In January of 1953, a tidal surge shook the North Sea.
The titanic waves flooded the Dutch coastline, killing almost 2,000 people.
54 years later, a similar storm threatened the region.
But this time, the Netherlands were ready.
As the water swelled, state-of-the-art computer sensors activated emergency protocols.
Over the next 30 minutes, a pair of 240-meter steel arms swung shut, protecting the channel ahead.
Using 680-tonne ball joints, the barrier moved in rhythm with the shifting wind and waves.
By morning, the storm had passed with minimal flooding.
The first field activation of the Maeslantkering had been a resounding success.
As one of the planet’s largest mobile structures, this storm surge barrier is a marvel of human engineering.
But the Maeslantkering is just one part of a massive, interlocking system of water controls known as the Delta Works— the most sophisticated flood prevention project in the world.
The Netherlands has a long history with water management.
The country lies along the delta of three major European rivers, and nearly a quarter of its territory is below sea level.
This geography makes the region extremely prone to flooding.
So much so, that some of the earliest Dutch governing bodies were informal “water boards” that coordinated flood protection projects.
But after the storms of 1953, the Dutch government took more official measures.
They established the Delta Commission, and tasked them with protecting the entire southwestern region.
Focusing on densely populated cities, their aim was to reduce the annual odds of flooding below 1 in 10,000— about 100 times as safe as the average coastal city.
Accomplishing this lofty goal required various infrastructure projects along the southwestern coast.
The first line of defense was to dam the region’s flood-prone estuaries.
These large inlets fed many of the country’s rivers into the North Sea, and during storms they allowed flood water to surge inland.
Using a series of dams, the Delta Commission transformed these estuaries into expansive lakes that serve as nature preserves and community parks.
However, this solution wouldn’t work for the Nieuwe Waterweg.
As the lifeblood of the local shipping industry, this passage had to be kept open in safe conditions, and barricaded during storm surges.
In 1998, the completed Maeslantkering provided the flexible protection necessary.
Alongside additional barriers, like grassy dikes and concrete seawalls, these fortifications made up the bulk of the Delta Works project, which was primarily focused on holding back ocean storms.
But in the following decades, the Dutch pursued additional plans to complement the Delta Works and protect against floods further inland.
Under the "Room for the River" plan, farms and dikes were relocated away from the shore.
This left more space for water to collect in low-lying floodplains, creating reservoirs and habitats for local wildlife.
This strategic retreat not only decreased flood risk, but allowed for the redeveloped settlements to be built more densely and sustainably.
Perhaps no city embodies the Netherlands' multi-pronged approach to water management as much as Rotterdam, a thriving city almost entirely below sea level.
When a storm threatens, densely populated older districts are protected by traditional dikes.
Meanwhile, newer districts have been artificially elevated, often sporting green roofs that store rainwater.
Numerous structures around the city transform into water storage facilities, including parking garages and plazas which normally serve as theaters and sports arenas.
Meanwhile in the harbor, floating pavilions rise with the water level.
These are the first of several planned amphibious structures, some of which house water purification systems and solar collectors.
These strategies are just some of the technologies and policies that have put the Netherlands at the cutting edge of water management.
The country continues to find new ways to make cities more resilient to natural disasters.
And as the rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten low-lying cities across the world, the Netherlands offers an exceptional example of how to go with the flow.
I'm delighted to be here.
I'm honored by the invitation, and thanks.
I would love to talk about stuff that I'm interested in, but unfortunately, I suspect that what I'm interested in won't interest many other people.
First off, my badge says I'm an astronomer.
I would love to talk about my astronomy, but I suspect that the number of people who are interested in radiative transfer in non-gray atmospheres and polarization of light in Jupiter's upper atmosphere are the number of people who'd fit in a bus shelter.
So I'm not going to talk about that.
(Laughter) It would be just as much fun to talk about some stuff that happened in 1986 and 1987, when a computer hacker is breaking into our systems over at Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
And I caught the guys, and they turned out to be working for what was then the Soviet KGB, and stealing information and selling it.
And I'd love to talk about that -- and it'd be fun -- but, 20 years later ...
I find computer security, frankly, to be kind of boring.
It's tedious.
I'm -- The first time you do something, it's science.
The second time, it's engineering.
A third time, it's just being a technician.
I'm a scientist.
Once I do something, I do something else.
So, I'm not going to talk about that.
Nor am I going to talk about what I think are obvious statements from my first book, "Silicon Snake Oil," or my second book, nor am I going to talk about why I believe computers don't belong in schools.
I feel that there's a massive and bizarre idea going around that we have to bring more computers into schools.
My idea is: no!
No!
Get them out of schools, and keep them out of schools.
And I'd love to talk about this, but I think the argument is so obvious to anyone who's hung around a fourth grade classroom that it doesn't need much talking about -- but I guess I may be very wrong about that, and everything else that I've said.
So don't go back and read my dissertation.
It probably has lies in it as well.
Having said that, I outlined my talk about five minutes ago.
(Laughter) And if you look at it over here, the main thing I wrote on my thumb was the future.
I'm supposed to talk about the future, yes?
Oh, right.
And my feeling is, asking me to talk about the future is bizarre, because I've got gray hair, and so, it's kind of silly for me to talk about the future.
In fact, I think that if you really want to know what the future's going to be, if you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist.
No!
Don't ask somebody who's writing code.
No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.
They know.
In fact, don't ask just any kindergarten teacher, ask an experienced one.
They're the ones who know what society is going to be like in another generation.
I don't.
Nor, I suspect, do many other people who are talking about what the future will bring.
Certainly, all of us can imagine these cool new things that are going to be there.
But to me, things aren't the future.
What I ask myself is, what's society is going to be like, when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount of on-screen time, but have never gone bowling together?
Change is happening, and the change that is happening is not one that is in software.
But that's not what I'm going to talk about.
I'd love to talk about it, it'd be fun, but I want to talk about what I'm doing now.
What am I doing now?
Oh -- the other thing that I think I'd like to talk about is right over here.
Right over here.
Is that visible?
What I'd like to talk about is one-sided things.
I would dearly love to talk about things that have one side.
Because I love Mobius loops.
I not only love Mobius loops, but I'm one of the very few people, if not the only person in the world, that makes Klein bottles.
Right away, I hope that all of your eyes glaze over.
This is a Klein bottle.
For those of you in the audience who know, you roll your eyes and say, yup, I know all about it.
It's one sided.
It's a bottle whose inside is its outside.
It has zero volume.
And it's non-orientable.
It has wonderful properties.
If you take two Mobius loops and sew their common edge together, you get one of these, and I make them out of glass.
And I'd love to talk to you about this, but I don't have much in the way of ... things to say because -- (Laughter) (Chris Anderson: I've got a cold.)
However, the "D" in TED of course stands for design.
Just two weeks ago I made -- you know, I've been making small, medium and big Klein bottles for the trade.
But what I've just made -- and I'm delighted to show you, first time in public here.
This is a Klein bottle wine bottle, which, although in four dimensions it shouldn't be able to hold any fluid at all, it's perfectly capable of doing so because our universe has only three spatial dimensions.
And because our universe is only three spatial dimensions, it can hold fluids.
So it's highly -- that one's the cool one.
That was a month of my life.
But although I would love to talk about topology with you, I'm not going to.
(Laughter) Instead, I'm going to mention my mom, who passed away last summer.
Had collected photographs of me, as mothers will do.
Could somebody put this guy up?
And I looked over her album and she had collected a picture of me, standing -- well, sitting -- in 1969, in front of a bunch of dials.
And I looked at it, and said, oh my god, that was me, when I was working at the electronic music studio!
As a technician, repairing and maintaining the electronic music studio at SUNY Buffalo.
And wow!
Way back machine.
And I said to myself, oh yeah!
And it sent me back.
Soon after that, I found in another picture that she had, a picture of me.
This guy over here of course is me.
This man is Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, who passed away this past August.
Robert Moog was a generous, kind person, extraordinarily competent engineer.
A musician who took time from his life to teach me, a sophomore, a freshman at SUNY Buffalo.
He'd come up from Trumansburg to teach me not just about the Moog synthesizer, but we'd be sitting there -- I'm studying physics at the time.
This is 1969, 70, 71.
We're studying physics, I'm studying physics, and he's saying, "That's a good thing to do.
Don't get caught up in electronic music if you're doing physics."
Mentoring me.
He'd come up and spend hours and hours with me.
He wrote a letter of recommendation for me to get into graduate school.
In the background, my bicycle.
I realize that this picture was taken at a friend's living room.
Bob Moog came by and hauled a whole pile of equipment to show Greg Flint and I things about this.
We sat around talking about Fourier transforms, Bessel functions, modulation transfer functions, stuff like this.
Bob's passing this past summer has been a loss to all of us.
Anyone who's a musician has been profoundly influenced by Robert Moog.
(Applause) And I'll just say what I'm about to do.
What I'm about to do -- I hope you can recognize that there's a distorted sine wave, almost a triangular wave upon this Hewlett-Packard oscilloscope.
Oh, cool.
I can get to this place over here, right?
Kids.
Kids is what I'm going to talk about -- is that okay?
It says kids over here, that's what I'd like to talk about.
I've decided that, for me at least, I don't have a big enough head.
So I think locally and I act locally.
I feel that the best way I can help out anything is to help out very, very locally.
So Ph.D. this, and degree there, and the yadda yadda.
I was talking about this stuff to some schoolteachers about a year ago.
And one of them, several of them would come up to me and say, "Well, how come you ain't teaching?"
And I said, "Well, I've taught graduate -- I've had graduate students, I've taught undergraduate classes."
No, they said, "If you're so into kids and all this stuff, how come you ain't over here on the front lines?
Put your money where you mouth is."
Is true.
Is true.
I teach eighth-grade science four days a week.
Not just showing up every now and then.
No, no, no, no, no.
I take attendance.
I take lunch hour.
(Applause) This is not -- no, no, no, this is not claps.
I strongly suggest that this is a good thing for each of you to do.
Not just show up to class every now and then.
Teach a solid week.
Okay, I'm teaching three-quarters time, but good enough.
One of the things that I've done for my science students is to tell them, "Look, I'm going to teach you college-level physics.
No calculus, I'll cut out that.
You won't need to know trig.
But you will need to know eighth-grade algebra, and we're going to do serious experiments.
None of this open-to-chapter-seven-and-do-all-the-odd-problem-sets.
We're going to be doing genuine physics."
And that's one of the things I thought I'd do right now.
(High-pitched tone) Oh, before I even turn that on, one of the things that we did about three weeks ago in my class -- this is through the lens, and one of the things we used a lens for was to measure the speed of light.
My students in El Cerrito -- with my help, of course, and with the help of a very beat up oscilloscope -- measured the speed of light.
We were off by 25 percent.
How many eighth graders do you know of who have measured the speed of light?
In addition to that, we've measured the speed of sound.
I'd love to measure the speed of light here.
I was all set to do it and I was thinking, "Aw man," I was just going to impose upon the powers that be, and measure the speed of light.
And I'm all set to do it.
I'm all set to do it, but then it turns out that to set up here, you have like 10 minutes to set up!
And there's no time to do it.
So, next time, maybe, I'll measure the speed of light!
But meanwhile, let's measure the speed of sound!
Well, the obvious way to measure the speed of sound is to bounce sound off something and look at the echo.
But, probably -- one of my students, Ariel [unclear], said, "Could we measure the speed of light using the wave equation?"
And all of you know the wave equation is the frequency times the wavelength of any wave ...
is a constant.
When the frequency goes up, the wavelength comes down.
Wavelength goes up, frequency goes down.
So, if we have a wave here -- over here, that's what's interesting -- as the pitch goes up, things get closer, pitch goes down, things stretch out.
Right?
This is simple physics.
All of you know this from eighth grade, remember?
What they didn't tell you in physics -- in eighth-grade physics -- but they should have, and I wish they had, was that if you multiply the frequency times the wavelength of sound or light, you get a constant.
And that constant is the speed of sound.
So, in order to measure the speed of sound, all I've got to do is know its frequency.
Well, that's easy.
I've got a frequency counter right here.
Set it up to around A, above A, above A. There's an A, more or less.
Now, so I know the frequency.
It's 1.76 kilohertz.
I measure its wavelength.
All I need now is to flip on another beam, and the bottom beam is me talking, right?
So anytime I talk, you'd see it on the screen.
I'll put it over here, and as I move this away from the source, you'll notice the spiral.
The slinky moves.
We're going through different nodes of the wave, coming out this way.
Those of you who are physicists, I hear you rolling your eyes, but bear with me.
(Laughter) To measure the wavelength, all I need to do is measure the distance from here -- one full wave -- over to here.
From here to here is the wavelength of sound.
So, I'll put a measuring tape here, measuring tape here, move it back over to here.
I've moved the microphone 20 centimeters.
0.2 meters from here, back to here, 20 centimeters.
OK, let's go back to Mr. Elmo.
And we'll say the frequency is 1.76 kilohertz, or 1760.
The wavelength was 0.2 meters.
Let's figure out what this is.
(Laughter) (Applause) 1.76 times 0.2 over here is 352 meters per second.
If you look it up in the book, it's really 343.
But, here with kludgy material, and lousy drink -- we've been able to measure the speed of sound to -- not bad.
Pretty good.
All of which comes to what I wanted to say.
Go back to this picture of me a million years ago.
It was 1971, the Vietnam War was going on, and I'm like, "Oh my God!"
I'm studying physics: Landau, Lipschitz, Resnick and Halliday.
I'm going home for a midterm.
A riot's going on on campus.
There's a riot!
Hey, Elmo's done: off.
There's a riot going on on campus, and the police are chasing me, right?
I'm walking across campus.
Cop comes and looks at me and says, "You!
You're a student."
Pulls out a gun.
Goes boom!
And a tear gas canister the size of a Pepsi can goes by my head.
Whoosh!
I get a breath of tear gas and I can't breathe.
This cop comes after me with a rifle.
He wants to clunk me over the head!
I'm saying, "I got to clear out of here!"
I go running across campus quick as I can.
I duck into Hayes Hall.
It's one of these bell-tower buildings.
The cop's chasing me.
Chasing me up the first floor, second floor, third floor.
Chases me into this room.
The entranceway to the bell tower.
I slam the door behind me, climb up, go past this place where I see a pendulum ticking.
And I'm thinking, "Oh yeah, the square root of the length is proportional to its period."
(Laughter) I keep climbing up, go back.
I go to a place where a dowel splits off.
There's a clock, clock, clock, clock.
The time's going backwards because I'm inside of it.
I'm thinking of Lorenz contractions and Einsteinian relativity.
I climb up, and there's this place, way in the back, that you climb up this wooden ladder.
I pop up the top, and there's a cupola.
A dome, one of these ten-foot domes.
I'm looking out and I'm seeing the cops bashing students' heads, shooting tear gas, and watching students throwing bricks.
And I'm asking, "What am I doing here?
Why am I here?"
Then I remember what my English teacher in high school said.
Namely, that when they cast bells, they write inscriptions on them.
So, I wipe the pigeon manure off one of the bells, and I cgeorge@example.com.
I'm asking myself, "Why am I here?"
So, at this time, I'd like to tell you the words inscribed upon the Hayes Hall tower bells: "All truth is one.
In this light, may science and religion endeavor here for the steady evolution of mankind, from darkness to light, from narrowness to broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance.
It is the voice of life, which calls us to come and learn."
Thank you very much.
Which is the hardest word to translate in this sentence?
"Know" is easy to translate.
"Pep rally" doesn't have a direct analog in a lot of languages and cultures, but can be approximated.
But the hardest word there is actually one of the smallest: "you."
As simple as it seems, it's often impossible to accurately translate "you" without knowing a lot more about the situation where it's being said.
To start with, how familiar are you with the person you're talking to?
Many cultures have different levels of formality.
A close friend, someone much older or much younger, a stranger, a boss.
These all may be slightly different "you's."
In many languages, the pronoun reflects these differences through what's known as the T–V distinction.
In French, for example, you would say "tu" when talking to your friend at school, but "vous" when addressing your teacher.
Even English once had something similar.
Remember the old-timey "thou?"
Ironically, it was actually the informal pronoun for people you're close with, while "you" was the formal and polite version.
That distinction was lost when the English decided to just be polite all the time.
But the difficulty in translating "you" doesn't end there.
In languages like Hausa or Korana, the "you" form depends on the listener's gender.
In many more, it depends on whether they are one or many, such as with German "Du" or "ihr."
Even in English, some dialects use words like "y'all" or "youse" the same way.
Some plural forms, like the French "vous" and Russian "Вы" are also used for a single person to show that the addressee is that much more important, much like the royal "we."
And a few languages even have a specific form for addressing exactly two people, like Slovenian "vidva."
If that wasn't complicated enough, formality, number, and gender can all come into play at the same time.
In Spanish, "tú" is unisex informal singular, "usted" is unisex formal singular, "vosotros" is masculine informal plural, "vosotras" is feminine informal plural, and "ustedes" is the unisex formal plural.
Phew!
After all that, it may come as a relief that some languages often leave out the second person pronoun.
In languages like Romanian and Portuguese, the pronoun can be dropped from sentences because it's clearly implied by the way the verbs are conjugated.
And in languages like Korean, Thai, and Chinese, pronouns can be dropped without any grammatical hints.
Speakers often would rather have the listener guess the pronoun from context than use the wrong one and risk being seen as rude.
So if you're ever working as a translator and come across this sentence without any context: "You and you, no, not you, you, your job is to translate 'you' for yourselves" ...
Well, good luck.
And to the volunteer community who will be translating this video into multiple languages: Sorry about that!
Bryn Freedman: So you keep talking about leadership as a real crisis of conformity.
Can you explain to us what you mean by that?
What do you see as a crisis of conformity?
Halla Tómasdóttir: I think it's a crisis of conformity when we continue to do business and lead in the way we always have, yet the evidence is overwhelming that the world needs us to change our ways.
So let's look a little bit at that evidence.
Science has told us that we're facing a climate crisis, yet 40 percent of board directors don't think climate belongs in the boardroom.
And we have kids marching in the streets now, asking us to be accountable for their future.
We have a crisis of inequality.
We have Yellow Jackets not just in the streets of France, but all over the world, and yet we continue to see examples of businesses and other leaders fueling that anger.
BF: Do you think the pitchforks are coming?
HT: I definitely think this is not sustainable.
And the reason why it's so difficult for us to deal with these complicated crises that are interrelated is that we are at the lowest levels of trust we've ever been at.
In the UK, three percent of people trust their government to solve the Brexit crisis, and that was in December.
I think it's probably gone down since then.
BF: What do you think new leadership actually looks like?
HT: We need courageous leaders, yet they have to be humble.
And they have to be guided by a moral compass, and the moral compass is the combination of having a social purpose -- you can't have your license to operate anymore without a purpose that contributes to society, but what, to me, has been missing from that dialogue is a set of principles.
We cannot just define why we exist, we have to define how we're going to do business and how we're going to lead.
And to us, that has to be to solve these imminent crises: the climate crisis, the crisis of inequality and the crisis of trust.
So at The B Team, we embrace sustainability, equality and accountability as our principles.
BF: Do you think this whole question of purpose is really window dressing -- they're saying what they think people want to hear, but they're actually not making the fundamental changes that are necessary?
HT: A lot of people feel that way, and I think there's a growing momentum behind that.
So I think the world is calling for responsible leadership now, and any leader who wants to be around for the 21st century really needs to start thinking courageously and holistically how they're going to be part of the solution and not window-dress anymore.
You have to do it for real now.
BF: Do you see anybody out there who's doing it in a way that you think is actually effective and has a real, long-term impact?
HT: Fortunately, we have some great leaders out there.
And just to give one example, Emmanuel Faber, who's one of the newest members of The B Team, he's the CEO of Danone, the world's largest yogurt-maker and major food company -- a real global company.
He's so committed to sustainability that he's not only changing the ways of his own business, but his entire supply chain.
He's so committed to equality that when he took on as CEO and he said gender balance matters, he created a gender-balanced executive team and gave men and women equal maternity and paternity leave.
He's so committed to accountability that he turned his US operations into a B Corporation.
Now many of you may not know what that is, but that's a company that holds itself responsible for not just profit but its impact on people and the planet, and transparently reports on their performance on all of that.
It's the largest B Corp in the world.
So to me, that's holistic, courageous leadership, and it's really the vision we all need to hold.
BF: Is this "Back to the Future"?
I mean, I wonder, when I think about companies -- Anheuser-Busch comes to mind in America -- a 100-year-old company that invested in its community, that gave a living wage before it ended up, you know, losing and getting sold.
Are we really looking now for companies that are global and community citizens, or is that something that is not even useful anymore?
HT: Well, you can do this for the reason that it's risky, actually, to continue without doing the right thing now.
You can't attract the right talent, you can't attract customers and increasingly, you won't be able to attract capital.
You might do it for risk reasons, you might do it for business opportunity reasons, because this is where the growth is, which is why many leaders are doing the right thing.
But at the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves: "Who are we holding ourselves accountable for?"
And if that isn't the next generation, I don't know who.
So I want to just make very clear, because we tend to think about leadership as only those who sit in positions of power.
To me, leadership is not at all like that.
There's a leader inside every single one of us, and our most important work in life is to release that leader.
And I think one of the greatest global examples we have of someone who didn't -- no one gave her power -- is the 16-year-old girl called Greta Thunberg.
She's from Sweden, and a few years ago, she really became -- she has Asperger's, and she became passionate about our climate crisis -- learned everything about it.
And faced with the evidence, she just felt so disappointed in her leadership that she started striking in front of the Swedish parliament.
And now she has started a global movement, and hundreds and thousands of school kids are out in the streets asking us to hold ourselves accountable for their future.
No one gave her that authority, and she now speaks to the leaders of the world, heads of state, and really is impacting the world.
So I really think that when we think about leadership today, it can't be defined to those in positions of power though they have disproportionately greater responsibility.
But all of us need to think about, "What am I doing?"
"How am I contributing?"
And we need to release that leader inside and actually start making the positive impact this world is calling for right now.
BF: But we have such hierarchical leadership.
I mean, I understand what you're saying -- it's nice to release the leader inside -- but in these corporations, the truth is, it's extremely hierarchical.
What can companies do to create less vertical and more horizontal relationships?
HT: Well, I'm a big believer and I've long been passionate about closing the gender gap, and I really believe gender-balanced leadership is the way to go in order to embrace a leadership style that has been shown to be more powerful, and that's when both men and women embrace both masculine and feminine values.
It actually is proven in research that that's the most effective leadership style.
But I'm increasingly now thinking about how we close the generational gap, because look at these young children in the streets around the world -- they're asking us to lead.
Kofi Annan used to say, "You're never too young to lead."
And then he would add, "Or too old to learn."
And I think we have now entered this era where we need the wisdom of those with experience, but we need the digital natives of the young generation to co-mentor or to mentor us just as much as we can help with wisdom from the older people.
So it's a new reality, and these old, sort of hierarchical ways to think about things, they're increasingly coming under pressure in this reality.
BF: And you've actually called that the hubris syndrome.
Can you talk about that?
HT: Well, yes, I think hubris is our cancer in leadership.
That's when leaders think they know it all, can do it all, have all the answers and don't think they need to surround themselves with people who will make them better, which to me would, in some cases, be more women and younger people and people who are diverse and have different opinions in general.
Hubris syndrome is so present in leadership still, and we know many examples of them, I don't need to name them.
And the problem with that -- (Laughter) Yeah, we know them -- all over the world, not just in this country.
But that kind of leadership doesn't unleash leaders in others.
No one person, or no one sector even has the solutions we now need to come up with -- the creativity and collaboration we need.
The bold and the brave leadership we need to come up with solutions that cross government, private sector, civil society, young people, older people, people of all different backgrounds coming together is the way to solve the issues that are in front of us.
BF: Do you see that kind of leadership coming from the bottom-up or the top-down, or do you think a crisis is going to force us into a reexamination of all of this?
HT: Well, as someone who lived through the most infamous financial meltdown in my home country, Iceland, I hope we don't need another one to learn or to wake up.
But I do see that we can't choose one or the other.
We do have to transform the way we lead -- from the top, the boardroom, the CEOs -- we really do have to transform that, but increasingly, we will transform that, because we have these social movements coming from the bottom and throughout society.
And the solutions exist.
The only thing that's missing is will.
So if we just all find a way to embrace a moral compass of our own to figure out why we exist and how we're going to lead, and if we embrace courage and humility in equal amounts, each one of us can be part of this 10-year period where we can dramatically transform the world we live in, and make it just, and make it about humanity and not just the financial markets.
BF: Well, we have a lot of people here who I bet have questions for you, and we have a few minutes for questions, so is there anybody that would like to ask Halla a question?
Audience: Hello, my name is Cheryl.
I'm an aspiring leader, and I have a question about how you lead when you have no influence.
If I'm just an analyst, and I want to speak to senior management about a change that I feel will affect the whole company, how do I go about changing their minds when they feel as if they've had relationships that are set, that their way of business is set?
How do you change minds when you have no influence?
HT: Well, thank you very much for that fantastic question.
So sometimes people at the top won't listen, but it's interesting that with the low trust we have in society right now, the greatest trust we have is actually between the employee and the employer, according to recent research.
So I think that relationship may be the most powerful way to actually transform the way we do things.
So I would start by trying to build a coalition for your good idea.
And I don't know a single leader today who will not listen to a concern that many of their employees hold.
I'll give you an example from another B Team leader, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.
He's really been outspoken on homelessness in San Francisco, on LGBTQI rights, and all of the things that he's been standing up for, he does because his employees care about them.
So don't ever think you don't have power if you don't sit in a position of power.
Find the way to go convince him ...
or her.
And Marc, for example, was convinced to close the gender pay gap by two women who worked inside of his organization, who told him, "We have a gender pay gap."
He didn't believe it; he said, "Bring me the data."
They did, and he was smart enough to know he needed to do something about it, and was one the first tech leaders to step up and do so voluntarily.
So don't ever think that you don't have power, even if you don't sit in a position of power, but find other people to support you and make the case.
BF: Thank you.
Anybody else?
Any other questions?
Audience: Hi, I'm overwhelmed by fascination with everything you're saying, so thank you.
I just wanted to ask how, like, diversity in opinion and thought and also background has impacted your leadership ability.
And what do you think is the barricade that is limiting the overflow of diversity in all business settings, and what do you think can impact the change in that setting but also to disrupt the overflow of generations of people staying in place?
And what do you think is the next step to breaking several glass ceilings?
BF: We're going to do an entire Salon just on that question.
(Laughter) HT: I think Bryn said it well, but let me try and touch on it.
So the way I see gender, it is a spectrum -- you know, men also have gender.
We sometimes forget about that.
(Laughter) We sometimes forget about that.
And I actually played a very masculine woman early in my career, because those were the rules of the game.
And I achieved some success with it, but fortunately, I got to a place where I started embracing my feminine side as well.
But I would still say that the best leaders embrace both, both women and men.
But I see gender, also, as one of the most powerful levers to shift values in culture.
So the reason I'm so passionate about women in leadership and believe that balance is needed is because right now, our definition of success is incredibly masculine.
It's about financial profit alone or economic growth alone, and we all know that we need more than money.
I mean, we need wellness: well-being of people, and there is no future beyond the well-being of our planet.
So I think gender may very well be one of the most powerful levers to help all of us shift our economic and social systems to be more welcoming.
And the answer to your last part -- it's so complicated, but let me try to give you a short one.
I believe that the way talent and consumption is shifting is going to increasingly get companies to look at adding difference into their leadership, because sameness is not working -- BF: And difference is a superpower.
HT: Difference is a superpower.
BF: Thank you very much.
Halla, thank you so much, I wish we could talk to you all day.
(Applause and cheers) HT: Thank you.
(Applause)