TEDx Presidio

April 8, 2011

What does business 3.0 look like? How are successful companies reshaping the landscape and the workplace? With a packed schedule of speakers, TEDx Presidio was a heavy hitting dose of trailblazers from the Bay Area and beyond.

Hosts Deb Nelson of Social Venture Network and Darian Rodriguez Heyman of Code Green Agency, started off the day with the question: What’s the difference between a dreamer and a visionary? How do we integrate better models in business to move beyond A to B and complete the journey from B to Z?

The following is a kaleidoscope  of the day's speakers and their ideas and stories (a few speakers are omitted):

Ari Derfel, Co-Founder of Gather Restaurant and Executive Director of Slow Money spoke about the power of having a clear vision and end goal in sight. The vision behind Gather Restaurant was to create an all-organic restaurant within a like-minded community in the heart of downtown Berkeley where people could celebrate life together. With that specific end goal in sight, Ari and his Co-Founder Eric Fenster realized their vision within ten years. Ari spoke of a parable in which a Cherokee elder describes to her children two wolves within each person, one of hope, one of fear. When the children ask which wolf will win, she replies, “The one you feed.”

Rick Audry of New Foundry Ventures spoke about the misrepresentation of Darwin evolution theory being purely about competition; that ultimately cooperation is key for business success and it's time to shift away from the old ideas about non-profits saving the world and businesses messing it up.

Kelli McElhaney of Haas Business School spoke compellingly about how brand is linked to 80% of market share, as evidenced by the precipitous decline in BP stock after the oil spill and how Walmart, as the 23rd largest economy in the world, is driving the push towards foods with less sugar, fat and salt for their customers.

Melanie Nutter of the San Francisco Dept. of Environment spoke about the efforts to alleviate “range anxiety” for prospective electric car purchasers through their current program installing 60 electric car stations through the city. For bikes: making biking within the city safe for an 8-year old to an 80-year old; increasing bike use to 20% of all trips by 2020. Other items of interest: Upcoming development in San Francisco: the new rail station under construction, the Treasure Island project, and a new development at Hunters Point that will be built by a workforce sourced from local residents. Also, free energy auditing for businesses within the city and efforts to liberate city info at DataSF.

Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms spoke of his company's path to $350 million a year business in all-organic yogurt. Stonyfield has such a loyal and engaged customer base that although they have no standard marketing budget, they are on par with their competitors. They utilize many grassroots marketing techniques including an Adopt a Cow program and a Yotube video stream about the farmers from whom they source their milk. In their ever expanding sustainable efforts, they have recently shifted to plant-based materials for their yogurt cups.

Julie Hanna, of Kiva, spoke about her personal history and the roots of Kiva's purpose. Migrating from Egypt and experiencing first-hand both civil unrest and economic hardship as her family established itself here in the U.S., she spoke with authority about the need for access over pity or charity. Kiva was created to assist in providing  fair access for the “Forgotten Half” of the world which owns only 1 percent of the world's assets. Today, Kiva has invested $200 million in loans from half a million lenders and 98.6 percent of those loans have been repaid. Hanna called for business 3.0 to include the circle of bringing “humanity to business and business to humanity”.

Carlos Dominguez , Senior Vice President of Cisco, dazzled with clips of their video conferencing services around the world. From connecting international business to connecting U.S. soldiers with their loved ones, their video conferencing has made an impact. Some entertaining new projects: the introduction of enhanced reality business meetings, with overlaid names and relevant info on attendees at the virtual business table and the story of Cisco's first hologram presentation, which resulted in a thousand people rushing the stage  at the event where they premiered it.

Paul Woolford, HOK San Francisco, spoke about his work on the Mint Project in San Francisco, a design re-visioning project that will transform the Mint into a vibrant museum and the greenest National Historic Landmark in the U.S.  With an impressive history (it was a key part of the country's financial system and at one point held a third of  the nation's wealth in gold within its walls) and impressive original design (the Mint was at the cutting edge of design when it was constructed in 1904), much of vision for the new museum design is to maximize existing beneficial green features of the building, such as California's temperate climate. Says Woolford, “In a place  where it's 65-75 degrees, we spend millions to heat and cool buildings to 65-75 degrees.”  He also showed a photo taken after the famous SF earthquake; in it, a sea of rubble and flattened buildings with the Mint the only structure standing untouched on the horizon.

Kevin Surace of Serious Materials spoke about the extraordinary six month project his company completed on the Empire State Building.  Their company systematically re-processed and recycled all the existing windows of the Empire building in a shop they set up on a single floor of the building. They then installed more energy efficient windows made of the previous window glass. A great model of energy retrofitting of existing large scale office buildings. It can be done!

Lynelle Cameron of Autodesk showed us a system that empowers product designers with a dashboard that includes the environmental impacts of a product's materials and suggests alternative materials, creating a system where the value of sustainable design can be easily communicated to all other stakeholders in the production process.

Lukas Biewald of Crowdflower spoke about the power of modern technology to bring access to jobs for disabled individuals and others with barriers to jobs.

In the only presentation of the day that earned a spontaneous standing ovation, Back to the Roots Co-Founders Alex Velez and Nikhil Arora described their journey starting a business selling mushrooms grown on Peet's coffee grounds. The two young entrepreneurs came up with the innovative model during their very last semester at UC Berkeley when a professor mentioned  in lecture that mushrooms could be grown on coffee grounds. Poised for careers in consulting and finance, the two UC students took sharp career turns upon graduation and are now urban mushroom farmers. They have a growing distribution for their mushroom kits and products in Northern CA Whole Foods and Peet's coffee shops. The coolest part – their raw materials are a waste product (coffee grounds) and their waste is a value-add product (soil enhancement).  Young leaders crafting a truly sustainable business model.

Other amazing speakers & key take-aways:

Chip Conley, Joie de Vivre Hotels – Give all constituents (employees, investors, customers) a path towards self actualization (based on Abraham Maslow theories) and everyone wins.

Robert Rosenthal, Center for Investigating Reporting – He spoke of questions and tactics for insuring a continued high caliber of journalism to maintain our democracy. Proposed new models include deeper, longer term research and reporting with syndicated widespread distribution of those stories.

Jason Rzepka, MTV – Yes, MTV is a force for good. Educating youth about STD's, healthy relationships, voter engagement, and much more, Jason's team at MTV focuses on programming for social good. With such a devoted and engaged audience, their campaigns hit home  in big way with their viewers.

Maria Giudice, Hot Studio –  Business needs more DEO's, Designer Executive Officers, and design thinking is key to leading business in the right direction.

The gauntlet has been thrown for a better way of business, Business 3.0.  How does your business stack up with some of these leaders?  As TEDx host Darian Rodriguez Heyman asked:  What would you do if you could not fail?

Here at BetterWorld Telecom, we're excited at the opportunity with every organization and business to help them move closer to a work flow that supports Business 3.0. How? A flexible and powerful set of communication tools, provided by a sustainable company that walks the talk and lives the values of Business 3.0.

In Service,

Salem Kimble & The BetterWorld Team

Posted in: BetterWork Events General Blog

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