Awarded this evening to Tesla Motors, with Diarmuid O’Connell (VP of Business Development and the first non-engineering hire at Tesla). We both committed to the company in the same month, June 2006.
And Geoffrey Moore, of Crossing the Chasm as MC for the evening on the far right.
Benioff tried to wear the little bronze bowler hat
— closeup shot, and he went on to give a very inspirational talk on his approach to philanthropy at the personal and corporate levels.
THE CHURCHILLS 2013
On the evening of September 26th, the Churchill Club will present THE CHURCHILLS, an annual event that draws inspiration from extraordinary people, companies and teams within four themes: innovation, leadership, collaboration, and social benefit
By highlighting excellence in these four key areas, the aim of THE CHURCHILLS is to inspire others to positive action.
Each inspirer will be present at the event to share with the audience their perspectives and insights around the theme for which they rose to the top each year, in conversation with an interviewer of their choosing.
Legendary Silicon Valley author, speaker and advisor Geoffrey Moore will act as master of ceremonies. Honorees will accept the awards and will be interviewed by a very special guest.
The areas of excellence are:
Game Changer: For indispensable technology and business innovation (company)
Spirit of the award: "You changed how things are done or viewed and there’s no going back"
The 2013 Game Changer Award is presented to: TESLA MOTORS.
Accepting on behalf of Tesla Motors: Diarmuid O’Connell, VP of Business and Corporate Development.
Mr. O’Connell will participate in an interview with Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Global Benefactor: For irrepressible vision and positive impact on society (individual)
Spirit of the award: "Thanks for thinking big"
The 2013 Global Benefactor Award is presented to: MARC BENIOFF, Chairman & CEO, Salesforce.com.
Mr. Benioff will participate in an interview with Geoffrey Moore.
Magical Team: For collaborative breakthroughs resulting in an irresistible product (team)
Spirit of the award: "You guys nailed it"
The 2013 Magical Team Award is presented to: MARS ROVER TEAM.
Accepting on behalf of the Mars Rover Team: David Blake, Principal Investigator, CheMin instrument on Mars Science Laboratory, and Jim Erickson, Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager.
Mr. Blake and Mr. Erickson will participate in an interview with Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute.
Legendary Leader: For inspirational leadership and contributions to others’ innovation and
success (individual)
Spirit of the award: "Couldn’t have done it without you"
The 2013 Legendary Leader Award is presented to: PETER DIAMANDIS, Chairman & CEO, XPRIZE; Co-founder & Executive Chairman, Director, Singularity University.
Dr. Diamandis will participate in an interview with Paul Saffo, Managing Director of Foresight, Discern Analytics.
Thanks! And here are some new photos from the audience of my folks, and my friend Tom from the
high-school years in Dallas… It was a fun mini-reunion:
and the on-stage discussion:
The Shell logos overhead were surreal in this context as Shell has run a GameChanger program for many years, where they ostensibly empower managers to take on Moonshots.
As the main sponsor of this event, they brought a Formula Race car shell and clearly invested in this. They audibly groaned to see that we chose Tesla for the "Game Changer" award, and my first question on stage beckoned Diarmuid to share why he joined Tesla from serving the U.S. military — he saw the deaths from the U.S. engagement in the Middle East and "it’s all because of oil. Those people are dying because of oil and I wanted to do something about it."
The hypocrisy of Shell’s sponsorship of technology events and "game changing" is too ripe not to mention. Of course big oil companies are not going to change the game. They never will. It’s as fundamental a law of business as you’ll find. And among big oil companies, Shell has proven to be the one of the worst when it comes to commitment to change.
When the fears of a carbon tax waned, they pulled back from renewable projects across the board. One example:
"When pushed to choose between profit and survival, the oil giant chooses profit – irrespective of collective consequence.
Shell said it couldn’t ‘make the numbers work’ for wind power. There’s something so blithe – and enormously telling – about the excuse offered by the oil company Shell… And they have, of course, been able to "make the numbers work" for heavily polluting tar sands." — Guardian
I was on a stage with a Shell executive at TED, at the lunch they sponsored, and I had the change to challenge her directly about Shell’s withdrawal from sustainable energy projects while sponsoring technology conferences. I compared it to cigarette companies sponsoring medical conventions.
They seem to have a renewed focus on this. When I posted about the Churchill Club awards on Facebook, the ads popping up on my wall were purchased by Shell:
Viewed with a cynical eye, the Shell approach to changing the game appears to be nothing more than a shell game.
They could be honest, like Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi oil minister for 24 years:
"The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil.
Technology is a real enemy for OPEC. Technology will reduce consumption and increase production from areas outside OPEC.
The real victims will be countries like Saudi Arabia with huge reserves which they can do nothing with. The oil will stay in the ground forever."
> "And among big oil companies, Shell has proven to be the one of the worst when it comes to commitment to change."
This observation reminds me of the conversation we had about Monsanto…only you were on the other side! It also reminds me of the UCal-Berkeley study from 2011 that said that the wealthy tend to lack empathy, and the related Forbes article about how low-empathy people (including outright psychopaths) tend to do better in business. Some people literally lack the brain circuitry for empathy, so harming other people simply doesn’t matter to them–or they are able to squelch any misgivings under a mountain of denial. This self-centeredness tends to be magnified in corporations, because there is a distance between the harmful actions and the people who are affected, so there is even less opportunity for personal responsibility. As the Milgram experiments showed, even "decent" people can be induced to act against their natural empathic tendencies; and as Hitler showed (at the extreme), it only takes a small number of sociopaths at the top of an organization to steer a large number of people in an unhealthy direction. The employees at Shell want to keep their paychecks, so they are willing to keep their blinders firmly fastened. Denial is a powerful force!
Yeah, there has to be a massive cognitive dissonance in oil and cigarette companies, both feeding an addiction. But those blinders are localized in my opinion. The long arc of human history and cultural evolution is that we expand our circle of empathy, from kin to tribe to community to all peoples and, finally, all sentient beings with sufficient neuron count. =)
Monsanto is a bumbling boffin when it comes to marketing to farmers and the population at large, but I regard GMOs as products that are essential to save the planet, quite the opposite of pumping oil to burn in sub-scale 20%-efficient engines. Thoughtful environmentalists like Stewart Brand agree with this dichotomy, and I spent some more time with him recently. Summary:
"The environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we have been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool. We make ourselves look a conspicuously irrational as those who espouse ‘intelligent design’ or ban stem-cell research, and we teach that irrationality to the public and to decision makers." — Stewart Brand
the problem with Cargill and Monsanto’s approach, more than anything else, is the subscription model, where you are required to buy next year’s seeds from them.
it conjures up a future where the GMO seed plants have overrun all non-GMO plants and the planet’s food security lies in the hands of one company. one can easily imagine a world where all the wheat DNA shows up as patented and the Supreme Court of course will insist a contract is a contract.
see ->
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/05/30/187103955/gmo-wheat-...
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/newsroom/2013/05/ge_wheat_detection.shtml
there is something fundamentally wrong with eating a food the main attribute of which is resistance to a chemical.
especially given the chemical is wiping out all the bees.
it also remains an undeniable fact that famine and food scarcity are entirely economic factors and have little to do with science. once the British left India, even though the population has increased we have not had any famine like in Bengal when the British were in charge.
the Republic of Ireland has had no famines either since independence from Britain.
stewart needs to face up to those two facts, about Britain.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1770
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
some of us still remember facts.
and in the China of today famine is also highly unlikely despite the population increase because Maoism is dead.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
http://www.amazon.com/Maos-Great-Famine-Devastating-Catastrophe/...
GMO food has zero to do with it.
p.s. am delighted 57 copies of stewart’s ‘Whole Earth Discipline’ book are available on amazon at the price of 1 cent. the book has arrived at it’s true value……
whereas his excellent ‘How Buildings Learn’ continues to be worth much more.
the market knows 🙂
> "The long arc of human history and cultural evolution is that we expand our circle of empathy, from kin to tribe to community to all peoples and, finally, all sentient beings with sufficient neuron count. =)"
Does that include cats? 😉
Until recently, I would have agreed with that rosy outlook, but now I’m not so sure. Old paradigms apply until they don’t. Is empathy like Moore’s Law, or is it like Blackberry’s stock price? Sociopaths are created by both birth and (faulty) nurture. The latter type seems to be increasing in number at an alarming rate, and that has much to do with the disintegration of the traditional family unit. The pace of technological change is faster than ever, and it is ever-increasing. The "creative disruption" that accompanies this change is both positive and negative. On the downside, it makes a lot of jobs obsolete, and that brings new economic pressures to bear on people and thus families.
In the past, civilization has managed to get past these obstacles and thrive. But at what point does the pace of disruption outstrip the psychological ability of society to cope with it? A psychologist called the effects of this disruption the "schizophrenization of mankind," and that was back in the 1950s. The world population was a lot smaller back then. We now have far more people, more pressing environmental issues, a more rapid pace of technological change, and more frequent conflict. When does it all reach critical mass? And how does the psychological impact on people play into this issue? It’s a kind of feedback loop: more disuption leads to more pressure, which leads to more fractured families, which creates more sociopaths. A single sociopath can do an incredible amount of damage to a large number of people. If we unwittingly create more and more of them, our circle of empathy might well collapse into a Machiavellian dystopia. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)
As for GMOs, I would feel a lot better about them if it were an open-source project. But it’s not–Monsanto is close to being a monopoly. How did Netscape fare against Microsoft? Monsanto, like Shell, is a company without soul or conscience, and with an unwavering focus on their profitability. Human benefit is merely a by-product, not a goal. I trust Monsanto with our agricultural destiny about as much as I trust the wolf with Little Red Riding Hood. They’re playing their own shell game.
here’s an interesting column from Government Executive this week –
http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2013/09/if...
And a timely article on the risks of Monsanto’s GMOs (in this case, corn):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/science/earth/a-disease-cuts-c...
“My theory is that there were a couple of hybrids planted that were selected because they had extremely high yield potentials,” said Dr. Robertson, whose research is financed by Monsanto and the Agriculture Department. “They also may have been highly susceptible to Goss’s wilt.”
Oops! Nature has a way of humbling you when you think you have it all figured out. I’m not against GMOs. But it’s a really bad idea to have one or two companies doing all of the engineering, and then controlling it all through patents.
here’s the parallel situation in the world of e-books.
the same people who want the world to buy the seed every single year have designed the e-book system.
"Stewart has called libraries “undeniably socialist” because books can be loaned out (for free!) many times, costing writers money from presumably lost sales. This is the same justification book publishers use for their distorted ebook pricing.
down with physical books! – is the concept…….
just like down with unpatented seeds!
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/10/how-ebook-pricing-hurts-us-...
Big oil, Big bio …ha … and I like Brand, except when he goes on that rant (which I supported for many years up until a chance meeting of Jeremy Rifkin on a long train ride NYC->Chicago, then lots of years of reading). Sometimes I wonder how much Brand is invested in Big Bio.? Monsanto’s monoculture model and phenotype is corrupted culture to the core, however they are just doing what their corporate charter charges them to do; its designed perfectly for winner take all capitalism. Not having the ‘insight’ or ‘intelligence’ to realize ecology affords economy (of man), not the other way around, makes a whole host of very bad crew members we must collaborate with on spaceship Earth.
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