World Business Forum and Lovemarks

I attended the World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall, invited by the organizers not to speak but to be in the audience.

Professor Bill George of Harvard Business School and a director at Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil gave the opening lecture. He praised Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Paulson as great leaders who stepped up in a time of crisis. He also mentioned unemployment as our most pressing problem, citing 25 million people or 17% of the workforce as unemployed. He said that Goldman decided to get out of the sub-prime market in Q1 2007 due to $70 million in losses.

Jack Welch former CEO of GE could not make the forum due to illness but Bill Conaty who spent 40 years in Human Resources at GE said that great leaders develop great succession plans and are not intimidated by star underlings.

Patrick Lencioni, teamwork guru, said that management, like parenting, is simple conceptually. The challenge is to repeat it day after day. He insisted that to be successful, companies have to be smart as well as healthy (i.e. not dysfunctional).

David Rubenstein co-founder of The Carlyle Group, one of the world's largest Private Equity funds, said that we should get used to knowing our children better as they will likely move in with us after college. He compared our financial environment to the aftermath of a severe hurricane. We now have a mess consisting of debt, deficit, impending inflation, taxes, unemployment, declining dollar and energy concerns. We should expect 7-8% unemployment as as opposed to 4-5% and 1-2% GDP growth as opposed to 3-4%.

Economist Jeffery Sachs Director of the Earth Institute gave a painful lecture about global economics, pointing out that the "world is bursting at the seems." With 7 billion people in the world and a $70 trillion world economy, we are living in an unsustainable situation. major problems include carbon emissions, water resources, energy (oil) and land usage. He said that unfortunately policy is still being formed behind closed doors by special interest groups.

T. Boone Pickens gave his pitch for energy independence by using natural gas for automobiles.

Kevin Roberts CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi spoke about the death of brands and the birth of "lovemarks" which call for "loyalty beyond reason." We are moving in a "participation economy" (word of mouth turbo-charged by social networking) where the only two questions that count are:
1) Do I want to see it again? 
2) Do I want to share it?

George Lucas said that in his youth he was and wanted to be a race car driver and fell into movie-making accidentally after a car accident. He defined art as an emotional connection always involving technology (where voice and dance involve the least technology while movie-making involves the most) and said that our goal is to create knowledge and pass it to the next generation.

Comments

[Jack]

Thanks for the summary. Jack Bloom MIT Sloan '83