Beijing Debate Abridged Transcript
The Debate begins with introductions from Mr. Heng Hock Cheng, Chairman of Shell Singapore, and moderators Andrew Stevens (CNN) and Robert Friedman (FORTUNE Magazine).
Heng Hock Cheng: "Today, we are gathered here in Beijing to talk about business innovation and the role such innovation has to play in the global economy. How appropriate it is that we are having such a discussion in China the world fastest growing economy.
"At Shell we are constantly looking at new ways to engage our stakeholders. So perhaps today's event is an example of innovation in practice. At the end of the event we hope to have a better understanding of the challenges we face in our daily business. And share our own perspectives and experiences during the course of the discussion. Thank you again for joining us today and sharing your views."
Andrew Stevens: "One of the good things about Principal Voices is it allows CNN, FORTUNE Magazine and TIME Magazine all to work together on this project so I'd like now to throw over to Robert Friedman my co-moderator, International Editor of FORTUNE Magazine. Robert."
Robert Friedman: "Thank you Andrew. On behalf of FORTUNE Magazine I want to thank you all for being here today.
"Innovation has become somewhat of a buzzword in the business community. What does it mean? It means change, it means invention, it means doing things differently to stay ahead of your competition. All of which seems kind of obvious and we all strive to do that in our businesses. And yet some succeed better than others and some fail miserably.
"I had the pleasure of meeting this morning with the CEO of Samsung Electronics, Mr. Jong-Yong Yun. And he has in the 8 years or so that he has been CEO of that company reinvented it in a spectacular way and turned Samsung from a manufacturer of cheap consumer electronics into a brand that is well established around the world now and represents cutting edge technology. This is a pretty remarkable transformation in a very short period of time. He did it by spending more money on research and development, he did it through a quite an effective marketing campaign and he did it through a lot of hard work and great leadership.
"And it's fitting that one of our speakers here today used to work for this guy. And is in fact partly, if not largely responsible for the marketing campaign part of Samsung's transformation.
"That would be Eric Kim, who is sitting over here. Eric told me before we got up here on stage today that inside the soul of a great engineer is a great marketer which struck me as an interesting comment, but a very true one and he is going to talk a little bit about innovation and perception as soon as we finish introducing the other panellists. I'm looking forward to what Eric has to say."
Andrew Stevens: "Our second panellist is described by Robert's magazine as one of the most powerful businesswomen in the world. I'm of course referring to Marjorie Yang, the Chairman and Chief Executive of the Esquel Group, the top end shirt maker based in Hong Kong.
"Marjorie is a mathematician and a banker who with her father in 1978 founded Esquel. A prescient move given the fact that it was also in 1978 that the former Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping unveiled the open door policy which really was the beginning of China's reconnection with the world. And in that year Esquel began."
Robert Friedman: "Our third speaker is Sir Ken Robinson. Ken is not really a businessman except I suppose in so far as he manages his own personal accounts. But he is a brilliant thinker about the subject of creativity which of course is what innovation is all about. He began his work in the theatre, has taught, lectured, written books and inspired many people in his crusade to get people to recognise that we are all creative souls and how do you unlock those talents in individuals starting at a young age by transforming an education system that by and large tends to defeat creativity rather than promote it. And his work in the UK on the what became known as the Robinson Report was a key document in trying to rethink education policy in UK. Ken moved to Los Angeles a few years ago, works with the Getty Museum and also travels and speaks to many different kinds of groups including this one here today and I think you will quite enjoy his remarks."
Andrew Stevens invites Eric Kim to speak
Eric Kim: "I would like to express my gratitude for allowing me to participate in this very important forum. I guess the topic that was given for me to discuss is this topic of innovation and perception which many of you might think what an odd combination but in fact I sort of view those two as sort of a almost two sides of the same coin.
"My career of 30 plus years has been in innovation R&D technologies as well as in marketing which deals with the perception side. And I'd like to talk about why I believe those two are so critically intertwined.
"I think it's a common accepted wisdom today that in order for businesses to succeed you have to innovate. So therefore companies typically make very big and long-term commitments in R&D technology innovation as well as in process innovation, manufacturing process to achieve competitive advantage in delivering better
"But there's is a third angle which I think is truly critical which is what you may call a perception innovation and there is actually two parts to this. One is really the ability to understand your customers, your market place better than your competition. And your understanding is really much more than simply asking customers what is it you want but really be able to project out as to what might the customers want, what might their needs be given their lifestyles given their situation given the choices that are available. And then as you bring your offering to the market place your ability to properly position your offering such that your intended customers embrace your offering and is willing to give you the necessary trust to accept your offering. Both two are critically important in any innovative process within the business.
"To me there are many examples of great technology great products that come to the market place and fail. And so simply focusing on one aspect and not the other is not sufficient.
"It is also the case that especially nowadays trying to differentiate purely on technology and on the product attributes alone is becoming more and more difficult because technology is changing very rapidly. And so really in many aspects the ability to differentiate based on perception is also becoming a key element to achieve market differentiation and market success.
"Samsung is a one classic example. When I joined the company in 1999 it was already a very, very big company. It was close to $20 billion in size, they had massive global manufacturing scale, tremendous investments in R&D. It had very strong portfolio of technology, it had many products and yet in the market place it was perceived as a low end, cheap commodity. Thus despite all that investment it wasn't able to command the kind of price position that would give sufficient profit to continue, and therefore when the Asian financial crisis struck it literally put the entire company in jeopardy. They had to go through some massive restructuring and coming out of that was the really fundamental realisation that they had to do more than be just great technologists, great manufacturers. They also had to be a great marketer and so there was a very concerted effort to build brand for the company.
"And really it boils down to identifying specific focus areas to really achieve substantive differentiation and the focus area for Samsung at the time was the mobile cellular phone. It really focused on coming out with a very, very innovative design and uniqueness and identifying select markets such as US and working closely with very few carrier partners to achieve penetration.
"I always tell myself to advise that perception is reality and reality drives perception and so when one focuses on innovation you also have to really focus on understanding your target and being able to position your innovation in a way that gets acceptance. Thank you."
Robert Friedman: "I neglected to mention in my brief introduction of Eric that he left Samsung last fall and is now working for Intel. What is your mission at Intel?"
Eric Kim: "My mission is to take Intel to the next era so to speak."
Robert Friedman: "Which is what?"
Eric Kim: "Which is what you may call the digital convergence era. In fact everything is turning digital, from a content perspective - every content is turning digital whether it be movies, or music or information content and with the broadband being available everywhere……there is this major confluence of traditionally separate segments such as the PC segment, the communications segment, the consumer electronics segments that are all coming together so the Intel challenge is to position itself as the continuing driver of innovation and leader in this segment."
Andrew Stevens: "On the product innovation side of this - you can sell a great story marketing-wise, but it has to be backed up I'm just wondering about consumer loyalty in this day and age. With Samsung for example - just how much did you have to keep producing new models almost for the sake of producing new models just to keep at that cutting edge? Just how important is that now?"
Eric Kim: "From a marketing standpoint, there are two aspects of marketing one is brand and the other one is product. Brand is something that's beyond any particular product. When you have a strong brand you can always bring up different products and you will have a better chance than those that does not have a brand in achieving market success. And as the new products come up more frequently, as the products are more sophisticated as the messages are more complex customers tend to trust more, rely more and more on the brand."
Andrew Stevens: "Are customers more or less loyal now do you think?"
Eric Kim: "Customers are very smart - I would never take customer loyalty for granted. No matter how big you are no matter how powerful you are you can't say well my customer is loyal and therefore I could take it easy. Customers are very demanding, they very smart. And now especially with the Internet one customer with one voice could be amplified throughout the world. And so in that sense the challenge is bigger, the challenge is more difficult.
"I believe it is absolutely critical that you not only have to continuously maximum leveraging what is possible from technology at the time but you have to compliment that with very strong marketing to continue to get the minds and hearts of your customers. So that when you do come out with products you have a better chance of being accepted."
Robert Friedman: "One more question over here, going back to Samsung, did you encounter any or much resistance from the Samsung executives to what you were doing or were you given carte blanche? I mean was there a struggle about how to get Samsung on the cutting edge?"
Eric Kim: "Samsung's history has been, as with many other Asian companies, very much in manufacturing. It started off as a contract manufacturer building for somebody else and then it grew more and more to build its own brand. But the concept of marketing really wasn't there. The basic mentality was: Well, if I make something cheap enough people will buy it. That mindset was very strong and frankly that mindset is quite common among a lot of the high tech companies and a lot of the Asian companies. If I make it cheap enough I can sell it.
"The problem with that approach is that you have a diminishing margin scenario so therefore you can never invest in the future because you never make enough money. So you have to get into a point where you're sufficiently differentiated and where the consumers are sufficiently willing to give you the necessary credit so that you can make enough money so that you can invest in your future. That's the sort of cycle you need to be in.
"I think it was the financial crisis that literally put Samsung at the edge of dying, that forced them to rethink everything. Yes, initially there was a major resistance, a major barrier, but on the other hand because of the Asian financial crisis there was also the view that they had no other choice. There was nothing else they could do but this."
Robert Friedman introduces Marjorie Yang and invites her to speak.
Marjorie Yang: "How does one justify ethics as part of a business strategy, particularly one that hopefully will make some money? I believe there have been a lot of people that have said that a business should be run as a business and forget about social corporate responsibility and all these other concerns.
"Now I'm going to try and argue that in the 70s we competed based on cost, in the 80s we competed based on quality, in the 90s we competed based on speed to market, other services. Now we have the ‘e' culture. It is ethics, environment, exploration, excellence and education. And all 5 of them are interrelated. Let me start from the last one but not the least - education.
"Within the company we have tried to build a culture of perpetually learning from our mistakes. Having cycles of learning that will help us to improve. Within the communities we have tried to help those who are not as fortunate as we are. In Xinjiang, where we broker cotton, collect cotton and do the spinning we realised that there a lot of children who are deprived of the kind of education that we all hope our children will have.
"So we started building some schools. And then one of my colleagues, a young colleague who is a good scholar himself said: Hey, I visited a lot of schools but there are no books in these schools. So we started donating libraries and then later on after donating about 3,000 libraries now, he came back and asked me to go judge a reading contest.
"And I asked why am I judging a reading contest and he said well, because in many of these schools after we give them the books they are put on a shelf for decoration and the children are not allowed to touch it so that they wont get it dirty. So we had this reading competition. Well it's given our people a sense of pride and that sense of pride is very important in the other activities that we are engaging in the company.
"And excellence. Excellence is related to productivity. When we try to do something well. The electronics industry, I believe, has a measurement that is called a First Pass Yield. Well companies like Quanta they are going after 99% First Pass Yield. Apparel garment factories tend to have much lower First Pass Yield. I guess it's because we work with less expensive material and traditionally labour cost has been very low.
"So simple you just have the garments reworked. So First Pass Yield has traditionally been very low. Now what we decided to do was to train the workers and have industrial engineers go in and bring up the First Pass Yield - that's related to excellence.
"But as a consequence we are also able to predict and forecast production plan much better. Because now we have a much stabler system therefore our overtime is no longer as high as it used to be, therefore helping the company to become compliant to labour law.
"Exploration. Exploration for us includes R&D, Product Development, use of technology of all kinds including supply chain management, information, for speed.
"The environment We have been very concerned about the environment. I think in the 80s when I visited one of our factories and I saw a fish pond with dead fish and I asked what happened to the fish and without blinking an eye the supervisor said this is next to a finishing mill which is ours and obviously the fish will die because of all the chemicals and dye stuff in a finishing process.
"Well today within the company there is a tremendous sense of pride because we try our best to not damage the environment.
"Workplace safety is another issue in under environment and the first time I brought up the issue of AIDS everybody thought first of all this is not proper dinnertime conversation and secondly why do we have to talk about AIDS. Well we have to. We have to be prepared. We have 47,000 some workers and many of them are young girls and they are inexperienced. We have them living together so we have started a series of education programmes for young and older girls and the men to educate them on general health as well as how to protect themselves. Why does this matter? Again I believe this creates a sense of pride and a sense of belonging.
"Ethics. I think that many of the issues I brought up earlier relates to ethics. This is very important for me because within our own company and I believe many in the society we have a many young people who want to believe that being ethical, having principle is fine and we can make a living and a good living, but many of them are in doubt. Particularly in China where we've been through a period where all of us have to do things, bend rules because the rules were made in a way that you could not follow. So now when things have changed sufficiently for us to be able to have principles and really stick to them and fight for rules to be changed. I believe this is very important and it's made everything I have tried to do in the company, with the company - is to give the next generation of managers who are going to be leaders that we can be ethical and we can make money. Thank you."
Robert Friedman: "You started out by saying that you feel that all these things that you are doing to build an ethical company give you a competitive edge. And you mentioned that there is a certain pride that your employees take in doing these good things. But it's also probably a little expensive to do some of these things maybe not the cheapest way and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about where the competitive edge comes from?"
Marjorie Yang: "I am not sure that I can say for every activity that we do it is short term cost effective. However I believe that short term many of them are cost effective. The common myth is that if you adopt these standards the cost will go up. There are some costs that probably the saving will be more long term."
Eric Kim: "I can give one very critical example from Intel's perspective why being a good citizen is so important and we spend a lot of effort in this regard. We are in a business of essentially human capital. That is what it is about - being able to attract, retain and build creative talents. And being ethical is one of the major elements required elements to attract people. That is becoming more and more important."
Robert Friedman: "One more question Marjorie to get back to this notion of innovation. So this desire to build an ethical company has obviously pushed you to try to innovate in new ways. Can you just describe some of the things you do. Here's a shirt that I'm wearing. Behind the scenes, behind the seams, what's going on that I'm not seeing that's innovative in the way you have created this business?"
Marjorie Yang: "Innovation is key to making it all happen. There are a lot of old habits that we've adopted and how to get people to think out of that box, because the first thing people say is that's the way we've been doing it all along. Whatever country you talk about. So now you've got to get them to try to think differently and try to be prepared to abandon the old way of doing things and get into an uncomfortable zone. That's why it's useful to have a woman as a CEO because they think I'm mad and therefore quite willing to humour me and try new things. So we have had this company that's now been through a lot of transformation to go from a very traditional set way of doing things into doing things in a very different way. I in fact had one customer say to me that when you first took over we weren't sure if you were going to make it because you seem to think quite differently. So I think innovation is key in this whole transformation.
Robert Friedman introduces Ken Robinson and invites him to speak.
Ken Robinson: "One of the things that strikes me as I travel about, and I travel about quite a bit, is that very many adults think they are not very creative. It's rather astonishing proportion of adults, I find, who think they are not very creative. And this seems to matter rather a lot because as both Marjorie and Eric have said, and in fact the whole theme of this session, is that innovation is absolutely critical to the future of business of every sort and yet it seems to be a hard commodity to come by very often.
"There are really 3 propositions I think that I think are embedded in the conversations here about innovation. One is we're all of us now facing a revolution, I mean a real revolution not something that is similar to a revolution, but a real full blooded revolution: its an economic revolution and a social revolution and its comparable to anything we've seen in history and perhaps exceeds it in some key respects.
"Secondly in order to meet this revolution I think we have to completely rethink our attitude to human resources and particularly to our conceptions of intelligence. And in particular I feel our education systems have to be completely transformed if we are to face the challenges of the future.
"Thirdly to do all of that we need to have different strategies in place, we need to think differently about how we educate people, we need to think differently about how we organise our companies and organisations.
"Let me just say a couple of words about each of these 3 things. In terms of the revolution it seems to be pretty plain that we're being driven forward now at a relentless pace by at least two things. One of them is the rate of technological innovation and Eric's talked about it and Marjorie referred to it. I gather in the year 2000 the number of silicone chips that were produced on earth was 10 to the power 17. I have no idea what this number means by the way but it sounds terribly impressive. But I was told recently its roughly equivalent to the world population of ants - which is a lot isn't it? And I say this knowing you have no way of contradicting me either. What are you going to do? Check? But it's a lot.
"But the real horizon now, even though we are so impressed by what technology has achieved, I think is probably even more breath-taking. When I was at school we had a television at home that we weren't allowed to look at it very much and we did eventually have a telephone. My daughter, who is 16, when she's doing her homework she is online, she has a cell phone she's taking calls, she's texting, she's downloading from the internet, she's burning CDs and she's watching the television. I don't know if she's doing any homework, but she's running an international empire so I don't mind really.
"She looks back at my childhood as being quaint technologically in the way that I look back at my parent's childhood as quaint. Children being born today will retire in about 2060. I don't think any of us has any conception what that world is going to look like and certainly not people who work in the high tech industries - they don't know either what it will look like all we can guess is that its going to make what we currently think terribly sophisticated appear to be quaint.
"So technology is a huge driver here in almost every respect. The second driver is population growth and it's particularly evident in this region. In 1800 the population of the world was 1 billion. It took the whole of history to get to a billion. In 1930 it was 2 billion so it took a 130 years to get to the second billion. In 1970 the population of the earth was 3 billion and on the turn of the millennium in 2000 it was 6 billion so the population of the earth has doubled in 30 years.
"It means effectively that in the so called developing world the work force will increase by 50 percent in the next 30 years by about 1.2 billion. I think in China the estimate is that 50 million people will come onto the job market in the next 20 years. This is a huge demographic challenge. Well innovation seems to me to be vital for at least these reasons. One is that companies that want to survive have to keep coming up, as Marjorie's company is coming up with, and as Eric's is coming up with, new ideas for products, new ideas for services and new ideas for systems as margins become ever tighter.
"So innovation internally is absolutely vital. But at a national and global level it's absolutely essential if we are to keep pace with the growth in jobs, if we are to keep pace with the cultural challenges that are being presented by these processes of innovation.
"Well one of the major ways that people think they can do this is through education and they are right, education is the biggest investment we can make in our own future. The problem as I see it as I go around is that most countries are making a mistake. The mistake is that they tend to believe that we can face the future simply by doing better what we did in the past, we just have to do more of it.
"Do you know in the next 30 years more people will pass through formal education worldwide than since the beginning of history. If you add them all up until now there will be more of them in the next 30 years. One spectacular consequence already is a tumbling decline in the value of qualifications.
"The problem now is that graduates are not terribly good at things you need them to be good at. They can't think in a creative way, they are not very good at communicating, they are not very good at working in teams.
"Now just in short I think the reason for this is that our whole system of education and I think its true globally, the reason why I compare Europe to Asia to America is that there is a remarkable similarity in the way we educate people. We tend to educate people so to speak from the neck up in our education systems and to focus on a particular type of academic ability. There is a very similar profile of subjects in most of our school curricula. One of the consequences is that children end up eventually not being able to think creatively.
"There was a very interesting study published a few years ago of divergent thinking. Now divergent thinking is not the same thing as creativity in every respect but it is an aspect of it. You know what it is: it is the capacity to come up with unusual association of ideas, to think analogically or to think metaphorically. It stands in contrast to linear thinking.
"This study was of 1600 children in America at the age of 5 and on the test they conducted I think if you scored over 85 percent you were considered to be a genius at divergent thinking. Just tell me what percentage of 5 year olds would you think scored at the genius level or higher for divergent thinking from that test? It was 98 percent.
"The interesting thing was that they conducted the same test with the same children 5 years later at the age of ten. What percentage would you say then? It was 38 percent. They conducted the same test with the same children 5 years later when they were 15. Then it was 10 percent. So a sharp decline.
"They then did a control with 200,000 25-year-olds - just gave them the test once. What percentage of those would you say scored at the genius level for divergent thinking? It was percent. Now these are the people you are hiring to take you into the future.
"The point is children are born with immense creative capacities, but they lose them by the time they are educated. I heard this wonderful story of a 6-year-old girl. A teacher was doing a drawing lesson with a group of 6 yr olds. And there was a girl at the back of the class who rarely participated, was not very enthusiastic about school. But while she was in this drawing lesson she was completely absorbed with what she was doing. The teacher went up to her and asked what are you drawing and the girl said I'm drawing a picture of God. And the teacher said but nobody knows what God looks like. And the girl said: they will in a minute. Isn't that great? Of course what happens is that by the time they get to be 25 she's lost all confidence in her conception of what God might look like because she will have had 20 years of people telling her that's wrong or that's not the right answer.
"So here's my point really. We are born with immense creative capacities. We systematically root them out of ourselves in the process of educating people and now business and national systems are desperate to re-in store creativity in all of our people.
"I think we have to do two things. One is we have to look very hard at our attempts to reform education. I think this is a huge challenge in Asia and especially here in China as China tries to move forward in this new economy. But it's also a global challenge. America is no better at this, Europe is no better at this. On the whole we are educating people as if we are still facing the industrial revolution - which by the way required a largely manual work force and a minority of people doing intellectual work which is way we had the system structured the way it was.
"Just a final comment. Creativity I think is plagued by misconceptions. I suppose there are three key terms. One is imagination, which is the capacity we all have to bring to mind things which aren't present. Second is creativity, which is the application of imagination to issues or challenges, problems of various sorts; and innovation is putting these things in practice.
"There are three misconceptions about creativity which I think plague our education institutions and our businesses. One is that only special people are creative. Actually everybody has real genuine creative capacities - the problem is locating them and giving people confidence that they have them
"The second misconception is that creativity is only about certain things. Like it's about the arts or it's about - in business it's about marketing or design. Actually you can be creative at anything and everything, anything that involves intelligence.
"And thirdly there is the view that there isn't much you can about it - that you're either creative or you're not. Truthfully there is a huge amount you can do to realise creative capacity.
"So in essence what really want I to - my kind of signature theme here is that the future is about helping people to become more creative. There is a bottom line economic reason why we should do it, there is an ethical reason why we should do it and it's also a matter of straightforward sustainability and survival.
"The one thing that stands in the way of our long-term prosperity is a failure of our collective imagination and it seems to me that in bringing together the economic with the cultural with the ethical and the educational is our only way into the future. We cant predict the future but I think if we reassess our approach to human resource we can at least help to create it and make sure we last more than half a decade."
At this point Andrew Stevens opened the debate up to the floor.
Man 1: I'd like to ask Ken a question on creativity. If you look at the American school system it does strike me that other than terrorism - I think the second greatest threat to our society in the United States is a school system that is not turning out kids who can do the jobs of the 21st Century. The question is: Where do you start?
Ken Robinson: "One of the problems for education is that it is based on a linear model and I think we should be investing much more not in conformity, which is what we tend to do in schools, but alongside it on divergence and creativity.
"Now this doesn't mean people running wild and tearing down the social structure. What it does mean is that we should be putting more value on people thinking differently, particularly on entrepreneurship on people taking responsibility for their own lives and careers and on encouraging local enterprise.
"Because truthfully the magnitude of the task that faces China, 50 million coming onto the job market - that's going to lead to all kinds of difficulties if people go through everything they think education requires, they go right through the system they get PhDs and they still cant get a job. I think that's happening increasingly around the world.
"I think these are very really seismic shifts. And you're quite right there are huge resource problems in education, huge managerial problems huge administration problems, but I think we've got to get on and deal with them. But we wont solve the problems if we are fixed on the wrong questions.
Man 2: Speaking as the father of a five year old you've got me very concerned with this dampening creativity he's going to go through. So I'm curious that while we talked about reforming education systems, does that education start at the parents, at the corporate level, where does it start and does that intertwine if you will with the comments you made on technology. Part of us want to keep kids away from computers and on the other part feels you're keeping them away from something they are born into, as you said the digital era. So I'm curious as to where is the priority: do you release them into that or do you hold them back?"
Eric Kim: "Intel has done very extensive studies in China because we are in the business of providing PCs and technology to broader based audiences. And what was very interesting from the Chinese household - this is the average household not the high end upper class but the middle to lower middle class household. A lot of the parents felt that computers were disruptive for the children. And that was one of the key reasons they refused to buy computers for their children. So we had to actually think of some innovation in our product that would satisfy parents' concern."
Marjorie Yang: "How to use it? It's even a problem for teachers there are so many computers lying around in schools that are not properly used - that is why the media lab work is very important because how do you use the computer in a constructive way is so critical otherwise all that resources goes to waste."
Eric Kim: "I guess my point is that I think technology is a very critical element, but it is only an element. I think the other relevant pieces have to come together and figuring all that out is the challenge."
Ken Robinson: "Very quickly, my son when he was 14 asked me if he could have a computer he is now 21 so this was 7 years ago if he could have a computer if he did well in his exams and my wife and I said no. Not because you can't have a computer, but because we said you don't need a present to do well in your exams. All his friends were getting them. We said just do well. And he said what will be my reward. I said we'll thank you for it. Anyway he did do well and in the end we did get him a computer because I wanted one really - there were such great games on it. We set up the computer for him and my daughter who was 4 years younger was out in the garden she found a piece of a rope in the shed and asked if I would make a swing and I did. My son went down half an hour later and forgot the computer and played on the swing with her. Actually they spent the whole summer on that swing doing tricks, showing tricks, asking us to come have a look and they had a wonderful time because it was very physical interactive thing.
"And that is one of the problems with computers that they are not, there is a whole other world other than computers they are a part of it. I remember saying to my wife I wonder if we said to James that if you do well in your exams you can have that piece of rope in the shed would that have been the incentive he was looking for. Probably not. But they still remain children in the middle of all of this and have other needs as well.
"But I think when you asked about your child I think its recognising that your children are more than academics. Academics are important but it's a very narrow view of intelligence and often the most successful people you meet often didn't do very well at school I find. Some of the most creative people I know failed at school and its because - not because they were wrong but because schools were looking for something particular."
Robert Friedman: "I think the message is implicitly that you have to change, you have to innovate or you die, or you lose. That's a pretty stark message but it's a challenge to all of you in business and to all of us to find the ways to transform your companies whether its Samsung going from cheap goods to cutting edge, whether its Marjorie taking her company in the second oldest profession in the world and turning it into a modern, ethical, different kind of business or whether its unlocking the creativity in your employees, in your children that Ken has been talking about. These are all challenges and the stakes are high and in this global world that we're living in they are even higher. It applies to all companies and all countries and I think there is no subject that is more vital to business today than this one. And I want to thank our panellists and to borrow from Marjorie a job well done. Thank you.
