Earlier this month, I had the privilege of attending the World Business Forum as part of my job as SuperheroYou’s Managing Editor. Run by WOBI (World of Business Ideas), the World Business Forum gathered some of greatest minds to discuss how business leaders can push boundaries, break paradigms and disrupt the status quo to change the world and create successful companies. The speakers included famous names like Sir Ken Robinson, Malcolm Gladwell, Ben Bernanke and Simon Sinek - all there to address the 3,000 executives from 55 countries and over 700 companies who gathered in Radio City Music Hall.
Well, 3,000 executives and the gaggle of journalists in the balcony, including 23-year-old me. The fact is, my peers and I are not the World Business Forum’s primary audience. Despite what Forbes’ 30 Under 30 would have you believe, I don’t know anybody my age who is an executive or who can afford to spend $2700 to spend 2 days at a conference (my press pass came with free admission).
But as I sat in the balcony for hours on end listening to these amazing speakers, I started to realize that a lot of them were repeating each other. And while a lot of their content wasn’t relevant to non-CEOs, the speeches were also full of advice that is relevant to my friends hustling at the bottom of the corporate totem pole. So here are 10 Lessons Millennials Can Learn from World Business Forum, no corporate price tag required. (Although if you happen to be that unicorn millennial entrepreneur, you should totally pre-order your tickets for next year, because, I mean, wow.)
1. Everybody has to be an entrepreneur.
At this year’s World Business Forum, the theme was to celebrate the provocateur, AKA those who forge their own paths through contradictory business landscapes. So in the next few points, you’ll read words like entrepreneur and disruptor. But those terms apply to everyone in today’s working world. Linda Rottenberg, Co-Founder of the non-profit Endeavor, put it as follows:
“Entrepreneurship is no longer just about starting a business, as valuable as that path is. It’s about building a skill set to tackle any problem, to reinvent any organization. It’s about giving ourselves permission to take chances. We all need to take some risk today, or risk being left behind.”
Don’t care about your current job? You definitely care about your future jobs. You need that spirit of entrepreneurship to manage your own career, according to Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath. We’re moving away from set career paths to a series of ‘gigs.’ If you don’t learn how to reinvent yourself and take risks with your own career, you’re going to be left behind.
2. Crazy is a compliment.
That’s the title of Rottenberg’s new book, it’s the motto she lives by, and it’s a theme that was repeated several times throughout the conference. Provocateurs like Henry Ford and Sam Walton are often called crazy. That’s where most people stop, because as Rottenberg pointed out, the biggest barriers to change are psychological. But Malcolm Gladwell states that it’s precisely their reaction to being called crazy that sets apart the household names from the failures. Ignore someone who calls you crazy. Take it as a compliment.
“If you’re not called crazy when you’re doing something new, you’re probably not thinking big enough,” said Rottenberg.
3. Diversity matters.
To survive in today’s cutthroat environment, you have to be innovative and creative. But you can’t do that by surrounding yourself with people who think exactly like you. Sir Ken Robinson touted the importance of diversity for creativity, as did Linda Hill, ethnographer and Harvard Business School professor.
“Basically, if you want to get innovation, that is something that is new and useful, you have to be able to unleash the slices of genius or the talent and passions of the individuals you’re working with,” said Hill. “And then you’ve got to figure out how to leverage and harness those slices of genius into a work of collective genius that is actually useful.”
You can do this in your professional and personal life. Work with someone who’s not at all like you and see what you can create together.
4. Keep a journal.
Have you ever noticed that a lot of great innovations seem super-obvious in retrospect? We’ve all seen that million-dollar idea and thought, Damn! Why didn’t I think of that? Take TOMS, the shoe company that rocked the fashion world with the idea that for every pair of shoes they sold, they’d give a pair of shoes away to an impoverished child. It’s a great idea, but both shoes and charity have been around for centuries. Why had nobody thought about this before?
Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS, gave a speech about his journey as its founder. He got the only standing ovation of the conference. But the thing that struck me most was that he kept saying some variation of this:
So I wrote in my journal about some topic and then I had this great idea…
Mycoskie’s not the only person who’s championed keeping a diary or ‘idea journal.’ Others on that list include Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Sure, keeping a list of ideas or writing a diary can be a hassle. But hey, you could come up with the next TOMS.
5. We’re not all doomed – yet.
I imagine you’ve noticed that we do not live in happy times. Much of the world is ridden with poverty, war and crime. We’re wasting natural resources. Our massive population growth threatens our survival on this planet. Worst of all, our governments are not really helping. But it’s not all bad news.
Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize and by far the speaker most excited about the future, points out that the world’s actually not all that bad. We’re living in the most peaceful time in human history. Over the last century, per capita income for every nation has more tripled, and the average human lifespan has more than doubled. Even Sir Ken Robinson, much of whose speech essentially said, We have to be creative or we’re all going to die, referred to himself as “cautiously optimistic” about the future.
But the key word here is cautiously, and political scientist Ian Bremmer warns that our government won’t be helpful. Bremmer posits that since the United States is far more geopolitically buffered from potential violence in Asia or Europe, we’ll collect capital and enjoy a fairly stable economy. But that means there won’t be pressure on our Congress to “really pass much of anything in Washington.”
“We have so much more rope to hang ourselves with, and we’re intent on using at least a little of it,” said Bremmer.
For us, that’s just another reason we have to be creative and entrepreneurial and innovative. We have to become provocateurs because if individuals and companies don’t start figuring out how to save humanity, nobody else will.
6. Learn to adapt.
Our generation got lucky. We grew up during the mobile revolution, with Internet and laptops and iPhones. We never had to change the entire way we worked, the way some of our parents did. But don’t get too comfortable.
McGrath gave an example about a woman whose finances were being studied by an economist. She had been saving up for a computer, but every time she got close, her money suddenly went away. Finally, the economist asked what was going on. It turned out that she kept receiving Save The Date cards.
In today’s world, nothing is permanent. We don’t know what technologies will replace us. We don’t know where our competition comes from, and sometimes it’s from the places we least expect. The only guarantee is change, so you must learn to adapt to new environments.
“What got you here won’t allow you to stay here if you don’t have high potential,” said Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, business executive and author.
For Fernandez-Araoz, high potential has a lot to do with adaptability – and you can teach yourself how to have more. So be curious. Ask questions. Challenge yourself at work. Take on roles you haven’t before, or ask your colleagues how it’s done. When your company is hit with a major change, you’ll have the skills to pick yourself back up.
7. Take risks.
Former chess champion Garry Kasparov is used to taking risks for a living. Perhaps that’s why he’s so worried about how our society is no longer taking risks. The lawyer to engineer ratio suggests that we’re not as innovative. Just 8% of businesses are less than a year old in the United States. Instead of taking risks, we’re too busy, looking for the ‘safe’ choice. That might seem fine to you, but it’s certainly not to Kasparov.
“It’s a dangerous myth that there are no more new frontiers,” he said. “We’ve just stopped looking for them. Taking risk is a risky business, but not taking risk is even riskier today, because the only way to guarantee failure is to stay still. But we can change our course and rediscover the path of innovation and risk. We must. We have no other choice. We need people to fight for the future. We need you to fight for the future.”
If that’s not enough to encourage you, consider this paraphrased quote from celebrated designer Philippe Starck:
Nobody is obliged to be the next Galileo. Everybody is obliged to bring what you can.
If you’ve never been the bold type, you don’t have to force it. But if you’re 25, stuck in a dead-end job and you have an idea, don’t be afraid to take that chance.
8. People want to hire you.
For a few months after college, I shuffled 2 internships and a bartending job. But I was employed full-time in November, and I’m one of the lucky ones. I know several people my age and older who are still un or underemployed. When you’re in that boat, it’s awful to read articles that keep saying how much the job market is improving. It’s hard to believe people are hiring when nobody wants to hire you.
I hate to be one of those people, but it’s true: people want to hire you.
One of the things that struck me from World Business Forum was how concerned the executives were with hiring millennials. Several sessions included points on how to attract millennials to companies. In a lecture on how we make bad decisions, psychologist Daniel Gilbert gave an example of a situation in which undergraduates wanted to make $90,000 instead of $100,000.
In the follow-up Q&A, someone asked: So how do we attract millennials if it’s not with money?
Unfortunately, I didn’t network at the World Business Forum, so I have no secret knowledge of companies who might want to hire you, or how to get them to. But I promise the newspapers aren’t lying. People want to hire you.
9. We’re kind of lazy.
I know, I know… I’m a millennial, so I’m not supposed to say that about my generation. But it’s kind of true.
In 3 Myths About Millennials Debunked, SuperheroYou contributor Roselyn Sebastian defends us against the conception that millennials are lazy. In her context, which is that millennials are unemployed because of the job market, that perception is correct. But in a more general sense, we are a bit lazy.
The biggest surprise from the World Business Forum was that nothing I learned should have been a surprise.
Think about it. Almost everybody I’ve mentioned in this article has published a book, which you can probably afford to buy or at least check out of the library. Even if you had never heard of any these people, you are reading this post. This means you have access to the Internet, an unimaginably large and free repository of knowledge. You could feasibly get a decent college-level education just by studying on the Internet. And yet, we spend all our free web hours watching the same TV shows we’ve already seen on Netflix.
If you’re a 20-something with access to Wi-Fi and a few hours of free time, you have great power at your fingertips. But most of us will never use it, and that is why we are lazy.
Don’t want to be? Go learn something and put it to good use.
10. Go to conferences.
I used to work as an usher at a New York theater where they had a lot of conferences. As part of my job, I spent much of those days standing in the back of the theater, keeping aisles clear and whatnot. I never listened to what those conference speakers said. But after attending both World Business Forum and Techweek New York in the span of 2 weeks, I now fervently wish I had.
When you’re 20-something, spending your weekend at a conference is the last thing you want to do. They’re expensive, they require you to sit in a room with people you don’t know, and you have to give up a valuable weekend of partying to go. But you should still go.
A lot of people assume conferences are mainly networking opportunities. I didn’t talk to a single person at the World Business Forum, and I learned an incredible amount in just 2 days. If you pick the right conference, it’s not a weekend wasted. It’s an investment in your future, no matter how corny that sounds.
Just make sure to put the World Business Forum on your list, so you can go when you can afford to spend $2700 on a conference. And don’t forget to bring a notepad – you’ll never remember all that information otherwise.
Know a millennial? Share this with them, and let us know what you thought in the comments, on Facebook or Tweet us @SuperheroYou.
Image Courtesy of WOBI
Written by Sasha Graffagna
The post 10 Lessons Millennials Can Learn from the World Business Forum appeared first on SuperheroYou.