t explain it very well. But that’s exactly the point of his presentation. He’s in the business of eliciting an emotional response from us in a way beneficial to his clients (e.g., Procter & Gamble, Toyota, General Mills, Visa to name a few). Say what you will about his style and his purpose, but his talk at the Forum was entertaining, edgy, and most importantly thought-provoking, with frequent use of his firm’s ads to make his point.

One ad was an affected amateur style video. The scene: Balcony view of modern-day Liverpool train station in England. People rushing to their trains, meeting loved ones, or simply lost. Hundreds of them. Suddenly, music blasts over the loud speaker. Good music. Confusion ensues. A few people stop what they’re doing and dance – clearly professional dancers, young hipster types. Many others are confounded. As the music continues, more dancers – likely professional still. As time passes and the music mix varies, even more dancers – but this time, innocent by-standers moved enough to join in. The crowd grows. As the songs change, more and more people join in… even the ones who are on their phones in disbelief, watching, mouth agape. Grandmas, dads, singles. Black, white, brown. It’s incredibly engaging. And you can’t explain why at this point even you are caught up in the moment, dare we say, emotional. Everyone in the train station is now dancing. Incredible. You are emotional and vulnerable - ripe for impression. Then, the company logo flashes on the screen: T-Mobile. The connection to T-Mobile doesn't make sense to us, rational sense anyway. Perhaps it’s about human connection and using T-Mobile to share in life’s random moments. Perhaps it’s simply a brilliant idea executed flawlessly to engage the viral generation. Either way, it touched us - and got over 10 million hits online in just three days.

I will always remember this ad. I might not switch my telecom provider, so perhaps the genius of it is misapplied. But what’s clear is that we are moving into what Kevin calls a participation economy which is driven by inspiration, unlike today’s attention economy which is driven by information. Heading into tomorrow, it’s not about marketing but a movement. Kevin explains that while reason and rationale lead to conclusion, emotion leads to action. In fact, he shared this insight as pretext for his seven ways to win in this new world we’re entering, a world in which companies and entrepreneurs need to drive “loyalty beyond reason.”

Here are Roberts’ gems, in his fragmented staccato style:
1. Face the truth. World is ugly now. Need to get along with less. Consumer research is worthless because consumer is in a different place. Deliver priceless value, not just price. “What are you giving me that’s emotionally priceless?” Purpose-inspired, benefit-driven brand.
2. Reframe beliefs about value. “When you buy a prius… it’s not about better MPG or reliability… you’re making the world a better place!”
3. Measure only what matters. Advertising – only two questions matter: “Do I want to see it again?” and more importantly, “Do I want to share it?” Don’t sell by yell. “Consumer is not a moron, she’s my wife.” Consumer has become the biggest medium.
4. Participation vs. Attention economy. Consumers are now their own medium, they’re their own creator. 14-17 yr-olds call themselves “Creatives”… they’re creating their own medium, their own world. Today, we’re in attention economy – it’s about information. Return on investment. Tomorrow, we’re in participation economy – it’s about inspiration. Return on involvement. Not through marketing, but movement. Not a brand, but a lovemark. Not price, but priceless value.
5. Let emotion rip. Rationale leads to conculsion. Emotion leads to action. We’re in the business of action.
6. Brands vs. Lovemarks. Brands are owned by companies; Lovemarks are owned by people. Brands built on respect; Lovemarks built on respect and love. Brand – for a reason. Lovemarks – beyond reason. Lovemarks drive loyalty beyond reason. Make brand irresistible, not irreplaceable (everything now is irreplaceable). Brands are about performance, reputation, trust. Lovemarks are about mystery, sensuality, intimacy.
7. Be true blue. Blue oceans, blue skies, be sustainable. Role of business is to make world a better place for everyone. Move from green to blue. Green is about fear; Blue is about optimism. Green is about “what is there to be done?” Blue is about “What can I do?” DOT – do one thing.

Roberts closed with another ad, perhaps the 7th or 8th of his presentation. The ad was for a New Zealand telecom company, but don’t let that off-put you, it was moving. Home video of son and dad over the past 30-40 years – first steps, fishing triumphs – grainy colored moments frozen to black-and-white stills marking the passing decades. Fine skin to wrinkles and white hair. Slow motion in parts, pleasant music throughout, strong bond clear. The last image goes up, full of color but also despair. It’s just the son, all grown up, standing on the front lawn. Sun is up but head is down. What’s missing – rather, who’s missing – is palpable. The music stops. On the screen appears: “Keep in touch.”

With an audience moved, Roberts closed his time with just one more line, “When this is done, don’t call your office, call your dad.”

David Rubenstein: Investments and Life Lessons

2009-10-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

David Rubenstein, Co-founder and Managing Director of The Carlyle Group, was incredibly informative if not a bit robotic here at the World Business Forum. We forgive his fast-paced monotone for the gems of information and insight he provided. Before we go into what he said, let us give you a better sense of The Carlyle Group, so you understand the weight of his words.

Today, The Carlyle Group is one of the largest private equity firms in the world. The group has about $100B under management. They’ve experienced a 33% annual return on their investments since inception, which is simply jaw-dropping (if you invested just $1,000 thirty years ago, you would have $4 million today). The firm is one of the most influential (very much behind-the-scenes) forces in the world of business and politics. They’re not market leaders, they’re market movers.

Here’s where David would invest right now:
a. Distressed investments… beaten down companies… likely turnarounds
b. Industries with support of US government
c. Energy – traditional and alternative energy
d. Healthcare – “Boomers will spare no expense for fake hips.” Healthcare will continue to grow more than its fair share, as a percentage of GDP.
e. Natural resources – oil and water… water in particular
f. Emerging markets – China, Brazil, India, … “If you don’t think of China all the time, you’re not living in the real business world.”
Of course, not all companies in these areas will represent good investments, but as a core principle, David believes in focusing investments in high growth areas and avoiding even normal levels of leverage (particularly now).

He also shared his career learnings, many of which surprised us because of how human they are:
Persist. Don’t take no for answer. Keep pushing. Take entrepreneurial risk. If you don’t, you’ll sit at your desk for 20 years.
Persuade. Improve your skills of persuasion.
Partner. You can’t build a business by yourself, so find a partner (or several) whom you can trust.
Passion. If you don’t love what you’re doing, do something else, your wasting your time and your career. You’re good at what you love. You’re not good at what you don’t.
Think about activity, not money. Money will flow.
Think like a leader, not a follower. If you think like follower, you will be a follower. If you think like a leader, you’ll be a leader. In related advice, Rubenstein implores you to think like an owner, not an employee. It has been the most important quality he’s learned in all his experience.
Luck. Everyone makes their own.
Deathbed. You never say “I wish I worked harder,” on your deathbed. You say, “I wish I could have given more to my family, to my community.” He urged the audience to “Give back to your community. Don’t just think about your business career.”

It’s worth noting that David had failed three times in his career before striking it out on his own and becoming a huge success. This is a recurring theme among the industry luminaries at this year’s World Business Forum. The Popped Kernel does not believe it’s a coincidence and plans to write more on it – and other broad themes of the Forum – in the coming days.

Bill George: A Lesson in Authentic Leadership

2009-10-07T06:02:00.001-07:00

Bill George, former CEO of Medtronics, current Harvard professor and best-selling author of the game-changing leadership book True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership, was the opening speaker at the World Business Forum. His style, while reserve, exudes experience and drips professorial. He shared a number of stories with the 4,000+-strong crowd here at the Forum, highlighting signs of authentic and lasting leadership – CEO accountability in the cases of Mattel and JetBlue, Bold decision-making at Goldman Sachs before the Great Recession. But what struck us most came at the end of his speech. It wasn’t about case studies of respected companies or the company boards on which he sits. He shared his personal story with an unusual, and much appreciated, amount of vulnerability.

Bill taught us a lesson about ego and how he overcame his to become a leading expert and thought-shaper on leadership. He told us about being “The Number Two” at Honeywell, in line to become CEO of one of the world’s largest and most respected companies. Bill had been at Honeywell for 10 years. He was trying to impress his colleagues and his board. He wanted them to choose him as the next CEO. But something didn’t feel right. He even wore cuff links (which he didn’t like). He would talk to his wife about it at home. A relatively small biotech company, Medtronics, approached him several times to run their company, but they were too small. He kept saying no. His ego wanted to run a large company.

Finally he met with Medtronics. He was surprised by his reaction. He felt at home and loved the mission of their work. He left Honeywell to lead Medtronics, taking the $1B company to $60B in market value in 10 years. Now, he’s on the board – or has been on the board – of several corporate stalwarts (Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil, Target, Novartis) and is an international powerhouse in the field of leadership.

It’s unclear whether Bill made the move to Medtronics because he wasn’t going to make CEO at Honeywell or because Medtronics just felt like a better fit for him. But we do know that he shared with us a piece of his personal story that not many CEOs would have shared. And more importantly, his story proves that when you leave that which doesn’t feel right for something that does, good things will happen. It all comes back to passion. Follow it... by definition, it’s right.

World Business Forum: Starting with a Bang

2009-10-06T11:35:00.001-07:00

It’s lunch time right now at the 6th Annual World Business Forum. Titans of industry are dining. Some internalizing the morning talks; others right back to the pre-Forum grind. There are a number of highlights from this morning’s session – which we’ll write about in forthcoming entries – but first, context.

The Forum opened with a bang. After the lights dimmed in the main hall of Radio City Music Hall, a booming Hollywood-style short dramatically shot up on screen. The film ranged from alarming to uplifting. It began with a stark image of space to a doomsday score. A slathering of headlines from one year ago filled the screen. The clippings morphed quickly into a large ball, a planet, then froze for an instant. The music too. Nothing. Then, just as dramatically, hope filled the auditorium with a charge of instrumentals and images of great leaders espousing the timeless values of leadership, decision-making, the long-term view. As the music crescendo-ed, so too did the wisdom and stature of the leaders. It ended simply and directly with a narrator's voice, “We want (you) to start growing again.”

The message at this year’s World Business Forum is clear: The storm is over. As we get up, dust ourselves off, and look around, there’s devastation. But there’s also opportunity… opportunity to learn, move on, and apply. The possibility that it may be harder to do than surviving the storm itself is real, but it does not minimize the magnitude or value of that opportunity. Perhaps it makes meeting the challenge that much sweeter.

World Business Forum: Countdown

2009-10-04T18:45:00.000-07:00

Hi Kernels. Are you ready to pop? Just two more days until the 2009 World Business Forum. The headliners this year are impressive. Be sure to check in for real-time insight and inspiration from:

President Bill Clinton - Embracing our Common Humanity

George Lucas - A Conversation with George Lucas

Paul Krugman - The Future of the Global Economy

T. Boone Pickens - A Conversation on Energy Dependence

Patrick Lencioni - Building Winning Teams

Gary Hamel - Management Innovation

Irene Rosenfeld - Leading Transformational Change

Jeffrey Sachs - Economics for a Crowded Planet

Bill George - Leadership in Time of Crisis

Bill Conaty - Talent Management

David Rubenstein - Global Economic Crisis

Kevin Roberts - Branding

Antoine Van Agtmael - International Insights

Peter Voser - International Insights

Dennis Nally - International Insights

Morris Chang - International Insights - Taiwan

Francisco Gonzalez - International Insights - Spain

Roger Agnelli - International Insights - Brazil

Patrick Lencioni: Let Passion be Your Guide

2009-10-03T20:16:00.000-07:00

Patrick "Pat" Lencioni, author of best-selling book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and founder of organizational management consultancy The Table Group, embodies what The Popped Kernel is all about - follow your passion, even in the face of risk, to reach your full potential. We interviewed him recently to understand who he really is and what's behind his success. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation (we plan to post the audio interview soon).

Pat is a faithful family man. He makes it very clear that family comes first. Knowing his priorities early on allowed him to set up his company and manage his time in a way that affords him both professional success and personal fulfillment.

He insists that his success - or at least the degree to which he's realized it - was not planned, but simply a side effect of doing what he loves. He genuinely believes that if you do what you're passionate about, then everything else will fall into place (and then some). His experience has proven it.

He remembers facing several risks as he contemplated jumping from secure corporate gig to starting his own firm - his savings, his reputation, the careers of four founding employees. With knowledge of the risks, strong faith, and lots of support from his wife, he said no to two corporate job offers - one from Steve Jobs and the other from Eric Schmidt (now CEO of Google) - in favor of opening his own firm. He started very small, remained positive in outlook, and focused his energy on simply making it work.

When making the jump to do your own thing, Pat's view bucks conventional wisdom. He does not believe that it makes sense to pursue your passion part-time to test the waters, while maintaining your corporate gig. Rather, if you're passionate about something, let that passion work to your advantage. Don't hold it back.

Pat's view of failure is real and comforting - don't fear it, embrace it. It will help you find your path. For Pat, that failure happened early in his career at Bain & Company when he realized number crunching wasn't for him. That realization led to an interest and pursuit of organizational management. Today, he is one of the most widely recognized forces in the field of organizational management.

Pat is living proof that if you follow your passion, then good things will happen.

Check out the audio interview here:

Welcome

2009-10-02T20:11:00.000-07:00

Welcome to The Popped Kernel.

Here you will find success secrets of industry luminaries. From business and politics to arts and entertainment, The Popped Kernel aims to bring you the inspiring stories you don't know behind the people you do. We hope that you find in them the motivation to follow your passion and make a real difference.

And what better way to launch The Popped Kernel than covering the World Business Forum in New York City, Oct 6 & 7, 2009. Headliners of past World Business Forums have included Richard Branson, Alan Greenspan, Colin Powell, Jim Collins, Rudy Giuliani, Muhammad Yunus, Tony Blair, and Jack Welch. This year, headliners include Bill Clinton, George Lucas, and Patrick Lencioni. Visit us here for live updates and incisive interviews.

For a preview of what you can expect, come back tomorrow. We will post highlights from our recent interview with Patrick Lencioni, best-selling author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and "A Top Ten Guru You Should Know" according to Fortune magazine. He turned down offers from Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt to pursue his passion and reach the pinnacle of success. Find out the secret ingredients that got him there.

Are you ready to pop?

World Business Forum - Taste it here: