by Gary Hamel

First off, thanks so much for being part of the MLab’s inaugural conference.  I hope you thought it was a worthwhile use of your time.  Several of the participants have sent me emails suggesting ways of carrying our work forward.  I’ll send you an e-mail in a few days which outlines some potential next steps.  My hope is that some of these activities will of interest to you.

Since our time together, I and my MLab colleagues have had two priorities:  (1) To pull together a compendium of conference-related materials that can be sent to you—as a record of our discussions in Half Moon Bay; and, (2) to produce an initial summary of the conversation we had around “management moonshots.”   On the first item, it will take a couple of weeks to edit all the video material that got generated, and a bit longer for Grove (David and Kristen) to compile all the slides, presentations and graphical outputs into a summary volume.  These materials will be sent to you, or made available online, as soon as they’re available.

Synthesized notes from all pre-Conference interviews.  

 Up to date based on responses received as of 5pm Pacific Time on Tuesday May 27th.

By Gary Hamel

I don’t read People magazine. It’s not that I’m disinterested in the lives and loves of Paris, Owen, Katie, Tom, Julia, Zac, Nicole, Keith, Jen, Ben, and all the other estimable icons of 21st century haut culture; rather, it’s that I seldom have the time. Friends and colleagues expect me to read the business press, and mostly I do. I am seldom asked, however, to render an opinion on Britney’s over-exposed anatomy or Lindsay’s latest run-in with the law. Nevertheless, the other day I found myself in the gym with 15 minutes of workout remaining and no unread pages left in my Financial Times. So, making sure I wasn’t seen, I slid the November 16 issue of People out of the magazine rack (Jane Seymour—Staying Sexy at 56!) and retreated back to my treadmill. Imagine my shock, when I discovered Nicholas Negroponte’s name on the contents page. Nick is the co-founder and long-time director of MIT’s Media Lab—and as far as I know, a model of propriety who’s never seen the inside of the Viper Room. But he’s also a driven man, a crazy visionary who dreams of closing the digital divide by getting laptops into the hands of the poorest children in the world.

Negroponte’s “One Laptop Per Child” non-profit started producing computers in earnest last month, and is deploying the first batch in Uruguay, where a presidential initiative aims to get a computer into the hands of every school-age kid. For $399, first-world donors can get one of Negroponte’s cute, but seriously capable laptops, while sending another machine to a poverty-stricken child.

So there I was, abusing my middle-age knees while reflecting on the fact that a passionate boffin old enough to pull a Social Security check might just succeed in connecting the planet’s most disadvantaged children to a world of knowledge. And it struck me that while Nick Negroponte is certainly unusual, he’s hardly unique. There are other folks around the world—thousands of them, maybe millions of them—who’ve committed themselves to their own moonshot goals. Think of Craig Venter’s quest to unpack the human genome, of Bono’s campaign to focus attention on Africa’s crippling debt load, of Angelina Jolie’s work on behalf of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (when was the last time you saw her emerging blearly-eyed from a Bentley at 2 am?), or of all those NASA engineers plotting the next mission to Mars. And when one ventures out beyond the spotlight of celebrity-dom and billion-dollar budgets, one finds a legion of similarly valiant folks who are ardently picking away at obstinate and out-sized problems.ⁱ