Hill is a management professor who studies the factors that lead to innovation. In her talk, she says that the key is being able to celebrate differences and generate what she calls a “marketplace of ideas.” It’s not about brainstorming and suspending judgment — instead, it’s about having constructive debates.
Hill highlights Pixar as an example of a company that has refined its creative process. At Pixar, “they have developed a rather patient and more inclusive decision-making process that allows for both/and solutions to arise and not simply either/or solutions.”
The leader of an innovative organization must create a space where even the lowest-ranking employees feel compelled to share their ideas. That way, everyone’s strengths combine to create works of collective genius.

If you’ve ever left the office after a full day at work and realized you got precisely nothing done, you can probably identify with Fried’s argument.
According to Fried, the author of “Rework,” modern offices just aren’t conducive to optimal performance. That’s because we’re constantly getting distracted — by our boss checking in on us, by pointless meetings, by coworkers with urgent requests, etc.
“You don’t have a work day anymore,” Fried says in his talk. “You have work moments. It’s like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits, because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there.”
To remedy this problem, Fried advises organizations to implement half-days (or more) of complete silence, during which employees can work uninterrupted. Moreover, he recommends doing away with most meetings entirely so that people have time to actually think.

In his talk, Sinek, a leadership expert, asks why the modern workplace doesn’t look more like the military. The answer, he says, boils down to a difference in management strategy — in the military, leaders put their subordinates first.
“When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first,” he says, “to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen.”
Sinek argues that the key elements of any successful organization are trust and cooperation. That way, employees spend less time competing with each other and more time collaborating to protect themselves from the potential danger outside. It’s the leader’s responsibility to create a culture like this, starting by putting the organization’s interests above their own.

Torres has spent years analyzing what makes a great leader. What she’s found is that companies are investing more resources than ever in leadership training, but are failing to produce effective leaders.
That’s possibly because they’re ignoring three fundamental questions, which she summarizes in her talk:
1) Are you anticipating new trends that will affect you and your team?
2) Is your network diverse, made up of people who are very different from you?
3) Are you brave enough to change your strategy, even though it’s made you successful in the past?
The idea, she says, is to prepare yourself “not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow.”