Good Evening. I'm Stewart Brand from Long Now Foundation. Couple of announcements. One is the lights are gonna stay up because our speaker Rosabeth likes to see what's going on with you and maybe more interactive than some speakers. Also, Rosabeth has a new book, "America: The Principled", which there's some for sale outside and she'll stick around for a few minutes in the lobby after the talk to sing some if you want them. Nice announcements for Long Now. There's probably a firm number of Long Now members here. How many actually? I thought so. Great. We went through the auditorium. A long time fairly quite but significant supporter of Long Now has been Pierre Omiliar and his wife Pam and they are so focused on community as the way things should happen in the world that they like very much the way this membership thing is going forward with Long Now and they want to support it. So, we are now announcing a matching grant up to a hundred thousand dollars from Pierre and Pam for to match new memberships. And so people who become a member from now through the end of June, double your money will happen to the foundation and thank you and thank them. This is coming up on Christmas Season and so people want to give gift memberships that I gather is an option. New members and future members there's we had an event for members with Brian Eno a couple of months ago. We will have at least two more events like that. It'd be scheduled in the next few months. It will be just for you Years ago I was hired by Royal Dutch Shell, AT&T, and Volvo, the senior people on those three organizations who wanted to think about organizational learning and some new and productive ways and we had a series of conferences that wound up turning into a thing called global business network. It is now twenty years old that I've been working at all that time. I was one of the co-founders. But when I first started looking at organizational learning, it wasn't a hell of a lot of literature on it. But one who is very good and as I got more and more into the world of business and organizational and governmental consulting, it was the person whose name and whose books kept coming up again and again. That's Rosabeth Moss Kanter and that's why she is here tonight. Rosabeth Thank you. Thank you Stewart. Thank you. I'm very honored to be introduced by a legend. So thank you for that and hello to you in San Francisco. It's always a great pleasure to be here. I believe that my home city of Boston and Cambridge is the only other place in the country that has so many visionary thinkers all in one place. Well, I'm here to talk to you about long-term thinking enduring principles for changing times and I'm known as a guru of change but in fact I really hate change. I think change is a pain in the neck. Change is what other people are making me do. You know, and that's how we think about change where as of course I love being entrepreneurial, creating new projects, that's not exactly change but change has a bad reputation and that's one of the reasons that I think we need principles in order to cope with it. I'll come back to that in a moment. But there's a story, it was actually an all-purpose commencement speech that was written by one of my favorite management philosophers, Woody Allen. I see you've heard of him. And it went something like this. He said, "Never before in human history has humanity face such a crossroads. One path leads to the despair and utter hopelessness. The other road leads to total oblivion. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose the right one. Well, you know I'm glad you laughed because actually, in the 21st century this young 21st century because of what happened to the national mood, in fact what happened to the nation which is part of what propelled me to write America The Principled. I don't even think that's particularly funny because sometimes that seems like our choice everyday. In fact, I defined this as a gross national comedy deficit. When there are two many people who have not long-term thinking they have very short term apocalyptic thinking that the world is gonna end any minute anyway and so why bother cleaning up the environment. You know, why put in the effort. Well, change does have a bad reputation. But that's in part why we need enduring principles and values because that's the only way that we help people make sense of changing times, of the anxiety that we all feel about what's being inflicted on us that appears to make no sense. One of the things that leaders learn is that it is more important to lead through rationale, understanding principles why we're doing things than it is to simply issue directives. And so, I did write America The Principle in order to provide a coherent, progressive agenda for seizing our future and restoring what I think are Americans strengths and a country to be proud of with opportunity for all by returning to enduring principles, we need enduring principles. And in fact, in any effort to improve things, to make change, to create a better and brighter future, we always hit road blocks and obstacles in the middle. In fact, I defined this a long time ago as Kanter's Law. I'm not sure whether anybody else calls it Kanter's Law but you can help me out. Kanter's Law is that everything can look like a failure in the middle. Anything we start anything we start that is new and different or as an attempt to make an improvement upon current practice always hits obstacles, road blocks, objections, resistance to change in the middle and that's a problem of short termism. If you don't have a goal, a vision, and underlying principle and you hit that obstacle in the middle, every entrepreneur in the room know this, that there were moments when you have the naysayers and the version that didn't work. And the problems and the team that's affected and the people who were hired away by your competitor. You stopped then and by definition, it's a failure. But persist, persevere because of having an underlying vision, a set of principles that say there's something that going to endure and we can make this work. It is often then a success and so long term thinking is incredibly important even to the success of new ventures of new and different things. And so we need enduring principles. We need we need ways to make sure that we don't panic in the middle of things that aren't quite working but instead, we persist because there's an underlying set of values or an underlying set of principles that were applying to that effort whatever it is. In fact, in my last book called Confidence, How winning streaks and Losing streaks begin and end, I found that one of the reasons winning streaks end, that is success cycles end is because people panic when something unexpected happens and they immediately drop all the values, all the principles that they stood for. And I feel that that has happened to our country in the 21st century that a few assaults on America and our sense of ourselves and suddenly many people were willing to abandon principles that we have stood for for several centuries that have made this the land of opportunity and I wanna get us back on track. I wanna get back to the enduring principles that helped us cope with changing times. If we loose sight of those enduring principles, then we're gonna be in trouble. We'll panic just like people panic in the midst of a sport match and suddenly throw out the game plan and can't succeed. And I worry that our country is in that position right now and we have to get back to the enduring principles that have always made us strong. And there are three that I want to talk to you about talk with you about tonight with lots of examples of where I see these in place. The first principle enduring principle that helps us cope with changing times is open minds open minds. I also happen to think we need some other things to be more open than they are but we certainly need open minds. A spirit of discovery, human perfectability, this is what has made the country strong and this is what will help us cope with changing times. In short, innovation the mindset of an innovator that's open to discovery where a sense of progress and problem solving is built in to everything we do and I worry that in the last in the last years of this century there has been an effort to close minds rather than open it. I talk about the kind of thinking that we need for changing times as kaleidoscope thinking. We need to to see the world the way a kaleidoscope works. When you look through a kaleidoscope, a set of a set of fragments form a pattern but all we have to do is twist it, shake it, change angle, change direction and suddenly the same fragments form an entirely different pattern. It is often not reality that's fixed, it's our view of reality and often the elements are already here it we're willing to open our minds to new possibilities. Human perfectability is one of those enduring principles that had always made America strong. We were always the place of discovery, not the place of received wisdom but the place where minds were open where we solved problems, where we did things in different ways and that principle of open minds of kaleidoscope thinking has been lost in debates about science versus religion. In the United States for example, it is not really a debate between science and religion, it's orthodoxy versus creativity. And I come down on the end of creativity. That's how we continue to cope with changing times. In Union City, New Jersey there was an incredible experiment in changing education dramatically that has made an enormous difference and it's part of the principle of opening minds to new phenomena. In Union City, New Jersey one of the failing schools in that community, a visionary mayor, Robert Menendes who is now a US senator, Robert Menendes partnered with the school superintendent on the belief that even the poorest urban kids out of poor families in a failing school district could learn and make a difference. And they sought partnerships with leading technology companies to bring the best and the latest to Union City because of a belief that truly no child should be left behind even though that legislation is often mythical in its applications. And so in Union City, New Jersey they started on a journey of discovery that would open minds to the possibilities that the children themselves could become the teachers. Now, that's an enduring American phenomena, an enduring American principle. We were said to be the first nation on earth in which the young taught the old. Well, in Union City by applying new technology and using the school as a test site for the latest that Bell Atlantic now Horizon wanted to offer, they not only gained experience with DSL which is built-in to the products now, they put the children to work as teacher of their parents and their teachers about the technology and had an enormous gain. So I believe that the innovators of America are there because we open minds to discovery at the youngest ages and must do more of that in order to have a country which continues to move forward. I said the debate is not science versus religion but orthodoxy versus creativity. Values can constrain or values can enable. You know, I had I taught a program at Harvard that had senior executives from the Middle East from nearly every country in the Middle East except Israel because the Israelis couldn't come to that particular round of the program and here was the most striking thing to me about the program in terms of this issue of orthodoxy versus creativity, not science versus religion. I taught a case about Nelson Mandela, the first democratically elected President of South Africa and an incredible role model and a hero of how to bring a country back from the brink of conflict, heal it and move it forward. Well, I thought the case about Mandela and his philosophies and we're discussing the case with the set of executives from the Middle East and I was amazed at a question they asked. Someone said, "Well, what is Mandela's religion. You don't mention his religion." So I asked the group, I said "Why is that important?" Well, then we will know how he thinks. If we know his religion, we will know how he thinks because I suddenly realized to this group of leaders from Middle Eastern countries with which America supposedly today has a clash of civilization which I think is an over statement of a range of opinions and views that are held in that region, but to them, religion was received wisdom. Religion then told you how to think. And I realize that in the traditions I grew up in, it was a starting point. It wasn't the answer. But to them, they said "If we don't know what his religion is, we won't know how to evaluate his leadership." And I thought, how striking, how different from the principles that have made this country great which are principles of open mind of taking received wisdom that has been handed down to and doing something to add to it, engage with it, have a dialogue with it and that is an enduring principle that also produces change. And that's really what we're after in the United States. We're a placed where we don't prejudged, we see the particular. Where we we don't accept received wisdom, we improved upon it. Innovation has always been the thing that has made this country great. And so the enduring principle even when times change is that minds are open to learning, that the young can teach the old, that fresh knowledge can combine with wisdom to make a difference, and that principle has made this country strong and I argue that's an enduring principle that will help the rest of the world cope with changing times once we restore respect for the traditions of this country. The second enduring principle for changing times is that activities need to be directed towards a higher purpose, a sense of meaning. In fact I think we could be after an age 30-year age of cynicism beginning to enter an age of idealism if we shift the political climate in America that the sense of values of higher purpose as creating meaning in life and meaning in work, meaning in all of our endeavors even when even when times are changing, that's what endures, is the values and sense of purpose that we start with. So of innovation is all about change opening minds to new discoveries, engaging children as well as people of all generations in the quest for the new. We also need a sense of higher purpose. That's an enduring principle and that's also a principle that has long been part of this country and is increasingly part of the repertoire of a surprising set of institutions. We maybe entering an era of a new kind of capitalism. We have the potential to create the values-based capitalism that puts a sense of purpose to make a difference in the world at the center of how businesses operate and how businesses creates social enterprises that have a purpose even beyond making money. So let me give you an example. IBM under Sam Palmasano has become a strikingly different organization in the 21st century. Palmasano inherited the company that have been turned around by Lou Gertsner and it was still among the world's largest technology companies, depending on which products you Hewlett-Packard overtook it in terms of certain product lines but it is still one of world's giants after is sold off some efforts, IBM was a little smaller. But one Sam Palmasano's first act at IBM was to convene a 300 a 300, 000 person web chat called the Values Jam in which every IBMer had an opportunity over a 3-day period to discuss values, to discuss what do we stand for and why are we doing this work. Not to talk about technology or strategy, although that came later when they also convened an innovation jam in which over 300, 000 people wait in on what should be the technology priorities of the future. But he started a Values Jam, a kind of chat over a 3-day- period on the web. Now, IBM had a strong set of values they thought they have been laid down out of the head of Tom Watson in an earlier period. But Palmasano did it differently in this open participative process and in fact when he mentioned this to the board of directors of IBM, one of the directors who have been CEO of another large company and a fairly conservative industry said to him "This is socialism." And what Sam Palmasano said back is he said "Today, we do need values but they can no longer from the head of the CEO." That sense we have sophisticated people all over the world. They're cynical. They speak different languages. They come out of different cultural traditions. Unless they participate in a conversation about what we stand for, what's our higher purpose. Nobody is going to buy this. Nobody is going to use it. And so they had the web chat. They got all of this input. They just tilt it down to a statement of three key values at the centerpiece of those values is the statement that says innovation that makes the difference for our customers and the world. And that's all the company needed to begin to begin to operate in a very different way. Those values are not just on a poster, on paper or on the web, those values are invoked all over the world, almost everyday in meetings at IBM. And when I asked people why do there seem to be so few political disagreements there, they say it's because we have this statement of values. Of course, that tells us exactly what to do. Well, it doesn't tell anybody what to do. It's very grand in general. But it guides activity by independent people and that sense of higher purpose of a meaning that transcends my own activity unites IBM in a way that other organizations are now starting to emulate. And it is an enduring principle that we have values and a sense of purpose that also guides people in the work of change. But here's what Palmasano said about why he did this and it certainly long-term thinking at its best. He said, "Management is temporary. Returns are cyclical, but if we use these values as connective tissue that has longevity." If people can get emotionally connected and have pride in the entity success, they will do what is important to IBM. While defining that sense of purpose so broadly, innovation that makes a difference for the world was license for people in the United States to work differently when IBM had a new technology. For example, IBM research lab had made major advances in grid computing where you get the power of super computers simply by harnessing unused computing power from desktop, from PCs, and they had made a major advance in this and were wondering how they're gonna get this out to market place and their customers and one of the values keepers at IBM immediately got win of the technology is in Palmasano office creating the model for what they called World Community Grid. They gave away grid computing power first before they started selling it. World Community Grid is a non-profit established by IBM to get lots of us, I don't know if anybody here has their PC running on World Community Grid. You can volunteer your unused computing power to become part of this network because it is then deployed on some of the world's biggest and most challenging scientific projects that need to use the amount of computing power and so you couldn't have you're computing power donated to projects on HIV-AIDS, cancer research, heart disease where just the number of images require a great deal of computing power in order to do the research. And all over the world, certainly mostly in the US where there was an incredible pride in World Community Grid but all over the world, I've been in executive's offices where they point to they point to the laptop behind their desks and say oh today we're processing date for a major cancer research project. Well, they gave it away first in a non profit because of the values of the sense of higher purpose. And that's a new kind of capitalism, that's a new way of approaching the world and we need more of that in America. We need to applaud the people who were doing that. We need to see they're being guided by principles and values. This provides more motivation for employees. It helps partners to feel connected to the company. It makes new relationships and it changes the world. So a sense of highmayer purpose is an enduring principle that helps us change. Because if you have a higher purpose then you know where innovation should be directed and targeted. You don't hang on to orthodoxy. You become creative but you are reinforcing that value. And we need more of that in America. That's why I think principles are behind how we should run our country as well. And a third enduring principle and this particularly an American principle is common ground. The United States has been said to be the first new nation. By that political scientist meant that it was the first nation on Earth defined not by race or ethnicity or shared history but defined by the fact that people were occupying the same territory. They were on common ground, in fact when people first started settling the East coast of the United States, all of the towns were characterized by having a commons in the middle of the town where everybody would come to grazed their cattle. Where anybody with a few exceptions women couldn't vote and slaves still weren't people. So I can't say that everything about American history was perfect and inclusive but for the that's a principle that has such been important part of this country. For all the battles about waves of immigration, in fact gradually people started to stand on common ground. Inclusion and then the responsibilities of citizenship have always been part of what this country has stood for. And in fact in the 1820's, the french aristocrat Alexis Totofil came to the United States. And he wrote a famous book called, Democracy in America. And he didn't write about our federal government. He didn't write about our big business. Because we didn't really have much of course in his era. But what he wrote about was the ways in which Americans who stood on common ground built community because of voluntary actions by citizens to take responsibility for their own territory including all that where on that territory. And he said Americans of all ages, all stations of life and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms knowledge. On its progress depends that of all the others. In towns it is impossible to prevent people from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves. In short we take responsibilities ourselves. President Clinton declared that era of big government is over, to be replaced by the era of big citizens. And that enduring principle of citizen responsibility is an opportunity to infused our country and the world with a different sensibility. And I have to say this part of the country like mine, my home city of Boston, are the models for the nation in terms of social entrepreneurs who formed sudden passionate resolves with their fellows and not simply create new businesses but create new non-profits that become models for the world. And I think that the donation from Pierre Amajar to the Longnow Foundation is a great example of the generosity of Americans. It's generosity unites us across partisan divides. People who can't agree on the politics of the situation often agree on the need to help those in need and to create social innovations that can produce a better future. It's generosity that can unite us. And it's generosity that can change the image of Americans in the world. This is a big problem. And those of you who will do anything internationally here whether its in business or other realms know that we must get back to those principles because the view of America in the world is very negative at the moment. In fact however there is a big different gap between the view of America, the government versus Americans, the people. There is still much more goodwill around the world to Americans than there is to our country in part because of a losing streak of a war in Iraq as well as other actions that never really make their countries safer or better as we see on the situation in Pakistan and its neighbor Afghanistan at the moment. However we can restore that view of the world if we again returned to that enduring principle of common ground through service where responsibility is taken by citizens. We could mobilized citizen diplomats who are already involved in projects in Africa, in projects in the middle east. Because of the generosity of Americans and our penchant to form non-profits, voluntary associations at the grass roots and do it ourselves, we have an opportunity to do things that government cannot do. And of course is not doing. The defense budget is about 23% of the federal budget while my research staff and I were counting up how much of the federal budget was spent on programs involving any kind of diplomacy or aid, that came to less than 1/16 of 1% of the entire budget. Well that gap is being made up by us that we the people. Through our desire to unite on common ground. To take responsibilities, the grass roots around the world. Because of the Gates Foundation's efforts and contributions as private philanthropy, 22 governments were encouraged to get involved in childhood immunizations. It's often our voluntary actions out of the private sector that galvanized government into doing things. So I think service is sorely needed in the United States. And I'm a gigantic advocate of national service. Civilian national service, I'm on the board and helped with the founding of youth service core that is active in San Jose. It's a national corp. It was the model for Americorps. President Clinton's national service program. It's called City Year and young people 17 to 24 have the opportunity to sign up for a year of full time service. And when they do that, they are deployed in schools, they are deployed in community organizations. They make a difference in the community but they also become united as a force across diverse aspects of the population. They reached out across partisan divides to various members of the community. And they create a new sense of what the commons, the common ground can be. The first President Bush has created the Points of Light Foundation in order to get more volunteerism in America. And I looked at that and said who can be against it? A thousand points of light the more lights the better I say. But if those lights are not focused like a laser beam on some of our most difficult problems we will not be the country in the future changing times that I want us to be. So national service as an effort that we should ask every presidential candidate to endorse. National service is one of those ways that we can take desperate efforts and through full time course of young people, full time course of retiring baby boomers who are part of experienced core with civic ventures right here in San Francisco has created, we can create a force that cannot only bring about change in the world but can help us change in America, solved some of our most difficult problems while brining us together on common ground. And that's the spirit I want in America and those three principles: Open mind open minds in which we can learn from the young as well as from those who are more senior than we are. A world of discovery, of innovation in which we don't get bug down in orthodoxy which kind of science is allowed to be taught in the schools for examples. A world of higher purpose and higher higher aspiration in which our businesses are ran by values and not by bureaucracy or control systems or putting money first but rather getting to higher purposes than can make a difference in the world and in which we find common ground. That those kinds of enduring principles can help us cope with some of the most difficult problems we have in America because we have models of how to make each of these things work. And this 21st century that I says have a gross national comedy deficits and where anyway change seems like it's going to bring troubles like my Woody Allen story, this kind of America has been living through something we know better on the East Coast than you do here but endless winter. You know Shakespeare in one of his tragedies had a famous line, now is the winter of our discontent and I feel that we've been in an endless winter of discontent in the 21st century because winter is a time where we don't open our minds, we close our doors. Winter is the time when we huddle in fear, don't wanna go out on the streets it is too cold rather than remembering the purposes that we stand for. Winter is the time when people retreat rather than stand on common ground. Well, if this has been the winter of our discontent then I think we need a shift of seasons. Now, the former governor of California, President Reagan, coasted to the presidency in the 1980s when he said, "Okay it's morning in America." And I say let's make it summer in America, year round. Because the spirit of summer is the spirit that reflects openness and a sense of energy that means that higher purposes can be obtained and standing on common ground. In summer people come out from behind closed doors. They go out on the street. They think they can fix their communities. In summer, people go back to nature. We become closer to our origins, we simplify. In summer class distinctions tends to be erased because we all dressed the same. In summer, we trust strangers. The commons in America, instead of the places where we graced cattle in New England centuries ago, the new commons in America might be the public beach because on public beaches, there are studies that actually confirm this people will leave their belongings in the sight of strangers and yet wander off in complete trust. That's spirit of summer should be translated in two a summer of service for middle school children to a spirit of optimism, openness, higher purpose, generosity, and common ground. Those enduring principles and the spirit of summer can bring us back to what we've always stood for but had forgotten which is the land of opportunity. One of the most respected nations on earth, a beacon for democracy, the source of innovation, that's where I like us to be in the future and those are enduring principles that even in this troubled difficult times that sometimes do feel like endless winters until we had a presidential election and maybe shift to summer. That's the America I'd like to see in the future using open minds, a sense of higher purpose in every endeavor and standing on common ground. Thank you and I look forward to a dialogue with you.
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