Transcriber: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Vale Bustamante
So, 18 minutes isn't particularly long to try and save the world,
but it's exactly what we're going to do, together, now.
Firstly, I need to introduce you to one of my heroes.
He's called Ashley, he's young, he's hugely intelligent, articulate,
and just released from prison, and not for the first time.
At that point Ashley was made a bet by his probation officer,
that he'd be back inside within a year.
For those who don't work in the criminal justice system,
you are right, that's not what probation officers are supposed to do.
In fact that might actually to be illegal.
Luckily, Ashley made his way to us,
and we got him onto an apprenticeship scheme
that we designed, in a record label.
And Ashley brought that business new understanding,
new insights, new channels, the audience that it needed.
And in time he came to me,
and said, "It's time for me to go out on my own.
I've understood this business and more than that
I've understood the sector. I get to see exactly what I should do.
I've seen the gap in the market
and I'm gonna launch myself and my success into the world."
I said, "That's amazing. I think maybe you should think about finishing the apprenticeship.
You've only been there a week."
(Laughter)
He wouldn't hold back. He was ready to do this.
He wanted to take on the world on his own terms.
I said, "Ashley, I've got to be honest with you.
I don't get paid if you don't finish the apprenticeship,
so can we make some kind of deal."
And we did. I agreed to help him with his business plan,
if he finished the apprenticeship.
And that's what we did.
He went into the world, he signed the first artist to his talent management agency.
He got her on the road, he got her on tour,
he got her on the radio, he got her on magazines.
And then, and bear in mind, this is just after
being bet by a probation officer that within a year he'd be back in prison,
within a year he got his first artist signed
to the world's biggest record label for 100,000 pounds.
And Ashley is not the most remarkable thing about that story.
Because I think that absolutely every single one of our children is born
with the opportunity for that kind of success.
I think the remarkable thing is the systemized waste
that nearly took place to Ashley.
The waste that takes place absolutely every single day,
in every single country that's facing economic and social chaos,
we are systematically wasting one of the most powerful,
one of the most important, one of the most precious natural resources at our disposal,
because every single day, we systemize the failure
and deny the opportunity that we have within all of our young people.
And instead of being distracted by the debate around deficits and cuts
which on their own will not going to get us out of this mess,
I think we need to invest our time and energies into empowering
the opportunity for creative, social and economic power
that we have within our young people.
I learnt a phrase during this trip.
Forgive my pronunciation.
(Greek): Greece eats its children.
If I nearly got that right.
(In Greek): Its children. And it has to stop.
It's a fantastic phrase.
Greece eats its children.
And like you heard before, it's a message to the world.
We all eat our children and it absolutely has to stop.
I started within the criminal justice system for a reason.
Because if we are looking for examples
of how we systemize the failure of our young people,
the criminal justice system does it really really well.
Across Europe and the northern states of America,
in the worst instances, the failure rate of rehabilitation
and this is for young people who serve their time
and now deserve honest chances in society,
the failure rate can run up to 90 percent.
You don't often hear 90 percent connected with failure rates, do you?
It's a strange statistic.
I mean, put it into a different context.
Imagine 90 percent of our iPads failed.
There'd be middleclass mayhem.
The Apple Store would be on fire.
The media industry would grow into a halt.
Or 90 percent of my cups of tea turned up cold.
I wouldn't have it.
90 percent of young offenders in the worst cases go back into prison.
And I, like many other people who work in this area,
frustrated, banging our heads against the table
when faced with brilliant, bright, articulate young people
who deserve a chance.
And one day, one of these young people took pity on me.
[He] looked me in the face and said,
"Sam, do you wanna know what it was that actually I was really good at?"
I said, "Honestly, yeah, actually I do, but I didn't think it was polite to ask."
And he told me.
He told me his story about his success as a middle manager.
The management disciplines that actually he put into place,
and he was a fairly ruthless manager when he needed to be,
of upwards of fifty people.
He told me about his marketing skills, some social media,
but ahead of his time, mainly mobile,
based on his understanding of customer relationship management systems.
He told me about his understanding of economics,
of supply and demand, and profit and loss,
and financial control,
and he was ruthless when it came to cashflow.
And he told me that during bonus season,
actually he was earning more money than I was.
And he'd share some of that to supplement his mother's low income
to help support his stepbrothers and sisters.
And why aren't those skills on his CV?
When those are skills that we all really need?
Because they are learnt in the informal economy?
Can we not see past that?
And I am not for a second forgiving or forgetting
the negative impact of the drugs trade whatsoever.
But if you park the morality for a moment,
and think about it, the career,
because that's what it was that he chose in his life,
was just as much glamorized as it is critisized.
I turned around to him, my honest response was there,
but for the Grace of God why?
As a young man who's responded to his environment,
trying to make his way in the world.
So I suggested to him that we started a business together.
He said, "Maybe, but I'm taking 51 percent"
(Laughter)
I'd just met at this time some of the team at Google in the UK.
A guy called James Elias was creating business tools,
free business tools for startups.
To help startups and stimulate the economy.
And I said to him, "James, I think I've found a group of enterpeneurs
that you may have overlooked."
James said, "Really? How exciting, where are they?"
I said, "They're over here."
And to his credit, James and his team backed us in the support
of a program for ex-offenders
who displayed natural entrepreneurial skills.
It was just six weeks.
They provided business mentoring,
digital skills, marketing planning,
just to augment the skills that they already had.
A year later, had ninety percent of them re-offended?
No. Ninety percent of them had not re-offended.
It's now two years later.
The same ninety percent still have not re-offended.
We start to add that together.
Those guys on average, a young offender costs, give or take,
seventy thousand euros, a hundred thousand dollars.
For ninety percent of them not to re-offend,
half of those are still running their own businesses.
Which means they're employing people.
Which means they are creating jobs.
They are creating wealth. From social cost to social capital.
This isn't just a moral and intellectual argument
of how we need to stop the systemized failure of our young people.
It's an economic one.
And it's a very big economic one.
In the euro zone alone the cost of the young people,
who we term as not in education, employment or training
is 150 billion euros a year.
150 billion euros a year. Sorry, nearly half of Greece's national debt.
150 billion euros a year. That is a cut I would like to see made.
I would like to see that come right down.
Because I know there's a fat percentage of those young people
who can go out just as Ashley and just as these groups of young people did.
If we can get out of their way and open doors to opportunity.
That plays out across the whole world.
In the United States they've taken exactly the same economics,
just months ago, but extrapolated across the life cycle.
And then the additional costs there might be of health-care and justice.
Then it comes out 4.75 trillion dollars.
These are very significant sums of money,
these are very significant amounts of waste,
that we are not just tolerating but we are perpetuating.
And there's a clue in that term I just used.
the "not in education, employment or training".
It's a terrible acronym and we call these young people NEETs.
I don't know how many of you have heard of it.
I want to apologize for it.
It was something that was originated in the UK.
We've now exported around the world.
It's probably our least good export since "One Direction",
who I apologize for as well.
Especially the bow-tie one.
But it's indicative of the systemized failure
that we've allowed to take place.
NEETs, all of you.
In your creative organizations, new world changing in the organizations.
looking for talent, looking for inspiration.
When would you ever term people by what they're not.
These guys, there's forty million of them in Europe,
all defined by what they're not,
before they've even got through the door.
And then once you're in that group, you're 20 percent more likely
to end up on the streets, in crime, teenage pregnancy, teenage parents.
Of the young offender group, 80 percent of them
came from the NEET group.
Now we can see it happening and we can intervene
before we it costs us all so much.
And we can turn this social cost into social capital earlier and earlier.
But, how are we doing this back in the U.K.
When working with the same team, at Google,
we've identified across that broad section of young people,
looking at them as a pool of talent
and not as a pool of trouble,
One skill that they all demonstrate,
is their natural status as digital natives.
When talking to employers and businesses
the one skill they all seem to be looking for is digital skills.
So we're running a program
for some of the most disadvantaged young people,
toughening up their digital skills, and you know what?
The employers are lining up.
The gaps are there.
We just have to keep closing them.
We have to keep opening doors instead of closing them.
So moving on, I'd like to start talking about what we're going to do.
The plan for us and the plan for all of you.
And to do that, I'd like to introduce you to my second hero.
Shineze Henry, a young woman, who, when I met her, was fourteen,
a young black girl, from innercity South London,
who'd been excluded from multiple schools.
So, she's already demonstrating a key skill of tenacity.
She arrived in my office,
and I should put my office into some context, I keep mentioning it.
My background was in marketing, and twelve years ago
my business partner and I decided that we were going to start
a marketing agency that was going to change the world.
It's how naive we were.
We're sometimes called a marketing agency with a youth club in the middle of it,
sometimes a social enterprise.
My favorite explanation was two young men who came into our office, just last year.
There was troubled teenagers that'd been with me
and now in their early 20's had come to tell me how successful they were being,
and they said, "This office is a transformation engine."
I love that phrase.
And I wonder what would happen if just a tiny percentage of our offices
became transformation engines.
And there's one of them left.
He said, "Sam, you ought to give me a job."
I said, "Why is that?"
He said, "Because I've been here,
I know all your secrets.
I'm going to start my own marketing agency
that's going to change the world if you don't.
So he may well be here next year.
Back to Shineze Henry. There she is, she's in my office.
She's turned up, she's been referred there.
She's excluded from school and frankly she's not very pleased about it.
We couldn't get a word out of her for the first couple of weeks,
or encouraged her to do any work. But then we did.
And with every bit of energy she gave to us, we matched it.
Every bit of trust we gave her, she became more trustworthy.
Until suddenly there is not a meeting in my office
that doesn't have Shineze Henry in it.
We're introducing her to clients.
Clients then asking after her, how Shineze is doing.
The evolution, the blossoming of this talented and insightful young lady
took place before our eyes.
We got in touch with one of the schools that had excluded Shineze.
They came in, they set some performance indicators
that she needed to achieve to get back into school.
She just knocked them out in the park.
She managed to make it back into school just before examinations.
She nailed nine, she got three A stars.
She worked over the course of that summer.
She ran for Youth Mayor of one of the biggest boroughs in London.
She came second, as deputy Youth Mayor.
On her way to college, she got into her first choice of college
to study her favourite topic.
Then she got nominated to run with the Olympic Torch.
And the day before the games in London,
Shineze is running through the streets of London
with the torch above her head,
and my entire office is on its feet in front of the BBC, crying.
And then later, Shineze comes into the office, still holding the torch.
We're all still crying.
And that is the talent. Thank you very much.
A round of applause for Shineze. (Applause)
And that is the talent that everyday we waste.
I sat Shineze down, I put a contract in front of her.
I said, "Right, book deal, speakers tour, we're making a million.
Shineze, sign here. What was the secret?
What was the magic moment that allowed you to do that?"
Shineze looked back at me and said, "Oh... It was hard work."
I said, "That's terrible, give me the contract back,
that's never going to get us a book deal."
I didn't. That's not how I mentor.
Mentoring should be time-specific and goal-oriented obviously.
And "Shineze", I said, "think hard, think back to those days,
when you were miserable as hell.
What happened? What switched it back on?"
Shineze closed her eyes, and she put herself back in that place,
and said, "I know exactly what it was.
I remember the day that I realized, that you really did like me."
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
The underestimated power of a human connection goes so far.
And you can look at any research that exists in the world
[unclear] around this group of young people.
And when we ask ourselves questions about these young people
and why they display anger and rage
as a response to what we try to present as opportunity.
The answers are there.
And sometimes the answer is as simple as a human connection.
And that leads me to my challenge to you.
Because this is all rather simple stuff.
They're big complicated challenges,
but some of the answers, aren't.
I challenge you and the global TED community
to use your networks and your common sense
to find your way to an organization
that's working with young people, like mine,
and ask to volunteer, to mentor a young person,
to work on a challenge.
And hopefully, I've already won the intellectual and moral debate,
that all of these young people are our responsibility
and we have to do something about it.
Hopefully, I've also begun to win the economic argument
for these young people as potential.
Now I'd like to suggest that actually the main beneficiary
from this challenge is going to be you.
I want you to think of a challenge that you've got in your life.
A difficulty, something you can't quite get past.
And I want you to take that to this meeting.
Whether it's just an hour, or a day, or a month, I don't mind.
Goal-orientated and time specific.
That's all mentoring needs to be.
And ask a young person, their challenge.
And together, you're going to find solutions.
That's all I need you to do.
Now I can feel the wave of scepticism, the questioning.
So, I've tested this, on your behalf.
Recently, I had twelve senior executives
of the world's biggest and oldest energy company, in my office.
They were there in search of innovation and understanding.
So I matched them with twelve innercity teenagers.
The integration was seamless.
Now, I asked them to do exactly what I've just asked you to do.
But I didn't give them as much time or as much freedom.
Each of them presented a challenge.
And then I paired them together.
So, senior executive over here has got massive problems
with his upstream oil and gas supply distribution something.
Very serious stuff.
And over here, I have a young man who's having difficulty
getting home from college without getting beaten up by a local gang.
Much more serious stuff.
That's not fair. They're both serious things.
Put them all together, send them away.
15 minutes is all they had, and I'm giving you your own time period.
They all came back.
The skepticism across their faces, gone, as one by one, by one,
they each revealed a solution.
If not a solution, certainly a brand new way of looking at the problem they had,
that they never would have got to before.
And as we got to the end, the most senior amongst them
and certainly the most cynical, she didn't just have a solution,
she had tears running down her face.
And this isn't usually an indicator of client success for me.
And I assure you, and I am not going to try to make you cry,
but I wanted to make a point.
And I want to make this point,
because I am hoping that the positive byproducts of us all collectivelly
losing faith in the people who are supposed to be in control,
means that we devolve that responsibility to ourselves.
And this is a very simple act that we can all do.
It's a very simple act that I believe will have a profound effect
on a young person's life.
It's a very simple act that I believe can switch
a young person on from being a social cost to being social capital,
for a school, is a very profound act that I believe
will bring you some innovation, fresh thinking to challenges that you have.
It's a very simple act that will cost you nothing to do.
But if we don't do, it might just cost us everything.
(In Greek): Thank you
(Applause)