SpeakGlobal 2018 - Issue 8 by londonspeakerbureau

SPEAKGLOBAL THE INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER INDUSTRY MAGAZINE

ISSUE 8 | 2018

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

NOURIEL ROUBINI

Economist Who Predicted the Financial Crash

CHRISTIANA FIGUERES

Architect of the Paris Climate Agreement Who Remains Optimistic

ADAM GREENFIELD Expert in Smart Cities, Urban Design and Emergent Technologies

HELEN CLARK

New Zealand’s Three-Term Prime Minister: “Women’s Leadership Matters”

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SPEAKGLOBAL ISSUE 8

“THE ONLY GLOBAL SPEAKER BUREAU” International New York Times London Speaker Bureau (LSB) is the world’s leading network of speakers and advisers. It is a global resource for corporations, governments and professional associations, providing keynote speakers, executive learning and C-Suite advisers across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. Exclusively representing more high-profile individuals in more countries than any other agency, we

work with some of the most influential people in the world, from politicians and economists to business leaders and educators. For the past decade, we have led the way in the speaker industry, uniquely developing a deeper and more impactful relationship with our corporate and government clients. Working with some of the world’s

outstanding keynote speakers, we give our clients the opportunity to engage in more fruitful, richer dialogue with our faculty of experts through our Executive Learning and Boardroom Advisory programmes. Often led by globally renowned chairmen, these engagements are tailored specifically to an organisation’s needs.

FROM OUR PRESIDENT

elcome to the latest issue of SpeakGlobal which is full of interviews and articles by interesting speakers and boardroom advisers from around the world. AI, Cyber and Healthcare are currently major topics at corporate and government events and we cover them all in this issue.

With over 100 people working from 33 locations across the world, not only is London Speaker Bureau involved in a community project in every one of our localities, but more importantly all our speakers and advisers are having their travel offset. As part of our mission to be a fully carbon neutral company by 2020, all emissions produced travelling to and from our speaking engagements were offset in 2018. The carbon produced by the production of this magazine has also been offset. I hope you find this issue interesting! Jeroen van der Veer Chairman Philips and ING

London Speaker Bureau enquiries@londonspeakerbureaucom +44 (0)20 8748 9595

LSB’S FAVOURITE

Helen Clark

hree Term Prime inister New ealand

nil Gupta

sian Strategy Guru

on Jandai

Greg Cross

Gurcharan Das

Artiﬁcial Intelligence Pioneer at Soul Machines

Former CEO Procter & Gamble India

Lorraine Hahn

Yukio Hatoyama

Renowned Hong Kong based CNN Business News Anchor

Former Prime Minister Japan

Porter Erisman Former Vice President Alibaba

Red Hong Yi

“Asia’s Alternative Artist”

Tony Fernandes

Anwar Ibrahim

Malaysia’s Leader-inWaiting

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

NOURIEL ROUBINI

Economist Who Predicted the Financial Crash Amitabh Kant

Ayesha Khanna

John Liu

Peggy Liu

Chinese Ecologist

Chairman JUCCCE, creating a liveable China for the public

Mark Mobius

Sugata Mitra

Narayana Murthy

Khailee Ng

Azran OsmanRani

xpert in Developing usiness in China

Jim Rogers

Co-founder Infosys

Architect of the Paris Climate Agreement Who Remains Optimistic

ADAM GREENFIELD

Innovative Malaysian serial start-up CEO

Expert in Smart Cities, Urban Design and Emergent Technologies

Han Seung-Soo

Global Investment Guru

Former Prime Minister Korea

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

Recent BBC Global Business Correspondent

Former President Indonesia

Serial Malaysian Entrepreneur

Linda Yueh

Arun Shourie Renowned Indian Politician

Justin Yifu Lin Former Chief Economist World Bank

eading speaker and advisory network nspeakerbureau.com

Sonu Shivdasani

Co-founder Soneva

Muhammad Yunus

Founder Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Prize Winner

LONDON SPEAKER BUREAU

Haiyan Wang

Professor of Educational Technology and Winner 2013 TED Prize

CHRISTIANA FIGUERES

ISSUE 8

Smart Cities Expert

aghuram ajan

ISSUE 8 | 2018

Founder Air Asia

CEO NITI, National Institution for Transforming India

ecent Governor eserve Bank of dia

SPEAKGLOBAL THE INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER INDUSTRY MAGAZINE

hailand’s Happiness' Farmer

merging Markets uru

SPEAKGLOBAL

EAKERS AND ADVISERS

HELEN CLARK

New Zealand’s Three-Term Prime Minister: “Women’s Leadership Matters”

SPEAKGLOBAL ISSUE 8 Editor: Hannah Dar Assistant Editor: Nadine Park Art direction/design: Andrew Charalambous Printed by: Cambrian Printers Publisher: London and Beijing Publishing Copyright © 2018. SpeakGlobal is published by London Speaker Bureau Ltd, 1st Floor, 235 Kensington High Street, London W8 6SF. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. SUBSCRIPTIONS SpeakGlobal is available on subscription and circulates to professionals working in the meetings and events industry. Customer enquiries, change of address and orders payable to London Speaker Bureau, Subscriptions Department, 1st Floor, 235 Kensington High Street, London W8 6SF or email hannah@londonspeakerbureau.com. Subscription records are maintained by London Speaker Bureau Ltd at the address above. POST NOTE All editorial enquiries and submissions to SpeakGlobal that require replies must be accompanied by a stamped, addressed envelope.

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In This Issue... 6

NOURIEL ROUBINI Powerful insights into the future of the global economy

CHRISTIANA FIGUERES An architect of the Paris Climate Agreement

DIVERSITY & INCLUSION Voices to incite equality

AZRAN OSMAN-RANI 6 questions with the renowned Asian Innovator

EMERGING TALENT The new generation of speakers

SIGMAR GABRIEL Europe’s new challenges

AYESHA KHANNA AI can be a double-edged sword

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SPEAKERS The human race can evolve beyond its current limitations

DESTINATION FOCUS SouthEast Asia & Hong Kong

CHRIS KUTARNA The man who predicted Brexit and Trump’s election

THE BIG INTERVIEW: HELEN CLARK Three-term Prime Minister of New Zealand

FAVOURITE TED TALKS The powerful platform for thinkers and visionaries

ADAM GREENFIELD Navigating the radical technologies changing lives

CYBER SPEAKERS From ethical hackers to heads of national security

NICK EARLE Virgin Hyperloop One: the future of travel

PERFORMANCE TIPS FROM THE TOP Achieving High Performance

ANWAR IBRAHIM Malaysia’s Leader-in-Waiting

LSB’S 100 DAYS IN THE COMMUNITY

BOOK REVIEWS Recent reads from our speakers and advisers

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NOURIEL ROUBINI

NOURIEL ROUBINI EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

The Economist Who Predicted The Financial Crash

POWERFUL INSIGHTS INTO THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY You famously predicted the last economic recession, there is now rising concern that we are on the precipice of another global recession. Which factors could play a role in derailing the global economy? I am not predicting another recession or financial crisis for the time being as the world economy is still expanding. The main tail risks that could derail the global economy are several: First, a generalised trade war that slows down growth, reduces business and consumer confidence, dampens capital spending, disrupts global supply chains and triggers a major correction of US and global equity markets. Second, the undesirable US fiscal stimulus may lead to an overheating of the US economy, stoke inflation and force the Fed to hike sooner and more than markets expect. Third, a disruptive train wreck in Italy that could threaten the future of the Eurozone. Fourth, a hard landing in China if the challenges of reducing leverage and over-capacity are not addressed through reforms and

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rebalancing. Fifth, a major geopolitical shock that shakes economies, markets and leads, for example, to a stagflationary increase in oil prices. Sixth, the current frothiness in some asset markets turning into a full-scale asset and credit bubble that eventually goes into a crash and a bust. I do not expect these risks to materialise for the time being; but by 2020 a few of them could emerge, derail global growth and even lead to a recession.

What do you predict could be the repercussions of President Trump’s proposed trade wars with the rest of the world? I fear that Trump’s trade policies will lead to a generalised global trade war. Trump sees China as a strategic threat to the US: thus, he will impose tariffs on most Chinese exports to the US, severely restrict Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) into the US and also restrict the transfer of technology and intellectual property to China. Trump will impose tariff on all US import of foreign autos including those from Europe, Asia and North America. And now the NAFTA renegotiation looks like being dead on arrival. The US trading partners will retaliate in a number of different ways and we may end up in a world with more restricted trade and international mobility in goods, services, technology, capital, labour information and data. Thus, a less globalised world that will slow global growth and hurt business and investors’ confidence.

How do you think the global economy will be impacted by Brexit and the political unrest across Europe such as the recent political uncertainty in Italy? Brexit will have a greater impact on the UK than on the EU economy: slower potential growth and poorer living standards. But in the EU and Eurozone, like in the US and UK, we are also seeing a populist backlash against globalisation, trade, migration, supranational authorities and even disruptive technologies. Populist and anti-establishment parties are already in power in six EU countries. Establishment parties need to pursue reforms that increase growth, jobs and wages and reverse this populist backlash. Otherwise disintegration forces may take hold in Europe. The weakest link in the Eurozone today is Italy, a country that is too big to fail and too big to be saved too and that is now starting to pursue risky populist and heterodox policies.

You have been quoted as saying that blockchain is “one of the most overhyped technologies ever”, can you explain why? The only current real applications of blockchain are in cryptocurrencies. But most of the current Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are scams and frauds and no cryptocurrency is a true currency/ money. A true money needs to be a unit of account, a means of payment,

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and a stable store of value. Even the most popular cryptocurrency – bitcoin – is not a unit of account as no one is pricing well in bitcoin; it is not a means of payment as it can manage only five transactions per second (Visa can handle 25,000 transactions per second); and it is not a stable store of value as its price can go up 20% in a day but also fall 20% or more in a day. And blockchain more generally is still a technology in search of solutions that other technologies already provide. It is not scalable, decentralised or secure. Specific applications of blockchain may emerge as useful but they will not be of the peer-to-peer, decentralised, public, trustless ledger type. They will be private, permissioned and centralised ones where trusted institutions will still play a key role. So, it is a most hyped, untested and unreliable technology for the time being. Given your scepticism of blockchain, are there any other technologies that you think deserve hype in terms of their potential disruption of economics? The major technological disruptions will come from a combination of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Big Data (BD) and Internet of Things (IoT). For example, there is a revolution in financial services, or fintech, that has nothing to do with blockchain or cryptocurrencies. It has all to do with combining AI, BD and IoT to revolutionise payment systems, credit allocation, insurance services, asset management and capital markets. And of course AI will revolutionise manufacturing (robotics and automation) as well as many services (transportation, retail, healthcare, education and even governmental services).

There is a lot of noise surrounding cryptocurrencies, both positive and negative. I understand that you are sceptical, but do you think the rise of cryptocurrencies can teach us anything? The rise of cryptocurrencies can teach again about the pervasiveness of asset bubbles and crowds’ manias and delusions. In the fall of 2017 everyone I knew – even folks with zero financial literacy – was asking me whether 8

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“I fear that Trump’s trade policies will lead to a generalised global trade war. Trump sees China as a strategic threat to the US” they should buy bitcoin. And its price skyrocketed to almost US$20,000. But once this bubble burst its price collapsed – like the one of many other historical bubbles – to US$6,000 and it has been ranging in a US$6,000-7,000 range for months now. Crowds’ manias always lead to the delusion that you can make a quick fortune without any effort. This is a dangerous and financial risky delusion.

What is your primary hope and utmost fear for the future of the economy? My primary hope is that the technological innovations – starting with AI and its pervasive future applications – will improve sharply the way we live, work, produce and create massive increases in human welfare and well-being. But these technological innovations are capital-intensive, skilled-biased and labour-saving. So owners of capital and the top third of individuals with the best education, skills and human capital are benefiting from these innovations; but the jobs and incomes

of lower-skilled and even mediumskilled blue collar and white collar workers are threatened by these major technological disruptions as well as by globalisation. So, technology may exacerbate the rising income and wealth inequality instead of reducing it. Thus, the current backlash against globalisation, trade, inequality may be worsened unless we find ways to make sure that all workers survive and thrive in a globalised and digital world. This is the key economic and policy challenge of our times.

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CHRISTIANA FIGUERES

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW Executive Secretary UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2010-16 An architect of the Paris climate agreement

What do you think are the greatest sustainability challenges we will face in the next five years? We are facing all the sustainability challenges that are addressed by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. But from my perspective the most urgent challenge is climate change, because it has an in-built urgency and irreversibility if we fail. We are already at 1° C warming, and this has led to catastrophic heatwaves this year in North Africa, Europe, Japan, Pakistan, Australia and Argentina; deadly wildfires in Greece, Sweden, the USA and Russia; a drought in Kenya and Somalia; major water shortages in Afghanistan and South Africa; extreme storms and deadly flooding in Hawaii, India, Oman and Yemen; record melting of the Bering Sea ice; and the 400th month in a row of above-average global temperatures. If over the next two years we do not put ourselves in a position to start a clear descent of global greenhouse gas emissions, we will soon soar past the emission level that will take us to a 3- or 4° C temperature rise. This would produce enough havoc to make our economy systemically uninsurable, and to close the door on all sustainable development goals. Following America’s withdrawal, how confident are you now in the Paris climate agreement? It is not “America” that has withdrawn. It is the Unites States that withdrew and it is one of the 39 countries on the continent of America. Furthermore, it is not the entirety of the US economy, but rather the current administration of the federal government. The real economy of the USA, led by states, cities, financial institutions and major corporations, 10

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continues to decarbonise and invest in low-carbon solutions, because they understand it is good for their economy and profitable for their bottom line. Beyond the USA, I see large economies such as China and India continuing their efforts towards decarbonisation also, because of their own enlightened selfinterests. Therefore, I continue to be optimistic about the Paris agreement. What do you think are the most pressing global issues that the UN must work to solve? How do you think we can argue for the necessity of organisations such as the UN? Irresponsible nationalism and isolationism have sprouted in many countries recently and are weighing heavily on multilateralism. I am a firm believer in multilateralism in particular in a world which has become so inextricably interdependent. The nationalism that we see now will not last for many reasons, including the fact that it is contradictory to the historical evolution of humankind, which is never linear or unison, always challenged by factors on the extremes, but does follow a trend of increasing interconnectedness and ultimately collaboration. Frankly, in a world where we have exceeded all planetary boundaries we have no other option but to collaborate with each other. Is there a particular source of renewable energy that you would champion over others? The world is quickly moving towards a broad family of energy sources that have zero emissions. I am certain that some of the ones we will be using in the future have not even been developed yet. Currently the “champions” for low

price and high reliability are solar and offshore wind. Being installed according to the conditions that are most conducive to the best performance of each, these energy sources are relatively new and are already being widely disseminated. They have gone through the development cycle quickly and are already considered mature technologies and are increasing exponentially. New installations totalling more than 97 Gigawatt in 2017 took global solar PV power generating capacity to nearly 400 GW, a 32% increase on 2016. Solar capacity has nearly quadrupled in the past five years. A historical record of 4,000 MW of new offshore wind power was installed across nine markets globally in 2017. This represents an increase of 95% on the 2016 market. Overall, there are now more than 18,000 MW of installed offshore wind capacity in 17 markets around the world, and it continues to soar. Is there a new (or old) technology that you think has huge potential for helping to improve sustainability globally? The age-old, and yet every day newly challenging, technology that is most supportive of sustainability is reforestation and restoration of degraded lands. When we expand forest cover and recuperate the quality of soils, we address many pressing issues at the same time. We encourage the diversity of flora and fauna, we protect aquifers, we diminish run off into rivers and oceans, we improve food security, we protect livelihoods, we improve health and wellbeing especially of women and children, and we diminish involuntary migration. At the same time of course, we contribute to the mitigation of climate change. There is hardly one

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“We are already at 1°C warming, and this has led to catastrophic heatwaves this year”

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CHRISTIANA FIGUERES

“I CONTINUE TO BE OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE PARIS AGREEMENT.”

single physical measure that has so many beneficial effects as the careful management of our soils. As convener of the global campaign, Mission 2020, how do you propose to achieve the movement’s target of reaching a turning point on greenhouse gas emissions by 2020? By 2020 we have to put ourselves into the position of starting the decided decrease of global emissions, reaching one half of those emissions by 2030, and continuing to halve emissions every decade until we get to zero net emissions by 2050. From where we stand today that is a monumental task. Reaching the 2020 milestone can be measured across specific metrics in six sectors: Energy: In the electric sector, to deliver the 2020 turning point, renewables must make up 30% of the world’s electricity supply up from 23.7% in 2015. Infrastructure: For the built environment, cities and states must, by 12

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2020, initiate clear action plans to fully decarbonise buildings and infrastructure by mid-century, and be funding these plans to the tune of US$300 billion annually. Transport: For the transportation sector, we need to see electric vehicles making up at least 15% of new car sales globally by 2020, a major uptick from the 1% market share that battery powered and plug-in hybrid vehicles now claim. Land use: Because emissions from deforestation and land use changes represent a full 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions, land use policies must be enacted to drastically reduce deforestation and begin to shift to reforestation and afforestation efforts. If emissions from deforestation can be zeroed out next decade, then the forest sector can become a growing carbon sink by 2030, helping achieve global net zero emissions within two decades after. Industry: By 2020, heavy industries

such as cement and steel must develop and publish plans for increasing their efficiencies and cutting emissions, with a goal of halving emissions by 2050. Finance: The financial sector must rethink how it deploys capital, and must by the 2020 turning point be mobilising at least $1 trillion every year for climate action, most of which will come from the private sector seizing the opportunities of the low carbon transition. Though these pathways are steep, they are doable if we build on the advance that has already been achieved and on the increasingly exponential curve of progress. Perhaps, most importantly, they are desirable because of all the associated benefits, all of which will help to usher in the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

DIVERSITY & INCLUSION

DIVERSITY & INCLUSION SPEAKERS

IDRIS ELBA

The award-winning British actor, Idris Elba, is an influential advocate for diversity and inclusion. Renowned for his roles as Stringer Bell in HBO’s hit series The Wire; DCI John Luther in BBC series Luther (for which he won a 2012 Golden Globe); and as Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom, Elba has frequently criticised the TV and film industry for typecasting minorities. In 2016, he delivered a famously powerful speech to the House of Commons in London, calling for greater diversity in the media, especially for women, disabled people and different ethnicities. He believes that diversity is not just skin colour, but gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, social background, as well as diversity of thought.

RAUL KRAUTHAUSEN

As a wheelchair user, Raul Krauthausen is a renowned disability rights activist, award-winning communications manager and social innovator in Germany. He has been highly instrumental in raising awareness about the issues facing people living with disabilities – and helping improve their lives. Krauthausen is co-founder of both Sozialhelden eV (a Berlin-based non-profit organisation promoting action for social justice), and Selfpedia.de (an online self-help community for people living with a disability). His many innovations include Wheelmap. org (a crowd-sourced, multilingual, free online map for wheelchair accessible places) and a printable 3D mini ramp (which can be used to overcome pavement curbs from a wheelchair).

JOY BUOLAMWINI

Joy Buolamwini, known as “the poet of code,” is an award-winning social impact technologist and an MIT algorithmic bias expert, who leads the Algorithmic Justice League. She is renowned for fighting coded prejudice in artificial intelligence and discrimination of underrepresented groups in machine learning. Buolamwini has pioneered techniques that are now leading to increased transparency in the global use of facial analysis technology. Her 2018 paper Gender Shades, which discovered that software found it hard to identify darkskinned women, prompted both IBM and Microsoft to swiftly improve their software.

BIBIANA STEINHAUS

In 2017, elite European football finally welcomed a female referee into its ranks, with the debut of Germany’s Steinhaus. A trained police officer, she worked her way through the leagues by refereeing 80 second-division games since 2007, before breaking the glass ceiling into Germany’s premier league: the Bundesliga. That’s why Steinhaus is such an inspiring role model for women who dream of entering male-dominated sports. Her story proves that dedication pays off and performance outweighs gender. According to the DFB Referees Committee Chairman, Herbert Fandel, she is “the best referee in the world… anyone who knows about football knows that too.”

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AZRAN OSMAN-RANI

AZRAN OSMAN-RANI INTERVIEW 6 QUESTIONS

WITH ASIA’S RENOWNED INNOVATOR

You are renowned for creating and leading “challenger brands” which bring change to their industry unconventionally. AirAsia X and now iflix Malaysia have both been successful challenger brands – is there a commonality between the two brands that has led to their success? There are definitely common themes across these two companies, as well as the current startups that I am building or investing in, such as Naluri and MoneyMatch. The first theme is that they are focused on the mass-market consumer segment, within emerging markets, and in particular, Southeast Asia. This requires reimagining the respective business models and industry dynamics from the lens of this under-served consumer segment, which has not been the priority of large existing incumbents. We specifically look for new ways to deliver a service at a simpler and lower cost by going back to first principles without legacy systems and processes. Secondly, we use technology, and specifically digital technology, to deliver personalised services and targeted marketing. The traditional strategy segment is that you either win by being the lowest-cost commodity provider, or the highest service quality premium brand. With technology, we found ways to be both the lowest unit cost operator but offering a personalised service delivery that delights consumers more than existing incumbents. Finally, the brands were accelerated 14

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through strategic partnerships. If we had built the brands organically, it would have taken a much longer time to get traction across multiple markets. Instead, we found partners that gave us instant access to a large following or existing customer base, whether it was global sponsorships in Premier League football or Formula 1 racing, or through our telecommunications partners for iflix. We earned their trust by coming up with unique ways that we added value to their customers.

What would you say is the most important tactic a large scale corporation can learn from the startup mind-set? If I had to pick only one, it would be to revamp the evaluation of new investments, projects or initiatives. Many corporations spend a lot of time trying to craft the perfect business plan, with detailed financial and operational forecasts and scenarios, risk mitigation plans, and business continuity plans. In today’s dynamic and volatile environment however, it is impossible to predict what will happen around the corner, and too much planning can lead to missed opportunities. Instead, corporations should have an early-stage venture capitalist mindset when they invest in startups. They invest less on the business plan, but much more on the founding team and their ability to be creative and resilient in order to adapt to any unplanned circumstances that are bound to crop up within months of the new venture’s launch. Corporations should think about how they build a

steady pipeline of top entrepreneurial talent within their workforce who can build and lead new ventures and make faster decisions with business plan evaluations. And make sure that the executives who lead new projects have real skin-in-the-game, including downside exposure if the project fails. This requires larger corporations to deploy agile management practices that create a faster cadence, rapid design and prototyping, and build a strong sense of curiosity and learning through frequent “retrospective” sessions every sprint cycle.

What is the most critical piece of advice you would give to young entrepreneurs? Don’t fall in love with your business model or product idea. Expect that to change through constant iteration. What matters is that you fall in love with the problem you’re trying to solve. You need to be obsessed with the pain points that your target consumers are experiencing today and use that to focus your efforts to create new products and services that will address those problems in ways that others are not able to.

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“We want to solve this through embedding artificial intelligence tools”

Can you tell us about the latest company you have founded, Naluri Hidup? Naluri started off as a digital platform to offer health psychology services to those at risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and obesity, to coach them how to make lifestyle changes that will last. Many people want to become healthier and they know what they need to do, but most fail – not because of lack of knowledge, but because of mental resilience factors such as self-esteem, stress and anxiety, and inability to cope with conflicting demands in their lives. While there are other models tackling them, lifestyle changes require a deep understanding of local language and culture. We also cannot just be a marketplace that connects healthcare professionals to users who need help,

because there is a dramatic supply shortage in Asia. We want to solve this through embedding artificial intelligence tools to increase the productivity of psychologists and allied health professionals by between10 to 20 times. Finally, we see a big problem within the current healthcare delivery model which is siloed and not patient-centric. Doctors, dietitians, psychologists, fitness coaches, pharmacists are providing advice based on the lens of their own disciplines. We want to develop tools so that the health and lifestyle care is coordinated and holistic across the different disciplines.

What is your favourite thing about your job? I relish the opportunity to tackle hard, protracted and persistent problems in industries that exist

because incumbents are not consumercentric. In particular, they tend to neglect the unique needs of the massmarket consumer. I love imagining new potential solutions to these problems and building them out quickly to test and refine. I’m most proud of building the teams that do this so that they can keep being innovative leaders long after I have left.

What are your hopes for the future of Asian business? The best way to illustrate my aspiration is to use the example of how Grab, a ride-sharing platform started in Malaysia and now a dominant Southeast Asian unicorn, beat Uber and caused them to leave the region. This requires us to nurture entrepreneurial leaders who think as winners and not followers, who may not be the very first to come up with a business idea, but who are the best at customising it for the three billion Asian population, and who can successfully build scalable organisations across multiple countries, languages, and cultures.

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EMERGING TALENT

EMERGING TALENT SPEAKERS Emerging talent is at the heart of our creative industries, the forefront of growth within our economies and the solution to our present and future global problems. Pew Research Center (a nonpartisan American fact tank based in Washington, D.C) defines millennials as those born from 1981 to 1997 (aged 21-37 in 2018). This is a generation of world-changing, rule-breaking professionals, often with a powerful social conscience and a desire for purpose-led employment. Collectively, they bring youthful enthusiasm, creativity, cutting-edge ideas and fresh perspectives into the world. As tech-savvy, digital natives quick to master the newest media, they’re redefining the workplace as we know it...

LEWIS IWU

At 31, Lewis Iwu is already one of the UK’s leading social purpose campaigners and an expert in building coalitions between corporations and NGOs to drive positive change. A former founding director of the Fair Education Alliance (FEA), he is now Director at Finsbury, the strategic communication firm. Iwu is also a powerful role model for the Black Minority Ethnic (BME) community and an influential voice for greater education equality and increased social mobility. Having attended a state school in the economically deprived area of Newham, East London, he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at New College, Oxford; won the World University Debating Championships for Oxford; and became the first black president of the Oxford University Student Union. At Finsbury, he now assists the private and non-profit sectors to collaborate and devise campaigns that help address big social challenges such as climate change, financial inclusion and discrimination. A highly skilled orator and a specialist in public debate, Lewis Iwu is certainly one to watch…

BEN JEFFRIES

Ben Jeffries is the 22-year-old digital entrepreneur who founded Influencer, one of the UK’s largest influencer marketing companies. An agency and a directory, Influencer connects brands with the most relevant social media “micro-influencers” (offering the loyalty of at least 10,000 followers) to promote their products. Jeffries realised at 15, while marketing his first business (a clothing company) that this is the most cost-effective way for brands to reach target audiences. After being shortlisted for the Virgin Media Business “VOOM 2016” competition and winning Young Start Up Talent 2016, where he secured £50,000 worth of prizes, he suspended his BSc in Business, at Bath University and used Crowdcube to secure initial funding for Influencer. Within 24 hours, the £100,000 target was exceeded. Since then, this expanding agency has created a buzz for companies such as Uber, Badoo and Primark while being profitable with six-figure revenues.

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EMERGING TALENT

This is a generation of world-changing, rulebreaking professionals JAMIE WOODRUFF

Jamie Woodruff, aged 25, is Europe’s leading ethical hacker and a world-renowned authority on cyber security and “social engineering” (the art of manipulating people to fraudulently gain confidential information). After starting hacking by the age of nine, Woodruff first entered public consciousness by successfully hacking Facebook for an IT competition at Bangor University. Today, he advises corporations (financial organisations, governments and global technology companies) on their cyber vulnerabilities, using methods ranging from diversion theft, phishing and baiting. In fact, Woodruff once even impersonated a Domino’s pizza delivery boy at a major financial institution, walked passed security and gained access to their server room. His unique expertise is set to remain in demand, as the average company is targeted by over 100 cyber attacks annually – a third of which prove successful.

RAND HINDI

Dr Rand Hindi is a French-Lebanese entrepreneur, a multi-award winning data scientist and the founder and CEO of Snips, a big data innovation firm that aims to change the way we interact with technology. He started coding at the age of 10, founded a social network at 14 and a web agency at 15, before getting involved in machine learning at 18. At 21, he began a PhD in Bioinformatics at University College London (UCL) and then received graduate degrees from Singularity University in Silicon Valley and THNK in Amsterdam. Subsequently included in the 2014 MIT “35 Innovators Under 35” and “30 under 30” Forbes lists, Dr Hindi is now focused on how data can be used to solve everyday problems, while ensuring privacy and transparency. He believes that the proper harnessing of big data will allow us to guide our lives better. After all, by 2025, the world is predicted to have over 100 billion connected devices – so Snips aims to utilise big data to create Artificial Intelligence that is highly personal, acting as an extension of our personalities.

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SIGMAR GABRIEL

SIGMAR GABRIEL EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Recent German Minister for Foreign Affairs

How do you view Germany’s place in the world currently? Germany is definitely one of the strongest industrial nations in the world. However, due to its strength, our country is facing a huge challenge and one of its responsibilities is to get more involved on a European and international level. For good reason Germany has been a geopolitical “abstainer” for more than 70 years. Since Germany takes the responsibility for two world wars in the 20th century, our neighbours, and primarily the USA, integrated us in systems of alliances such as the European Union and NATO which limited our security-policy accountability. Aside from economical questions, only Great Britain, France and the USA as members of the Security Council could decide on important international questions. The USA was without doubt the leading nation in the Western world. The postwar order is massively questioned by Donald Trump. Europe has to take more responsibility on its own and that includes us Germans. This is a completely new challenge. How robust do you think Europe is in its current state? Europe is still unique, there is no other part of the world where people live as freely, peacefully and safely as they do in Europe. Nevertheless, Europe has to face internal contradictions and challenges. Its fiscal policy splits into Northern and Southern Europe, whereas questions concerning the rule of law and democracy divide into Western and Eastern Europe, additionally questions about governance and the fight against corruption can be distinguished between Northwest and Southwest Europe. One of the biggest European conflicts is clearly the question of how 18

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to handle the long-running issue of mass migration. No doubt Europe could also collapse due to internal contradictions. However this is not fate, nothing about this challenge is unsolvable. Everything depends on the heads of states and heads of government who have to be clear about how much is at stake and about how small states such as Germany would exist in relation to the world without the European Union.

“They are searching for an identity but sadly at this point in time they find this only offered by the nationalists” How do you think transatlantic relations have changed since the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency? Yes, of course they’ve changed. But this change did not start with Donald Trump. Obama has already talked about America as a “Pacific nation”, as opposed to his predecessor who described the

USA as a transatlantic nation. The USA feels “imperial overstretch” and wants to pull back parts of its international responsibility. The difference between Obama and Trump is that Trump tried to fill the vacuum that occurred due to the withdrawal of the USA, with international agreements and the support of the international order/ regime. Trump focuses only on the position of the USA. In his opinion the world is not a place of common rules but an arena in which only the stronger survive. This is the opposite of the idea of the West. How can we meet the challenges that rising right-wing populism poses? In the first instance we have to listen to what people have to say. The problem with right-wing populism is that it actually brings existing problems up, but answers with completely wrong, and partly irresponsible, approaches. Of course globalisation produced not only winners but also losers. The question is how can we lend an ear to them, how can we give them new hope and perspectives? And of course, the world doesn't only consist of 'anywheres', as the ideologists of postmodernism believed in, but rather of most people being 'somewheres'.They are searching for an identity but sadly at this point in time they find this only offered by the nationalists or populists. Therefore the liberals have to answer. This requires taking people seriously and not simply facing them with economic theories and liberal ideas.

SIGMAR GABRIEL

“For good reason Germany has been a geopolitical “abstainer” for more than 70 years.”

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AYESHA KHANNA

AYESHA KHANNA INTERVIEW

AN EXPERT IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, SMART CITIES AND FINTECH

What ignited the spark to launch your artificial intelligence consultancy firm, ADDO AI? Coming back to Asia after spending most of my adult life in the US was like sitting on a bullet train. Countries like China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan were full of a young, driven, emerging middle class that was keen to learn new skills and have better access to services. On Wall Street, I had worked for many years on building systems that used advanced analytics, yet I found a gap in firms that helped companies use data and AI to build scalable and innovative models to meet the needs of this middle-class demographic. So I partnered with some of Asia’s leading AI researchers to set up ADDO AI, and I’ve subsequently been lucky enough to build AI-powered systems for clients such as SMRT, Singapore’s largest public transport company; Singtel, Singapore’s largest telco; SOMPO, Japan’s largest insurance firm; Habib Bank, Pakistan’s largest bank; and Smart Dubai, the government agency tasked to transform Dubai into a leading smart city. In 2017, ADDO AI was featured in Forbes as one of four leading AI companies in Asia, which was pretty awesome. As a technology expert, are there any new technologies on the horizon that you think we should be particularly wary of? I firmly believe that we need to put our values and humanity in every new technology, such as AI – because the march of technological innovation is inexorable. And, given its many potential benefits (including financial inclusion, disease prevention and democratisation of access to basic services like education), we want continued research 20

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and investment in these areas. However, their use should be governed and, for me, the key to accountability starts with transparency. Organisations should be transparent in the way they are using techniques such as CRISP-R for gene editing, and, in return, governments should not over-regulate these

“I prefer to pose the question of how humans and machines will co-exist happily, rather than whether they will, so that we take the responsibility to make it happen.”

one of the few, if not the only, female techie in a boardroom. Yet we know very well from experience that better products and services are designed when we have diversity in organisations, which is why, in my experience, the final product is always more usercentric and resilient when there are more women involved. To encourage greater female participation, I started a charity called 21C Girls (21st Century Girls), which provides free coding and AI classes to girls in Singapore – it has now taught thousands of girls within the country. My aim is not that every girl should necessarily become a software engineer in the way I started my career, but that every woman has the creative confidence to collaborate with AI engineers to empower their vision and passion.

innovations, provided they are used ethically and responsibly.

You co-wrote the book Hybrid Reality with your husband, Parag Khanna – can you explain what you mean by the “hybrid age”? Human beings have a long history of using technology and tools to evolve. From the Stone to Agricultural to Information age, we have now come to a new age in which we see a deepening of technology in every aspect of our lives. Technology, as it becomes increasingly cheaper, ubiquitous, intelligent and social, will become so embedded in our homes, work and environment that we will essentially have to learn to coexist with it. A popular term for this is also the “4th industrial age”, but we term it the “hybrid age” to emphasise the additional social and geo-economic impact of these technologies on society.

What does it mean to you to be a woman in tech? For most of my career, I have been

We are often made to feel that AI is a threat to humanity – do you think AI

AYESHA KHANNA

“AI, like many technological innovations, can be a double-edged sword”

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AYESHA KHANNA

“What we need is a relationship with AI” and humans can truly coexist happily? I prefer not to pose the question of whether human beings and machines can coexist happily, but of how it will be possible – because that places the responsibility to ensure it does happen on us all. AI, like many technological innovations, can be a double-edged sword, capable of both benefitting and harming societies, depending on how we employ it. I strongly believe that if we teach children computational skills early on, they will view AI and similar technologies as enablers of their imagination and not as black-boxes that are incomprehensible and must be watched passively. What we need is a relationship with AI where we maintain our agency and use it to creatively solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. At the same time, we must find a way to govern the use of AI to avoid bias, manipulation and invasion of privacy.

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You and your family now live in Singapore, one of the world’s leading tech hubs: what can other cities learn from Singapore’s interpretation of the smart city concept? Singapore’s strength lies in its evolution of the smart city concept. Smart city 1.0 was very much about technology systems that were conceived as the “operating system” of the city, and whose primary goals were efficiency. In the last few years, a new concept of smart cities has emerged. This smart city 2.0 is built upon an eco-system of public and private companies coming together to offer services such as transport and healthcare, without depending on central operating systems. The government then has the additional role of governing the data exchange

between these services, bearing in mind both privacy and the security of citizen information. Singapore has moved the needle further by calling itself a “Smart Nation”, which is built on a strong foundation of emerging technologies, but focused more on human-centric design with an emphasis on skills, economic development and quality of life. It also takes a more interdisciplinary approach towards the smart city concept – moving beyond technical implementation to integration with culture, economics and social sciences to build a stronger urban environment.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) The human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations GREG CROSS

Greg Cross is an AI pioneer, a successful serial entrepreneur, and the chief business officer of Soul Machines. As a groundbreaking tech company, Soul Machines specialises in humanising AI and creating “digital humans” that can engage in an interactive, immersive AR/ VR experience.

HIROSHI ISHIGURO

Dr Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University, builds humanoid robots to revolutionise our interaction with AI. He studies the mechanics of person-toperson interaction to make his androids increasingly human-like in both their appearance and behaviour.

HUGH MONTGOMERY

Dr Hugh Montgomery is a University College London (UCL) professor and director of the Centre for Human Health and Performance. A clinical adviser at leading British health AI firm, DeepMind Health, he is an expert on the massive disruption that AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) will bring to healthcare in the next 5-10 years.

SHIVVY JERVIS

Shivvy Jervis is a multi-award winning futurist, adviser and presenter on the digital economy. Recognised as one of Britain’s top digital influencers and one of Europe’s 30 leading women in tech, she is the former creator and presenter of the long-running video series Digital Futures and The Trailblazers.

NICK BOSTROM

As an Oxford University professor and founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom is widely respected as the premier thought leader on AI, transhumanism (the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology). and existential risks. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), his New York Times’ bestselling book, has altered the global conversation on the future of AI. londonspeakerbureau.com ISSUE 8

DESTINATION FOCUS

SOUTHEAST ASIA AND HONG KONG

t’s been a decade since London Speaker Bureau (LSB) arrived in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong with a one-man office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Over the years, our team has expanded alongside the impressive growth of Asian economies, and LSB is now recognised regionally as a truly global speaker bureau delivering world-class content, expertise and experience. Southeast Asia consists of eleven countries that reach from the east of India to the south of China, comprising the mainland countries: Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam – and island or maritime Southeast Asia which includes Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, and the new nation of East Timor (formerly part of Indonesia). These countries are as distinctive from each other in society, governance and business as they are in ethnicity and culture. Nevertheless, the ASEAN economic grouping is home to over 600 million people, with a median age of just 29 and the world’s fastest-growing middle-class population. This is driving the economic and business dynamics in the region with global multinationals already long established in most Asian countries. The LSB brand in Asia has been closely associated with the global icons we have brought to ASEAN such as Usain Bolt, Sir Bob Geldof, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sir Richard Branson, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamed and Jimmy Wales. Demand from corporations here for “big name” international keynotes is stronger than ever. We have also delivered high impact executive learning masterclasses in monthly and bi-monthly series to top Malaysian banks over a number of years. As consumer demand and business competition in this region grows, we find increasing corporate need for talent development and customer retention. Similarly, more corporations find themselves looking outside for

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advice and guidance on governance and ethics, succession planning and risk management. As elsewhere, there is tremendous interest in new technology, including cryptocurrency, cybersecurity, AI and robotics. The Asian business community is well known for its resourcefulness and innovation as well as for “leapfrogging” technologies.

“Southeast

Asia remains a buzzing hive of economic activity, increasing consumer spending” LSB Southeast Asia and Hong Kong has helped several local and regional businesses host international events as they reach global markets. At the same time, we have been instrumental in identifying local leaders in business, government, and the arts for the international speaker circuit. Business leaders like AirAsia founder Tony Fernandes, former president of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Lim Siong Guan and the serial “innovative disruptor” Azran Osman-Rani are just some of the personalities we represent. Other notable regional voices include Paralympian Dr William Tan, Asia’s “alternative artist” Red Hong

Yi, Indonesia’s sixth president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), Malaysia’s longest serving minister for international trade, Rafidah Aziz, and former South Korean premier Un-Chan Chung. Our commitment to local communities includes the LSB team’s participation in monthly outreach programmes targeting the urban homeless at food kitchens, rental subsidies for single mothers in inner-city tenements, and abandoned pets and strays at animal shelters. From 2018, we adopted the LSB group-wide Zero Carbon Footprint programme, and we now carbon-offset all international speaker travel and provide clients and speakers with a copy of the Carbon Footprint certificate. Despite speculation about slowing growth and regional volatility, Southeast Asia remains a buzzing hive of economic activity, increasing consumer spending and a destination for foreign investment. These are undoubtedly exciting times for Southeast Asia. An advance estimate of 2018 GDP growth for ASEAN suggests that the region’s economy continued to power ahead in the second quarter, largely brushing aside rising trade concerns and tightening financial conditions. GDP is estimated to have expanded 5.2% in the second quarter on an annual basis. The economic prospects for Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand remain strong, while, on our home turf, optimism is high after Malaysia’s landmark general elections in May. The team at LSB Southeast Asia and Hong Kong share this optimistic, upbeat view of the coming years, and we are poised to take the bureau through its next growth spurt as we explore untapped opportunities across the region.

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CHRIS KUTARNA

CHRIS KUTARNA INTERVIEW

HE PREDICTED THE OUTCOME OF THE UK’S EU REFERENDUM AND THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP. WHAT ELSE CAN THE COAUTHOR OF AGE OF DISCOVERY: NAVIGATING THE STORMS OF OUR SECOND RENAISSANCE TELL US ABOUT OUR UNCERTAIN FUTURE… Can you explain what you mean by the “second Renaissance”? I count seven primary drivers of change, which together usher in a new world and make our old maps obsolete: demographics (a drop in fertility, a jump in life expectancy, and rapid aging); the shift in economic geography from the Atlantic to Asia and the Pacific; the gig economy; new organisational forms; ballooning public debts; digital technologies; and a pandemic of identity crises.

It’s become popular to describe the transformation underway as a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. But that is a limited, limiting vision of the now. It brings technology-driven change into focus, and that’s helpful. But it blinds us to other, more powerful engines of change, and that’s dangerous. It elongates the box we’re already in. But leaders today need to confront the hard questions of how the box is being wholly redefined. A Renaissance is a deeper, more profound transformation - one that challenges not just how we organise ourselves and the technologies we work with, but how we think, and what we value. The most recent Renaissancethe European Renaissance, shifted Western civilisation out of the Medieval Age and into the Modern. Our second Renaissance is shifting the world out of the Industrial Age and into the Knowledge Age. When we can see the present through a Renaissance lens, we begin to see the powerful purposes that call leaders to lead. You famously predicted both Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump by referring to historical events. History may be useful in predicting similar events, but is it also useful at helping us cope with these unexpected changes? There are two main types of people: those who think history is irrelevant (because it’s all in the past) and those who think history explains everything (because every cause is in the past). I’m building a global community of people who see themselves as a third type: those who see history as a tool to create new futures. One of the biggest challenges for leaders today is that it’s hard to gain perspective. The biggest trends and events reshaping our landscape are right in front of our face. But they’re also global. So where can we can go to get some distance from them? In modern life, time - history - is the neglected dimension that allows us to

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step back and get some distance - some perspective - from current events so that we can understand them, and our leadership task, with more depth. Take, for example, the narrative of digital “disruption” - a word, it seems, we can’t do without. Over the past two years, I’ve surveyed thousands of senior executives, and this is the word that’s used everywhere to describe the moment we’re in. It’s also a remarkably flat word; it has almost zero depth. It’s a word, a narrative, that conveys, “Aaaarrrrrggh!” and very little else. Even a brief glimpse at history can help us to shake free from these debilitating narratives and give ourselves better stories to help us cope with the unexpected. Take the advent of electricity, about 100 years ago. It’s an apt analogy to our advent of digital today: a general-purpose technology that had profound application everywhere. Do we look back and say that electricity “disrupted” the whole of economy and society? Not really. We might say it “disrupted” candle-making, or kerosene lamp-making, but most of the rest of society experienced it as an enabling force. Inserting some historical depth into how we look at the now has deep and practical implications. One of my clients is a major bank. By consciously shifting the narrative of the senior leadership team from “our industry is being disrupted” to “our industry is being enabled”, they started to see “fintech” startups differently - less a threat, and more an exciting pool of new services that they can acquire on their clients’ behalf. They shifted their investment strategy accordingly. Inevitably those who will be most affected by the current disruption we’re experiencing are the younger generation. What do you think are the most trying difficulties young people may face in the future? Young people are already facing an identity crisis. The starkest evidence is this: suicide is now the leading cause of death, globally, among 15 to 24-yearolds.

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CHRIS KUTARNA

One aspect of society that is changing the fastest right now, from one generation to the next, are socialising technologies. These technologies civics, community and military service, religion, sport, media, education systems - help us all to understand who we are, and what we belong to. Or at least, they used to. Now they are all localising, personalising or weakening. We see the consequences in our national politics, our organisational HR issues and in our personal lives. “How do we broaden our sense of belonging in a moment of profound personalisation?” This is the crux question that millennials must confront if their generation is to realise the promise - and avert the catastrophes of having been born into humanity’s most energetic moment. Would you agree that it is now more important than ever for politics to manage the changes we’re experiencing and will experience in the near future? The short answer is yes. In democratic societies, politics is the pressure valve that helps us all to cope with the profound (and profoundly uneven) consequences of rapid change. And in all societies, politics is how we organise ourselves to shape the future - and not simply arrive there, bewildered. The long answer is no. Politics is not a magic solution. Politics without civics is simply war by other means. It can tear a society apart as surely as armed conflict. Politics without shared norms is simply a playground brawl. It produces temporary winners and losers but builds nothing collective.

What is needed - now more than ever is political leadership. Nelson Mandela famously said, in the midst of race riots in South Africa, “I am your leader, and so long as I am your leader, I will give you leadership - which means telling you when you are wrong.”

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How can governments equip themselves in order to be prepared for the second Renaissance? Across all domains of society today, it’s fashionable to call for a fundamental rethink. We need to rethink business. Education. Work. Health. Justice. Governments need to recognise that they - systems of government - also need to undergo a root-and-branch rethink. How does government create good policy for the long term if the system’s incentives lock elected

“Donald Trump’s chief opponent in the 2020 election is truth, and he is systematically destroying that opponent.”

It’s fashionable today to call for people to participate in politics. Participation is the panacea. But one could also argue that greater participation right now is just a recipe for wider conflict and deeper division.

Right now, political leaders on all sides are, in fact, following their “followers”. This is a moment, not for mass participation, but for singular

acts of political courage. My work is to help would-be leaders to identify those opportunities for action.

officials into short-term thinking and fundraising? How do regulators respond to rapid technological change - cryptocurrencies, for example - if the legislature is already log-jammed and the legislative process takes years? How do governments respond to crossborder crises (climate change, cybersecurity, pandemics, tax evasion) if the costs and benefits vary so widely? How do governments recruit and retain the best young people to help them build the future, when the best young people see the terms of government employment as a prison? These are hard questions. And urgent. I urge governments to begin the last one - recruitment. Young people want

to do work that has meaning and purpose. Government is rich with both. In departments around the world - the US Department of Defense, the Swiss foreign service - bureaucracies are experimenting with flexible forms of public service that appeal to toptalent millennials in the gig economy. Start there. Widen the doors. Then, governments will be staffed by the right mix of “insiders” and “outsiders” to rethink how other parts of the system should work. What is your favourite topic to give a keynote speech on? My favourite topic to speak on is “Mapping the New World” because I know that - in as little as 15 minutes I can unleash people’s capacity to completely transform their world. The world is changing rapidly. But the mental maps by which we navigate the world haven’t changed - and they won’t, at least not automatically. Our maps are out-of-date. That’s why we struggle to make sense of present events, and fail to see the risks and opportunities in our path. The sooner we consciously redraw our maps, the less time we’ll waste feeling shocked by events, and the faster we will adapt to the shocks yet to come. History is rich with examples of individuals who have reshaped their organisations - and the world - by redrawing our shared, cognitive maps. I love sharing those examples: from Copernicus and Columbus to Tesla and Einstein. But I also love sharing the wisdom I’ve extracted from many examples of how they did it - and how we can do it, too. One example: one of my best friends, the famous Columbian physician Alejandro Jadad, is reshaping global health right now by applying my mapping principles. In the old world, health was a product - something we obtained by purchasing the medicines and expertise of the healthcare industry. But in the new world, it’s an ability - a capacity within ourselves to achieve well-being that we can develop. By following this new map to health, Alejandro has built a healthcare system in Columbia for just US$500 per person per year, that exceeds the healthcare outcomes of rich OECD countries where annual per capita

CHRIS KUTARNA

spending ranges from US$5,000 US$10,000. Along the way, he is saving thousands of lives and creating billions of dollars in new wealth. Map-making is a subtle art, but it can be learned. How do we consciously recognise, and grab hold of, the maps we currently navigate by? That’s the crucial first step. How do we get outside our own maps and begin to see the world in powerfully original ways? That’s step two. How do we trigger those Aha! strokes of genius that resolve our confusing new reality into stunning new clarity? That’s step three. At each step, there’s a secret. Only it’s

not really a secret: it’s wisdom that’s available to anyone who wants it. I love sharing it. And I love hearing the audience stories, from friends like Alejandro, of how it changes everything. Can you tell us your next major prediction for the future? My next major prediction is that Donald Trump will be re-elected in 2020. Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is the most powerful US president in modern times. He dictates the conversation that Americans have each day. No other politician has yet proved able to wrest control of the conversation from Trump. And in America right now, if you can’t control

the conversation, you can’t win. Donald Trump’s chief opponent in the 2020 election is truth, and he is systematically destroying that opponent. With truth out of the running, raw audience size is the deciding factor. There is an obvious way to overturn these logics - Trump’s position, like all demagogues, is both powerful and precarious - but I haven’t yet met the 2020 presidential candidate who’s figured it out. From inside the fishbowl, the obvious is sometimes the hardest to see.

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THE BIG INTERVIEW: HELEN CLARK

HELEN CLARK The BIG Interview Three-term Prime Minister of New Zealand

New Zealand now has its third female Prime Minister as well as numerous women having held significant leadership positions across politics. To what would you attribute the high levels of gender equality in your home country? The achievements of women in New Zealand need to be seen in the context of the country’s broader economic, social, and political history. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world where women gained the right to vote in national elections. Under a reforming government at that time, New Zealand also introduced the world’s first old age pension, industrial arbitration and conciliation legislation, and workers’ public housing. Later, in a second wave of reforms in the late 1930s and 1940s, it became one of the first countries in the world to introduce comprehensive social security legislation and free public hospital care and secondary education. Gender equality was an expectation of my generation of postwar baby boomers – we were the first to break through to the top ranks of leadership across society. What advice would you give to other female leaders working towards achieving gender parity across politics and business? It is vital that women who do rise to high positions encourage and support others to follow them. Many girls and women do take inspiration from the achievements of women who have gone all the way – providing that we are frank about our experiences of getting to the top and don’t disguise how difficult it can be to break through. The aim must be to make the representation of women 30

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at the highest levels across society the norm rather than the exception. Why did you agree to filming My Year with Helen and is its message in line with what you envisaged? When I agreed to the movie being made, it was prior to making my decision to run for the post of United Nations Secretary-General. The director was therefore initially focused on making a film about my work as the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Then, the SG campaign eventuated, and the film changed its focus. I think it is an important film which raises critical issues about geopolitics and gender equality. What were the key trends and issues that you tackled while administrator at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)? When I went to UNDP in April 2009, there were barely six years left for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and targets to be achieved. I led UNDP to work on how progress could be accelerated, working with national stakeholders and other UN development entities. Then, from the time of the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012, we became very busy facilitating consultations and outreach on the design of the successor agenda to the MDGs. That was negotiated by United Nations Member States and became the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. Now UNDP and other UN agencies put a great deal of effort into supporting achievement of that agenda.

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“I remain an optimist about

the power of connectivity through social media as a force for good”

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THE BIG INTERVIEW: HELEN CLARK

During my eight years at UNDP, we also had to step up greatly to support emergency development in countries plunged into crisis by war and conflict and by mega-disasters such as earthquakes and extreme weather events. Sadly, the need for this work shows no sign of abating. You are known as a prolific user of social media. How significant do you think social media can be at inciting positive global change? Since the 2016 US presidential election, we are accustomed to very negative accounts of the harm and manipulation attributed to social media. Cyberbullying via these media at the level of the individual is also a significant problem. Yet, I remain an optimist about the power of connectivity through social media as a force for good. On a daily basis, I see, for example, tweets from inspiring community-based organisations and others around the world who are working on incredibly important issues of social development and peace and justice. These combined voices add up to significant momentum for change.

“We cannot achieve the new global sustainable development goals without gender equality, women’s leadership matters.” 32

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Social media has also played part in the rise of populism across much of the developed world. What can be done to limit the use of social media to promote malignant views? I believe that the social media companies need to take much stronger action against the abuse and manipulation of their platforms. Any form of hate speech should be prohibited. There needs to be total transparency around who is posting on these platforms. Users should have the right to expect action to be taken against those who post offensive content. Users need to understand how to protect themselves from malicious targeting and what we now know as “fake news”. Which topics do you most enjoy speaking to organisations about? I enjoy speaking about the interconnectedness of issues. As the new global agenda, the 2030 Agenda states, there can be no sustainable development without peace, and no peace without sustainable development. We have to find ways of advancing and maintaining human progress which don’t compromise the environment. Concerted climate action is essential. We cannot achieve the new global sustainable development goals without gender equality – women’s leadership matters. I speak across these issues, and also have an interest in public policy aimed at combating noncommunicable diseases and HIV, and in advocacy for evidence-based drugs policy based on my membership of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. What is your biggest hope and greatest fear for the future of global politics? My biggest hope is that all countries will take the global sustainable development agenda seriously and work to implement it. My biggest fear is that xenophobia, populism and hate will impact on the politics and agendas of even more countries – that is not an environment in which peace and sustainable development can be achieved or sustained.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;The 2030

Agenda states, there can be no sustainable development without peace, and no peace without sustainable development.â&#x20AC;? londonspeakerbureau.com ISSUE 8

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FAVOURITE TED TALKS

“Having masterfully exposed the unprecedented challenges facing the world today...”

s a non-profit organisation, TED is devoted to spreading great ideas through short, powerful talks of 18 minutes or less. Considered the “holy grail” of achievement for experts and innovators, it provides a powerful platform for thinkers and visionaries to communicate their ideas. It also gives viewers, spread across the globe, the chance to gain a better understanding of the biggest issues facing the world - feeding a desire to help create a better future. Today, the annual TED conference in Vancouver covers almost all topics – from science to business and motivation to politics – in more than 110 languages. TED talk presenters have included Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bono, Malcolm Gladwell, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Mike Rowe, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Vint Cerf. An important part of the TED recipe is that videos of the talks are made freely available on the TED website. TED has expanded a great deal over the last two decades. In addition to the annual conferences, TED events are held regularly across the globe. They include TEDWomen, TEDGlobal, TEDMED, TED-Ed and TEDYouth. Furthermore, more than 50,000 independently run, nonprofit TEDx talks and events have recently sprung up worldwide – helping to further spread groundbreaking new ideas.

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MONICA LEWINSKY THE PRICE OF SHAME

As a social activist, Monica Lewinsky’s powerful 2015 TED Conference speech received a standing ovation and, to date, almost 13 million views. Drawing on her unique experience as the first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the Internet in 1998, she takes a hard look at cyberbullying, our online culture of humiliation, and asks for a safer and more compassionate social media environment.

SUGATA MITRA

BUILD A SCHOOL IN THE CLOUD

2013 TED Prize winner and renowned educational researcher, Sugata Mitra explains how and why self-organised and minimally invasive learning will shape the future of education, in this inspiring talk. His TED prize wish: Help me build a school in the cloud where children can explore, learn on their own and teach one another, using resources from the worldwide cloud.

JON JANDAI

DAVID MILIBAND

As an advocate for happiness, Jon Jandai is a very happy farmer from north-eastern Thailand, with a unique philosophy for life. In his TEDxYouth 2017 talk, he explores why following societal norms may not be the best path – and why returning closer to our roots in the land is. Jandai raises important and timely questions about self-reliance, sustainability and the real value of personal economics stresses.

This must-watch 2017 talk by former British Foreign Secretary and current president of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, focuses on the global refugee crisis we face today. This passionate TED talk is a call for action. Miliband explains why each of us has a personal responsibility to help solve the crisis and he offers tangible ways for us to help refugees and turn empathy into action.

TO BE DIFFERENT IS GOOD

THE REFUGEE CRISIS IS A TEST OF OUR CHARACTER

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BEAU LOTTO

CHRISTIANA FIGUERES YANIS VAROUFAKIS

Globally renowned neuroscientist and founder of Lab of Misfits, Beau Lotto, is a specialist in human perception. Here, he illuminates the mysteries of the brain's visual system by using puzzling colour games to spotlight what you can't normally see: how your brain works. Lotto’s engaging and fun talk reveals how evolution tints our perception of what's really out there…

As a climate advocate, Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) who led the 2015 COP 21 climate talks in Paris, gave this fascinating talk in 2016. She explains how she used optimism and positivity to help achieve the most important climate agreement in history.

OPTICAL ILLUSIONS SHOW HOW WE SEE

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT

CAPITALISM WILL EAT DEMOCRACY – UNLESS WE SPEAK UP

Renowned economist, Yanis Varoufakis, engagingly presents the case for a radically new way of thinking about the economy, finance and capitalism. With great charismatic verve, he presents his dream for a world in which capital and labour no longer struggle against each other: “one that is simultaneously libertarian, Marxist and Keynesian.”

CHARLES LEADBEATER ELIF SHAFAK

NICK BOSTROM

In this deeply thought-provoking talk, leading authority on innovation and creativity, Charles Leadbeater, forces us to question how children should learn in the future. He takes us on a journey to discover new and radical forms of education. In the slums of Rio and Kibera (Nairobi), Leadbeater finds informal and disruptive learning taking place, which, he explains, is what all schools need.

Oxford professor, philosopher and AI thought-leader, Nick Bostrom, suggests an ominous idea: machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make. He asks us to think about the world we are building now, driven by thinking machines and to consider whether our technological advancements will ultimately destroy us.

EDUCATION INNOVATION IN THE SLUMS

THE REVOLUTIONARY POWER OF DIVERSE THOUGHT

In this passionate and inspiring talk, the award-winning and bestselling Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, emphasises the revolutionary power of plurality, the indispensability of democracy and the beauty of cosmopolitanism. Having masterfully exposed the unprecedented challenges facing the world today, she explains how these same problems will show us the way forward.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN OUR COMPUTERS GET SMARTER THAN WE ARE?

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ADAM GREENFIELD

ADAM GREENFIELD EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

NAVIGATING THE RADICAL TECHNOLOGIES CHANGING OUR LIVES What would you say makes a technology “radical”? Couldn’t we argue that all new technologies are radical? Well, in the book I define “radical” technologies as those which somehow affect us at the root of our being, either our individual or our social being. By that definition, technologies like laser printing or wifi or radio frequency identification (RFID), as transformative as each of them might have been in some ways when they first appeared, wouldn’t necessarily make the cut. But a technology like facial recognition changes something profound, something that turns out to be key to the way in which we organise ourselves as societies, which is the assumption that we’re effectively anonymous when we move through public space, literally just a face in the crowd. When you can trivially and more or less instantaneously identify everyone moving in the city, all the time – pinning each of us to a particular location at a particular time, and what’s more, specifying the company we keep – you alter the terms by which we present ourselves to the world and comport ourselves as members of a community. And something like automation goes further yet, redefining what work is, what a job is, who will be able to retain one, and who it is that’s able to generate value for themselves, their families and the broader society. When I set out to write the book, it was this class of emergent technologies that I thought could really stand some sustained and careful consideration, because it had started to unnerve me that nobody really seemed to be following up on what struck me as the fairly obvious implications of their introduction – not policymakers, not people in business, and certainly not us ordinary citizens just trying to make sense of all this. 36

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Which new technology would you say has the greatest potential to transform the world as we know it? I should probably first say that there’s a class of developments with extraordinary transformational potential that I just don’t talk about, because I’m simply not qualified to do so, and that would be everything emerging from the life sciences, genetic engineering and biotechnology more broadly. It seems inevitable to me that hugely consequential advances will be made in these fields over the next several decades, with the most profound implications for both individual lives and for the composition of society, and I can’t meaningfully speak about any of them. That said, I do think the advent of a functionally effective artificial general intelligence will erode and etch away at virtually every one of the assumptions upon which we base the organisation of our society. We’ll be confronted with questions like, who counts as a person? Who gets to bear the rights of a citizen? How are questions of resource allocation or life and death decided, and where does accountability for those decisions vest? And as is so often the case, what matters in artificial intelligence isn’t so much what is actually achievable as what people believe can be achieved, what they therefore invest in, and what gets instrumentalised or operationalised as a result of those investments. Your book Against the Smart City was published in 2013. Do you remain sceptical of smart cities? Ha! More so than ever, I’m afraid. What the smart city discourse gets fundamentally, foundationally wrong is that cities simply aren’t processes that can be optimised by technical means, in the same way that you might optimise a laptop for weight or battery life or processing power.

Any city worth the name is a cauldron of contention, in which any number of identifiable constituencies are at all times trying to create a set of circumstances congenial to their own survival. The interplay between them constitutes a fiercely complex system, with all kinds of wicked feedback loops and baroquely nonlinear dynamics, and there simply isn’t any Pareto-optimal solution achievable. No matter how much data you collect, how many measurements you make, how much you fine-tune your managerial interventions based on those measurements, you’ll never satisfy every constituency at once. At best, at most, you can achieve local, tactical moments of compromise, in which most of the parties in a contest over resources get some of what they want – enough to get by, anyway. The name we give to the process involved in achieving such compromises is “politics”.

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“We’ll be confronted with questions like, who counts as a person?” Now politics is a fine and a noble thing. But it’s virtually never encompassed by the rhetoric, the theory or – to the degree that there is any such thing, anywhere on Earth – the practice of the smart city, which rather bizarrely treats the urban field as a single entity with a single, unitary and articulable set of goals. After over a decade, we still

have yet to see the proposed smart city product, service or system that’s capable of reckoning meaningfully with the diversity, multiplicity and complexity of the contemporary metropolis. There has been a great deal of noise surrounding blockchain and its potential. Can you explain the hype and express any concerns you might have about this new technology? A large part of the excitement around blockchain technology, I’d wager, is down to the promise of frictionless transactions – transactions unimpeded by regulation, middlemen or what blockchain partisans regard as rentseeking on the part of the trusted intermediary institutions we’ve historically relied upon to serve as the guarantors of value, like banks or governments.

But even if that strikes you as a desirable set of circumstances, the irony is that you’re not truly doing away with the necessity for trust. You’re simply forced to repose your trust in a different set of processes and actors – ones that are highly abstruse, highly technical, often not comprehensively well-understood even by their own developers, and not subject to any mechanism of accountability, legally binding or otherwise. And this is why, even putting some of the very real concerns with proof of work and the network’s energy consumption and sustainability to one side, I have a hard time taking blockchain as it exists at present seriously. Whether or not anyone ever intended it to be, cryptocurrency feels so much like a giant Ponzi scheme right now because in effect that’s just what it is. londonspeakerbureau.com ISSUE 8

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work. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that it’s only manual tasks that are vulnerable to being automated. The essence of human discretion is pattern detection and recognition, and this is true whether the discretion concerns precedents one might bring to bear in a legal brief or a court argument, the most judicious surgical techniques to use in a resection, the themes and taglines most likely to captivate a given target audience, or the most advantageous disposition of one’s capital resources. We will find, if anything, that those professions we presently regard as preserves of the kind of problem-solving human creativity that’s born of long experience, at least at their highest levels, are almost uniquely susceptible to capture by machine learning-based systems. The disappearance of those jobs is going to force a much more fundamental social reassessment than the evaporation of warehouse or construction labour.

As for potential uses of blockchains or distributed ledgers beyond cryptocurrency, at the moment there just doesn’t seem to be any use case that requires them, or couldn’t be addressed just as well (and with far less drama) using more conventional database techniques. The speculation, the wild claims, the flakiness and unreliability, the dodgy politics and outright criminality associated with the cryptocurrency community are generating an enormous amount of fog that enshrouds all these efforts at present, and unfortunately I think 38

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we’ll have to wait years for that fog to dissipate before seeing if there’s any genuine utility remaining underneath. Another technology on most people’s radar is automation such as machine learning, robotics, AI and the internet of things which implies that an increasingly posthuman economy is ahead of us. How do you think automation is going to reshape both our economy and society? As I said, the first and most obvious impact is going to be in the realm of

Your most recent book expresses the need for politics to shape the use of technologies – how can we organise ourselves politically to create institutions that can cope with, and maximise, the new technologies that have the potential to change society? That’s an outstanding question – indeed, it’s probably the central question of our time. I’m afraid the only answer I have for you is the one I gave Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd when I was on their “Reasons To Be Cheerful” podcast not long ago: we’ll never find a solution until we first agree there’s a problem. And fortunately – as agonising as it’s been, with much worse to come before it’s all over – those of us in the Western democracies are in the process of learning just how vulnerable our societies are to technological disruption, whether unintended or motivated, entirely conscious, purposive and goal-seeking. But it’s only once we collectively come to terms with everything that implies that we can set about figuring out how to do something about it together. If I’m reading things correctly, we’ve taken at least a first few tentative steps along this path in recent months.

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CYBER SECURITY ROBERT HANNIGAN

Robert Hannigan is the former Head of GCHQ, the UK government’s largest intelligence and cyber agency. He was responsible for completely transforming the UK’s cyber strategy and defence between 2014 and 2017, and set up the National Cyber Security Centre, bringing government and business together. He is European Executive Chairman of BlueVoyant cyber security and a Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center.

JOHN NOBLE

John Noble CBE is the former director of the National Cyber Security Centre, set up in 2016 to protect the UK’s critical services against cyber threats and incidents. A non-executive director at NHS Digital and a senior adviser at McKinsey, Noble has an unparalleled understanding of cyber incident management within both the national and commercial space.

JAMIE WOODRUFF

Jamie Woodruff, aged just 25, is Europe’s No.1 ethical hacker. A world-leading authority on cyber security and social engineering, he is renowned for unveiling major digital vulnerabilities in the world’s largest corporations, including Yahoo, Twitter, YouTube, Google and Apple.

JESSICA BARKER

Dr Jessica Barker is a world-leading cyber security consultant, co-founder of Redacted Firm, and one of the “UK’s top 20 most influential women in cyber security”. A highly sought-after expert on the human side of cyber security (cyber awareness, behaviour and culture), she is the media’s go-to expert on these technical issues.

Renowned ethical hacker, social engineer and co-founder of Redacted Firm, FC has over 20 years’ experience in information security. He has assisted hundreds of banks, FTSE 100 companies and government and security agencies in Europe, by determining their physical, personnel and digital control weaknesses.

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NICK EARLE

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH

NICK EARLE FORMER SVP GLOBAL FIELD OPERATIONS, VIRGIN HYPERLOOP ONE Nick Earle is the former SVP of Global Field Operations for Virgin Hyperloop One – the leading company in the race to build the first new mode of transportation since the airplane in 1903. Hyperloop is a new form of ground transportation which will see passengers travelling at 700 miles per hour in floating pods within low-pressure tubes. As part of his role, Earle led all worldwide sales and business development activities with governments, engineering companies, consultants and regulators. During his tenure, the company secured the first Hyperloop projects in the market with engineering activities in the Middle East, India, the Nordics, the US, and a research and development facility in Spain. Before Virgin Hyperloop One, Earle worked for some of the biggest names in IT, including Cisco where he ran the US$11bn services sales organisation and was responsible for their global cloud go-to-market strategy; and Hewlett Packard where he ran Worldwide Enterprise Marketing. You were about to retire when the opportunity to be part of the Hyperloop adventure came along. Why did you decide to embark on this journey? It’s true that after Cisco I thought I would do the usual Board type work and not take on another full-time role. But, when I went to the Nevada Desert and actually saw the Hyperloop prototype, I was hooked. Some people saw a transportation system but all I could think of was that this will be the next version of the internet. That might sound crazy but it’s essentially physical packet switching where the packets are things rather than bits – the individual pods are the packets and they go down tubes at very high speed just as digital packets 40

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go down fibre. I knew from my time at Cisco how revolutionary the internet was and how people didn’t appreciate its potential in the early days so I thought “retirement can wait – I’m in!” The arrival of the Hyperloop could totally revolutionise the transportation sector globally. What are the reactions of people and society so far, is it mostly excitement or scepticism? It’s both. Around the time that Elon Musk wrote the original Hyperloop white paper, he said “when people first hear about the Hyperloop they have one of two reactions either ‘this will never work’ or ‘it’s so obvious – why haven’t we done this before now?’” and I think that sums it up pretty well. But, after two years in the market of doing hundreds of speeches and dozens of government meetings, I have clearly seen the pendulum swinging from scepticism to early belief. The key moment was when the Mumbai to Pune project was announced and the chief minister of Maharashtra State talked about how they would collapse the one-way journey time from three hours to 30 minutes in five-to-seven years. Suddenly, this was real and the sceptics started to melt away.

A new promotional video has recently been unveiled, showing the Virgin Hyperloop One shipping goods "at the speed of flight", with the new cargo brand DP World Cargospeed. Is society ready for such a disruption to the manufacturing sector? It’s not only ready, it’s well overdue. We’re still shipping goods in a metal container on the back of a slow-moving truck just as we did in the mid 1950s. Since then, commerce has moved online and we now want packages ondemand the same day. DP World Cargo Speed could deliver a package anywhere in India, the Middle East or the US in six hours or less. Think of what that could do to take millions of trucks off the road around the world… less congestion, less pollution, better track and trace, and no need for all those warehouses whose sole purpose is to buffer stock outside major cities. Just like the internet, this will massively disrupt legacy business processes – and supply chain distribution is just one example. When do you think Hyperloop will transport its first passengers? And what are the biggest challenges the industry faces until then? Subject to regulatory approval, we could see the first passengers travel by 2023. Freight could well be earlier as there are less regulatory hurdles. The biggest challenges are raising the capital to fund the engineering, building the key system components (including the IT control platform), and gaining regulatory approval. Demand is not a problem – in my time, we had 2600 applications for project work.

NICK EARLE

“This is one of the reasons why autonomous cars are going to dominate – software gets better every day, humans don’t.”

There seem to be concerns about the safety mechanisms in the Hyperloop system. How would you respond to such concerns? This is a big subject and hard to do it justice in a short form like this, but essentially most accidents in all forms of transportation systems are caused by human error. This is one of the reasons why autonomous cars are going to dominate – software gets better every day, humans don’t. Hyperloop is fully autonomous and, don’t forget, it runs inside a tube and so does not cross the path of other modes of transportation like trains do at level crossings where most accidents occur.

Finally, how do you think Hyperloop will “make a billion people’s lives better”? The average person spends four years of their life travelling for business and pleasure. And, if you think that is bad, consider that, in emerging markets, the figure is six years. That’s terrible and unfortunately the figures are getting worse. Here in the UK, the abject state of the rail system and its increasing delays are front page news. It is clear that we have reached the tipping point where, no matter how much money we spend, there’s a limit to how much improvement we can squeeze out of

an analogue-based system that was designed 200 years ago. In fact, I believe that it will continue to degrade no matter what we do or spend. Hyperloop holds out the promise to save time in ways people can only imagine. For example, instead of spending six hours a day commuting back and forth from Mumbai to Pune, they can get five hours a day back – enabling them to return home earlier to see their children, choose to work longer hours to earn the money to feed their family or realise their dreams. Apply that to the world and Hyperloop will truly change the lives of a billion people.

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PERFORMANCE TIPS FROM THE BEST

HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAMS ARE EQUIPPED WITH A HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAM CULTURE. THESE INDIVIDUALS’ BACKGROUNDS RANGE FROM THE SPORTING WORLD TO EDUCATION. HERE ARE SOME OF THEIR TOP TIPS FOR

FOSTERING A CULTURE THAT OPTIMISES PERFORMANCE… “The key is self-awareness. I’ve seen people and teams weaken a strength by trying to strengthen a weakness. Knowing our strengths and developing them is the key to greater success.

their thoughts throughout the entire performance process to achieve success. They practice how to handle pressure and thereby constantly adapt their boundaries upwards.”

Blame looks backwards and responsibility looks forwards. Responsibility always starts with knowing ourselves.”

Sports psychologist to the German national football team

Jamil Qureshi

Hans-Dieter Hermann

Sports psychologist and specialist on the mindset and attitude for high performance

“You need three things for you (or the team you are leading) to be successful: tenacity, discipline and agility.

“If you are thinking about maximising your effectiveness, influence, decisionmaking, relationships, health and quality of life in general then you’ll need insight into your brain function – think emotional intelligence. People leadership is EQ + IQ.

Tenacity is all about your willingness to persevere, keep the focus, and stay the course while those around you fall away.

Emotional intelligence is a set of competencies that help you make better decisions in life, hence better performance. Emotions really drive people; and people, in turn, drive performance. Better performance results from better management of emotions.”

Dr Yasmin Al Bulushi Gulf region’s best known female management trainer

“Several parallels can be found between high performance athletes and the everyday work life in organisational leaders. Both disciplines require a continuously high level of motivation and engagement, and demand constant out performance of previous achievements. Continuously successful elite athletes are only able to maintain this high performance level when they are convinced of the purpose behind their actions. It is important that they deliberately make use of their personal resources and consciously utilise

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Discipline is hugely undervalued – it is essential if you are to develop a process-driven, systematised approach to achieving ambitious goals. Agility gives you the ability to respond to changing circumstances, flex your strategy when needed, and cope with the transformations that are all around us.”

Mark Gallagher

Grand Prix Motor Racing Executive

“The one thing you learn from Everest is this: it’s not done until you’re down. Keeping your eye on the end game and not being distracted by the view at the top is vital to survival in any hostile environment. Humility is the ethos of heroes.”

James Kerr

Author of bestselling Legacy and High Performance Expert

“I have always stayed true to core values around maintaining a strong work ethic, treating people with respect, and recognising that you never know it all – so just keep learning. My career owes much to the work ethic that my parents gave me, while Sir Jackie Stewart taught me a great deal about how to present myself in front of people. As for learning, I am still learning every day. And, by surrounding myself with talented people, I have been able to give myself and my businesses the advantage of constantly moving forward.”

David Coulthard

Former Formula One Racing Driver

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ANWAR IBRAHIM

MALAYSIA'S LEADER-IN-WAITING

ANWAR IBRAHIM AN INTERVIEW WITH "THE NELSON MANDELA OF MALAYSIA" Nurul Izzah has followed her own path. When I was jailed in 1998 – she was thrust into the international spotlight as a teenager fighting for her father’s freedom. I had very little say in the matter, being in solitary confinement. In that very difficult time she steeled her resolve as someone committed to fighting for justice and for a better Malaysia. Since then she has endured the bumps and bruises of politics and performed admirably across three elections, inspiring a new generation of young leaders. She has made a tremendous contribution to the nation and I could not be prouder of where she is today. What is it that kept you committed to politics throughout your incarceration? It has been a difficult road. Being locked up in solitary confinement for so many years and denied the opportunity to see your children and grandchildren grow up is painful. But my family has always stood behind me and I am grateful for their support. My commitment is but a reflection of the commitment that so many Malaysians have demonstrated over the last two decades. Perhaps there was an easier path. But had I chosen it, be it exile or some other compromise, I would not be able to ask Malaysians to sacrifice in the pursuit of building a better future for themselves and their families in this country. The question reminds me of the poem The Road Not Taken in which Robert Frost writes: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” I have no regrets about the past. Throughout the 10 and a half years of incarceration I spent ample time reading the stories of leaders who sacrificed in pursuit of justice and against tyranny and oppression. On reflection, I gathered that in life we are lucky if given the chance to muster the courage of conviction to fight for some greater good. I am even more fortunate to be around to see that labour bear some fruits. How do you believe Malaysia’s economic strength can be expanded? One of the reasons Malaysia has been a prosperous nation is by virtue of our friendly business climate and how attractive we are to foreign direct investment. We are 44

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in a vibrant and competitive region where we cannot rely on past greatness in order to secure a prosperous future. In fact we have already seen our neighbours outperform us in certain sectors. There has been a decay in our institutions of governance over the last 20 years and corruption has become endemic. Under the new government led by Pakatan Harapan, the Alliance of Hope, we have to re-invigorate the economy and reassure investors that things have changed for the better. This includes regulatory reform and creating new incentives for risk-taking and innovation throughout the economy. It also means reforming our education system so that in the long run we have a productive and highly skilled workforce. We must make no compromises in rooting out corruption and reforming the culture which has allowed so many crimes to take place such as the 1MDB fiasco. We need to look at the transformations taking place in the economy and identify the ways that Malaysia can take advantage of these developments, be they disruptions in global trade or developments in artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology. These initiatives would go far in reassuring businessmen and women around the world that Malaysia is once again an attractive place to do business and where the rule of law is sacrosanct. Your daughter is also a member of parliament in Malaysia, did you have reservations about her following this career path?

What are your hopes for the future of Malaysia and the Malaysian people? The vision of our Constitution has been lost and people had become disillusioned with the country’s leadership. However, after the May 9th election, the country was overcome with a sense of euphoria since the thought of beating the previous government was considered mere fantasy by most. Now we have to deliver real results on the campaign promises and go beyond. We have to rebuild the country. We will only succeed if we create democratic accountability in the system – which means a free and independent judiciary, law enforcement agencies and a free media. The Parliament should be empowered with oversight capabilities so that the Executive Branch does not have free reign over the State’s coffers. We need to rid the country of corruption. We need to do away with an economic system that delivers rewards to the wellconnected elites. We need to dismantle race-based policies and instead provide aid and support to all Malaysians based on need, both from the majority Malay and Bumiputera community as well as poor Chinese and Indian labourers. We must work towards a peaceful and prosperous future that embraces Malaysia’s diversity. I am very optimistic that we can achieve all this and more. This is a historic moment and I sense that Malaysians are united in these goals. I hope and pray that we will be able to answer their call.

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100 DAYS IN THE COMMUNITY In 2018, London Speaker Bureau launched a new Corporate Social Responsibility initiative: “100 days in the Community”. The goal of the programme was to provide our network of global staff with the opportunity to give back, expand their skills, and connect with their local communities. We tasked each of our 100 global staff (operating in 18 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and North America) to spend a working day volunteering their time and skills, within the communities in which they operate. We encouraged our network of consultants to volunteer as locally as possible, to ensure that we make a difference in all our locations globally. However, everyone was encouraged to choose the type of volunteering activity they wished to pursue and the way they donated their skills. With each of our 100 staff successfully spending a day volunteering with a community project, education initiative or charity, we successfully met our 2018 goal of collectively contributing “100 days in the community”. Our staff volunteered their time to a wide range of programmes, social enterprises and charities, which benefitted environmental, educational, social and health-related causes.

BATTERSEA CANTEEN, LONDON, UK

elissa Braconnier and Katie Lo volunteered at the Battersea Canteen – a new joint venture between social enterprise, the London Cooking Project and Be Enriched. The community venture provides a space where local residents on low incomes or in need of company can come together and enjoy a nutritious three-course vegetarian meal, cooked by volunteers using surplus food donations. A donation of £1 is requested, only from those who can afford it, just to keep the project running. Melissa and Katie both had a fulfilling experience at the Canteen, where they prepared, cooked and served meals to the community.

THE SHOP, OSLO, NORWAY

Kevin Aall volunteered at “The Shop”, a second-hand shop with a difference. It provides a unique way for people to responsibly dispose of unwanted items – by donating them to those who need them. Anyone can pick up and take whatever they like (limited to the quantity of a single plastic bag) from a large array of items - ranging from clothes and shoes, to toys and books. Kevin noticed that most of the customers were local immigrants, but that “The Shop” was also a hub for the community – a place where people could drop in for coffee, read books, or simply chat with someone new.

DONATE BLOOD SAVE LIVES, MUSCAT, OMAN After an urgent appeal by The Department of Blood Bank Services to all Omani citizens and residents to donate blood, Mariam Gonzalez and Marie Carloman decided to help organise a blood donation drive, in partnership with the Expat Muslim Community . The LSB Oman-sponsored “Donate Blood Save Lives” drive took place on Friday 23 March 2018 at the Bousher Blood Bank in Muscat.

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BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS RECENT READS FROM OUR SPEAKERS AND ADVISERS…

AGE OF DISCOVERY

IAN GOLDIN & CHRISTOPER KUTARNA Age of Discovery offers a fresh perspective on our modern era of genius innovation, disruption and inequality. Goldin, professor and director of the Oxford Martin School, and fellow, Kutarna, define the present day as the second Renaissance and masterfully explain that we have actually been here before. Five centuries ago in Europe, the first Renaissance was similarly an era of unprecedented discovery and chaos, which broke through long-standing barriers, redrew maps, liberated information and reshaped society. Columbus, Copernicus and Gutenburg’s world also grappled with the same negative challenges of rapid change that we experience today: social division, political extremism and pandemics. Essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of humanity Goldin and Kutarna address all the big questions.

HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE

ANDREW KEEN A powerful and provocative book, which tackles the huge challenges of this digital century and searches for solutions to the economic inequality, unemployment, cultural decay, war on privacy and individual alienation that the digital upheaval is causing. Keen, widely recognised as one of the world’s best-known contemporary analysts of digital business and culture, travels the world to find compelling examples of new ways of developing and integrating socially responsible technology into our lives. Ambitious, deeply engaging and even optimistic, How to Fix the Future suggests that our digital challenges may still be solvable, that we can still remake the internet, and preserve our humanity in a digital world.

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BOOK REVIEWS

TALKING TO MY DAUGHTER ABOUT THE ECONOMY

YANIS VAROUFAKIS World-renowned economist and bestselling author Varoufakis, takes the premise that, if you can’t explain the economy to young people, then “quite simply, you are clueless yourself.” His new, highly accessible and inspiring book answers all the big questions about money, debt, power and inequality. Using personal family stories, myths and literary references (from Oedipus, to Doctor Faustus and The Matrix), he explains what economics is, why it can never be apolitical, and why it is so dangerous. Talking to My Daughter about the Economy shows how the global economy is the root cause of many of the world’s current problems.

CONNECTOGRAPHY: MAPPING THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL CIVILISATION

PARAG KHANNA Connectography is an engaging geopolitical travelogue, which argues that connectivity is the most revolutionary force of the 21st Century and is our destiny. Leading global strategist and visionary bestselling author, Parag Khanna, takes the reader on a journey from the steppes of Mongolia to the streets of Detroit and to hyper-connected Dubai, to explain the rapid and unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. It is a bold and authoritative guide to a

future shaped less by national borders than by global supply chains. A world where the most connected powers, and people, will win. However, Khanna offers an optimistic vision of the future and argues that a new foundation of connectivity will bring the world together.

THE GOOD GUT GUIDE

LIZ EARLE This is a brandnew six-week plan to detox, cleanse and nourish the digestive system, and improve your outer beauty as well as your physical and mental health. Liz Earle MBE, one of the world's most respected and trusted authorities on wellbeing, explains why understanding our gut can give us the blueprint for a longer, happier, healthier life. Packed with the latest science and over 80 nutritious recipes, The Good Gut Guide provides practical advice on both prebiotics and probiotics, fermented foods, and how best to address your individual needs and goals – whether these are specific to life stage, a longstanding health issue, or weight loss. Beautifully illustrated throughout, each week focuses on a different aspect of transforming your digestive system.

RESCUE: REFUGEES AND THE POLITICAL CRISIS OF OUR TIME

British Foreign Secretary and current president and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Authoritatively and passionately argued, he explains why the problem is urgent and, yet, also fixable. He advocates a dramatic redesign in how governments and NGOs deliver humanitarian aid, and emphasises the importance of proper education provision, protection from violence for women and children, and cash aid. Highlighting several creative and cost-effective ways to help refugees find their feet in their host countries, Rescue is a morally persuasive argument for doing more.

THE CONFIDENCE CODE FOR GIRLS

KATTY KAY & CLAIRE SHIPMAN In this inspiring handbook, anchor of BBC World News America, Katty Kay, and the journalist, Claire Shipman, provide pre- and early teen girls with the tools to nurture their self-esteem. They explain that confidence comes not from being perfect, but from building a strong foundation of self-awareness, knowledge, and resilience - and it’s always a work in progress. The code encourages girls to embrace risk and deal with failure. Packed with colourful and inspiring stories of girls from diverse backgrounds who achieved great things by stretching beyond their comfort zones, this highly empowering book encourages young girls to adjust the code’s formula to suit their own values, passions and dreams.

DAVID MILIBAND Rescue is an innovative and compelling call to action: to confront and resolve the global refugee crisis. “Our response will be a test of who we are and what we stand for,” insists Miliband, the former

londonspeakerbureau.com ISSUE 8

LSB’S FAVOURITE

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