World Business Forum

CREATIVITY

One of the world’s leading authorities on creativity, innovation and personal development, Sir Ken Robinson’s work is dedicated to helping unleash the full potential of people and organisations around the globe. He is the bestselling author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, and Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life. 

Cultivating Creativity

• An analysis of the revolutionary times in which we are living and why creativity and imagination are more important than ever before.
• How to start thinking differently about ourselves and challenging common misconceptions around our own creativity.
• Rethinking outmoded ideas about the nature of intelligence and what it means to be intelligent.
• Revealing the characteristics that today’s most creative organisations share.
• What leaders need to do to create a culture of habits that promote creativity and innovation.

INNOVATION

Daniel Lamarre’s talent for international business development spans a long career in creative industries, culminating with his current position as president and CEO of the Cirque du Soleil where he is responsible for nurturing the delicate balance between the company’s global strategy (across five continents), its financial growth and stability, and the integrity of its culture and values. 

Leading Innovation

• Keys to sustaining culture of innovation and creativity over the long term
• How to search for, attract and develop the best creative talent on the planet
• What it takes to marry the needs of disparate groups and interests, and find positive outcomes for all
• Strategies for growing and succeeding globally while staying faithful to your core values
• Why the best leaders are storytellers: How it pays to make it personal

PEOPLE

One of the most respected business leaders of our age, Alan Mulally served as president and chief executive officer of Ford Motor Company from 2006 to 2014. Mulally led Ford’s transformation into one of the world’s leading automobile companies and the #1 automobile brand in the United States. He guided Ford in working together on a compelling vision, comprehensive strategy and implementation of the One Ford plan to deliver profitable growth for all of the company’s stakeholders. Prior to joining Ford, Mulally served as president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and president of Boeing Information, Space, and Defense Systems. 

Cultural Transformation

• Developing and communicating an inspiring vision that will unite and focus your people
• How to ensure accountability and collaboration: Creating a safe environment for honest dialogue
• Rethinking external relationships with suppliers and customers:  From win/lose to win/win
• Paving the path for outstanding execution:  Relentless implementation based on facts and data

PERFORMANCE

FIA World Endurance Champion and two-time Monaco Grand Prix winner, Mark Webber is one of motorsport’s most popular and high-profile stars. He enjoyed 12 years at the pinnacle of a sport that requires extraordinary levels of personal preparation, teamwork and constant innovation. In that time he notched up 215 races, nine victories and helped Red Bull Racing to four consecutive Constructors’ World Championships. 

Succeeding in an Ultra-Competitive Environment

• The mental and physical preparation required for worldclass performance
• Staying ahead in the face of elite competition
• Analysing the dynamics behind a champion team
• Balancing risk and reward: Knowing when the moment is right to put everything on the line
• Why the human factor remains so important — even in a technology driven sport

NEW MANAGEMENT

Chip Conley is the founder of Joie de Vivre, the second-largest boutique hotel company in the world, which he ran for 24 years. His success in a notoriously volatile industry was based on a philosophy that recognised the most basic needs of both their clients and their employees, creating a business focused on transformation and relevance. Today, as the head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb, he shares his proven methods with hosts in almost 200 countries. 

Leading Transformation Through Purpose

• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Why delivering on the unique, higher needs we all have as human beings is the ultimate differentiator for leaders and organisations
• Tapping into the power of self-actualisation to create peak performance
• Aligning the development of your people with the purpose and path of your company
• Becoming a disruptive player: The importance of focusing not just on customers’ expectations and desires, but also on their “unrecognised needs”
• Lessons from Airbnb, Joie de Vivre and other purpose driven companies like Google, Whole Foods Market and Southwest Airlines

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Author of the influential books Who Can You Trust and What’s Mine is Yours, Botsman is recognised around the world for her visionary insight on how a new era of trust and technology is changing the ways we live, work, bank and consume. Rachel Botsman designed and teaches the world’s first MBA course on the ‘Collaborative Economy’. She is currently designing a new course on ‘Trust in the Digital Age.’ She is a regular writer and commentator for The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Guardian and more. 

The New Rules of Trust in the Digital Age

• Why trust is fundamental to every action, relationship and transaction — and how to embed it into the fabric of an organisation.
• Understanding how the rules of how trust is managed, built, lost and repaired is rapidly changing in the digital age.
• Be it data breaches or misinformation, automation or algorithms, why technology can feed our deepest fears yet embody our greatest hopes.
• Lessons from disruptive companies like Airbnb, Facebook, Uber and Apple on how to gain and lose customers trust.
• Developing new mindsets and principles that will transform how we think about trust, innovation, risk and transparency.

LEADERSHIP

Award-winning professor and director at the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, Friedman teaches practical lessons on how to foster cultures of innovation and achieve sustainable, measurable results as an inspiring leader. His most recent book is Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life.  

Total Leadership

• Achieving “four-way wins” — improving performance as a leader in all domains of life (work, home, community, and self) by finding mutual value among them
• Being real — acting with authenticity by clarifying your values and vision
• Being whole — acting with integrity by respecting the people who matter most
• Being innovative — acting with creativity by experimenting with changes that serve the interests of stakeholders in all parts of your life

EXECUTION

Chris McChesney is the global practice leader of execution for FranklinCovey and one of the primary developers of “The 4 Disciplines of Execution®”. For more than a decade he has led FranklinCovey’s design and development of these disciplines, impacting hundreds of organisations internationally. Through this period of significant growth and expansion, Chris has maintained a single focus—to help organisations achieve results through improved execution. 

Defining and Executing Strategy

• Defining your strategy: The challenge of focusing on the wildly important
• Why strategy and execution are two sides of the same coin
• The principal obstacles to effective strategy implementation and how to overcome them
• Revealing the four disciplines of execution and how to go about installing them in your team

MARKETING

Kelly Peters is the CEO and co-founder of BEworks, the first management consulting firm dedicated to the practice of applying behavioral science to strategy, marketing and operations. She has overseen the launch of several new business ventures that capitalised on insights into consumer behavior and is passionate about bringing scientific thinking to business. 

Behavioural Science and the Consumer

• The evolution of behavioural economics into a powerful tool for business
• From pricing to product design, from user experience to sales — techniques for tackling your biggest marketing challenges
• How to apply the scientific method to align your strategy with how your consumers think and act
• Provoking the behaviour changes in your consumers that will lead to the results you desire

TECHNOLOGY

Fusing her engineering background with an intuitive understanding of how society is likely to respond to new technologies, Shara weaves the implications of technology innovations into powerful narratives that can be applied to every industry. She is the founder and CEO of Market Clarity, an award-winning technology analyst firm that provides insight, intelligence and advice on all aspects of the telecom and emerging technologies markets. 

Technology and the Future of Business

• The changing world of 2030 — Understanding how technology will impact jobs, security, and privacy as well as providing incredible business opportunities to commercialise these concepts into innovative new products and services
• Capitalising on the future, now — Thinking outside the box, imagining the world in 10–20 years
• An engineer’s view of the future — How society is likely to respond to the new world of work
• Staying up to date with exponential advances in technology:  Why Augmented and Virtual Reality will be big business
• Avoiding futuristic dystopia — Addressing business threats associated with emerging technologies: AI and Robotics
• Going into the future — What will it mean to be human?

STRATEGY

Vivek is the academic director of Executive MBA programs at the Melbourne Business School. He has been actively involved in the strategy consulting arena, having advised the boards and senior management of many private and public institutions, in Australia and internationally, on issues ranging from real options in valuations to designing organisational architectures. An applied game theorist by training, he has taught strategy, innovation, negotiations and leadership on MBA and executive education courses at MBS, Monash University, AGSM, UCLA and Yale University. 

Strategy, corporate venturing and organisational architectures

• What methods can and should firms use to construct strategy as a portfolio of bets
• The importance of corporate venturing and how to marry that with traditional internal R&D and other innovation processes
• How to align organisational architectures to ensure strategy, incentives and contracts, structures and processes and culture are all geared towards value creation and capture in tomorrow’s world