At this point in his career, Manwani understands that profit isn’t enough to sustain a business. Every organization, he says in his talk, needs to make a difference in the world. It’s up to organizational leadership to ensure that this happens.
Manwani is the COO of Unilever, and when he started there as a management trainee in the 1970s, he didn’t quite get this notion of changing people’s lives while making money. Today, he helps lead Unilever’s program on hygiene and health that reaches half a billion people across the globe.
“You need businesses that can actually define their role in society in terms of a much larger purpose than the products and brands that they sell,” he says. “Values and purpose are going to be the two drivers of software that are going to create the companies of tomorrow.”

Anderson’s talk is an ode to the power of extreme networking. According to Anderson, a Forbes columnist, great things don’t happen through individual effort. Instead, she says in her talk, it’s about connecting with people whose strengths complement yours, so that together, you create something big.
She calls it becoming an “opportunity-maker.”
Opportunity-makers, she says, are “not affronted by differences, they’re fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset.”
That’s how we end up creating things like drones and curative drugs, she says. “They can be devised by more people and cheaper ways. … It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling.”

Gross, a serial entrepreneur, says there’s a reason most startups fail: It’s not the right time for them to exist.
Gross analyzed 200 companies (he helped start 100 of them through his company Idealab) and found that the most successful were all started at a point when there was a genuine need for their product or services. In fact, he says in his talk, timing accounted for 42% of the difference between success and failure.
Other factors — like your team and your business model — matter a lot. But Gross advises entrepreneurs to think hard about whether it’s exactly the right moment to launch their business.
“The best way to really assess timing is to really look at whether consumers are really ready for what you have to offer them,” he says. “And to be really, really honest about it, not be in denial about any results that you see.”

This unconventional talk is given by an Israeli symphony orchestra conductor turned business consultant. Talgam outlines what organizational leaders can learn from conductors, namely that you don’t tell your team members what to do so much as create the conditions that allow the team to lead itself.
In other words, your role as a leader is to enable your employees (or musicians) to shine.
“You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body. You have the story of the audience as a community. … You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience. … And all those stories are being heard at the same time. This is the true experience of a live concert.”
By treating your employees as partners rather than true subordinates, you create harmony among your team and give it a better chance of success.”