 Thank you very much for joining us this evening and it gives me a chance to share some ideas, share some thoughts from my most recent publication titled Throwing Sheep in the Boat Room. People often ask me what does that title mean? It's a good point probably to start the presentation. How many of you are members of Facebook? Raise your hand. Pretty much everyone. So it's very strong following and penetration as you can see at least in this audience. Now on Facebook there is a small little application which is Throwing Sheep. So you can throw a sheep at someone and that's a playful gesture to get someone's attention. Now you can also do other interesting things like send a vampire bite or lick someone or other kinds of more exciting things. We chose a more playful, fun image of this world represented by Facebook and Throwing Sheep. And then the classical, vertical organization is represented in our title by the Boat Room. So the title brings these two worlds together. The world represented by these emerging, growing, fluid, dynamic social, horizontal networks and the more classical, vertical worlds represented by the image of the Boat Room. And it's our own playful gesture and organizations to tell them, hey look, something is happening out here, you better take notice and hopefully you can use it for your own strategic advantages. Now the number of different trends driving this phenomenon, I will pick on two. The first one is the generational shift that is happening. A lot of us in this room are probably in the age group below 13 and some of us are in the age group above 13. If you had the first group, especially if you're in the younger side of the first group, it's very important to realize one fact. If you take a young adult today, typically in the range of 15 to 25, let's say in that range, this person does not know what life looks like without the internet. Now at some level you can say so what? So you grow up with telephone, you grow up with other technologies and the internet is yet another technology. But it is much more than that. Why? Because the internet represents a certain way of living, a certain way of behaving and it is creating a set of expectations and what can even be termed as a new set of emerging values. What are these expectations or emerging values? They revolve around themes that we instinctively relate to when we go online. So you have the internet which is a global infrastructure. So when you go out there, you're not alone, you're not local, you are fundamentally in a world with others from around the world. It is very open, very low barriers to access. Even relatively uneducated people today with a mobile phone can access the internet. And as some of you probably know, today the mobile penetration in the world is touching 4 billion people. In five years time it is expected that about 5 billion people worldwide will be connected to the mobile phone. As the primary access to this internet moves the mobile, you will see that the bulk, the vast majority of the global population will be able to participate. And participation is another key value or expectation. People expect to contribute and in the same way people expect to be heard. Interactivity is very important out here. Transparency, people like to know what's happening, people like to rate, people like to evaluate, people like to give opinions. Now I can go on these aspects, but you're getting a sense of what I'm talking about out here. These new values of globality, of openness, of transparency, of interactivity, of instantaneous interaction, these are affecting and changing the world around us. Why? Because this generation is entering our organizations as employees and are also influencing us as customers or more generally as stakeholders demanding certain behaviors from organizations. And this is something which we cannot ignore because as I said earlier this set of values or new expectations is coming across the world. It is a global phenomenon. Now I was at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January and I was moderating a panel titled Technologies for Creative Leadership. Now one of the panel members was a key figure of Silicon Valley. Someone who has been there for 40 years, one of the key names of Silicon Valley. And he was relating a personal story from his own family. He said that he had four children and his second daughter recently turned 21. So the eldest child who was a girl decided to throw a party on Facebook for the younger sister. As many of you know throwing a party on Facebook basically means making a page putting content inviting people to come and join and the parents were invited. And the parents came and saw stuff they did not know had happened. They didn't say anything, they let the birthday come and go. After the birthday the father took the daughter for a walk on the beach and told her dear daughter we love you, we are your parents and we have seen you grow. And we are a little bit concerned by what we saw on your Facebook page. And at the same time we are your parents so we understand. We try to understand but what about all the other people from around the world who are also seeing the same stuff. Aren't you concerned that perhaps this can come back to purging? And this girl looked at the father and said dad you don't get it. So the father said okay you've been telling me that since the day you were born but now tell me what do I not get this time? And the girl looked at the father and said dad I will never work with someone like you. And that hit the father very much and he used that line to articulate what he thought was a shift in leadership, shift in values that a lot of us had to relate to but at least be aware of. So there is a generational shift which is happening and that is undeniable it's a global phenomenon. The second shift and the second driver is something very fundamental is the velocity of change. Now this is just some data I took from a recent article in one of the popular magazines in which they took the penetration time for some key technologies to reach 150 million users, doctors on a worldwide basis. Now even if you can't read it, don't worry the lines tell you the story. So it took fixed telephones, fixed line telephones, almost 90 years to reach a penetration of 150 million users. It took television almost 40 years to reach similar penetration. It took the cell phone in 15 years to reach the same penetration and today most recently it took Facebook and one example only 5 years. Now what does this tell you? It tells you that the time that organizations have the time that we have as a society to adopt to these new technologies is shrinking, it's becoming faster and faster and this is creating pressures, creating pressures on us to be able to respond adequately to be able to handle the pace of change and this is non-trivial because what you had 90 years to adopt to and to adapt to now you have 5 years, tomorrow you have 3 years the amount of time that you have for adjusting to these technologies is shifting dramatically. How do you as an organization, how do we as a society react to that? And what is interesting is this is not some kind of a phenomena localized in the US or in some development. This is a global phenomenon. Now this is some data from Nielsen from March of this year and I'm sorry I don't have the data from this part of the world but it gives you a comparable sense of what is happening. Now if you look at community sites and you look at the membership of community sites on a global basis today almost 70% of the global online population so 70% of us who are online on the internet are members of some community site. This is phenomena and if you go to some countries like Brazil the numbers should sum to higher than 85%. Now if you look at the trend across the world these numbers are moving very rapidly. Today Facebook alone is adding about a million new members in every single day. This is not a joke. This is global, this is fast moving and this is almost unavoidable today in the world around us. So with those words let me sort of tell you in terms of what we found. So when we were doing our research in this area and this I'm talking about two and a half years ago we went to the companies to find out what is happening. And we were very surprised. Very surprised because we found that in fact companies were not welcoming this technology, this phenomenon. In fact many companies were outright banning it and there were good reasons given for that based on time, productivity, laws, security issues and so on and so forth. And there were good cases or good examples in which in the UK several bureaucrats had lost their job or had been analyzed for using these technologies in the workplace. And that surprised us. Surprised us because when we started researching this two and a half years ago we did not expect this. This kind of a hostile reaction both in the private sector and the public sector in many developed economies that looked at then the financial part of our research. And as we sort of got into the research further we realized that a lot of this hostility was linked to a fundamental clash if I can use the word quotation clash between two sets of values. A value associated with the more classical, vertical organizations and a more emergent set of values associated with these more horizontal, fluid social networks. And really what we came to was the insight that it was not about technology. It was about a mindset. It was about a shift in values. So what I will talk about right now is not about IT per se. Of course technology is a key enabler of the change but it is really about shifting values, shifting expectations and an adjustment that many of us in private corporations and public corporations and government have to make to these emergent new set of values. So let me explain that a little bit with a framework. So you know the first instinct of a professor as you come to that key insight is how to structure that insight. And we decided to structure it based on these three very key, very fundamental values in terms of how human beings please, how we behave and interact with others. Identity is the way we represent ourselves to the world around us. The way we dress, the way we talk, the way we interact, this is all part of our identity. The whole notion of status, how we seek recognition from people around us. When we interact in society, we want recognition, we want social capital. That is status. Power is of course the ultimate in terms of you want to be able to influence others. You want to be able to get others to do the things that you like to do. So we took these three different elements that applied to human beings in all contexts. Be it in the private sector, be it in schools, be it in society or in government. And we asked the question, how are these three elements changing? And there you have in the sub bullet points the changes that we identified. So very briefly, we found that identities are getting disaggregated. Status is becoming more democratic and power is getting more diffused. So let me elaborate more on these three things in some more depth. So let's look at identities. Now this is a topic that has been studied in the social sciences for many years. Lots of papers, lots of research thesis on this topic. And we went and researched many of these papers and there's some very good theories about how people form identities. And the key, the key element really is a lot of people, most of us in fact form identities socially. We are socially constructed. By which we mean that we are members of some social organizations, be it our school, our work environment, our religious organization, some other social, private sports club, whatever. And identities are defined by a membership in these social organizations. Now there is one key element and process. And that process is defined by similarity. That word similarity is very important. That we try to be similar to others in that organization in which you're member of. Think about the schools, the companies, other organizations where you interact. You try to be more like others in the organizations. Why? Partly because maybe there's some commonalities driven by a choice, member of that religious organization, sports club or organization at work. And sometimes very often the organization explicitly or implicitly puts rules and expectations on you. In terms of how you dress, how you behave, what you do, how you work, the organizations traditionally do not like very high barriers. They do not like people who behave very differently. They want people who are similar. And the good reasons why you want that. Now today what is happening is the whole bunch of these social networks emerge which are fluid, which are dynamic, which are new. They are no well-defined norms and they often cross countries. They span the globe. Now in this kind of an environment you suddenly have a lot of freedom. Why? Because there's not one social network. There's not one Facebook. There are hundreds, hundreds. I don't know how many hundreds of these social networks all over the place, all over the world. So what you have is suddenly you have freedom to express your individuality and people are doing that. People are using these social networks to express the individuality. And this is creating the room for multiple profiles online. A very simple example which is a very common one is on Facebook. It's a common example that all of us know it. When we are on Facebook the very essence of that is you are sharing some information about your private life with your friends. Of course, what you're doing is you're showing more of yourself to some people whom you consider your good or good quotation friends. The interesting question in this context is how do you react to a bigger request to be a friend from a superior, subordinate peer in the workplace. And I was talking to the top executive of one of the large global defense companies and she was relating a humorous anecdote in her company. She said one of her top management-born members decided to join Facebook. So he went home one day in the evening and joined Facebook. And then he pressed a few wrong buttons. And what Facebook did was it uploaded his entire address book and sent a friend request to each one of them. And of course, for the next few days he was the pot of jokes in the company because people kept asking him if he got enough friends and still needed more friends and all. He became the pot of jokes and this is a large defense company an American, a large defense company so you know the culture and this person was the human nature inside the company. Now, most seriously, she asked the question what do you do? If you get a friend's request from the boss or your subordinate do you accept or do you don't accept? This is a very important question because what is happening out here is this person in the work context is now giving you willy-nilly this is a very important willy-nilly access to another part of this person's profile. In this case, the private life. Now, what do you do? Do you accept? If you accept do you actively participate? Do you actively look? And what if you don't like what you see? Does it influence your opinion about the person? Does it influence your judgment about this person's promotion? Rewards, incentives, other kinds of professional decisions? Now, these are very interesting questions because what is happening is there's a blurring happening you had a certain profile as a corporate man or corporate woman and now suddenly if you started letting another profile which is a personal profile enter and blur the space you have an interesting question in terms of how should you react to it? Do you accept it willingly? Should you in fact make Chinese walls? Should you ignore it? And these are real issues especially because a lot of young people are putting willingly information about themselves online. Now, a lot of companies actively search for that information. Now, in our book, we have documented many cases of people who have suffered either denied jobs denied promotions because of the content of their online profiles. This is the story of times in which a bright student was denied a position in one of the major companies because the company found some statements on his online profile that they found unacceptable. The examples of other people in the British army who denied promotion even though they had very creditable and good track records because of their online profiles. Now, how do you handle this? If an organization you're looking to hire the young people typically the CV that a young student sends to a company represents the profile you want to present, the identity you want to present. Now, should the company actively look for other aspects of the identity which by the way you're willingly putting online should the company look for what others are saying about you not just what you are saying about yourself but what others are saying about you because the transparency in the world is extremely high. Now, these are very complex questions but these are interesting questions which people are struggling with. As you have more of these online identities profiles being created how do you aggregate them? Because at one level some identities are your real personality. Often, most Facebook pages are aspects of your real life. It's not made up. It's real life. At the other extreme you have some profiles which are completely false in some cases in the center. There are cases in which young teenagers have committed suicide because they have been received by false identities. There are cases in which people have been taken to prison because they've received people in a certain way using the online profiles. There's a whole range of questions emerging in terms of as you're seeing more of people around you how do you handle it? How do you manage it? How do you integrate it into your decision-making processes? I just gave you a flavor of some of the questions. There are many others which can keep coming up. This is a very typical one in terms of blogging. How many of you blog? I'm just curious. A fair number of you blog. That's good. The very key question that I get asked is should I allow my CEO to blog? Or should I allow my employees to blog? Now think about what blogging is. Blogging is informal dialogue. You speak your mind. You shoot the breeze. You speak about good things, bad things, bad fears, your hopes, your weaknesses. Now, would you want your CEO to talk openly about his or her mind? How would the stock market react? How would the competition react? How would people perceive the CEO? Because the CEO today in most organizations is positioned as a strong man or the strong woman. The leader knows all. The leader knows right. The leader makes no mistakes. That is a simplification but not a dramatic simplification of our leadership model today. Now in blogging, do you allow the leader to express his or her doubts? To engage? And an even important question is should the leader and can the leader even accept critical feedback? Because when you blog, people react and people often say negative things, critical things often in harsh language. As a leader, you're often not used to hearing that harsh language. Most leaders live in closed echo chambers in which they just keep hearing back what they like to hear. So it poses a lot of interesting questions about leadership styles. The way is one of the few Fortune 500 CEOs who blog Jonathan Schwarz from Sun Microsystems. Now, the second element in terms of states, if you look at the world around us, the world is very much driven by titles. A very simple test is I often ask managers and executives to see your career developing. I would say in 95% of the cases the response I get looks something like this. Well, they'll say I have been in this position for the last two years and I hope in another two years to move to that position another four years to another position another eight years to the corner office. Your visualization of your professional development often is in titles and this is pretty universal believe me and you ask yourself why why is it that people think in terms of titles because today society is largely ascriptive which means that status is given to you often based on title and not necessarily based on expertise. Look at who gets the reserved parking spot who gets the corner office who gets called to important meetings who gets to fly business class all the small small details they all hide out they all are linked to titles. Now you can say well it's pretty natural after all you work hard you're smart and somehow that reflects your expertise but the answer is that is that really true? It's a good question to really ask isn't really the case that the people with the right titles today in organizations are the people with the right expertise for the problems in organization phases and the answer often is not necessarily so and today what you're finding is because of the openness because the transparency it is much easier for talent, for expertise to be provisible and it's an interesting question in terms of how does this talent get that recognition get that status get that social gap. Now let's take a couple of examples you probably have heard of this title or title of the phenomenon called citizen journalism it basically refers to citizens creating content which is news which people read and people accept as news Now I was recently giving a presentation to about 20 senior executives in the newspaper and the media sector and I used the example I thought of relevant for the sector they would like it as soon as I said the word citizen journalism one person raised the hand and said excuse me you cannot use the term citizen journalism you can say it refers citizen witnesses but not journalists and that touched a very raw nerve with it and we had a very good discussion in terms of why it was an emotional niche for him because for him to be a journalist referred years of hard work in a journalism degree in a top university years of hard work in working the way up as a reporter to all the levels and now this person was a chief editor after having gone through all these different years of hard labour and for him to call someone who hadn't done all that a journalist was shocked how can you do that now the reality today is that at some level it doesn't really matter that people recognize value and the best example of that is Wikipedia all of us I'm sure use Wikipedia at one point or the other and think about what Wikipedia did you know the benchmark of expert knowledge really was the encyclopedia Britannica that was with the benchmark I remember when I was in high school one year I did very well in my studies and my parents as a gift they bought the entire Britannica series for me and I was so pleased and we were also happy we put the volumes in the main living room it was like a showcase piece of display and today we're not at all fit and out there why because you have this common really knowledge base being created by individuals like you and me now if you look at why do people do it and this is a result of a research a formal scientific paper the number one reason is just pure fun people like to share now you can ask the question what about quality this is one of the questions raised by journalists can you trust that quality of the citizens who contribute content can you trust the quality of people who contribute to the media very good question because quality is important guess what a scientific study comparing errors in Britannica and Wikipedia found no statistical difference in terms of the rate of errors in fact guess what errors were made in Wikipedia sometimes big errors glaring errors which got precedential but they were caught faster and corrected faster behind the community so what happens is the community comes in and it's incredibly effective at how they catch errors and how they in fact correct errors so what you start seeing is how people normal people have come together and created collectively a source of knowledge which today has become some kind of a global reference and has destroyed completely the previous reference in this field why because expertise is now much more available, ultimately democratic and anyone can contribute is a her knowledge in this big space now in all this case people ask about accountability and this is very important now what is also happening and I must admit that behind the initial stages of this is there is much higher transparency why because people want to give their opinions if you are an expert if you are a professor if you are a doctor if you are a lawyer if you are a consultant people want to delve the world about how good of how bad you are this is a site, a real site rakemyprofessor.com in the US and any student can go and fill up comments and student is taken a class this is a professor that has my same last name and someone I know and I can actually go and look at information about what students tell about him something that previously was considered quite private the same thing is happening for all kinds of professionals this is about medical doctors medical doctors are again another secret profession very high level of expertise often you have more information available online about the house you intend to buy than about the medical doctor you will end up using and today what is happening is people are creating sites in which individuals are going and giving their views of course to the professors they don't like it now I gave the example of rakemyprofessor.com in France they tried to create the same site similar site in which students could rate the teachers and guess what the French education ministry stepped in and they got the legal system to close down the site because the argument was these professors these teachers are civil servants who enjoys the state only the state has the right to evaluate them now this is all archaic eventually at some states disappear but you see how the states react how in a sense there is a clash of values why because as an expert a medical doctor you do not necessarily want that kind of evaluation openly in public it is not something that you are used to but guess what this is what the world is born into this thing videotaped this is most like some part of the YouTube and even I'm going to comment about it and this is the world in which it is evolving so in some sense it's a very important issue how do organizations integrate all these new ideas now let's take a very important issue facing organizations innovation traditional innovation was something that was largely done in the R&D labs of companies and really some of the best source of ideas come from your customers your employees on a global basis partners from people around you and a big challenge that you have is how do you integrate these things inside the organization this is a big question facing organizations and believe me the cultural barriers out here are severe I'll give you a personal example from my own domain think of universities and I'm a member of one what is the basic assumption the basic assumption is the professors because of the clients they create knowledge and they are the guardians of knowledge now we all know that is not completely true in fact probably it's far from the truth today especially for a business school as many of the domains you have alumni in dozens of thousands of alumni who create knowledge in their own environment now you ask business schools why don't you integrate all the knowledge into your teaching into your research and the answer would be quality, rigor, research scientific in all kinds of words used to defend and argue why the research being produced or the ideas produced by executives working in the real world may not necessarily meet the standards that professors set for research the same Wikipedia story it is just that it is a much more closed environment much more difficult to change but the cultural resistance to this is extremely strong and the same thing happens in all other organizations in different ways the key idea really today is because the open low barriers to access higher transparency you're able to see expertise much more easily especially in domains like videos and music and songs and other creative domains and you can in fact get recognition of others much more easily much more willingly and perhaps in a more democratic fashion as opposed to before the last one is on power now power is a very exciting thing because a lot of people ultimately want to have power and if you think traditionally power has been very much dogged out so traditionally you have had the CEO's office a few local nodes the senior heads of geographies a few nodes in the system which control the power but today what is happening is power is getting more and more more confused and this is creating interesting challenges and I was talking to the CIO of a large pharmaceutical company now if you think about pharma business they have become pretty good these are global pharmaceutical companies and identifying who are the key influencers who are the key doctors who are the key medical associations and they have got pretty good at working with them trying to manage that trying to influence that in terms of giving them recent grants giving them conference trips other kinds of subsidies for the work and they have built a whole system around that today what is happening is in this world of medicine and pharmaceuticals you are having all kinds of new powers emerging new influencers emerging ordinary people parents disease and these companies are now struggling with trying to understand how do you identify who are the new power brokers who are the new influencers and second is how do you in fact work with them for the doctors and the associations we knew how to work with them we knew give a recent grant conference trip and so on but how do you in fact buy out a more whose child is very sick or a child may have suffered some tragic consequences now these are questions that the industry is struggling with this diffusion of power is something rich is a phenomenon happening around us and probably the best example of a leader who has exercised that power very effectively is Obama now we know very well Obama was a very unlikely candidate to become the president of the USA just two years ago now if you think about the political scene in the US like many mature democracies the political parties are fairly rigid classical organizations vertically structured with very well defined power you know one can argue that the Democratic party in the US was very much under the control of the Clintons now think about Obama he was four or five years ago an unknown senator and what chances did he have of turning this Democratic party machinery in his favor by working the traditional power structure probably very little and in fact that's one reason why he had to adopt a dramatically different strategy today people recognize that's very innovative but most people even during the election missed it almost completely now if you look at statistics in terms of how we engage that population segment of voters below 30 in the USA it is quite remarkable you know he basically was able to successfully energize this group and today we know that 75% of that voters below 30 voted for Obama not just that many of them in fact played very important roles in convincing their parents and their friends and all the friends and generations to vote for Obama if you look at the passion that was created amongst the support of base one key metric is the number of videos produced by them Obama's official campaign produced 2,000 videos his supporters produced more than 400,000 videos look at the difference 2,000 to more than 400,000 including the famous yes we can video that was very key in turning Obama into a household MTV starlight character in the USA now he also used this diffuse power base to completely change the fundraising strategy the traditional fundraising strategy and raising money is a very important part of any connection because go to the rich people identify the power norms go to the rich people and hold these fundraising dinners in which the rich people come and donate donations of whatever 10, 20,000 dollars each and that is very important to keep in mind because Hillary was online McCain was online but those things didn't work it is because the package the leadership profile was more credible think about what kind of a leadership profile is required to succeed in this value point of work I talked about openness transparency now what Obama did was as you know very well he wrote these two books he basically laid open his own life very complicated very passive but he shared them all with people and of course he had a very good charisma he had a message the timing, the number of factors that made for the package came across as highly controlled not participative, not open and that kind of a leadership profile is very important today you see it happening first hand in the UK it's a wonderful example of how a current sitting prime minister is going down in flames driven, partial and large degree requires inability to use these new media I don't know how many of you have seen only watching what has happened in Gordon Brown but he has been destroyed by a number of videos that are floating around most famously of him picking his nose in Parliament basically means that you're always on stage so you can basically never be hidden and even worse based upon some advice probably from not very good advisers he made a recent YouTube video on the MP expense as you well aware there's a whole moon landing in the UK around that and his video was so terrible and it got slammed in the blobs left and right for his fake style for his artificial whatever everything was bad it's a good video to see to learn what not to do and even worse even worse he disabled your comments think about how stupid you can get so if you look about it the whole idea of this generation is participation you have to be open to get feedback negative and here's a man who fundamentally puts something out and disables viewers comments I mean this is a classical example of a sitting leader who is getting killed in part because of what is happening is inability to use this new media now I've always emphasised in my presentation that the implications of this are really globally are really transcending all dimensions of society both public and private and I think it has very important implications of society governments how we work how we engage how we interact with the governments and the same principles of transparency openness participation are going to influence the way we live and work society it will happen differently in different countries but the principles are global the principles are powerful and the principles will keep pushing now here you see for example that in many countries there are many concerns about water waters are not concerned especially young are not very involved in politics now here is a great technology a great tool for creating that kind of involvement it's a great way to give some space for the young to be able to express themselves so you can in fact increase the level of participation the level of transparency and even if you don't have public democracies I think the voice of the citizen can be heard much more and this is very important because this can change eventually the world around us and can lead the lower corruption can lead to better governments can lead to better societies ultimately for all of us so what in summary I think what is happening around us I started by saying that the key message really is it is not a question of technology of course technology is enabling pushing accelerating change but it is a question of shifting values shifting principles and fundamentally at some level we are being challenged in some of our core assumptions about how we organize ourselves how we manage how we interact how we exercise influence now if you look at history the shift of power even if it is partial it never happens always moving there is always resistance there is always some kind of pushback and the challenge for us is to be able to manage this process moving and doing this will not be easy always because some people will have to change the behaviors some people may have to develop some established rights but fundamentally the direction the direction of change out here is pretty clear in my view it is pretty unstoppable now my last slide is this so what is the bottom line the bottom line is this whole social media space is extremely powerful don't underestimate it is not a question of Facebook or Flickr or posting videos here and there it is a question of new values being adopted by a whole generation around the world and the global nature of the connected system around us is going to create change you know when I was at Dargo's also I mentioned earlier there was a lot of you know especially in January you go back about 5 months people were in doom and gloom about the economy so that was all the sessions about the economy where disaster, disaster, disaster that is that of the world then I was also involved in sessions around technology and there you had optimism there you had hope and a lot of the young people in the technology sessions came from Silicon Valley and you could see them in January they were excited because they felt they had changed the world changed the world they were having the next Obama it remains to be seen Obama does and I'm not claiming he's the best but there was the sense that they had changed the course of American history and maybe the course of the world so there was a sense of achievement and this is very powerful because the future is bright the future is exciting the amount of technology adoption the change of values all these are very exciting things and especially in a part of the world like this part of the world where you have a lot of young people young people are growing up with this excitement with this set of values and this set of hopes and even at a corporate level I think what it means is we can't use these technologies for doing some of our core elements more effectively we can certainly improve the way we think about branding branding is no longer something that you manage branding is in fact something you co-manage you co-own your brand with your customers the second most successful page on Facebook is the Coca-Cola page created not Coca-Cola but by fans Coca-Cola Coca-Cola is in fact working with the fans to manage the brand branding is co-owned you get in fact brand value by involving your customers you get engaged much more widely IBM decided to revisit the values of the company and what they did was they engaged the entire population of the company more than 80,000 people contribute their views to the values of IBM and now the 100,000 red is not confident at least participated in terms of reading what is happening now what you see is you can get much more of buy-in much more of wider engagement across your company across your business ecosystem using these technologies the power is there to engage widely if you want to do so you can increase the rate of learning today many companies are in Twitter Twitter to obtain rapid feedback about products about new product launches about customer service failures so you have a number of different aspects by which you can increase your rate of learning and of course these technologies give you the possibility to learn faster ultimately in the world that is fast changing if you can speed up your rate of learning that can bring path for normalization and of course leadership you can lead more effectively if you are able to use these technologies more creatively and of course for that as I emphasized before you need to be able to adapt perhaps a different leadership style a leadership style that is a little bit more humble a leadership style a leadership style that is more inclusive a leader who does not claim to have all the answers a leader who does not claim to know it all a leader who does not claim to be right always but someone is able to involve, be humble, be more credible and be more human at the end of the day I think these all are phenomenal very important change is happening around us it will require us to change our behaviors to trust people more and to engage in dialogues more and ultimately ultimately it will require us to give up some control now this is a very delicate issue because classical organizations classical power structures have been built on the basis of maintaining control everyone wants to maintain control in traditional space as a professor I want to maintain control of what happened in class I want to control what is taught now you have to be able to lose that control of course without losing control because if you don't give up some control eventually the people will take control and that can be very dangerous so I think what is important now here is to have this balance and to be able to manage that tension and we all do it and we have children who grow up we have children who grow up you know it that as they become teenagers and young adults you have to give them the space of freedom because if you kept controlling them in the same way as you did when they are much younger they would probably grow up as young adults so you have to be able to give them the space to grow up also as young adults and this tension is something which we have to be able to manage effectively so thank you very much for your patience I try to share with you some of my thoughts some of my ideas there is a lot of work to be doing in this space and clearly I think these kinds of ideas are going to have tremendous implications for all parts of the world especially this part of the world and there is a lot of interesting new research that can be done about how these new ideas and technologies are being adopted are being influenced by the young people in this part of the world I hope you find the time to read the book of Angeles and certainly if you have any feedback and we have to get feedback from you and thank you very much once again for your work on the work of communication and information society this year's theme is protecting children inside of space how is the emergence of social networking science impacting the safety of our children online and what should we be doing the challenges around this is a very important so I don't want to be much more open I want to say that we desire to be open and to be more willing to share and there is sometimes not a complete realization of the logarithm implications of that so what we need to do is as the world is not perfect as the world is not perfect and as the world will take some time to evolve and change we need to reinforce education in schools and universities about how to use these technologies effectively and at the same time without learning some of your own private interests and the challenge out here is that education in these domains is seriously challenged because most teachers have got no clue what's happening and they often very shy to even go in those areas and I always commend teachers who are willing to learn from the young students in Finland for example in front of a program in which around 3,000 teachers are being mentored by their students on some of these technologies the thing about this students teaching teachers I think that's a great way to be able to educate the teachers on some of these dangers and if these teachers are better prepared and are currently better prepared I think our younger generation will be more prepared also for these kind of risks Thank you So I just want to make note if you want to ask a question in Arabic we do have the translation and the Kursu Mantra can answer your question in both languages So I can answer that in Arabic I think that question is So any questions from the audience? Yes please if you can say your name Hello My name is Susanne from patternhappi.com and my question is probably more directed to ICT but it was inspired by something that you said in our website we're endeavoring eventually to become very open and interactive and then we have to take into consideration the environment that we're under here So my question for ICT is with respect to censorship and how that you see that impacting and how that made this not because I had conditions where I was told I cannot advertise at patternhappi.com I cannot get a license so what is the future for that because we see the future for our web-based business really being subjected to openness Is there something here that can help us with that? Well I'm not sure I can help you with that but what I can tell you is that technology as always has to be embedded in the local context Technology fundamentally is organization neutral and you have to embed in the right context so I'm not fully aware of the details of the context that you're facing in your business but my general message is you have to embed in the context in which you operate now if your context is the local context now too you have to be aware of that if your context and the customers are more global you also have to be aware of that so you have to have the balance between these different context or conditions Yes I'd like to clarify one that we don't censor I'd like to give a comment for all of you I'd like to clarify one more that we do not censor 100% if you have anything you can progress it and we have no power to say yes or no Thank you very much Professor for this enlightenment for someone who's not in the web free anyway My question is when we see to the world right now we see like in certain things that emerge of course especially technology phenomenon while there are certain things like for example international law of international development and probably international law of responsibility which is not really on the same pace to speak with these kind of changes to really find relationships between cultures and people and so on and so forth so with that kind of balance in the other kind of probably corporate governments or global governments of course people attitude would be some of the rejections for example in isolation for example because of these religious values some would be probably more open and somehow there is a balance in development which probably could end up in a duplicity show off and probably would present a certain amount of prior to this corporate financial crisis way way ahead and maybe the world would be safer but I think you raised a couple of important issues out there so let me let me try to give a sense of what I do from your question on the first issue of global governance there is a very key and fundamental problem that we are facing today in the world a lot of the issues that we face today are global issues to be in climate be in terrorism, be in environment be in many other issues like that and current structures which were large people in place of the Second World War grossly inadequate for 100% so there is a mismatch today between the international structure that we have and the global policy and as you can see even the simple issue like changing the modic structure and the world fashion institutions becomes a major issue so who gives up the power to be a new player in the scenario so I think the transformation of one of the existing structures and the creation of the structures is an area where we are lagging behind I hope that the social networks and these kinds of global networks creates some kind of governance mechanisms for these things in the future but right now none exist so I hope that there is some kind of a new new emerging which transcends on these and eventually they can help with the modern solution I'll give you a very simple example of how we have very initial days but at the World Economic Forum this time in some of the sessions they had a partnership with Facebook in which they discussed the issues it should be discussed and for some issues they said let's get a medium of people around the world and they posed a question to 150,000 Facebook people used it as a sidecar and you got responses from 150,000 people in real time and that was an amazing profit now think about tomorrow Facebook has a population the size of the US 200 million or even more perhaps and it transcends on things and if you're able to involve people in decision making or at least getting feedback or key values on key issues it just creates some new methods of governance or at least some participation in the governance mechanism so let's hope that this actually leaves something interesting the second issue you mentioned in terms of transparency in terms of a void situated in all the kinds of disaster like that yes I agree that if you had more transparency and more openness some of these unfortunate accidents in the national world could perhaps have been avoided but I'm not completely sure that human greed is a very basic emotion and human greed often overcomes all national behavior so I'm not completely sure that we would overcome that basic human emotion of greed and ease so let's hope so it will become easier to detect some of these frauds or some of these disasters facing the future but I'm optimistic that not going to be an issue thank you Dr. Simone for your great lecture I just have a question about spam because now you have millions of users a lot of cooperation looks for these millions of users and so they just want to access to this database basically all around the world you have many social networks Facebook or MySpace you might use these profiles for marketing purposes for media purposes for brainwashing at some stage that's my question it's a very important question and certainly as people spend more and more time online there will be organization including the provider the network themselves companies like Facebook others who are more trying to utilize information or at least monetize it so as individual customers or consumers they might have the risk of being spam by too many emails or having junk emails fill out life or at least junk messages but the important issue is if you think about mail what is the difference between very relevant mail for you and junk mail and the issue is when it satisfies the need that you have then that is a very relevant issue for you so if you are able to identify the context or precisely and send you a response which is very specific to your context and become more intelligent about doing so maybe it will not be junk for you or junk for someone else but not junk for you if you can do it only for you, not for hundreds of people maybe it is a good use though we are not yet there at the level of intelligent technology but there is a lot of progress up there in the direction also so I am hopeful on that front thank you you said that employers should not have a rigid approach towards employees using Facebook or other social networking sites but don't you think that you should understand that an employee should not have that information or gossip about a company this would affect the reputation of the business online so don't you think that you should understand that come back to the question of trust I had last night at some level you have a trust of people and you have to assume that people are good and they want to do the right things if an employee wants to talk badly about you they don't need faith in the producer or even outside the working environment they can do it the challenge is to be able to let people develop the right kind of community standards to be able to express themselves constructively and I would post to you that most employees want to be constructed they want to be heard and if the management is such that management is hearing, listening and participating in solving problems my own sense is people respect that and people will in fact respond positively I will give you a real example from IBM in IBM they actually encourage employees to blog but what they decided was they decided to allow employees themselves to come up with some guidelines for blogging they said what are some guidelines for blogging and let's form them in the community and today they have a public document if you go on IBM site it is short about five page document which is a set of guidelines formed by the community themselves about how to blog, when to blog, what to blog and the community is extremely strong and enforcing it when someone violates the guidelines the community comes in themselves and peer to peer they correct and they in fact enforce guidelines so what is important out here is the sense of participation and the sense of being able to express your views and to be able to have their research yes, I just have one question and that's concerning the misuse of some services or social networks I mean Facebook it's an open thing and anybody can use it when you get misuse do you think it's justified to close down the service by some authority because only a few weeks I put an email about Facebook saying that Israelis are using it therefore we should boycott it I mean we know that Israelis use every tool that's available, not only Facebook but you are against all word those services when people misuse it the questions of governments that were raised earlier because fundamentally people we don't have effective means of governance in these new emerging structures today traditionally think about how you enforce rule society you have nation states boundaries, nations have rules and then people violate rules you have the bullets you have other kinds of legal ways to enforce and to sort of penalize people that require today in much more horizontal much more fluid much more dynamic and global environments like Facebook we don't have effective governance mechanisms so you could you could for example try to enforce some control in one part of it based on your own local national context but those would probably not be things probably people who really wanted to make a fine to be around are you justified in doing so I would answer that decision based on your own local context and rules I don't think so I have the right to question because you have to be able to apply to local context I always think that technology has to be applied to local context now ultimately you have the decision to make on that decision can you take the last question thank you for very intellectual presentation I am the above 30 and I think I have a reason to be able to discuss but I'm not a very fan of Facebook I have a comment and a question I must disagree with you that companies are banning or organization banning Facebook because of they are afraid of the interwords cultural flash I think they have a good reason to ban and you can have a democratic culture and listen to them without really having Facebook access the question I have is what am I missing as an individual or as an organization or will be missing in the future if I'm not supported of these social thank you so my comment on that would be I think it's an excellent last question because my comment on that would be don't think of this as Facebook or Twitter or some other social network I think if you left thinking that this is about how to join Facebook and when to shut down Facebook and when to do a technology I think that it's the wrong message the right message already is about a set of values that are coming to society around us because of the shared infrastructure that we all share it's a generation of people that are growing up out here globality, openness, transparency interactivity and these kinds of values and expectations are they important things the message always is think about how to adopt these values inside your business and how to integrate them you can do them in a face-to-face manner you can do them without Facebook without technology but in many cases today given that global Asia or the world technology often becomes a key in April but think in terms of values and principles less in terms of specific but to all about something else technology I said the last question I think I really enjoyed it if I think many years from now I think what's happening now probably a lot of people think that this is a transformation in the global society we know that technology is doing that is doing that even more I think this is a time where many terms have been being defined privacy privacy is something that we need to redefine power is being redefined I also can you say that a lot of learning is being redefined I think 10 years from now I think kids would be really empowered through this technology I think kids are already as stated leading the learning in Finland and other countries and will do more in a few years but also I see that through the technology and the social networking work will be redefined I think maybe the younger generation will follow what you need because of their creativity and because of the way they have access to more information and more technology I went with the role of bolder people I'm over 30 the good news is that young people grow old also they don't stay young at least age-wise let me just make a quick comment the first one is on learning your first comment is very important because I believe that education is one of the most low-changing sectors and to change the way people teach in a very painful process part of the pain in some sense I was at a conference recently talking about how people learn how perhaps it's changing when I went through school I went through school in India my daughter went through school in France at least in these two countries I saw it firsthand education in school is based on one important premise is the importance of long-term memory you can memorize capitals memorize multiplication tables and all kinds of details and in today's world where in access information we can ask the question what is the importance of long-term memory where short-term memory is really what is available for free so fundamentally what you need is perhaps a different way different sort of skills that you teach people and this involves radical rethink of the entire education character now on the issue of there's a age it is a reality that there are people who know more some other things about technology and some others and my recommendation to most people would be don't be shy be open to learning and in fact the best thing is learn from someone younger than you and guess what the younger person also has things to learn the younger person doesn't know at all the relationship schemes clearly the older colleague can learn from the younger one but the younger one also has not to learn about business, about strategy about life, about people relationships in the older one so I think there is a given day in the process thank you Mr. Matra