Transcriber: Miki Sakai Reviewer: mariana vergnano
Thank you so much.
You know, sometimes in our lives something happens to us
that changes the way we think, that changes what we're going to do.
And I wanted to start by telling you a story
about something that happened to me almost five years ago
which really set me off into thinking about this question
of how do we regenerate ourselves.
About four years ago I decided to take my younger son Dominic to Africa.
You know he's like many teenagers in London
spending lots of time hanging around, you know
and I wanted him to really understand what was happening in Africa.
And in particular you know he was just becoming a young
adult, I wanted him to spend time with a Masai warriors.
And so we took a plane - we took a little private plane -
we got into a car and eventually
- it took us about two and a half days - we ended up
in a Masai village in the middle of the Masai Mara in Tanzania.
And just as we had hoped there were a couple of
Masai warriors that spent time with us over a couple of days
talking to us about their rituals
and so on, wonderful stuff. You know this was great
for a teenager to really understand what it was like to be a warrior.
And one morning he took us to the top of the hill
and what he was doing is he was showing us
his Masai territory and he was talking about how it was
to be a Masai warrior and what it meant
the implications, that they you know, had to live by.
And there he was standing in his whole Masai wonderful red robes
carrying a spear, a spear to kill lions with.
This was an authentic moment.
And as we stood there, there was a funny little sound.
Can anyone imagine what that funny little sound was?
(Audience: It was his phone)
It's his mobile phone! So out of his pocket
you know this sort of leopard skin pocket
he gets his mobile phone.
And like every 23 year-old
he has a very excited conversation on his mobile phone.
Well at that moment, I realized that my world had changed
more than I ever imagined it would have done or could do.
But that wasn't the only thing that happened that afternoon because
when he put his phone down, being sort of an inquisitive professor
at the London Business School I said to him,
"What was the conversation about? Who were you talking to?"
And he said "Ah! I was talking to my brother"
Now he as a warrior, his job was to look after the cattle.
But his brother who was younger than my son a 12 year-old
was looking after the goats and in fact his brother
had gone out that morning, at six o'clock in the morning
and had taken the goats out. This was about 12 o'clock by now.
He said, "Well I was talking to my brother."
I said, "Well what was the conversation [about]?"
He said, "My brother had phoned me to tell me
that the goats had just found green grass" .
Now you see that for me is the paradox of the future
because in many ways things changed beyond imagination.
Who would imagine that a Masai warrior four years ago
would have a mobile phone?
By the way he had no electricity, he had no car,
he had no refrigerator, but he did have a mobile phone.
But yet at the same time there were things about his life
that had remained essentialy the same
in terms of his values, his beliefs, and what was important to him.
You know, I think the challenge that we face now
is we are in the midst of the biggest transformation
that the world had ever seen.
When I wrote my book "The Shift" I said
"The biggest transformation since the industrial revolution" .
I don't think that's the case anymore.
In the two years since that was written
I realized it's the biggest transformation ever.
And one of the challenges that we face is to ask ourselves
"What sort of a world do we want to construct?"
And more importantly, what sort of a life do I want to construct?
And there is no question that there are some
pretty tough things happening to us in the future.
If we look into the future what's clear is that
you could walk into the future blindfold.
You know you could walk into a default future
where you don't make choices, you let the future unroll
in front of you or you could be a lot more thoughtful
about the future that you want to create.
You can create in other words a "crafted future".
Now to do that, I think you have to think about
some of the things that are happening in our lives
over the next couple of decades.
Both in terms of the bright side and in terms of the side
which is a dark side.
You know, one of the things that's really clear about the future,
about our lives, about the lives of our children
is it could be a life of fragmentation,
it could be a life where in fact everything is broken
into three minute periods.
If you look even now at your life you'll find that even now
you're constantly interrupted by technology.
It's sort of like a bad tempered two year-old.
You know you can't really find the time within your life
that allows you to be reflective,
that allows you to be thoughtful.
So isolation, fragmentation, is a really important part
potentially of our lives. But yet it doesn't need to be like that.
The very technology that interrupts you
the very technology that behaves like
the bad tempered two year-old
can also provide enormous opportunities for co-creation.
Right now across the world tens of thousands of people
are joining together on platforms like InnoCentive
to share ideas, to think through the opportunities,
to solve problems, both in their own country
and indeed in other countries.
It could be a world of isolation.
There is a potential for many of us
to be living in small families.
We've moved into the city, we've lost our family roots
we're very mobile, we're working at home
rather than in an office and it could be a really isolated future.
It could be a future where it's hard for you to connect
but at the same time you know there are
opportunities as we've heard today to really connect
into your societies to connect into your communities
to be part of the place that you live.
And it's a world of exclusion.
It's a world where the rich get richer,
where the poor become poorer,
wherever they happen to be located.
It's a world where if you don't
or you're not educated you can't join
the global labor talent pool,
you have no way of actually accessing
the value that the world's creating.
But it could be a world where you become engaged
and where five billion people can connect to each other
using the abundant knowledge that's available now
through the sort of hand-held devices that my Masai warrior
was holding that could create enormous amounts of engagement.
And what I want to suggest is that the challenge
that we face now is that we could walk into
the future blindfolded or instead we could make some important shifts
that change the way that we think,
that change our behavior, that change some of the ways
that we want our future to continue.
And it seems to me, that right now, we are faced both with choices
and with consequences.
And I want to suggest three shifts
I think each one of us should be thinking about
in terms of how we create the sort of future
that's going to be important to us.
The first is about the way we think about our own skills.
Now you know there was a time
that you thought maybe, you know, to be a generalist
would be wonderful.
I just need to be like a T-shaped manager.
I need to know a little about a lot of things.
But frankly if you know a little about a lot of things
you're competition is not those smart highly educated people in China.
Your competition is Wikipedia and Google.
So, you need to build mastery.
You need to focus on areas that you love, that you're passionate about,
because the future in my view is about hyperspecialization.
And if can do two things, then that's even better.
So, number one, first shift, think about what you love,
what you're passionate about and really really focus on it.
Number two. You know certainly when I was
growing up what we thought was the way to get on was to compete.
You know, that there was a rank and some people will be at the top
and some people would be at the bottom.
And the way to make sure that you were at the top
was to compete with everybody else around you.
and to be the best that you can be.
What we're now realizing about the future
is that there are incredible opportunities
to build value through collaboration and through cooperation.
Technology, those billions connected,
abundant knowledge provides incredible opportunities
not simply to compete but also to realize
that networks are going to be important.
And those could be the sort of networks
that are the possy, you know those people who are really close to you
who understand your knowledge who can ride with you
it could be the regenerative community,
those people who you're close to, who you give time to,
who you can reflect to, it could be the big ideas crowd.
The thousands of people you might know
who between them have ideas that you can't even imagine
but the combination with your ideas could be very valuable.
And the final shift is this.
You know when organizations began to industrialize
the deal between the worker was very simple.
You work to earn money to buy stuff that makes you happy.
I don't think that's working anymore.
I mean what we're beginning to realize
is that there's very little correlation between higher standards of living
and better feelings about happiness or quality of life.
And what we're also realizing is that
if we're going to be working until 75, which we will be,
and if we're going to have work as a center
of our life, which for most of us it will be,
work is where we find meaning and I believe
that in the future the shift comes less from thinking
about work as a means of making money
to buy stuff that you can consume
but rather to see work itself as a source
of enormous creativity and a source
of enormous possibilities in terms of what would help
each one of us to become the very best we can.
You know human potential is indeed infinite.
And I believe that whilst there are
some very tough parts of the path ahead
at the same time, we have opportunities
for the next 10, 20 years to be incredibly exciting
for every one of us.
Thank you.
(Applause)