INBOUND 2013 - Arianna Huffington Keynote

Key Takeaways

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you so much that was such an incredible incredible video and it really brought a special energy in the room and I saw a lot of people put their iPhones and their blackberries down uh let's keep that way for those of you who have not heard me before H this accent is for Real uh it's been the bane of my existence I I struggled um for years especially when I lived in England and went to school at Cambridge and I was laughed at and basically I didn't relax about my accent until I moved to the states and met Henry Kissinger and he said to me never worry about your accent he said in American public life you can never underestimate the advantages of complete and total incomprehensibility so I'm really excited to be speaking here with you I feel that um oh my speech is H down on the floor I feel that speaking about leadership to a group of young and all their leaders at A Moment Like That which is incredibly turbulent uncertain and despite Nate silver genius completely unpredictable is a remarkable opportunity to really talk about leadership in some new ways and for me if you look at leadership now it's a little bit of a split screen world let's get my jacket off and get going um you basically have on one screen an amazing number of leaders who are very smart High IQs H great degrees making terrible decisions in business in media in politics basically look at Washington it's incredibly depressing it's a it's really looking again and again at people who seem to be incapable of making anything but suboptimal decisions about our biggest problems and then you go into American workplaces or workplaces anywhere in the world and they are largely fueled by burnout sleep deprivation exhaustion a a kind of very male model sorry guys of success which is working 247 driving yourself into the ground and ending up with a corner office and a heart attack in your 50s Not a great model so on the other side of the split screen is just an amazing new world that's emerging of people and companies that are realizing that in fact we need to find ways to renew ourselves if we are going to be really creative leaders because you cannot really manage creativity you have to manage for creativity it you have to create a space in which creativity can emerge if you read the biography of um Walter that Walter Isaacson wrote of Steve Jobs Steve Jobs very specifically talked about how it was after Zen meditation it was when he had stopped dealing with whatever was coming in that he was able to create a space to come up with all these ideas that led to the iconic products that we are all using today Bill Gates famously has think weeks when he leaves all his devices behind and goes up to the mountains and things many great leaders that we know of and many that we don't know of have some way of tapping into their own wisdom and creativity and that requires really redefining success because right now success is mostly defined in terms of two metrics money and power and that's like a two-legged stool if you see success purely in these terms sooner or later you're going to fall off that stool so I started talking recently about a third metric of success which consists of our wellbeing because you know what if we don't take take care of our well-being and our health our human capital basically nothing else really matters our wisdom how do we tap into that wisdom that we all have inside us but very often we are so disconnected from it our capacity to wonder to celebrate life to to look at life you walk down streets now and most people are not looking at anything except their iPhones or even just listening to something on their iPods it's as though we're afraid of space and silence and also our ability to give back which was what this amazing video was about that's really what makes a complete life but the way we define success the way many companies are run and led does not promote these other values it just promotes the first two and that's why you have this language of War metaphors in Corporate America you know we're killing it we're crashing it you know the whole sort of darwinian thing going on and as a result people are living in a constant fight or flight mode and now my new role models in life are gazel I want you to look at gazel so here's what happens with them if there is a danger you know a leopard appears or something gazel run like crazy the minute the danger is over they graze we just need to learn to graze we are running all the time we are running even even when there are no leopards or lions or anything this is like the mode we are in so as a result I'm Not Who is doing [Applause] that um you know I'm not surprised that um the CEO been bound I was following him on Twitter dares and he tweeted in the middle of the night last night that he could not sleep he said he just gave this um great presentation he talked to everybody afterwards and he could not sleep and his um hashtag was I hate insomnia so first of all ders just go to the Huffington Post sleep section we have an enormous amount of things that you can do to be able to sleep beautifully like a baby tonight also another thing take a nap I don't know where you are but take it take a 20 minute nap you know if you are tired it's much better to stop take a nap and then get back to your day at the havon post we have two nap rooms and at first you know everybody was saying to me we have the great shahen here who does some of our best financial reports in so you can attest to that at the beginning everybody would say nobody's going to be seen walking into a nap room in the middle of the afternoon now they're perpetually booked we have to open a third one and I must say the other day I was walking by one of them and I saw two people coming out of one of the nap rooms you know I thought to myself whatever it takes to recharge [Applause] just don't tell HR but my point is that if you look at what leaders have written about their mistakes Bill Clinton famously said that he made his biggest mistakes when he was really tired he did not specify what mistakes those were but if you look at if you read a biography of Winston Churchill or Leonardo DaVinci or JFK they were great Nappers the point is how do you reconnect with your own energy renew yourself and then get back into your life get back into all the things that you love to do but not from a place of exhaustion and burnout burnout is the disease of our civilization and if I can talk to the women in the room women will have to lead the way out of it not because men aren't going to be huge beneficiaries when we are out of it but because you guys have designed the world we're living in and it's not really working you know it's not working for men it's not working for women it's not working for polar bears it's not working for anybody so if we are going to really cultivate leaders who will be able to take us through these turbulent times they need to be able to first of all see the icebergs before they hit the Titanic that's leadership everybody can see the iceberg after it it has hit the Titanic Aaron Collin who was the CFO of lemon Brothers just before lemon Brothers went bankrupt wrote a very moving piece in the New York Times recently in which she described her life she said she had no life she was working around the clock her marriage was destroyed her relationships were destroyed and the thing she didn't say is that and Limon Brothers went bankrupt so that's the thing that I want everybody to understand it's not like it's a tradeoff like I'm just going to build this great company and the hell with my relationships and my life and my health no you can no longer do that because the world is moving so fast change is happening at such overwhelming speed that if you're not really connected with your own wisdom your own intuition if you're not able to listen to what um Steve Jobs called the whisperings if you're not going to be able to tap into the Zite guys to know what the needs are before even your customers know what they need people didn't know they needed an iPod did they if you don't know all that you're are not going to be able to Be an Effective leader that's why I love the name inbound because inbound means also going inward into yourself it's not all about being outward our lives are so outbound at the moment we need to make them more inbound [Applause] in fact the great philosopher platinus in the thir Century said that there were three forms of knowledge and there were opinion science and illumination now opinion and science data we are swimming in we are drowning in but illumination and wisdom is exactly what we need desperately more than ever right now and I love going back to the Ancients because the great thing right now is this combination of ancient wisdoms and modern practices and whatever it is that you're creating remember there is a lot of wisdom we can tap into and bring it back into whatever new we creating and when we launched the hington post in 2005 it was really going back to some of the best things of Journalism of communication of Aesthetics we actually hired someone who was um designing New York covers to design the cover because we wanted a more old-fashioned type phas you walk into this convention hall and it's great that it's old and you going to the new one by the airport and it's like I'm sorry is anybody here from that place because it just doesn't seem human so bringing in the ancient and the modern together in every sphere of life is incredibly powerful and whenever we are creating something new it doesn't mean we are abandoning something old at Halos for example the thing that I love the most is that we can be a journalistic Enterprise and be a platform that we can have 850 journalists and reporters and Engineers around the world but we can also have tens of thousands of people who otherwise might not have a a voice have a voice and one of my favorite things is when we discover something on somebody's blog that gets like a few dozen readers and then we ask them if we can move it on the Huffington Post and it just goes crazy I mean there was a post that's my favorite I I urge you all to read that we posted last week by a mother called the day I stopped saying hurry up she has a six-year-old child and she was writing how she used to say to her daughter hurry up hurry up and have your breakfast hurry up and get dressed hurry up and go to school hurry up and go to bed and she suddenly said this is the way to just drive her crazy at the age of six and that's how we lead our lives and she wrote that and suddenly it has over a million likes and 7 million people have read it and it just took off and that's the magic of the internet that's the magic of what can happen right now that somebody with something to say that resonates can really take off and in fact I want to invite all of you who have something to say otherwise you would not be here to say it on the Huffington Post and we don't care where else you say it it's not about exclusivity it's about distribution it's about making it available to Millions more people around the world and to make it easy for you to bypass the Huffington Post growing bureaucracy I am going to give you my email address which is Ariana with one R and two n's at huffingtonpost.com that's what happens when you found a company you get the good email address so send me anything about your sleep habits and your marketing habits because they are connected and in fact um when the title of my speech that was chosen was leadership from politics to the boardroom I actually wanted to at the bedroom because leadership in many ways starts in the bedroom I mean my bedroom for example is a completely technology free zone I never take my devices to bed I never take iPads iPhones blackberries I don't charge them near my bed because I feel it's imperative to be able to have uninterrupted renewal time not to actually be tempted if if you're going to be waking up in the middle of the night for whatever reason if you can't sleep like dares last night he was tempted to get his iPhone or blackberry and tweet because m d it must have been really close to your bet which is an absolute no no if you go to the Havington post sleep section and the truth of the matter is it's great to read real books does anybody here still read real books great so I only read real books by my bed and you create that kind of atmosphere of disconnecting from your day renewing yourself and getting back into your day with new energy and New Passion and enthusiasm rather than dragging yourself through the day isn't that the worst feeling when you really sometimes want to crawl under your desk so so men have actually to a large extent been responsible for that again because they have somehow equated sleep deprivation with virility I had dinner with a with a guy recently who bragged that he had only gotten four hour sleep the night before and I didn't say it but I thought to myself you know what if you had gotten five this dinner would have been a lot more interesting and that has always led to to what is has been called time famine that we are all walking through life feeling that we are running out of time that it's always later than we think and it's a terrible way to live your life in fact in many surveys when they ask people what they want more of the question is often answered by saying time people want more time more time for themselves more time for their children more time for their families more time for their Hobbies they want that more than they want more money so the truth is that when we redefine success Beyond money and power to include all these other elements of well-being and wisdom and wonder and giving back then somehow time opens up for us and we don't live life through that breathless way as though we are missing out of on something and it's very hard to lead from that place because that's a place where you always feel like you're are behind and if you're behind it's really hard to also lead another thing that's very important here is being able to complete projects now I discovered early on in life that you can actually complete a project by dropping it and this has been incredibly useful to me for example I thought that I was going to learn German I thought I was going to become a good skier I thought I was going to learn to cook and one day I decided I was actually never going to do any of these things so I dropped them so when I go skiing now with my friends or my children they go skiing and I sit by the fire and read books and I feel [Applause] fabulous so you just have to decide what are you going to put your energy into and what you're not going to put your energy into and that's just as valuable because if you pretend to yourself that you are one day maybe going to put your energy into skiing or cooking or whatever but you're not really going to your subconscious treats this as an incomplete project so you need to give your message to the to your subconscious that this is done we're done with that and that also means I mean I leave movies in the middle I leave plays in the middle I decide that this I'm never going to finish this book it's not interesting enough it's fine you can do all these things just do them with Clarity this movie is Dreadful I am I'm I'm working out it does not deserve another 15 minutes of my life and also this relationship how many people stick to relationships for whatever reason I mean I for example was very much in love with a man in my 20s who was uh twice my age and half my size but that's another story love is blind and by the time I got to be 30 and I really really wanted to have children and he decided he really really wanted to have cats and and no children and I decided I really wanted to have children so I left and because I didn't trust myself to stay in London where we lived at the time and not go back to him I left and moved to New York and really everything that happened in my life H my children the Huffington PA being here speaking to you today happened because a man wouldn't marry me remember that because very often the worst things in life the things that seem terrible heartbreaks at the time are the best things that could have happened to you because they open doors to other things that otherwise would not happen so remember that because you know life only makes sense when you look back life doesn't really make sense as you are living it and one of my favorite poets that I love to read um in in bed is roomie and roomie said something that I love which is live your life as though everything is rigged in your favor you know how often we go through life acting as though everything is rigged against us a acting from a kind of victim Consciousness as though things are happening to us and that's a very disempowered place from which to live and from which to lead you cannot lead from that place because you know what every day things are going to happen that you don't like hi Nate Nate silver I don't know if you're here yet but this is a big prediction that I'm making right now I'm predicting that everybody here will have things happening to you today tomorrow the day after that you're not happy they're happening to you so the only thing we're in control of is our attitude to what is happening to us and if we can move to a place of imperturbability it's a big word for a Greek girl but it's a fabulous word because you you can really practice to be in that place and whatever happens deal with it from that place it's an incredibly powerful place to lead from because whatever happens you kind of expand to include it you are bigger than whatever happens to you the alternative is to contract the minute something happens and then you're smaller than what just happened to you and you see leaders are able to take the most adverse circumstances and turn them around they're able to take criticism and move on despite that and it gets easier and easier and easier trust me I know when when we launched the hington post on day one who had terrible reviews one of one of them I've learned by heart um it said the hington post is an unsurvivable failure it is the movie equivalent of jile Heaven's Gate and ishar all rolled into one and the person who wrote that review a year later sent me an email saying I was wrong and the havant has become an indispensable part of the internet can I write for you and I said yes because you know what is the worst thing you can do that totally saps your energy is to hold grudges holding grudges is like drinking [Applause] poison there is so much Science Now around that that there is so much science around living in the moment and being present the whole science of mindfulness that it is beyond any any doubt that if we can actually be every day present in that day we're at our most powerful and this is actually ancient wisdom again the Bible says Let the dead bury the dead the evil of today is enough don't carry it with you into the next day I mean one of the worst worst little needle point pillows that if I see in anybody's living room I'm really tempted to take it away and burn it says living well is the best revenge really that's that's such an other directed way of living your life that's again how people lead their lives in some way based on what somebody else wanted them to do you know how when people change careers which I love sometimes when they decide you know what I'm not happying doing that I'm doing that because that's what my mother wanted me to do or my neighbors wanted me to do or a magazine I wrote in my teens it's not who I am and updating our images of ourselves is absolutely key and defining success according to what is important to us because that's our life and we can't leave anybody else's life and you know I had an amazing mother who um taught me a lot of things including the fact that failure as she used to say is not the opposite of success failure is a stepping stone to success and as Seth Goden said in his speech here you know if you're going to if you say that failure is not an option he said then success is not an option increasingly today when everything is constantly changing and evolving we need to be able to create teams that are willing to fail and as Leaders we need to be able to say failure is part of the process of leading to Great products um great companies and if you're not willing to do that you're not really willing to do something great and that also involves patient one of the worst things that we've done in Corporate America is the whole system of quarterly earnings the fact that every company now that is a public company is expected to beat expectations every quarter has led to some of the worst decisions in [Applause] companies because instead of leading your company for growth grow for Progress for great new products you are leading your company based on beating the expectations of some stock brokers in Wall Street as Jeff bezo said screw you and it was fantastic for seven years Amazon made no profit he had the guts to say I'm going to do it my way if you don't have the guts to say you're going to do it your way don't go public inbound are you listening I hear you're considering an IPO you don't have to do it just keep raising money you just raised enough and if you need and if you need more and if you decide to go public do it your way don't do it the way that so many companies are doing and they are destroying themselves and in the process destroying our economy because if you hear people saying you know how we are coming out of the hoods and things are doing better really millions of people are still out of work millions of people are graduating from college and they can't get jobs we are living in a in a state of absolutely Dreadful upward Mobility which is really become downward Mobility we're number 10 in upward Mobility around the world we're now behind Spain and France and being behind France in upward Mobility is a little bit like France being behind America in cound and afternoon sex it doesn't make sense [Applause] [Music] so one of the one of the major problems we're having when it comes to finding that place of wisdom and strength inside us is technology now I speak as somebody who runs a 247 Technology based media company so I'm not putting down technology I think technology has been absolutely amazing magical and really in a way has created a Garden of Eden of communication and connection but there is a snake in the garden and that snake is hyper connectivity and this is the time for us to just really take charge and learn to disconnect from technology in order to connect with ourselves otherwise what I'm seeing around is incredibly troubling I was at the airport at LaGuardia today h waiting to H take my plane to come here and across from me was a mother with her probably 5-year-old little girl and we're waiting there for about 45 minutes they did not look at each other they did not exchange a word they were both buried in their smartphones and I wanted that child has probably grown up like that and what is this doing to her brain and how is she going to be able to have human connections I mean I have two daughters who are in their early 20s and at least they had a lot of years without smartphone so they have kind of a memory of what that world is like but what happens if you have no memory of what that world is like that's why we launched another section on the hington PO post called screen sense where we really work with parents to help them deal with their with screens and their children and it starts with dealing with screens and the themselves it starts with ground rules we have always had ground rules of no devices at the dinner table period and it really helps to be able to have the patience of human communication also email you know what there are so many studies that over 70% of the emails you're dealing with every day are utterly useless maybe maybe not % but there are at hington post who have certain ground rules which include for example that nobody is expected to answer emails after hours or over the weekend to everybody who works with me um knows that I may send emails because I get them off my to-do list but I'm not they're not expected to respond if there's something urgent we'll find them we'll call we'll text but 99% of the time it's not urgent and to create a culture where you are expected to be always on because you can is just to create a culture of burnout and a culture of burnout can never be a culture of creativity even if you create something it's not going to be a culture of sustainable creativity the thing that is different now is that you can't create create a great product and rest on your laurels you have to constantly be Reinventing what you've created the Havington post is unrecognizable today from what it was in 2005 we now have 70 sections we are in eight countries we're going to be in 15 I just looked at our latest com score data and we are 75 million UVS and 40% of that is from outside the United States if you're going to be a media company you have to be a global Media company today but you cannot be constantly inventing and Reinventing if you operate from burnout and that is what is something that needs to be taught in Business Schools and increasingly it is being taught in business schools that is really one of the most amazing things that happening Bill George who teaches mindfulness in leadership at Harvard has been very eloquent about the fact that what used to be thought of as California flaky mindful meditation yoga is now being introduced as a leadership tool and we had our first mik brazinski and I co-hosted our first third metric conference in New York on June 6th and we had CEOs there like John M from hall foods and um mark bertolini from Etna talking about that and and very often these leaders come to these realizations from personal experience Mark bertolini for example was your typical hard charging fueled by burnout CEO of the third largest health insurance company in America and then he had a terrible skiing accident and for one year he was hooked on narcotics and then he disc covered yoga meditation acupuncture and it was such a transformative um effect on him that he made these benefits available to his 34,000 employees and he said that what he wants to do now is to make these benefits available to everybody so these are like the personal moments that transform how leaders think and what we want to do is to accelerate these aha moments I had my own aha moment in 2007 when in the middle of burning out myself working around the clock trying to be a good mom taking my daughter around colleges and not using my Blackberry during the day and instead working through the night I actually fainted from exhaustion hit my head on my desk broke my cheekbone got four stitches on my right eye and that was my wakeup moment and after that you know I became an evangelist for a lot of these things I started becoming an evangelist for sleep when I started talking about sleep in 2007 people were like thinking this was quaint now there is unbelievable incontrovertible evidence that sleep is a leadership tool it's a performance enhancement tool or as I told um the graduating class of Smith when I gave the commencement there last May it's time to sleep your way to the [Applause] top so that's why we're having a growing number of companies and leaders going for digital detoxes acknowledging that they need that but let's do it for real you know how many times people put out this away email you know I'm going away I'm not going to be answering emails and then to minutes later you get an email from them does that make you feel special no it just means that people can't really do it just do it the world will be there when you return and you are going to be recharged and ready to deal with it from a more creative more balanced and my wiser plays and now 25% of American companies have introduced some form of mindfulness for their employees not because they're incredibly charitable but because they recognize the impact on the bottom line stress is causing American Business $300 billion dollar a stressed out employee is costing 46% more than in in terms of health benefits than a healthy employ and for women the numbers are much worse that's why we women cannot afford to climb up the ladder in the same way men have done it forget the ladder anyway as Cheryl Sandberg wrote in her book it's not a it's not a ladder it's a jungle gym and my point is it's not just about leaning in it's also about leaning back to recharge and then lean in again you know there is a great French expression um that the French is in case there any French people here they can see my accent is better in French than in English which means lean back in order to lean to jump higher which is what cats do you know Lean Back recharge and then you jump higher so if you look at all that you if you think of it after all the idea a that success and getting to leadership positions is just some kind of straight line is a male invention a straight fly clim it doesn't work you know it's actually much more complicated and very often it can be having a lot of detours um failing losing a job getting to another job it's much more of a dance and being open to possibilities than just blind L climbing up some ladder so that also is what makes it easier for us to overcome our own self-doubts as Leaders because very often we ignore that we ignore that as you look around often leaders self-destruct more than they are destroyed by someone else Anthony Winer anyone Dominic straan I remember the the headline on The Huffington Post the day after Dominic straan was caught at the Sofitel Hotel um it was OMG IMF basically incidentally why is it always man who was the last woman who self-destructed in that way just saying but I really believe that if they had actually taken more time to deal with their their inner demons they would not have self-destructed in those ways and often it's also dealing this is more of a problem for women I'm afraid with what I call the obnoxious roommate living in our head you know those voices of inner doubt because we women have an even greater tendency to judge our elves you know all human beings have it but men find it much easier to shut up that voice and watch a game or something and move on and we women have to wrestle that voice into the ground so learning to deal with that obnoxious roommate learning to deal with our negative fantasies you know as Montaine said there were many terrible things in my life but most of them never happened so learning not to sort of of exhaust ourselves through all these mind games that we play is just an incredible ritual for us as Leaders because then it means we have our energy available to us at all times to really lead and create and that's just an incredible place from which to live you know the the Greek philosophers had three big questions they asked the first one was how do we govern The City the second one was what do we need to know and the third was how do we live a good life but modern philosophers have really asked stopped asking the question how do we lead a good life and as a result they've let us all kind of reduce a good life to money and power and yes when you go to people's f funerals and memorials they talk about other things they talk about the third metric they talk about how wise somebody was how kind someone was how much they gave to their Community they don't say you know this person was worth $3 million $225,000 dollar when they died have you ever heard that in a memorial oh you know this person ended up being an SVP amazing no so if we can take you know these values that we eulogize people about after they die and actually incorporate them into how we live we would actually change the [Applause] world you know Seth Garden um said in his speech here that generosity is going to become more and more important in marketing because people don't want to hear from somebody they think is selfish and also because there is something happening in the Zeitgeist you know John aul before he died I summed it up by saying we are moving from a period driven by competition and survival to a period that's going to be driven by cooperation and meaning and in that place qualities like humanity and generosity are going to matter much more and that's why Adam Bane recently when they asked him how he's going to monetize Twitter he said three things humor humanity and huge deals Humanity generosity these things are going to become increasingly important as our the times we're living through are going to be more and more turbulent and uncertain and that's why the kind of leaders that we need right now if I can end with that I have to remember what Archimedes my great compatriot said he said give me a place to stand and I can move the world now that that place is inside each one of us it's that place of strength wisdom peace we all know it we've all been there and we all also know that most of the time we are not there and that's why actually we even launched an app at the hington post yeah there is an app for that and we called it GPS for the soul and you can download it for free from the App Store and it gives you a proxy for your stress level your heart rate variability and then you can launch a guide with the things that help you course correct that help you distress it can the guide can have anything that you love it can have poetry and music and pictures in my case it as pictures of my children when they were young and unpr problematic and and it can take just under a minute but that short time can help you reconnect with yourself you know how your device when it's out of range sends you a little signal that says restore connection we need to say that to ourselves restore connection because if we are operating from a disconnected place we cannot really lead leaders find that place that Archimedes talked about that place of wisdom strength and real connection and they lead from that place and from that place we can truly create Miracles and change the world thank you [Applause] w