There were three principle speakers the first morning of the World Business Forum - Bill George, Bill Conraty, and Patrick Lencioni, and they perfectly illustrate the generation-gap problem that afflicts discussions of management and technology these days.
The consensus around the Bloggers Hub was that Lencioni gave by far the best presentation, as a stand-up presenter. George had good material, although he didn't have the energy or style that Lencioni had. But Conraty was not so good, either in terms of style (a somewhat plain and boring PPT presentation) or substance (he seemed to miss the ball on CEO pay and on social media, for instance).
And if there's a central unifying theme from this morning, all three speakers do think that the predilection of businesses to focus on short-term results rather than on long-term value is crippling innovation, productivity, and growth, and will prove to be a competitive weakness for those companies that cannot shake it off. This, of course, is music to Martha's and my ears, because we've been writing about (and ranting about) what we call the "crisis of short-termism" for years now, at least since we published Return on Customer in 2005. The subtitle of our 2008 book, Rules to Break & Laws to Follow, in fact, is "How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism." And we spend a lot of time inside this book drawing out the same basic lessons that George and Lencioni emphasized this morning.
We even have a whole chapter on "recovering lost trust," in which we tell the same story about Jet Blue's heroic post-ice-storm actions that Bill George told us. What we didn't know (and I only learned from Bill last night) was that David Neeleman, Jet Blue's founder and CEO at the time of the ice storm service disaster, apparently lost his job as CEO partly on account of some members of the company's board thinking he had admitted too much fault with his apologies, making the airline look bad. Boy oh boy, talk about a generation problem! Whoever that board member was, I will absolutely guarantee it was a male, and over 50 years old - probably over 60, actually.
This "generation gap" problem was very evident in the differences between these three WBF speakers. Conraty was the older, uninformed generation of big companies, focused on execution primarily, not too sensitive to the underlying issues of CEO pay inequity, and seemingly oblivious to the implications of social media in our economy and the workplace. George is an older guy but very open-minded, focused on understanding, embracing, and "trying out" new things like social media, rather than simply rejecting these unconventional ideas as too untried. I think Bill Conraty must be a great CEO (or HSM wouldn't have invited him to speak), but my guess is he's exactly the kind of executive who would have held David Neeleman accountable for being too forthcoming with customers and giving the firm a PR black eye. I hope I'm not being too harsh on Conraty here. It's very possible (likely, in fact) that he's a heck of a lot better CEO than he is a presenter, per se.