 Hello. Good afternoon. Welcome to the last panel of this event. Thrilled to see such a full room, you're the die-hards. You're the ones who lasted almost to the very end. Before I get started, I do want to alert you that we're going to have closing remarks after we're done with the panel and then musical performance. So please do stick around. Welcome to the Quest for Leadership 4.0. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm the editor of Harvard Business Review. And today we're just going to try to pull together the threads of all of the thinking that has been going on over these past few days. As we all know, we've been seeing sweeping technological and other changes in the fourth industrial revolution. And these changes are profoundly changing, shifting the ways that governments and businesses operate. The question facing us is how can leadership become more responsive and responsible to confront the enormous scale complexity and urgency of the world's challenges? Our objectives today are to provide a framework for business leaders to effectively promote change beyond their own company to make the case that corporate leadership is responsible for more than creating shareholder value, that it must also encompass the interests of employees, partners, the environment, the community, and society at large, all the stakeholders. And we want to foster a discussion that facilitates best practices for leaders across the world. We're going to discuss these questions with our distinguished panel today and pull you into the conversation maybe halfway through. So if you have questions, hold on to them. Let me start with introductions starting at the end. We have Yi Ping Huang, who is the deputy dean of the National School of Development at Peking University here in China. Next to Yi Ping is Michelle Zotlin, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Cloudflare, one of the conference's young global leaders. Michelle, just tell us a little bit about Cloudflare. Cloudflare, we are about nine years old where I'm an entrepreneur and our mission is to help build a better internet. Our customers are internet properties and we help make sure that they are fast, secure, and reliable around the world. And so it's been an amazing nine years. We have over 16 million internet properties that use Cloudflare and help make the internet safer, faster, and more reliable for a large percentage of internet requests. Great. Next to Michelle is Super Chi, chair of Vanant, the CEO of CP Group in Thailand. Super Chi, tell us a little bit about CP Group. CP Group is an agro-based food company. We, in the past 30 years, diversified into retail distributions, telecom leaders, and a few other sectors. We invested in about 21 countries and traded more than 100 countries around the world. We are 98 years old this year and I'm the third generation of family members. Terrific. Thank you. Next to Super Chi is Inas Abohamed, who is a fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering at Imperial College London. And she's one of the conference's young scientists. But you're also the founder of a very early stage startup, right? Tell us about that. So H2Go Power is an energy storage company. We store energy in the form of a hydrogen. So we take renewable energy. Instead of compressing gas up to high pressure, we convert it to solid state. And that gives the user the benefit of storing energy for long durations. Seasonal storage is the focus of the company. Great. And finally next to me is John Miko, the global chief strategy officer of Deloitte, USA. Let's start with a question we actually put to you all a couple of days ago. We asked you to think about what it means to be a leader. We asked you this at the very start of this conference. Now that you've spent the last three days thinking about being a leader in 2019 and beyond, how has your view changed? Michelle, let's start with you. I think being here over the last few days in Dalian, you mentioned your opening remarks about all of the fast rate of change that is happening in touching businesses around the world. And when you asked me on Sunday what my definition of leadership was, it was pretty straightforward. It was the act of motivating a group of people towards a common goal. And I still think that's the case. I think what has changed over my few days here is the context to which being a leader is and how fast things are changing. And it's not going away. And as a leader, you can't just cope with the change going on. You actually have to be the one driving it within your organizations or your communities. Because if you don't, you will be disrupted. And I think that's one of the highlights that has changed for me spending the last few days here in China. Super Chi, you run a company that is nearly 100 years old. How does what Michelle say sound to you? I agree. In fact, leaders is to create values. And to create values, leaders have to constantly make change. And now we not only have to constantly make change, but in fact, we are seeing a lot of disruptions. Technologies which are making change, the dynamic of this geopolitical environment. So we have to adapt and be able to lead the change. So leaders usually can become clear leaders during this time. The kind of times that actually nobody is nowhere to go. Or in most of the time, a darkest time or darkest moment for the company, for example. So I think it's really testing the leaders out as well. The way we are seeing the changes that are happening through the technologies, political environment, new super economic power like China coming up, if you are multinational businesses. Anas, you are sort of at the beginning of your corporate leadership career. And I'm wondering how your view has changed over the last few days. So I want to share my opinion about what a leader looked like and how this meeting changed my opinion by sharing a story from a video that I watched. So in this video, basically, there's a park full of people. They are all assembled at the bottom and there's a hill. One person stands out and go stand at the hill and start dancing. Everyone in the park looks at them like in a very weird way. And after a few minutes, one person joined that person who is dancing. And then after a few minutes, a few more people joining them. At the end, the whole park joins the person who started the dancing movement on the hill. And everyone in the park is dancing. And what I've learned from this meeting is that first person who took the bold move to stand on the hill and start dancing and got everyone in the park who looked as them as weird people making that move have to be very careful with every move they make because they will have the entire park doing exactly what they're doing and it's their responsibility. And this is how this meeting changed my policy of responsible leaders. John, you're in the business of helping leaders lead better. How has your view changed? I question whether it's changed. I think it's confirmed a few things. Yes. I clearly have been talked about that rapid change of technology, rapid change of business model and pace. Clearly about leaders leading in an uncertain environment. But I think it's an interesting one, the video that's talked about. I'm not sure everyone wanted to dance. So I think you've got to be prepared to say, try and sort through what is reality and what's not. And one of my worries is you hear so many things and so many things are going to completely change our world. Some of them won't. And so I think there's a chance of getting caught up in the hype rather than being as a leader. I think you have to have very clear direction and sense what's happening, but also be willing to stand against that tide of times and say we have a purpose, we have a clear direction and I'm going to stay with it. So I think that's the challenge for a leader is sorting out what the reality is and what's not. And you, Pink, finally, I wanted to get your view on this. You're very focused on Chinese corporate leaders. How is this all hitting you? Well, I think good corporate leaders are probably very much alike. Or around the world. One of the political, a particular challenge that the Chinese corporate leaders now face is the change of the growth model. So for instance, GDP per capita was $2,600 in 2007. Last year it became almost $10,000. That significant rise basically changed the growth model. Three years ago, our Chinese companies can just rely on low-cost advantage to produce things, export to the world market and build a very successful model. Many of these experienced significant difficulties last 10 years and now you can find only the ones that are able to innovate and upgrade their industries or their production are able to survive. This is probably one of the most significant challenges facing the companies. But we are also seeing a lot of innovators around China. You look in the internet space, the BAT, even in the more traditional, for instance, industries like the white electronics. We used to have a lot of brand names in electronics products in the Chinese market. Most good ones are foreign brand names like from the US, from Germany, from Japan, and even Korea. But nowadays you find a lot of these good brand names are Chinese. So you can see whether it's in really new industries like 5G or AI, but also traditional industries like air conditioners or washing machines, you're seeing this rising. This is the test for everybody, certainly everybody in the corporate world in China today. And that is only the beginning. This is probably a process we'll continue for quite a while. How is it testing leadership though? Well, leaders are very different in terms of the Chinese corporate managers. The first generation of the corporate leaders, a lot of them were actually peasants who started their own businesses. So they were all very good in managing the production process and so on, but to some extent we experienced this some kind of generational change. For many companies you actually had a crisis because you now need a very different group of corporate leaders to lead the company. So that's why you distinguish some good companies in the early days continue to survive. Others are facing significant difficulties and they even fail. Interesting. So, Anas, I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about your argument that leaders need to think more like scientists and act more like entrepreneurs. What do you mean by that? So basically if we want to achieve responsible leadership and really look to improve the type of leaders that make long-term decisions that's going to bring back benefit to society and us as people who elect them, we really want them to integrate science and evidence-based facts in their decision-making because some of the decisions take very long time to implement and once they are implemented they are irreversible and that basically process means that we really want to reduce the probability of getting decisions wrong and if we base our decisions on evidence and facts and think like scientists because that's what scientists do or increase the influence of scientists on the decision-making circles we basically will make better decisions. The quality of the decisions will be made better and I'll give you an example of that. In the 50s, scientists said there is climate change coming and nobody listened to the scientists. We did not give them enough influence to do things about climate change and try and mitigate it and try and reverse it back in the days and the result is that today we are under an emergency operation of what do we do with climate change, how we reverse it, how we mitigate it. If we have dealt with it at the right time when the evidence was there and the scientists said there is a climate change problem think now we would be focusing on other problems to solve and maybe focusing on more economical growth and by acting like an entrepreneur which is the second part of the statement entrepreneurs are the ones who seize a gap in a system or a process and they act on it efficiently with hustle and agility and come up with a solution and then scale it and I think this mechanism of dealing with the gaps in the system makes a difference quite fast and this is something that would be appreciated if leaders would do. Yeah, I think there's a challenge there though because I think there's essence of agree in both those but certainly when you're dealing with much bigger organisations it's also how do you actually cater for both areas and I think interesting enough given the rise of machine learning, given the rise of AI I think leadership will be far more in the end about going back to things like intuition, creative problem solving, creativity, empathy so I think you actually got a movement of we talk about movement from the hands to the head to the heart and you'll see this much greater alignment with social purpose much greater alignment with customer value so I think the challenge for leadership is clearly using as much evidence base as you can to have an organisation agility but then it is how do you actually empower people and have this collective and collaborative leadership that really drives a large workforce and a big organisation. Right, you know, Super Chi you run a company with values baked into them would you talk a little bit about CP and that kind of moral compass you use the ethical compass you use when you go into new businesses and so forth. Yes, just before that I would like to paint the background a little bit CP group started from the industry of 1.0 which is vegetable seed shops in the Chinatown long time ago and then during the second generation they actually industrialised they actually produced products that can be distributed throughout the country or around regions and all that and then we come the age of third industrial revolutions and it's actually a flow of capitals capitals that drive everywhere that actually give best returns more or less a market driven economy and we are in the fourth industry revolutions and it's about people who talks about data information, digital assets we are going into this new economy whereby a lot of digital technology or converging of the different technology through computing and digital technology is happening and we see big players that are replacing certain service areas but there are also still a lot of brick and mortars and physical elements of the economy that's why we are all sitting here we are physical base so you have to look into all these changes and then you come back and look at yourself fourth industry evolution is not only about data but we are talking about how to make the world more sustainable because we are entering an era whereby there is exponential speed of change that not only impact our business but impact the social and environmental issues in the speed that we never faced before the consumption rate that we are are growing the waste that we are producing we might really, I myself, I am 52 now I might really leave to see really a crowded dark sky, toxic oceans and we might not be able to breathe very well with if we do not change and that's sort of a parallel an integrated issue of the new business models the business going forward you cannot leave behind the issues that you cannot create these liabilities without responsible for what happens so with that in mind how to integrate the business itself with the sustainability issues is very important now sustainability issues touches the very core of so-called business values when we talk about governance we talk about a really best way to address our shareholders and stakeholders on the governance when you touch a very core of the values you are talking about how can you maintain and be able to sustain those values across now one of the very key values that the CP Group embraced a long time ago is so-called sustainability so where will we invest or where will we do business we wanted that country to benefit first and then second is the people in the country we should actually create values for them and then the company can create the values so that kind of mentalities in our core values you know again I still recall when I was younger that the story about CP Group at the beginning is that we first put the seeds into the envelopes that actually at that time are growing by all these my father's generations on top of that envelope my grandfather said that you have to put in the expiration date because if not the farmers will lose the whole season of plantations and it is not being honest to our customer so the first principle is about caring you know when you talk about the very core of governance and the very core of all the regulations we are putting out it's actually about caring and collaborating so I was fascinated by this story because you've built values and purpose into you've woven it into the fabric of CP Michelle you have a startup company I'm wondering how you think about purpose and values with your organization I mean it's been critical to our success you know I'm based in San Francisco the Silicon Valley it is incredibly difficult to hire people in the Bay Area it is incredibly competitive and you know as an entrepreneur you're facing lots of challenges every single day when you start a company and most fail and very early we realized that we're not just starting a business to drive ROI I mean of course you want your shareholders to do well but we have a mission as a company and our mission is to help build a better internet and we didn't start with that kind of ah-ha but very quickly within a couple years of starting the company we realized how important it was to have this greater purpose and when you have a mission as a business or a purpose all of a sudden it's easier to attract people you need to be able to execute on what your business does and it becomes a huge competitive advantage and so in this market which again we are in a very competitive market for great talent all of a sudden people are willing to come join as employee number 30 at a company that was just an idea because they said I want to be here I want to do the best work of my life and if we achieve what we think we can achieve together as a team I will have a lasting impact and that was again a huge advantage to us as entrepreneurs and you know you see so many companies who do this again your company is 100 years old which is amazing and a lot of new companies who say okay we are passionate about something we care about it let's go build a business about it and that's how you assemble a team and it wasn't just the people who came to work at Cloudflare it was our investors we've raised a lot of capital to build our company over 300 million dollars US dollars which is a lot of money for a private company and the investors were excited to be part of this they wanted to help make the internet better too so they saw there were issues there were challenges and they said wow I want to bet on you to be able to go solve this because if we achieve it I would be so proud and I think it will drive business results and so for us it was able to attract an amazing team it's been able to attract investors who give us the who enabled us to get our business off the ground and now today we're eight and a half years old we have 1,100 people around the world we have 12 offices and today it's the reason why customers choose the Cloudflare too they don't want to just buy from a vendor they want to buy they want to say what are you really trying to achieve as a business and when they hear about it they're like wow I want to be part of this as well and so I think this idea of purpose I think that is mission but I think they're really interchangeable been really critical to our success it's allowed us to create a great team our customers and investors to be able to go execute and help overcome a lot of the risks and a lot of the challenges that stand in front of you when you're starting a business I just a little bit more here starting with the values and the purpose is actually most important because CP Group been through this already number four industry revolutions and the thing is that the values never change those values that embedded carry you along changes so I think it's certainly very important John is ten years 100 years old and your values haven't changed I mean that's really incredible yeah it's an extraordinary story John are you seeing your clients grappling with this question of mission and values what are you seeing? very much and the key is not only having a very clear mission or purpose but then also living it which I think because we've all seen a lot of mission statements and then yeah how do you take the plaque on the wall and make it real? I'll use our example not to sell Deloitte but it's very similar I mean we have 300,000 people so I mean obviously that's an interesting challenge but we use a thing that's called make an impact that matters for our clients our people and our communities and that's been unbelievably effective I mean it's no different to what should have been talked about but it's important because I think you can define it too tightly the beauty of making an impact that matters is it's up to each individual client each individual person and community what matters and so it's really what's available for them and so we find it incredibly empowering for each person that works for us each client they're working for an impact that matters will different but that's become a very defining sort of purpose for us and I think it is the thing I agree with the other speakers around if you get that right and people are working to that purpose and feel inspired then you'll actually create value for the company but ours is very much defining clients, people and community rather than Deloitte Pink, how does this sound to you? Well I think these challenges we also face in many Chinese companies pursuing stable value and trying to fulfill some mission I think this is the same for all these companies one particular issue and I think just a subject I just mentioned about the implications of the force industrial revolution that certainly poses a lot of challenges for the cooperative world one area I've been focusing on a lot in my research is the financial technology financial technology is really changing the financial industry and you can find a lot of new innovations for instance the digital payment it's becoming a daily life you can't live without the payment services but you're also seeing a lot of businesses building on these payment services for instance online landing by our online banks they land millions millions of loans every year without even seeing the customers these are the benefits you get from the innovation and that's the benefit of the digital technology the problem I think with many companies is also how to balance the benefit of innovation but the potential risks coming with it so for instance the good example I just mentioned digital payment and online landing we also had a lot of problems in the so-called peer-to-peer landing platforms in fact they're literally landing lots of money and also gathering lots of money but also create a lot of risk there was one single platform for instance which collapsed at the end of 2015 it burned lots of money but most importantly the platform goes down with almost about 1 million investors so I think that's something this is now facing most of the Chinese corporate leaders you do want to adopt the new technology to either improve your efficiency or to expand your financial inclusion but at the same time how do we maintain financial stability and remain responsible not just to your stakeholders or shareholders but also your customers they invest the money in your platform and the money disappeared after a while that's something I think we really needed to look at now I'm going to ask the panel one more question and then I want to open up the floor to you so you can ask questions I'm going to change the topic just a little bit Michelle you and I attended a session this morning I think it was called leadership without leaders so I want to ask about the need in this given all of the pressures and complexity that leaders face in the 21st century what were your thoughts about this notion of pyramid type leadership hierarchical leadership giving way to flat leadership sometimes we call them circles understanding I think that so my thoughts at this panel where the discussion around leading without leaders ultimately from the discussion is it ultimately doesn't work but it doesn't mean it's a pyramid top down and so what you want how I always think about the model I think about and that discussion for me was you know as the CEO of cloudflare I want to make sure that the ideas come from everyone right across the organization right great ideas the next we should build I want that to flourish risks that we aren't thinking about I want those to flourish you want to be an organization that is open enough that allow all these ideas to flourish and come up however you need to have enough structure to allow everyone to operate and know what they're doing so you can actually get things done and ultimately deliver results which is what really matters and I think that is the balance that as a leader in an organization and as teams as you assemble an organization that are really important it's where there's enough structure that people understand okay this is what I'm responsible for here's my role who do I who's my manager who can give me feedback whether I'm doing a good job or not if I want to ask for vacation time who do I ask I mean employees need that to be able to do their best work and then you need to be flexible enough where they can as a colleague you can go talk to somebody else whether they're more senior or more junior so those great ideas or the risks can surface so ultimately the business can flourish and I think that that is the juxtaposition where there's enough structure that people feel yep I can do my best work but flexible enough to let the organization morph and change and so when I was at the session this morning it just reaffirmed that yes you need leadership both organizations also need to be very flexible yes so in us as you're building your company how do you think about leadership style and structure so I really want to go back to the point that we already talked about which is the impact I don't think no leadership work in organization where you're trying to build something new you'll create a mess it's inevitable because there won't be a direction you really want the leaders to convince the employees or the people who are capable of building things together that their contribution is going to create the impact and your responsibility as a leader is to help them with the direction once they are convinced in the direction they will do their best to structure the business and move it forward and create the impact that it was like set up the structure was set up really to achieve it so it's very important to have the right type of leaders who can convince their employees that this is the direction that we want to move forward in order to achieve the impact that we set up to do John how do your clients how is their leadership style changed it's changed somewhat and I think it's got to change a lot more you know I think the challenge we've lived in a very role-based ERP process based world so I think we still have too much command and control and I suppose big organisations have survived that way because they've been much more risk based I think that clearly has to change and we are seeing that absolute need for leadership to be very clear, I agree with the comments before, very clear about direction, that ability interesting enough probably more now but that ability to look out long term and set a very clear long term direction but I think it's a big shift I always use a range of words I think it's going from directing to orchestrating it's going from being exclusive with information and knowledge to much more inclusive I think we're moving from the sort of heroic type leadership to more collective and collaborative and moving from functional to much more systemic it is quite a shift of saying how do you actually empower people to create value for customers how do you actually inspire a workforce rather than a command and control so I think certainly the big organisation and I think you're going to see quite significant shifts over the next five to ten years as we use more of things like AI and machine learning etc to take away some of the process that's been about inspiring people around really creating customer value Supachai, your business has passed from generation to generation and I'm wondering what you will tell your son or daughter about leadership that's different from what your father told you about leadership That's a difficult and sensitive question I think let me put it this way let me compare you our existing educational system with the 4.0 educational system how you want to change a school principal how do you want to change your teacher so in the old days teachers is the centre of knowledge so in fact when you call the instructor from the industrial age you want really a commander you want people to hold on to their function and their responsibilities to make sure that all the products come out with high quality now in this age you want to change the teacher from the instructor to a facilitator because knowledge is abundant so students or the young people, young workers they can have access to knowledge they can make research that you have done years in the past within two weeks or maybe less so it is best that the new leaders look at things from the perspective of how can you encourage and facilitate those abilities the interesting thing is organisations of the future are going to become learning organisations and I think it is going to be that learning on the job is going to be almost more important than technical or formal learning we have had probably the last 20 years where it has been important to get two degrees and formal learning and I am not discussing that in any way particularly with the professor on the panel we go through a world where we are adapting and changing I think big organisations particularly but all organisations one of their key roles is how do they train people on the job and allow people to adapt and learn and shift so the learning organisation and the teaching is becoming incredibly important within an organisation so professor I do think the implication of the so called forced industrial revolution means innovation becomes a daily phenomenon so whatever management skills that managers apply you should be able to facilitate innovation and encourage everybody to participate but while I was listening to my fellow panellists talking about which management style would be better I was also thinking the Chinese internet and the fintech space you actually saw different successful models so for instance Alibaba and Alipay were more or less built on the basis of a vision and idea from the leader of the company and everybody was mobilised to implement that idea it's been very successful on the other hand if you look at the Tencent WeChat and WeChat pay they were initiated and developed in more decentralized way I must say it's been very successful but in January I would certainly agree whether the idea is from top down or from bottom up I think we needed to facilitate this innovation process in the entire company so that is a significant change from what we rely on in the past resource driven growth model essentially just increasing input the economy expands and now you need to rely on innovation so I think in January that management style needs to change we already seeing the companies that can be distinguished based on this capability great enough of me how about you do you have questions yes I see a question here in the front row and I think there's probably a microphone coming your way thank you panel for a wonderful discussion it's the most perfect way to conclude the last three days that we've been here I'd like to go back to agility for a second and we talked about agility in the 4.0 world it's not a novel concept I go back to one of my favourite HBR articles and miss Bernstein I'm not pandering here I love you it's an article about race to the south pole where there's two teams one from Norway one from England and the Norwegian team is just so agile my question is as we go into this 4.0 world is there such a thing that has too much agility especially when we know that there are some investments that require time that are more durable changes that require that persistence are we pivoting to a culture of too much pivoting interesting question Michelle there was a entrepreneur a San Francisco based entrepreneur who wrote a blog post reflection about how his two agility I mean he kind of described it schizophrenic decision making but it's another way of saying agility where he kept seeing all these shiny objects and ultimately he had to shut down his company where they they built a really successful company that over they had a ton of adoption real revenue they were doing so well and then he just kept chasing all these shiny objects and ultimately he had to shut down his company and this was they had raised money they had employees they were happy customers so it's absolutely I mean leadership matters market a great team absolutely does not mean that you're going to win right it's what your acts are every day how you execute and so leadership really matters and again I think it was really brave of him to post this article and kind of share that learning with the rest of us as a reminder that what you do every day matters and so yes agility I mean again I think it's great to be agile but you can't have whiplash yeah I think we have to be very careful of giving agility a bad name you know to me that sounds like complete lack of strategy and lack of vision I mean I think you need to be agile but you're agile within having a very clear direction and a very clear strategy and vision where you want wanting to go so the challenges we use we throw these words around all the time I mean I think organizations will need more agility but that doesn't say you don't have a strategy you don't have a direction or a vision of where you're going so can I add to this I think again it's important that we have agility but the resiliency the motivations the courage takes you to the target that you have the goals that you have set so those kind of things are also very important to drive so it's almost like projecting the visions and that visions become the beliefs not only by the leaders but also by the peers that they can actually and especially if those vision is with the right purpose then you'll be able to unite the team to go through all this rise and fall and learn because there will be obstruction totally along the way so one thing is that it's good to manage risk but again managing risk is looking from the fear point of view so that can actually keep you safe so you have to make sure that along your journey you have to have the fear factor to manage the risk but what's actually get you from point A to point B is courage Interesting let's see other questions yes I see right there, thank you Hello Yes Thank you for the great panel My name is Daniel from Istanbul Dancing at the Hill is a lonely place and I wanted to ask what kind of support system is necessary to keep as a dancer in the Hill Yes Depends on the Hill that you're dancing on it really depends on what system, what structure we're talking about, what company you're running it's very different from one system to another because one system might need like a support system that other system wouldn't need Are you an entrepreneur in Istanbul, Turkey? Yes, well being an entrepreneur is really hard and I used to go to dinners when we were a couple three years in I have a really successful company and I used to go to small group dinners and I used to say I don't understand why anyone starts a company and then people got mad at me they're like what are you talking about, come on you have a great company and things are going well and I'm like things are going well but it is so hard So Michelle what advice do you have so I'm just saying in the context of for the entrepreneurs in the room and if you feel like wow this is so hard you are not alone in many ways if people knew how hard it was they would never start it but if you keep going and it's really hard typically not always, typically from one to four years it depends on the business and how fast your business is changing but at some point it starts to get easier typically when you get it to about 100 million run rate if you're a B2B company because you actually have resources and you can recruit the executive team you need to be able to scale your organization or if you're a consumer potentially when you get to 10 million 100 million users using your platform because then it becomes really interesting again, executives that you need to help you scale your organizations you can then recruit it's really hard to recruit those people before that they would just don't take a risk on their career you believe in what you're doing you show up every day to try to make it happen and so that's why I think it's so hard and so the question is how do you get from A to B because again, there aren't that many companies there's not very many companies who get to 100 million dollars in revenue overnight takes years and so some of the things you can do is you can have co-founders and the research shows it's better to have more than one person starting a company now you go talk to some co-founders who don't get along and they'll tell you you have to have a co-founder if you pick the wrong one so there's another thing you have to figure out you've got to find the right co-founders to help run your business you have to assemble a great team and then outside of work you have to have investors that believe in you that you don't feel like they have misaligned incentives and so at the end of the day you have to make decisions based on the people you're surrounding yourself with whether it's business partners you're choosing or it's your first employees or whether it's people you're taking investment from or visions are aligned because it will make your lives a lot easier and it's already really hard for the next four years and that helps make it easier and then outside of work I think either it's loved ones it's friends you know people have different setups some people's families are very supportive and others aren't because they think what you're starting a company that's crazy like go be a doctor go be an accountant it's much safer and so some people don't have the family support but outside of work you have to find something you might want to join 7 cups which is an online emotional support system where someone just wants to listen when you're having a hard day but I think those are some of the things you can do to help get you from point A to B and again it does get easier once you get over the hump but it's really hard at the first couple of years but the thing that I like to say is it's so hard but it's also incredibly exciting it's really messy building a company or being an entrepreneur but it's also really fun and it takes way more time work and resources that you can ever imagine but if you achieve what you do it's incredibly rewarding and impactful and it's all six of those things wrapped up together just add quickly I was going to say the same thing find partner but if you cannot find the right partner come to terms with the failure you know shake hand with the failures as we learn from failures it becomes a stepping stone to a success so you fail first you will be the first to succeed if you actually learn from the failures so that kind of feeling you have to overcome it in terms of really facing your failures and then learning from it and then you progress more and then you will be the first one to get there because any success story never come easy it's always come with a lot of determinations any other wisdom from our panel yes I'm trying John do you see any oh I see a hand over there thank you the panel has talked about the very interesting and important role that values play in driving success and unifying an organization and so on in this room and on the panel we have people from a lot of different countries cultures different political systems different value systems perhaps and I'm wondering if you see any differences in value systems that may be troubling as we try to form our businesses and pursue them and if you see challenges there how do you see the best ways to address those challenges interesting I probably take slightly different I mean one of the things that I've found fascinating in China is meeting with some of the SOEs and the fact that they are very driven also by purpose which has been interesting and doing working with some of the regions to look at lifting poverty or you know so in some ways we can see big cultural differences although in some ways you go around and see that there are some very common factors I think I think in most countries they might I suppose have the opportunity to go to most places around the globe I think we're seeing the same thing in most organisations that they being just driven purely for profit now you're not going to survive so we are seeing and it's really interesting to watch the SOEs in China do this that it really is that mixture of for profit and for purpose that you need both and so I think that actually is becoming quite universal rather than just it's happening in some places and not in others would be probably where I'd answer that. Do you have a different perspective? Well I would actually agree but I also would add these additional requirements or responsibilities that imposed or enforced on the SOEs would also be partly regarded as a transition process I think if you look at the SOEs 40 years ago and SOEs today you still find a lot of policy responsibilities for the SOEs and that's why sometimes we call the soft budget constraint they don't even face a very hard budget constraint but they do share more responsibilities but you look at compared to 40 years ago it's changing quite significantly so I think eventually in terms of direction of change we're in the same direction but I do think as a part of the SOE manager you do have to answer to some of the policy requirement maintaining social economic stability that's a very important part of their job and maybe part of their value. In terms of the values and cultural difference maybe I'll make the comparisons in case of the eastern world and the America. In the eastern world when you want to recruit someone you try to understand how they treat their family so the children are taught to be very obedient and grateful to their parents for example and in America in the western world you can see that parents actually become friends with the children so it's very different style but in the western world in that case you will see a very confident young child raising with the respect even from their parents and a lot of creativity and innovations that's the strength for the eastern world maybe less innovate I would not say in general but more obedience more love and caring in family values that's the sort of dictated culture but if you can mix the two you can take the best of the best mix the two together maybe you have even stronger models this is the diversity is great in that sense that if you learn to pick the best and combine it then it's probably become a stronger way I'm not trying to pick issues on US and China but I always pick the best thing and certainly I look at things from where you think it would be good your imagination and your visions actually dictate what would happen any political decisions or leaders who make decisions once those decisions or political decision is actually capture the imagination of the mass then they win the election so what I'm saying here is that with all this conflict as well between the culture and also the interest of security whatever interest between the countries for example if we all in this room think positively that well the two economic power sorry I get off to some other issues but it's good if we actually the power of our imagination is positive they will call response to what we imagine it to be why don't we take one more question I see a hand right there hi there I'm Jesse I'm with the US China Comedy Center we use comedy to try to bring together China and people from outside of the world how do you lead in a situation when the rest of the world is determined to do the opposite of what you want to do do you have a specific idea in mind there Jesse so we're using comedy to try to bridge cultural gaps and right now the flow of history and the flow of processes against US and China working together and laughing with each other but I think that's actually what we need to do right now is to find a way to talk to each other and have a conversation where we're engaging as friends and friends laugh together this time is most valuable time for my mission it's obviously harder than ever to try to succeed with that because a lot of powers that be are against that flow so what do you do if your mission is heading in one direction and the flow of these you know giant economic and global forces are heading in the second direction don't give up how do you know that most of the people here don't feel like you feel I would argue already your question is to already persuade people to think along your side I would argue that businesses are not thinking that way I think businesses are wanting to work together and businesses are still playing very much a global game we will go three times and certainly not getting into any political debate but I think the flow of businesses wanting to work together and businesses seeing a more globalised world is unstoppable so I don't see it that way okay practical to add on to these ideas like find a win and so find a win and amplify it and you start with one win and one win you'll get another one and it doesn't need to be the governments talking to each other find a business find someone here who says oh actually that's interesting and you can find someone else and they can be two entrepreneurs and all of a sudden you have a story of a win and you've assembled something more than you had an hour ago and from there keep going and the thing is often these big successes seem like they're overnight successes but they start with that first win and if you can start there and you can build off there I think you look back five years from now you'll be back here in five years and you look back and be like wow now I have a really big company and you can build up and build up from there Professor? Well I do think that actually points to a very important question about the leadership which I think a lot about lately lack of leadership in globalization now China has been a key beneficiary of globalization for the past 40 years and I must say it's the leader of that process but now it looks like quite a bit uncertain what is going to happen we don't know so I do think whether it's for companies or for countries we do need to think about what would be the best for the world even if the U.S. government has a slightly different opinion at the moment I think we need to push ahead with the difficulties but I'm sure there are some common grounds we can still find just to give you a quick example there are areas where the U.S. is demanding China to do better protection of intellectual property rights opening up the services sector and also increasing the role of the market in allocation of resources in the Chinese economy all these are exactly what the Chinese government identified a few years ago to do so my own sense is that we still need to work together in that same direction probably even accelerate what we have been doing so I'm afraid Anas you want to say something quickly I just wanted to add that there are so many examples from history of entrepreneurs who came up with an idea like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates and their idea was invented ahead of the time so it was them against the word but a good leader will persevere and will know how to convince others to join their vision and this is like that goes back to the dance example that's like the second first person you join you on the hill to dance and then the third person and that's how you basically grow and scale so we begin with dance we end with dance I think one of the things I'm going to take away from this conversation is that while we have definitely moved from a command and control world to a world of vision leadership requiring vision setting and so forth that the verities still apply you have to have resilience you have to be able to guide your company and you have to think more globally than your own organization so I want to thank our wonderful panelists I want to thank you for your terrific questions and please stay where you are we have our closing session and thank you