World Business Forum: Here We Come!

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.

Clay Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life?

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.

Ideas: The New Widget

"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.)