Gil Friend - Keynote Speaker Demo

Nearly 73 years ago, in the aftermath of the Pearl harbor attack that catapulted the United States into World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called a meeting in Washington. He invited the chief executives of all the automobile companies in America to come meet with him in Washington to talk about the transition. And brought them in and said, gentlemen, we're at war. And as I'm sure you understand, we need to transition the entire industrial capacity of the US economy to war production. And the executive said to him, Mr. President, we understand that. We knew that that was what you wanted. We've come prepared, we have transition plans. We're going to convert our entire manufacturing capacity to armaments production within nine months. And President Roosevelt looked at them and said, you don't understand, you're out of the automobile industry. Now what we tend to say to our clients, whether they're in the utility industry, food, transportation, it, hospitality, what have you, is that you really have only two choices in this matter. You can blow up your own bridges, in effect disrupt your own, cannibalize your own business, or you can dig in your heels and resist until somebody else blows up your business. There's no third choice. If you think about something like the restriction on hazardous substances regulation from the European Union a little over 10 years ago, 2005, when the EU said we will no longer allow lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium in products being sold here. At that time, half of the global electronics industry was not prepared to comply with the European regulations. One third of the industry's global market. We did a piece for the Wall Street Journal back in that year arguing that this was not just an environmental concern, but actually a violation these companies duty to their shareholders. Why? Because they weren't prepared for a major economic impact that they could see coming. We asked the question of where is this value stream leaking? And people at first didn't understand, but then started to think and recognize, oh, this is an efficiency question. Two weeks later I got a call from the global head of strategic planning with a $6 billion global manufacturing company. And he said, we've got a number. I thought cool. He said, you'll be interested to know that it not a large number. And my brain just started to race figuring out how could that possibly be. And he must have done a stand up comedy because he weighed the requisite two beats and he said it was a massive number. How massive? He said, about as big as our total global revenue. Okay, let that sink in. There's huge opportunity here. What is the biggest brand promise that your company can make and honor. What conversations do you need to have with whom in order to bring that promise forward and to fulfill it? Because it's in conversations that we create our worlds and create our realities and create our possibilities and how we speak and the requests that we make of each other and the commitments that we make to each other are where the power of this work really lives. So that's the invitation here. We're actually, all of us, in the business of creating a future, whether we think about it in that way or not. Every decision we make as businesses and as customers, every investment we make as investors, every time we put some money on the counter to buy something, we're voting for a future. We're driving a chain of events that gives us a world. And we have the opportunity to choose the kind of world that we want and to create it through enterprise, through intelligent investment, grounded in the concerns that we share, to produce businesses and economies that serve those goals. That's the opportunity that we have before us. Thank you.