‘Power of the Crowd’ In November, TED and The Hufington Post announced what they called “an exciting experiment” — to take place every weekend for the next year — in which a theme is introduced, linked to a TEDTalk, and opened up for viewers to write their own posts, leave a comment, and ask questions. In addition, graphic artists are invited to illustrate the essence of an idea visually — and, according to a news release, “the speaker behind the talk will be online chipping in to the conversation.” TEDWeekends (hufingtonpost. com/tedweekends/) is designed to take the best of TED, known for sharing great ideas in talk form, and combine it with The Hufington Post, “famous for amazing perspectives generated by its passionate audience. Together … there’s a unique opportunity to do something significant: Take a great idea, and use the power of the crowd to make it greater still.”
You were able to rise to prominence by speaking up for what you believe. How did you do that? Where did that courage come from? My time at the Cambridge Union debate society helped me overcome my fear of public speaking — and of my thick Greek accent. That experience gave me the tools for the much taller order of speaking up for what I believe in.
Online learning and exchange is clearly something you value. As you look toward 2020 and beyond, what do you think learning will look like? The brave new world of new media has opened up new universes of opportunities — allowing us to connect with people far away and in circumstances vastly different than our own. And when it comes to learning, examples abound. There’s the education entrepreneur Sal Khan, who started the online Khan Academy by posting videos on YouTube to tutor his cousins. And the fact that more than 200,000 people signed up last year when Stanford offered its most popular computer science classes for free, despite the fact that they didn’t get credit.
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ON THE WEB In this short TEDWomen talk, Arianna Hufington explains why she’s so keen on getting a good night’s sleep: convn.org/ Huff-sleep.
What are your dreams for the 21st century with regard to every human being having the opportunity to reach their potential, to have more equal opportunities for all people on this Earth? Are these big dreams possible? The big dreams are possible. In order to get to them — and get to them faster — we need to, of course, keep talking about what we lack and have too little of, whether we’re talking about jobs, or opportunities, or good ideas coming from our leaders. But we need to start talking much more about our surpluses, like our creativity, ingenuity, and energy. Only then will we arrive at the solutions we so desperately need. I think the civic activist John Gardner said it best: “What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”
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Susan Sarfati, CAE, is CEO of High Performance Strategies LLC (sarfatihighperformance.com), which focuses on organizational assessments, innovative thinking in organizational strategy, leadership and management, moving from ideas to execution, and building a human- focused learning culture. She served as CEO of The Greater Washington Society of Association Executives. She can be reached at susan@ssarfati.com.