Thank you, goodness me, that was way, way too generous. It's such an honour to be here
and especially in this company, I mean if you talk about the power of ideas if we
could see and map of the ideas that are bubbling in each of these minds right
here, if you could really see them, you would have a glimpse of what the
future is going to be like. Your collective ability to shape the future
takes my breath away and it's really a treat to be recognized here alongside
each of you. I want to talk about one specific idea that I've been thinking a
lot about recently. It excites me. I think it has the potential to perhaps correct
some of the division and stress we see in the world today, a lot of which
gets blamed on technology, the way that social media is poisoning our
environment. The idea I want to share I'm calling it radical generosity, as in give
things away boldly and just be amazed at what comes back. Generosity is a weird
word it's a weak word in some ways. It's it's it sort of feels like what your
Sunday school teacher would tell you. I want to think about it in a different
way. Not first and foremost as a moral principle, although it is that, but as
effective in today's world, shockingly effective, and you've heard glimpses of
why I've got to that thinking. So go back 13 years in my own story to where TED
was at. It was an annual conference at the time we wanted to get these talks
out somehow, share them more broadly didn't know how, tried this experiment of
putting six of them out there, saw that they went viral and were immediately
plunged into a dilemma because if you gave content away why would people
continue to pay to come to our conferences? That was the only way that
we kept the thing going, so we puzzled about it, in retrospect it
seems obvious what the right thing to do was, which is what we ended up doing,
which is just give it all away. Give away our best talks as
as effectively as we could, and what happened to our surprise and delight, was
far from falling away, demand for our confidence is actually increased and of
course it was because suddenly a lot of people knew about TED who never had, and
so it was so exciting seeing many around the world responding with with great
emotional passion to some of these talks and it made us start to get obsessed
with this idea of what could happen when you give stuff away, because it turns out
that in the connected age that we're in the rules about what you should hang on
to and what you should give away have shifted for lots of reasons. First of all
in the connected age some of the things that are most valuable are intellectual
property, digital assets if you like, of all kinds. Those very things are things
that you can give away at almost no cost. Especially now with the
internet you can literally give them or you can spread them around the world at
zero cost and when you do that you actually do get something back. What you
get back is reputation. A little piece of reputation suddenly many minds know
about this idea they associate it with you and reputation itself matters more
now than it ever has. If you run a company for example you cannot afford
now to have a bad reputation you won't be able to hire everyone. The people
sitting right here, I'm pretty much sure that 95% of them will only work for
an organisation or a company whose mission they believe in. They want their
work to have meaning. We're in the knowledge age, so that matters more
than ever, so that really does change the rules about what you
should do and there's another really big thing at an astonishing thing that happens
when you give stuff away. It's really generosity super power it evokes a
symmetric response. Give and you shall receive, it's familiar saying in every
religion in one way or another, but it's it's deeply wired into human
nature. That is really a game changer it's one that we forget. At TED
because we got obsessed with this idea of what could we give away, noticing
the response back was amazing, so just from giving the talks away, suddenly we
were deluged with requests from people to translate TED into their own
language. That's what allowed these tens of thousands of volunteer translators to
take TED into more than a hundred languages, and it encouraged us to take the
next step which was to give away the brand itself.
TED adding the little asterisk X which means self-organized we were told not to
do this, that we would dilute the brand, that it would be chaotic and crazy, that
was true by the way, it was, we gave strangers in many cities the right, the
license, to organize their own TEDx events with just a little rule book and a
tool kit. Some of them were truly terrible, most of them weren't. Most of
them were extraordinary and the amount of time and love and effort and passion,
money that the people put into these things was simply remarkable it's
resulted in 10 or 12 of these being held every day now somewhere in
there in the world and 25,000 talk videos being given to us every year. A
billion plus views just on TEDx talks. I mean it's been quite extraordinary to
see. That could not happen another way. It happened by an act of, you
could call it generosity, or you could just call it being smart in the
connected era. It turns out that being generous is often the smart
strategy and so if you think about that for a minute and what that could
mean if we bought into that, that we're connected right now our connections are
often doing us damage one piece of outrage is provoking another. It doesn't
have to be that way. We're fundamentally a social species we respond to what each
other do. If we can dial up the ability of the connected world to spread acts
which feel like generosity, we will be amazed at what comes back
and so to you my friends I would urge you among your many other skills to add
to your toolkit the possibility of radical generosity. It doesn't mean that
you give up right now and go away and work for a non-profit
it means that you keep it in your head as something that is going to be part of
who you are and what you will do at some key point in your life. That you will
build the skills and the connections to do that. If that is who you are, I promise
you, you will be amazed at what happens to your reputation and the people who
will want to work with you, the people who will love you, the people who admire
you, the people who will carry your work further and long term the impact of
that radical generosity on the world and on the rest of us is incalculable.
Thank you very much, good luck and congratulations.