Thursday, 14 April 2005

Hear it from the BOSS: The Big Ideas (Sydney)

Transcript

This is an edited transcript of the panel discussion on Big Ideas held at the City Recital Hall, Sydney on April 14, 2005.

ADAM SPENCER: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Fantastic sight - 1100 people crammed into the City Recital Hall for the first AFR BOSS forum of the year, "Big Ideas in Business". But why wouldn't you come along to a venue like this, see an amazing panel, who I will introduce in a couple of seconds, dissecting these hot topics in the lap of comfort. We only wished we had installed a few more of those British Airways flat beds in the foyer.

Now, if you think about it, ladies and gentlemen, big ideas have always been what drive us forward. Probably the very first big idea was when one dude realised, "You know, I could rub two sticks together and create fire". This was followed soon after by the second big idea when a nearby guy thought, "Hey, that guy doesn't have any sticks left. I'll hit him with my stick. Now I have fire." And since then big ideas have driven us forward.

As a maths geek myself, the latest big ideas in my world have been those of quantum physics, things on the subatomic scale. Now, whether you consider these really big small ideas or really small big ideas doesn't matter. They are amazing stuff and they are driving us forward in areas of medicine and the like. And tonight, given such a broad compass of discussion, we will jump around between subjects.

I have noticed one thing in the three AFR BOSS forums I have done in the past: Leaders don't need to have the big ideas themselves; they just need to surround themselves with a group of hungry young go-getters to have the big ideas for them. So as your MC, I consider myself the leader this evening.

Our first panellist, seated immediately to my left, is a former CEO of Nine MSN and before that was Managing Director and Vice President of Apple Computer Asia Pacific. Since February 2003 he has been CEO of Microsoft Australia . Passionately committed to technology and to a number of charitable causes, he is just as much sheik as he is geek. Please welcome Steve Vamos.

Now, by a spooky coincidence, it was exactly the same time as Steve was taking over at Microsoft in February 2003 that one of Australia's most high profile retailers was lauding the internal promotion of "a talented leader and retail specialist" to their top position. Indeed, if you accept the proposition that "There's no other store like David Jones", then surely it follows that there's no other CEO like Mark McInnes.

Our ultra multi-talented third panellist is a member of the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia , as well as being a director of SBS, Woodside Petroleum and Coca Cola Amatil. Passionately involved in the arts and the Salvation Army, she speaks with vigour and knowledge on a host of subjects. But I must admit back stage, when I brought up the subject of interest rates, she did fall strangely quiet. Ladies and gentlemen, Jillian Broadbent.

Our next contributor is the Executive Director of the Australia Institute and he holds a PhD in economics, having held visiting academic positions from the University of Sydney all the way to Cambridge . July this year sees the publication of his book Affluenza , the follow-up to the highly successful Growth Fetish . Now, Growth Fetish was described by Noam Chomsky as "right on target" and by then NSW Treasurer Michael Egan as "silly, dangerous, left wing crap". He is a protagonist, polemicist and a host of other pretty persuasive P words, Clive Hamilton.

Now, when it comes to introducing our fifth panellist, I must admit that up until recently I thought the Australian of the Year award performed a very specific purpose: It was namely to honour recently retired, Australian men in their mid-30s who had been pretty good at hitting a ball - Steve Waugh, Pat Rafter, Alan Border, Mark Taylor, et cetera - but in 2005 we were reminded that there was a little known exception clause that occasionally allows Australian of the Year to go to world class, kick-arse, Australian scientists called Fiona, because Fiona Stanley 2003 was joined by the head of the Specialist Burns Unit at Royal Perth Hospital. Please welcome Australian of the Year Fiona Wood.

Now, surely, ladies and gentlemen, I hear you ask, there is no more room on the panel. How could the AFR BOSS forum on big ideas in business fit any more corporate talent onto the stage. Well, punters, we have done exactly that. Please welcome the man who may well be responsible for everything you drank today, from bottled water through to cola, via sports drinks, in fact may well have been responsible for any tinned fruit you ate as well, the Managing Director of Coca Cola Amatil, Terry Davis.

So our first key note address on big ideas in business - take it away, Steve Vamos.

STEVE VAMOS: Thanks, Adam. Good evening, everyone. I want to leave you with my big idea for business, which is about leadership in business, and the big idea that I would like to leave with you tonight is that great business leadership is being redefined, as leadership isn't one that goes with a particular view of hierarchy but it is leadership at all levels, leadership that extends beyond position of authority to a choice that anyone can make in an organisation and a behaviour that hopefully everyone within an organisation can display.

Now, traditionally when we think of great business leadership, in a sense the images, the behaviours, the personalities we think of are big - big bosses, big names, Jack Welch, Rupert Murdoch and other high profile CEOs, but those images and expectations need to be and are being redefined as we speak. The change that is occurring is occurring as we realise that the leadership, structures, systems, cultures that evolved from the industrial age, an era where big factories and big machines fuelled economic growth, aren't the ones that will see us capitalise on the great opportunities and deal with the many challenges that we face in the times and the world we live in. Now, call today the knowledge age, the information age or whatever you like, it is an economy that is dominated by service industries and where the market value of companies can often be three times that of the value of the tangible financial assets. So now we have significant value in human capital, knowledge capital, intellectual property, relationships, processes and brands.

A great example of the disconnect I am talking about is basic financial reporting that we still use broadly today to assess organisational performance. In that reporting equipment is considered an asset; people are considered an expense; and there is inadequate attention to reporting on the non-financial aspects of the performance of the organisation, which ultimately is going to drive the future financial performance.

Now, additional to the changes in our times, people are changing as a result. They expect a lot more from their leaders and from their working environment. Technology has been a big part of that. Technology has connected people to other people, to other knowledge and ideas that they want to get access to. That bridges any past hierarchies or organisational structures. People will get what they want when they want it if they really want to chase it. There is a generation of youth. My kids get their sense of respect for me as the fountain of all knowledge from watching The Simpsons . So you have got no chance of convincing the youth of today that they should listen to you just because of the position you might have in an organisation or in society, and then the pace of change we are all seeing is one where we all know that the people at the front line often see change happening faster than those in the central hierarchy can ever acknowledge it and deal with it.

So great business leadership, as I said, has to be redefined as leadership at all levels and the primary responsibility of leaders at the top is to motivate, enable and engage people in the organisation to be leaders at all levels, and that's really going to require an unbending determination, to create an environment where employees can think, act, initiate on behalf of customers in the organisation they work in any time they can and want to.

There are great books on this subject. There's one that is particularly good, which is The Eighth Habit by Stephen Covey, and it is unfortunate that it is called The Eighth Habit because it makes you think it is just another one of these books on the latest management fad, but it really is a sensational book that goes to the heart of how you get the best from people. The nub of it is that it is about engaging them, you're not just doing, not just setting people up in the organisation to just do, but to involve them in planning and evaluating as well as doing and making sure that they are involved in what the organisation is trying to accomplish, no matter how insignificant their role may seem to be. There is no role too small to be engaged in this process.

Now, the fundamental elements of leadership at the top which are going to drive this ability to create leadership at all levels is a very important area and covers a lot of things. It covers great team work at the top; it covers engaging people in planning and in agreeing and defining priorities; and it also involves culture and behaviours and making sure that organisations have a clear, agreed set of behaviours that all people in the organisation are expected to demonstrate in the way they go about their work, especially the people at the top.

One point I do want to just mention is that in terms of team work at the top, you have got no chance of creating leadership throughout an organisation if the leadership team is siloed, if they put their individual areas ahead of the overall good of the business, and whilst it may seem silly that would happen, it does happen a lot. I can remember when I started in the current job I have at Microsoft I actually asked the people who worked for me on the executive team, "What is your primary team and what is your secondary team?" In other words, "Is your primary team this team and your secondary team your functional team?" Eight out of ten of them said, "My primary team is my functional team and this team is my secondary team". So when you have that environment you have no chance of getting people to really lead and innovate across the organisation because they run into boundaries all the time. The management team at Microsoft has changed a bit since then and now everybody has signed up for the fact that the top team is the team that is the primary team.

So great team work, modelled by the top leadership team, staff buy into the priorities, a clearly defined set of values and behaviours will drive the opportunity for top leaders to create the environment that is the ultimate in leadership in business, and that is an organisation with leadership at all levels. Thank you.

ADAM SPENCER: Thank you, Steve. One of the key phrases there: Leadership at all levels, employees thinking, acting, initiating. Can I ask you, Terry, roughly how many employees does Coca Cola have in Australia , do you know?

TERRY DAVIS: At the end of the last month: 16,264.

ADAM SPENCER: Can you engage all 16,264 of them in the running of Coca Cola? Can they all be acting, initiating?

TERRY DAVIS: Well, I think it's obviously impossible to engage people on a one on one. You try to do that through a filtration system where you see as many of the people who are at the front end of the business as often as you can and ensure that you are driving a culture that enables you to drive a behavioural process where people feel comfortable about generating ideas up as well as generating ideas down. But I think it is unrealistic to expect that you know everybody by name.

ADAM SPENCER: Clive, what do you think about Steve's point on financial analysis and how it values people, because I know the Australian Institute has done a lot of work on value of employees and the role they feel they play within their work places?

CLIVE HAMILTON: I am very sympathetic to Steve's argument and if I worked in the private sector I would probably want to work for Microsoft, but his idea that one ought to value the human capital within an organisation in the same way that one values the physical capital is a revolutionary idea really, because it is so contrary to the idea of the economics text where labour is characterised as something unpleasant. They have a term for it, the "disutility of labour", and people will have to pay us money to force us to go and do it, but of course that is not how human beings operate. What people value most is fulfilling work, jobs that make them feel as though they are doing something valuable and which recognise their contribution as humans.

But I should say that that preference that Steve is talking about is contrary to the trend that we have witnessed in Australia over the last 20 years, which is increasingly intensified and longer working hours. Australians on average work over a year more hours than any other worker in any other OECD country, including Japan , where they have a term "kiroshi", which means death by over work.

Some people distinguish, if I can elaborate slightly, between workaholics and workaphiles, and there seems to be a bit of a backlash to the criticism of work, including from the esteemed editors of BOSS magazine, Helen Trinca and Catherine Fox who have written a book that argues that writing reports about the financial markets for 14 hours a day is better than sex.

When I read the essay I was reminded of an incident that happened when I studied psychology 25 years ago. We had a very crusty old professor, very uptight, and a woman came in one day, she had been coming to class, she came in with a baby, and half way through the lecture she got it out and she started to breast feed it and this was a very disturbing event for the crusty old professor, but he said nothing until she came to the next lecture the next week and she started to breastfeed the baby again. He stopped in the middle of a lecture and he said, "Did you know that breast feeding is a form of masturbation?" There was silence in the room. She said, "You do it your way. I'll do it mine".

ADAM SPENCER: Let me ask you, Fiona Wood, in the academic area you constantly hear it is incredibly hard grind, it is not particularly well paid compared to the private practice that some people could be paid for their skills. How do you create a workforce where people feel valued and so they have a real input and reason for being there?

FIONA WOOD: I think Clive's point is very valid. People actually don't go to work just for the money…. So if you want to foster an environment where people are valued, then you have actually got to start thanking them now and again, and that is certainly something I saw very upfront in October 2002 when we had people volunteering to come back and work in the hospitals who had been retired, and they are still there. They are still there because they were valued and people said thank you.

I am a rabid optimist. I believe there is something uniquely special in every single individual and I think it is a really great shame that so many people get to the other end of their lives and they have never found what it is within them that makes them burn, that makes them excited or passionate about something, and I believe also that there is a leadership potential in everybody. It is like running: Some people are better at it than others but everybody can more or less put one foot in front of another. And so you are in a situation where if you actually acknowledge that somebody's idea may not be the best idea in the world but it is worth air play, because by encouraging that idea you encourage the energy, the interaction of energy, you could therefore make them believe in their part in the whole jigsaw and then when you come in with the initiative requirement, then they are already going to be in front of the game because then they are going to contribute.

Certainly in the research and the scientific arena you run on initiative a lot. You have got the core desire to be there, the desire, the curiosity, because you find people have found what it is that makes them burn in their environment, they want to be there because they want to find something out, and then you have got to give them the environment where they can, so you have got to fund it properly, and then you have got to give them enough freedom for those ideas to start to bounce from one person to the other and give them that opportunity to lead, and some people can do it sustained, some people do it intermittently, but you have to give them that opportunity to demonstrate their initiative as a leader, as a contributor, and then you will start to see things really working forward.

ADAM SPENCER: Okay, in fact it is in any industry, certainly the case in science. Mark, in many ways in the retail industry this is quite a sharp issue, if a report I read recently was accurate, which said that in the retail industry you are talking up to 15 per cent per year turnover of staff; it costs $11,000 per head to retrain someone at a reasonable management level; there is hundreds of millions of dollars being spent just retraining people to do stuff that someone else could do 12 months ago. I guess a lot of people who work for you consider it maybe like a holiday job or a short-term thing until they finish uni. Is that sort of empowerment and personnel management a massive issue in retail?

MARK McINNES: Two things - the first thing is if Fiona were looking for a change in career, with that passion we would love to employ her. She can stay in Perth if she wants to. I think it is a good question but it is a complex question for us.

Firstly, I don't really buy the idea that companies don't value their human capital. I actually think that most companies today, at least most of the companies that we are involved with; actually do go about looking at their human capital. In our organisation we do that all of the time, looking at the quality of the people that we have, and one of the reasons why we don't report on it or talk about it is because it is a competitive advantage. Ultimately, the quality of the people that you have in your organisation, the quality of the people you hire and that you promote and the succession planning processes that you go through are actually a competitive advantage, so why would you want to let anybody else know why your company can do that better than anybody else?

I think it relates to staff turnover. I think most people love to work for us. The problem that we have got is that our business peaks at Christmas time. We employ all these great university students and these casuals who come in and hopefully give great service, but not always, and my e-mail address is used well by many of our customers, Usually I think of the things that haven't gone so well, and I think that is a complex issue because it is expensive. It happens on an annual basis. We don't keep those people for very long and yet those people are fundamental to serving our customers at the busiest time of year.

I don't think we have got any big idea to solve that yet. What I do know though is we have taken a leaf out of the information technology companies and we have just created a little pod of people who will do nothing else in our organisation today but focussing on that issue to see whether there is a sustainable solution to the cost of really frontline staff turnover.

ADAM SPENCER: Jillian, empowerment, decisions at all levels, does it work?

JILLIAN BROADBENT: I think it does work but it is very hard to achieve, but it has to be done in smaller units rather than, as Terry says, you can't meet every single employee but you have to create a culture, which encourages every single unit to feel they can make a contribution to their workplace or their activity.

ADAM SPENCER: Let's take another keynote. Fiona Wood, hit us with a big idea.

FIONA WOOD: Thanks very much. I think first of all the question is do you think you need a big idea, and I am firmly of the belief that we should be looking at today's experiences in a very critical way, in the nicest possible way, to make sure that today's experience enhances tomorrow's performance.

I am here with many hats on tonight. I am a surgeon, scientist and have had the privilege of taking basic science to the bedside. I have had the privilege of being in the situation where I saw a significant problem in the healing of the patients that I see and worked out how I could enhance that healing, and so I bring that to the table this evening, and my big idea can be encompassed in one word - collaboration.

We need to look at the boundaries that surround us. As Steve mentioned, if you work in a silo, that is where you stay. We need to look at these values and see if they are real. In my circumstance, as I said, I see suffering on a daily basis, I see the suffering that scars bring, and I knew that in order to solve some of that problem, which is ongoing, we haven't solved all of the problems by any means yet, I need certain scientists, I need cross-discipline scientists, I need cell biologists, I need nano-chemists, nano-engineers, I need to bring those people and instil in them the passion that they can actually make a difference to somebody else, somebody remote, somebody they may never know, but they will make a difference, they will contribute.

Ideas then have got to be facilitated, so we need to break down the other barrier: We have got to work out how we are going to fund this. Are we going to fund it through Government, through community sponsorship, through corporate sponsorship and corporate engagement? So we have got to start breaking down those barriers.

I have had a very privileged journey and a very exciting journey over these last few years where we have been able to take an idea of growing your skin … but to do so I have had to engage and learn all about things way beyond my sphere of education as a scientist and as a clinician, things in the business field, in marketing, corporate governance, due diligence, all these things that were not familiar to me. You know, we are all the same on the inside as we are on the outside. I know, I have been there often enough.

We all, as I say, have got something special in there, we just need to let it out, and we will really move whatever it is that we want to move forward more efficiently, in a more exciting manner, if we realise that the barriers that we build around ourselves are false, are unnecessary, and we collaborate and really start to cross disciplines and cross boundaries and learn from each other, learn how we can actually take that bit of knowledge or that technique or the way certain people do certain things, in marketing it may be something you have never thought of applying in a scientific endeavour, but by looking and learning and by taking the blinkers off and by collaborating, then I think we will all really start to share in energy, because we just can't do things in isolation. It doesn't operate that way from a society point of view or from an advancing society point of view. We all have to realise we need to take the responsibility for our actions and how it impacts on the others around us, and also how we can contribute to that.

There is no doubt about it that when you start to share your energy you get energy back and if you want ideas and innovation then you start to share the energy. So my idea that I throw on the table tonight is collaboration, breakdown those barriers.

ADAM SPENCER: Thank you, Fiona. Steve, you must see some of this as well. Fiona has brought it up in some ways in a purely scientific area. Yours is more directly applied technology sometimes I guess, but what are the major impediments to getting innovative projects to the market, to the public, to the point of working?

STEVE VAMOS: I think one of the big issues is that a lot of people in the organisation that could innovate don't know what the big picture is. They don't see how what they are doing can help the broader organisation. So they are very much driven by the individual goals or objectives they have been given and they haven't been engaged enough or involved enough in the whole process of defining the bigger picture objectives that the organisation is trying to accomplish, in other words the broader purpose for why they are even working.

I think that once you connect people to what is important to the organisation, and as long as that purpose is beyond generating revenue, that is a purpose that is one to help develop the way we live, our lifestyle, our economy, as long as you can make it a set of objectives and a purpose that they can really relate to, then I think that you can inspire them to start to think more broadly about, "Well, okay, how can I contribute to the bigger agenda, the bigger meaning of why we are here", and that would therefore lead them to start to see collaboration with others in the organisation that can potentially bring the pieces together with them.

ADAM SPENCER: But, Steve, if for the next three months and then the three months after that and then the three months after that, Microsoft fell short of its sales targets and its predicted growth and you were responding to the big guys back in the States, "Yeah, but we have never been more empowered and there is some innovation going on here. You wouldn't believe how connected people feel", in the same way as when you alluded to within a short period of time the Microsoft board had changed a fair bit, you would just get the flick.

STEVE VAMOS: This is not a three-month thing; this is about developing your business over time. Again, it is sort of working against the logic here. The more empowered, the more aligned your staff are with what you are trying to accomplish, the more they feel emotionally connected to what you are trying to achieve, that can only have positive impact on revenue. So if your revenue is bad, it has got nothing to do with that, it is probably some other fundamental things that you have got to get onto, but no, the answer to your question is, I wouldn't last very long.

JILLIAN BROADBENT: If you have got the right culture in an organisation, then when you are having a downturn everyone will mobilise their thinking to solve it rather than, "This is his problem, not mine, and I am glad it is his problem because my business is doing well". It is the sort of culture that you have got to work to achieve so that the company has value to ride through those cycles and to mobilise all the energy and people can come out of them and still endure as a successful company.

ADAM SPENCER: You very rarely hear the new boss of the bank who has just had to lay off 2,000 people saying, "What we're going to do here over the next six months is vigorously pursue spiritual growth. We're going to meet international benchmarks in terms of productivity". Do you know what I mean? Are you saying that you have those things in place in the first place?

STEVE VAMOS: That is the problem because why would you say because I am not performing well I should not have a values based organisation where people really are consistent and committed to a standard of behaviour that is great for the organisation and for its customers. The problem is a lot of this debate ends up being choice between two things that can quite comfortably co-exist, it is not one or the other, and I think we have really got to get beyond that to a serious commitment to the fact that when you put great people around you, they are motivated, they know what they are there to accomplish, you will perform better.

CLIVE HAMILTON: I am with you, Adam. I mean the fact is that we live in a society that promotes at every turn ruthless competitiveness and it has become more so, and I think Fiona is absolutely right, that collaboration is the key to fulfilment and being worthwhile, but it needs to be collaboration around a purpose. It is a common purpose that permits people and inspires them to collaborate. But it can't be any purpose; it has to be a selfless purpose. In the end, you have to be motivated not to accumulate more money in your bank account or to trample over the opposition and drive them into the ground, but to build a better world. I think an intuitive recognition of this is why one of the words which the editors and sub editors of every newspaper and Sunday magazine now try to look for to put in a headline is "Happiness".

Five years ago when I started to talk about this I was always a bit embarrassed to use the word "happiness" because it was so flaky and soft and weak, but now people are saying, "Well, hell, that's what life is supposed to be about, isn't it?" There has been fascinating research on this from psychology. I could talk about it for ever, but let me just make one point, and that is that a couple of psychologists drew together the hundreds of studies of what it is that separates happy and unhappy people. There were all sorts of factors, their age, their occupation, their income, their health, their relationships and so on and so forth, but they found that most of those don't make any difference at all, particularly income above a certain level, but there is one factor that stands out above all others that separates happy people from unhappy people - happy people are those who have a sense of meaning and purpose in life, they are doing what they believe is worthwhile, so they get an intrinsic benefit from what they do, rather than external rewards.

Yet, if you ask yourself where has our society been going for the last 20-30 years in particular, it has been going in exactly the opposite direction, more self-focussed, more selfishness, more materialism, more competitiveness. So I think that is the fundamental conflict we face in Australian society today.

FIONA WOOD: We are not living in the same place because I don't think our society is that ruthless and cutthroat. There is an amazing amount of people I have been exposed to who do fantastic things. The volunteers who work frontline, fire brigade, coast guard, et cetera, half a million of Australians are volunteers supporting the professionals, and they do that, sure. They have got their job and then they go and volunteer; they contribute. I think we live in a society that we have to acknowledge is an awful lot better than we think and we have to acknowledge that there is an awful lot more positive energy out there, and by acknowledging it, possibly we can foster it and nurture it and bring it out and say we don't have to listen to all the negative stuff in the media. Let's actually get a bit of positive drive, because there is an amazing amount of people doing fantastic things out there. So we just have to say, "Well done. Can I join in", instead of knocking it.

CLIVE HAMILTON: The fact is that volunteering has actually declined in terms of the proportion of time people devote to it over the last 20 or 30 years. Of course we have to recognise it and value it, and the Government gives awards for people who contribute on a voluntary basis because they are not otherwise rewarded, but the fact is that because people are working more, because they are more self-focussed, the fact is that the extent to which people do volunteer and contribute to the community is not as great now as it was in 1970 when our per capita incomes were half of what they are.

We did a survey a couple of years ago where we asked people whether they could afford to buy everything they really need. Two thirds of Australians say they cannot afford to buy everything they really need, and when we looked at the top 20 percent, half of them, the richest people in one of the richest countries in the world, in historically the most wealthy period, half of them said, "I can't afford to buy everything I really need". So they work harder, they borrow more, our debts are monumental, and yet we are wealthier than we have ever been. So what is going on?

TERRY DAVIS: I think you have got to take some of those comments and get some reality checks on what life is actually about. The fact is that human endeavour is about competition and I just wonder if you didn't have the passion of human endeavour whether we would have the technological breakthroughs that we have had. It is not a question whether people work 60 hours a week or whether they work 6 hours a week because I have seen lots of people who work 40 hours a week dreadfully unhappy, I have seen lots of people who work 80 hours a week who are so passionate about that that you can't keep them away.

COMMENT: What about their kids?

TERRY DAVIS: I was just going to say we teach our children, we say to our children, "Look, it is more competitive today" or they tell us that it is more competitive today that than when we grew up. Of course, their children will say the same thing. I think we have to be careful about separating unhappiness and work. The fact is that work well constructed can be just as much fun and just as enjoyable and the fact is the reason why people want to work in organisations is because a culture has been developed.

ADAM SPENCER: And you are saying that the challenge is to construct it in a way that it is enjoyable?

TERRY DAVIS: Exactly. It is not about how long we work.

MARK McINNES: I don't buy that competition and performance is unhealthy. I don't buy that performing or talking about performance is unhealthy in any way, shape or form. In fact it makes people strive to be better. It is about harnessing that competitive drive and the passion for performance. If you don't perform for nine months or twelve months, yes, you probably are focussing on the soft side of things and not focussing on the hard side of things, and then maybe there is a bit of a reality check. So I think it is a balance for organisations to ensure that they understand exactly what the requirements are of all of their stakeholders and ensuring that the culture of the organisation can equal the performance of our stakeholders. So I firmly believe in fierce competition and performance and I think it brings out the best in good people.

ADAM SPENCER: I think we will no doubt go back to these, especially this morning's questions, later. Let's move to you for a moment, Terry. What is a big idea you would like to throw in to tonight's debate? Just from your seat there, give us a big idea.

TERRY DAVIS: Coming from a consumer goods background, I think the thing that I look at now is the growing affluence of the baby boomers. If one could follow their battle with seeking what I call affordable indulgence versus health and wellbeing and that ability to have something that refreshes them and gives them fun versus what their partner is saying that they shouldn't be eating or drinking. Red wine is good for you; bottled water is good for you. Just keep that in mind.

If you look at the trends, people going to spas more often, skin care products over the last five years have accelerated at a rate of knots. If you look at what is happening across the globe where people are saying, it is that time poor, cash rich, "Give me something that is fun.

A coke is fun, a chocolate is fun. But for God's sake don't tell me that I can't eat it or drink it because I want to make up my own mind. I want to make up my own mind if part of my day I want to have a bit of fun and the other part of the day I want to look after myself". And that is a trend that is happening not just at the older age groups. We only have to look at the Atkins diet craze in America, and thank God it didn't come here to any degree, but Diet Coke for instance is now growing at four times the rate of Coke, yet people see it as a brand and still see it as an indulgence, and to me that is part of the fun of consumer goods marketing.

ADAM SPENCER: Can I ask you: In terms of people making their own informed choice about when they want to indulge and when they want to be healthy, could a cynic argue that you need to have access to a reasonable amount of information on both sides of those? People always quote the example of you don't get the fresh fruit and vegetable industry spending $65 million a year in Australia pumping their product because they just don't have access to the money to do it, so it is quite an imbalanced equation.

TERRY DAVIS: That is a law of the jungle exercise. You have to allow the market to perform. If there is a need for fresh apples, someone will find a way of differentiating their apple, as we have seen. We now have differentiated potatoes, for God's sake. People could say, "That one I am prepared to pay more", and why have they done that? It is either by flavour, it is packaging. We get little stickers on our fruit now that tell us where it has come from.

CLIVE HAMILTON: You have to let people make up their own mind. Well, why does Coca Cola spend a billion dollars a year on advertising?

TERRY DAVIS: Across the globe it is closer to five… And long may it live. How did you buy your shirt and how did you buy your clothes? The fact is that if there wasn't that communication medium, it doesn't matter how much was spent and it doesn't matter how it was done; the fact is that you had an idea communicated to you and you made that choice whether you followed that idea or that product or that service. Today there is so much information coming to people that the fact is that our choices are less informed today than they probably were ten years ago.

CLIVE HAMILTON: And that is due in large part because of the amount of misinformation they get from advertising. Any parent knows that they spend a large proportion of their time trying to undo the effects on their children of misleading advertising. I picked up a box of cereal the other day. You just go to the supermarket and pick it out and look at how much sugar. They are required in very small print to put in the amount of sugar that is included in the breakfast cereal, and this is a breakfast cereal, if you look at the cover, it is healthy, vitality, vitamin B, antioxidants, good for kids, if you look at it, 32 per cent pure sugar. That is lying. Yet the kids see the messages, the adults see the messages and they say, well, this must be good.

I have to come back to bottled water. Actually bottled water is very bad for you. There has been an outbreak of dental caries amongst children because they are not getting fluoride in their water because they are sucking on bottled water all the time, not to mention obesity.

ADAM SPENCER: Mark, what do you say reflecting on Terry's thoughts there?

MARK McINNES: I am right with him. The assumption is good, if it makes you feel good, and people love going to our stores and walking around and shopping. It makes them feel good. It is like a form of therapy. It is relaxing. I don't buy the argument that advertisers are trying to mislead consumers because in the end you are saying that all consumers are stupid and in fact the actual opposite is true, most consumers are really intelligent. Advertisers, sure, they always try and put a little bit of spin on it. That is part of the creativity of that industry, if you like. I think in general consumerism is a fantastic way for people to enjoy themselves and so what is wrong with being happy when you buy a new dress…

CLIVE HAMILTON: Very quickly, recently the American Psychiatric Association has added to its diagnostic and statistical manual a new obsessive compulsive disorder known as "owniomania" otherwise known as "shopaholism" and it is a serious, compulsive disorder. We know it as retail therapy. Just one fact - it has recently been discovered by some scientists, I think at Princeton University , that the best way to treat shopaholism or owniomania is to prescribe antidepressants. So I think that tells you that consumption in itself is an empty activity and we undertake it for the most part to fill a void, which no amount of consumer goods can fill.

FIONA WOOD: I was just thinking - it is all about balanced life. I believe very strongly that the whole community needs to take responsibility for their own wellness and health and prevention is better than cure. Certainly I see that every day. … It is not everybody that is on anti-depressants, it is a very small few, because for some people to go and have that experience (shopping), it is great. They have coffee and they meet people and have social interaction and off they go again. There are some people that have obsessive-compulsive disorders, whether it be following lines on the floor or shopping, it doesn't matter. That is a genetic intrusive problem for that person. It is not something that you can broad brush everybody with. So I think life is all about balance and taking responsibility to find out the information that you need in order to make sure that you give yourself the best opportunity for wellness and happiness at the same time.

ADAM SPENCER: Jillian, I would like you to contribute to the debate please with a keynote from the lectern

JILLIAN BROADBENT: I struggled with the big idea. I came up more with a big challenge, but I found even in listening to both Steve and Fiona speak that my big challenge is very compatible with their thoughts.

Many of the big ideas behind business successes in Australia globally over the last few decades have probably come from technology and automation or from industry consolidation, both domestically and globally, and it is savings in scale and costs.

Rather than big breakthroughs I see enduring business successes in the future coming from a continual focus on generating and implementing new ideas, new ideas from adjustments to and rethinking around existing activities and products. The challenge is to do things smarter, to avoid complacency and to pursue constant improvements.

Talent management and organisational culture play key roles in ensuring you have the right team and the right environment to achieve this. Attracting, obtaining and maximising the potential of talented individuals is facilitated by an organisational culture, which is open, stimulative and receptive to the new ideas necessary to compete successfully in a global market. That includes collaboration that Fiona talked about.

Talent management requires the right balance between carrot and stick, a good CEO to ensure an open culture, one which is low on fear and high on productivity and an effective remuneration policy which measures performance output rather than input and rewards appropriately. Talent management also requires a focus on initiatives aimed at retaining and maximising the potential of talented individuals irrespective of gender, race, age and height.

The big danger to effective talent management and a healthy organisational culture is the Warren Harding error. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking describes the Warren Harding error as the dark side of rapid recognition. It is the root of a good deal of prejudice, discrimination and the selection of the wrong candidate for promotion. Blink is a book about the capacity to quickly assess a situation by mentally extracting the key elements from a multitude of information. There are some fascinating applications of this thin slicing ability in medicine, tennis, art, speed dating, marriage guidance and recruitment. This technique can yield great results but it can have a dark side in this talent management recruitment area by selecting the wrong candidate for promotion.

Warren Harding was not a particularly intelligent man. He liked to play poker and golf and to drink and, most of all, to chase women. He became President of the United States . Adam, has heard of him, haven't you, Adam? Warren Harding, most historians agree, was the worst President in American history. His speeches were apparently described as "an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea". He died of a stroke after two years in office. His only merit was that he fitted people's ideas of how a President should look - tall, handsome and distinguished.

Height according to Gladwell triggered a certain set of positive associations. The CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies in the US , he observed, are mainly tall men. In the US population 14 percent of the men are over six feet. Among CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies the number is 58 percent. I am not suggesting that the tall, handsome CEOs we have on the stage at the moment are examples of the Warren Harding error, but fewer short people actually make it to the executive suite. Gladwell concludes that being short is as much a handicap to corporate success as being a woman. So meeting the idea of the right person can lead to bias and to promotion of mediocrity.

Bias is unconscious, hard to recognise even in oneself and even harder to eliminate. Harvard University has designed a number of computerised Implicit Assessment Tests (IATs) to identify biases. The IAT is more than an abstract measure of attitudes; it is also a powerful predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations. The computerised IAT measures your responses and the time you take to decide on these issues. It works to identify conscious and unconscious responses. The results very often are a surprise to those being tested. Harvard has a whole range of these IATs. I encourage you to visit the web site, www.implicit.harvard.edu, and give yourself the IAT test on gender careers, very sobering. With the race IAT 80 percent of the people taking the test have a pro-white bias and the test is open on the computer so they are constantly updating this with more and more people participating in the test.

Most organisations have long since begun to address major manifestations of prejudice. However, subtle barriers and micro-inequalities maintain their strength. Bias is more often covert, unintentional and unrecognised by the perpetrator but it acts as a barrier to the identification and development of talent and the promotion of the right people. These mechanisms of prejudice against people of difference are usually small in nature but not trivial in effect.

Graduate recruitment into organisations is probably 50/50 male/female and has been over the last couple of decades. With 55 percent of Australia 's graduates female this pattern will continue. In the 2004 EWA census of women in leadership, however, it was reported that of the ASX 200 companies less than five percent of senior line management positions are held by women. Micro-inequalities work to accelerate the exodus of female talent from large organisations, except Microsoft maybe. The challenge is to retain this female talent through identifying and eliminating these micro-inequalities and creating a healthy culture, which encourages diversity, new ideas and smarter practices.

Chief Executive Women, which is a group of professional women leaders, is working on a number of initiatives to improve the retention of female talent. We began a CEW mentoring program with four companies last year and have six in it this year working with the top female executives. The findings from this program suggest that culture is critical. If females leave for family reasons they do not come back because the culture is excluding and aggressive rather than constructive and open and not collaborative enough.

It is a most positive experience being associated with and working for a dynamic organisation, surrounded by talented people and with a healthy culture. It is an experience, which should be accessible to all.

My big idea is mobilising the talents, creative capacity and contribution of women and short people, and working to create a culture in organisations, which is healthy and open and collaborative, free of Warren Harding or at least free of Warren Harding's impositions of significant responsibility. Thank you.

ADAM SPENCER: Five years from now, to anyone on the panel, will anything have been really done at the medium or higher levels of management about the under representation? Are we really going to see that turn around?

JILLIAN BROADBENT: I suspect certainly there is a change of attitude. Just in the companies that are participating in the CEW program, there is a lot of desire to retain female talent. It is just getting on top of it. That is why it is a challenge, not really an idea.

MARK McINNES: We don't suffer from the problem of not having senior women on our management team. In excess of fifty percent of our management team are women and it is true of about 40 percent of our executive team and most of our consumers are women, so it makes a lot of sense. Our company is aligned to that.

I think the biggest issue that we really face, and Jillian has covered in her speech, is the issue that a large part of our dynamic workforce are between the ages of 25 to 40 and obviously having a family is really important to them. It is a real struggle for businesses on their own to deal with the issue of a capacity and talent and maternity and paternity leave. I think that my personal view is that it is the responsibility of employers and the Government to make a fundamental change to maternity leave to increase the capacity of organisations like ours, and in fact society, to make it far easier for people to contribute in times when they choose to have families.

We don't have any solutions for that in our company but we face it every day of the week and it is the number one human resource issue. But it is a responsibility, not of just ourselves but of the social policy makers, who actually, rather than give it platitudes, which I think happens today, actually do something seriously about it to increase the workforce capacity. We have had discussion by the Reserve Bank about the work capacity ----- actually half of our human capacity is at home. So we don't have a capacity issue. We just have a placement of work (issue) and what are they doing and how long they are doing it for. I think that is the biggest issue we face.

JILLIAN BROADBENT: I think it is also a matter of culture. I think if you have the right culture, then women want to come back in and you find ways to make it work. The problem is this sort of aggressive (cultures) these micro-inequalities, tend to not encourage women to come back in again.

CLIVE HAMILTON: I was just wondering when Jillian was speaking about the person who said that Warren Harding was the worst President in US history, that must have been written before the year 2000. A very interesting fact emerged in the last few years with the introduction of enterprise bargaining and some people at the Australian Centre For Industrial Relations and Training at the University of Sydney, did a very detailed study and discovered that women appeared to be doing worse than men in enterprise bargaining. When you look at the extent to which they have managed to negotiate higher pay rises, they are not doing as well. When they looked in more detail at it what they found was that whilst women aren't negotiating for higher pay, they are negotiating for better conditions. In other words, their sets of priorities in the workplace tend to differ somewhat from those of men. If pay levels are the measure of success in a corporation, or any other organisation, or any public one, then that actually militates against the entry and progression of women.

I think the key question is given the one dimensional, male dominated character of so much senior management; the big question is why would women want to go into that world?

ADAM SPENCER: I want to ask you, Fiona, and in asking you I should point out we have spoken about this publicly before, I am not some deranged, stalking fan. I know for a fact that you have got six children from age 10 to 18 and in particular you continued to breast feed all your children all the way through your research. You didn't just opt out for eight years of the research world. Was that remarkably onerous? How did you achieve that?

FIONA WOOD: I think you can set your mind to anything and great competition comes in many forms I guess. It was something that I could do for myself that nobody else could and I had been told that I couldn't do it because I was a working mother, and so that was the red rag. 12 years later when my eldest boy said, "She's in Year 1 now, Mum. Don't you think it is enough", I said, "Well, I would stop but I don't know how", so I have never stopped you see. So I certainly over compensated. I was in a clinical program of training that I maintained and I took holidays when I had the children and then I took the children into the hospital with me.

My eldest boy said he had given enough of his life to medicine before he got to year 1, so he does not do medicine, because he was part of the hospital and he has just applied to be a theatre orderly as a uni student, and when asked if he had been in a hospital he said, "Yes, I lived in one for the first five years". So you have to make adjustments to your life and it is like anything, it's a big team effort, because when I was on call and working in the hospital at night my husband brought the children to me as well. We made that decision that that is something that the family was very important to us and so was our work. We are both surgeons. So we made it work and we made it work by being together and making sure that we spend so much time together. If that meant at the hospital, so be it.

So you make the adjustments as you go through, but there are sacrifices and when I see young women who want to do surgery I say, "Well, that's fantastic. You have just got to make one decision: Is it worth the pain because there is pain in anything and it has got to be worth it to you."

I am absolutely bemused by your comment why would they want to be in the boardroom. Why would I want to be in the operating theatre when there are all these old crusty guys, sort of big bombastic surgeons? They were all tall as well actually when I was a kid. So a short woman from the north of England , speaking in the wrong accent, I was really behind the eight ball. But why would you want to? Why not?

JLLIAN BROADBENT: Working with talented people inside an organisation is a wonderful experience.

That is why the culture is important. Fiona I think made her situation work because we wanted to get back into that collaborative activity and make a contribution to it.

FIONA WOOD: When you are part of it you can actually mould it, change it, advance it, learn from today so that tomorrow is better. So you can't do that just sitting there saying girls don't do that. It is just beyond my head just not to want to. Do to you know what I mean? You have just got to think why not. Why is it that we have these barriers? I think the recognition that we don't have to have the barriers is the first step.

ADAM SPENCER: Terry, you are the tallest member of the panel. There is the issue here of female participation. There is also the broader issue here of attracting the best people and keeping them. I want to ask all the panel quickly on that. That is always a mantra that is spoken about. The people at the heart of the organisation, you have got to get the best people in. How do you do that and how do you do that when everyone else is trying to get them in as well?

I remember at the ABC when a new Managing Director came in a few years ago, he was massive on the psychometric test and he was asking people who were making decisions about television programs and he was asking them questions like, "Okay, you are on a life raft and there's only three of you and you get ashore. Do you play football or tennis?" And a few people who said, "I am just not going to be part of this" got the sack.

Now, more generally, how do you spot talent? How do you maintain it? Eight people come to you for the one position, and they are all lying about their qualifications. They are all talking themselves up. None of them say to you, "Well, occasionally I nick stuff from the office". How do you get the best people?

TERRY DAVIS: There is no perfect solution. That is the first thing. Recruitment is a bit self-fulfilling. The more successful the organisation, the more successful people are drawn to the organisation. So it is actually easier to attract people when you are there. Your question is: How do you get there?

In our case we look very heavily at finding something within the person's background that points to a passion for success in one area. It doesn't matter whether it is chess, it doesn't matter whether it is sport, but something that they can put their hand up and say, "I was the best" or "I developed a passion for that. I may be good at all these other things", because the fact is that university degrees these days don't help you any more because of the fact that university education has become so prevalent that it is difficult just to look at it on a marks perspective.

We go through phases where we are looking for engineers, we are looking for accountants, and we are looking for marketers. Today, as we go through the growth phase of the cycle, marketers are back in vogue. People with a Bachelor of Arts today are actually valued, whereas ten years ago it was the last thing that you were going to do at university because it was the lowest mark or the lowest eligible mark with which you could get in. So increasingly, when we have got 20 people going for the same job with the same qualifications, you look for something that is in there that is different.

ADAM SPENCER: And if you get them, Steve, how do you keep them?

STEVE VAMOS: You have to keep them motivated. You have got to keep them developing and give them opportunity to grow and have impact. Particularly, that is what good people are looking for; an opportunity to grow and make a contribution that was perhaps greater than they thought they would be able to when they walked into the organisation. I think that that means that you have to give them plenty of opportunity to have impact and you can't define their responsibilities and their roles down to the nth degree and expect that they are going to be motivated and happy to stay in that organisation.

It is really important, I think, to have a purpose associated with the organisation. In Microsoft's case there may be some people that think that Microsoft is driven by "let's make money" because we have made a lot of money, but the passion for Microsoft and the people in Microsoft comes from Bill Gates saying, "We want to put personal computers in front of everybody on the planet", and what it has been translated into now is we want to help people and organisations around the world realise their potential. That is what we are here to do, and I think that if you can relate a broader purpose and give people scope to contribute to that, then you will keep them.

CLIVE HAMILTON: I think the fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves is this: If economic growth is so good for us, why aren't we any happier? That's all.

FIONA WOOD: Aren't we happier? I'm happy.

CLIVE HAMILTON: Could I make a very methodological point here, that a lot of the comments that have come - if you fancy being a researcher, you don't assume that your own experience is the world, and when you say "I'm happy", so what, great, well done, but if you look at all of the evidence on the state of well being, happiness, psychological health in Australia, there is no question, in Australia, as in the US as in every rich country, that it is on the decline.

In the US , for example, rates of depression are ten times higher than they were after the war in the 1950s. What's going on? Politicians tell us we must focus on growth. I sometimes think that John Howard is to the truth what Yuri Geller is to the spoon, but when he came to power in 1996 he said, "The fundamental task in the measure of success of my Government is to achieve a four per cent economic growth rate", and everybody said, "Great, that is obviously what we should do", but if you actually ask people in Australia today whether they are more comfortable and relaxed, whether their level of psychological health has improved, whether people's sense of well being and fulfilment is better, I think all the evidence suggests that the answer is no.

STEVE VAMOS: I guess, Clive, the question is what is the alternative, is it economic stagnation. For me the weakness in the argument is it connecting happiness to economic growth or not, and my view is that people can be much, much happier in the workforce. My general opinion is that the quality of leadership of people isn't good in the workforce and the reason why they are not as fulfilled as they could and should be is because we are managing with an old mindset of management or what it is about. We need to connect people to purpose, we need to give them an opportunity to contribute and I think then they will be a lot happier. So economic growth in my eyes - I am sure Mark will agree and Terry will agree - what is the alternative? I mean untenable. But making people happier in the work environment maybe is something we can work at it.

MARK McINNES: I think it is really simple. Do a survey in 1991 when the country went through a recession and ask how everyone felt. If you compare that to 1950s you will find they are far more.

CLIVE HAMILTON: This is classic black and white thinking. We either have to maximise economic growth or induce a recession. Why can't we say: Okay, income is a significant factor, but most people in Australia have enough, certainly the average East Timorese. Why don't we just get some balance back into our lives and rather than focussing on accumulating more and more goods, more than we can actually pay for - I mean that's why we have had this massive, massive increase in consumer credit over the last ten years. Jillian will be very familiar. In fact she is preoccupied on a daily basis with what the hell to do about this extraordinary increase in greed, which is what it amounts to. So it is not going back to live in the caves. It is getting a balance back into it.

One of the most important things happening in Australia in the last few years has been the emergence of the phenomenon of down shifting. These are people who have made a voluntary decision to change their lives in a way that means they earn less money. Absolutely contrary to the whole argument of the market and the economics texts and what the business commentators say and what the AFR says every day we should do, maximise growth, maximise income. 23 percent of Australian adults aged between 30 and 50 over the last decade have down shifted, and these are people who want balance back in their lives, and when we asked them in our surveys why, there were three dominant reasons.

One was, "I just want to spend more time with my family", "What I am doing at work requires me to do things that conflict with my fundamental values", and the third reason was, "I just want to protect my health. I don't want to end up with a heart attack or a cancer or a stress induced disease". So I think this presages very favourably for the future, that here you have a quarter of the population saying, "What we need is some balance".

So it is not growth, I have simplified a bit, it is not growth, itself that is the problem; it is our obsession with economic growth.

TERRY DAVIS: It is an interesting proposition but I wonder how many of those 30 per cent of those people were able to downsize because they had earned the money, they generated the wealth because they had pursued something and whether it was overall economic wealth that allowed them to pursue that. The fact is that many of the people in the audience here today may not have even been in the workforce in the last recession, and the fact is that Australia has gone through the most benign set of circumstances probably in recent memory. So how do you define happiness?

I have seen so much market research that talks about what people want to buy and what they don't want to buy and I put out products that fail. So I think you have to be very careful about looking at the average, looking at the average of statistics, because we all know that it lies. I remember my father once said to me, "Well, money doesn't buy you happiness but the alternative is not flash either".

ADAM SPENCER: I just want to ask Jillian for her perspective on - it is quite a fundamental challenge to the concept of economy and the direction of the economy that Clive is saying. I don't expect you to go and say exactly what he said at the next Reserve board--

JILLIAN BROADBENT: It is also where the different responsibilities lie and who could make a contribution to it. If you take the macro-economic situation, the Prime Minister might say, "Well, we would like to put in place foundation to have growth". Then at the more micro level, the same as the Reserve Bank, they want to sustain growth and low inflation because that gives the opportunity for there to be jobs whether people choose to take them or not take them, but the responsibility of the Government and the economic managers is to create the environment where they have a choice of having a job. That is the responsibility.

Then you come down to the individual corporation where, as Steve says, if you can create an environment where they have a job and it is a job which they enjoy and the environment is good and you can give them flexibility where they can opt out and work only a little bit and come back, well, that that is that responsibility. Then you come down to the individual responsibility where it is a free society, it is a free market and these choices are being made that enable one person to make a choice to have that balance, another person to have another choice. It is the responsibility of the Government to have the availability of jobs, the corporation to have an environment which encourages people to pursue work in a healthy balanced way and a culture to do so and then the individual will make their choice.

ADAM SPENCER: I am about to ask one more question of the panel before throwing to you, the audience, to ask questions about anything that has been covered so far in tonight's wide-ranging and very exciting discussion. That question is: Mark, what is your big idea?

MARK McINNES: I am not really a believer in big ideas…. What I mean by that is I believe that ideas are only really good as the ability for them to implemented, and I don't believe that any company should be hanging out for one person or one leader or one job to come up with a big idea to save that organisation or to kick that organisation and get it going. I firmly believe that almost everybody, certainly everybody in a managerial role, and the corporate culture right throughout the organisation, has a role to do the job that they are doing well and do that well every day and then try and create ideas that create better value for themselves and their stakeholders over time, but only if those ideas are absolutely implementable in some way, shape or form, otherwise you end up with a culture where everyone goes, "I've got a good idea" and no-one knows actually how to do it and you create this organisation with people full of ideas with no ability to do it. So I am a firm believer that ideas are great, but I think that ideas that are implementable are better.

I think it is absolutely right for Steve's competitor, Apple, to create a new technology and have hundreds of people working on the latest technology to create a big idea, but it is not right for every one of our service people to come up with a big idea on service, when in fact all our customers are looking for is something a little bit different to that. So I think it is a horses for courses thing.

ADAM SPENCER: Let me ask you, Steve: When you see an ad for iPod, do you go "Fair call, great idea, deserved" or do you just rip your hair out and go, "Why didn't one of my dudes think of that"?

STEVE VAMOS: I say both things, okay, both things absolutely…. I think you have to define the scope of innovation or great ideas. So the big problem is when people come up with ideas that aren't applicable to the business you are in or aren't relevant to the challenges you are facing. So I think that if you can again give people a sense for what is important, they are going to come up with ideas that are more likely to be applicable and then management, as Mark says, has to make a decision as to whether this is something they want to invest in.

There is a good old saying that we talked about a lot in the dot com days, which is that great ideas are a commodity, great execution is not, and it is very much a point. You can have lots of ideas and the more those ideas are aligned, make business sense and a business possibility, the more productive that business is going to be.

ADAM SPENCER: Fiona, it is a real issue in academia, the idea of your research and your research proposal that has got an immediate bottom line pay off versus something that is very blue sky. You need the big blue-sky stuff to be done so that the day-to-day stuff gets by, yes?

FIONA WOOD: I think it is a combination. You never know where it is going to come from. I mean that is what makes it exciting. You have been looking down a certain path and you will see a response to a certain experiment or a response to a certain clinical situation and then you realise, "Hey, I didn't expect that to happen. Let's work back", and often the best ideas come from left field. So I think really, when you are looking for advancement of innovation and in my sort of field it is always keep the blinkers off, you never know where it is going to come from. Yes, always keep your eyes open and blinkers off.

ADAM SPENCER: Let's take some questions from the audience.

Q: Throughout my career I have seen many, many talented passionate people who have either left an organisation because they are just disillusioned with the people they are reporting to or they have been simply neglected, and that is because the people that they do report to lack the basic interpersonal or emotional intelligence skills to actually manage people effectively, and often managing other people is a huge responsibility.

My question is how do we help managers and leaders to learn about themselves sufficiently to be able to effectively manage other people?

TERRY DAVIS: Lots of feedback, honest and hope feedback and lots of information, 360 surveys and staff opinion surveys. In our business, if you are a manager that your people do not think highly of, that gets attention very, very quickly because we ask staff in a very protected and anonymous way and we can get that information and we start to get feedback to those managers around what are the areas they need to improve.

JILLIAN BROADBENT: I think it is honest and open communication as well and even on these issues of bias I would encourage these tests because people have bias and they end up not wanting to talk about it, not wanting to say that person is biased, and if you just air it between two people where someone thought someone was biased and they were or they weren't, it would be opening up wound to the sunshine.

ADAM SPENCER: But the case that you constantly hear about in an organisation where it is dynamic and there are ideas being put up and perhaps there is someone in a more senior position who is not really kicking it in, is that that person just steals all the ideas that people underneath have come up with and present them as their own to people further up the ladder. That person is not going to go, "Look, in the last 12 months I have come up with nothing, but gee, the people underneath me are just nailing it at the moment".

JILLIAN BROADBENT: Parallel to that there was a cartoon which had the typical men around the board table and the one woman and the caption was, "Ms Smith, that's a wonderful idea. Could one of the ideas suggest it so we could actually take it seriously". You may laugh but it has happened.

TERRY DAVIS: I think candour is a big thing but also having an organisational culture that spends as much time analysing and understanding the failures as the successes can often provide an environment where it is not the witch-hunt, you have failed and therefore you are fired. It is: We have failed and what can we learn from that, and that can often take the confrontation component out of it. We spend a lot of time understanding the failures and then deciding what could we have done better and that makes it a much easier environment for people to have an open dialogue.

ADAM SPENCER: Mark, when you took over DJ's, you had to make some pretty tough decisions about Food Chain and other arms of the operation that weren't up to scratch. Big decisions?

MARK McINNES: Yes, I have said this not to the public market but to the people. I think the hardest decision that I had to make, which is why I kind of cringe at the number of lay-offs in the bank, is how do you face a group of people and tell them that you are going to shut down a store that they have been working in. They went in good faith to go and work in that store; they had no idea about the public market capacity of the company or the ability to invest. How do you go and tell people that those jobs no longer exist?

I think the financial decision was easy and the human decision was really, really complex, and even today I am kind of like, gee, that was 500 people who lost a job, and that doesn't sit well with me. So when I read 2000 people will lose their jobs because it makes sense to the financial community, I have got a real problem with that.

Q: My question is there has been a loss of corporatised collaboration between people and getting great ideas from them, but what is it that sets all you people apart from the collaborations that makes you up the top where you are? What are the great ideas that you guys come up with that you go and collaborate and you get to the top?

MARK McINNES: I think actually the truth is that collaboration is not about holding the idea.

QUESTION: The question is: If everybody collaborated, would everybody be at the same level?

TERRY DAVIS: Inevitably out of groups of people someone will take a lead position and inevitably that doesn't necessarily mean it is the creator of the idea but it is somebody who has got the gist of it quicker, perhaps understands it more, mainly because they may well be the subject expert, they may have more skills for it, and that is where you come back to the team issue, that collaboration occurs so much more now when the framework that you start with says "We are all in this together and your remuneration is based on the team based effort". So it doesn't really matter who executes as long as the team comes out of it with a bright idea. I don't think it is a key issue any more.

ADAM SPENCER: I would think there would be many examples of corporate structures where the person who is notionally at the very top leaving wouldn't be as damaging to that organisation if someone who on certain trees might be second or third down goes. Often it is the loss of two or three people in the second or third line that really threatens your organisation. No offence to the people at the top. In some organisations they are far and away most important and indispensable but often it is people in different positions, depending on the organisations I would have thought.

MARK McINNES: I think that is true. I think the old saying that you are only as good as the work you do is absolutely true. If you nurture talent and you have got good people working with you, then it is not really about you, it is about making sure that you are looking after them and their positions are well covered and the loss of those people is usually a greater damage to the company.

STEVE VAMOS: I think this really goes to the whole mind shift that we need to have with what leadership and management is all about. The people who are closer to customers, closer to where the rubber hits the road are going to know so much more than the guys at the top about what is going on and what the opportunities are, that we have got to get away from this idea that success in management is about having the great idea and being the hero. It is totally acceptable for anyone on my team to say all I have done is put great people in, into the key roles to produce these fantastic outcomes. I am happy. I don't necessarily need a lot more than that and I think we have just got to get away from this idea that it is about you as an individual contributor rather than you as a person, as a leader who can bring out the best in others and make them do great work.

Q: I have something rather sobering I want to talk to everyone about tonight. I am in retail furniture and many of you that are out there won't know that we have had the worst turn down in 30 years since February this year. We are talking about negative growth. This is really, really bad and you are going to read about it in the paper shortly. Should we be looking at overseas (markets)? Should we be looking, as great Australians do, and great Americans do, overseas for opportunity?

JILLIAN BROADBENT: Well, it is a global market. I think all opportunities ought to be considered. It is a bit hard in the retail area of furniture to transport that, but you take Westfield . They are in shopping centre management and they are now the biggest shopping centre manager in the US . It is a matter of identifying what your skill is and how you might use that to apply it to a broader market in a different economic cycle than where we might be.

MARK McINNES: I am really glad that somebody else is finding retail really hard and telling the truth.

Q: I am just a normal guy but my question is to Clive. When you were talking about happiness versus economies of the business, are they really mutually exclusive? Or everyone on the panel; is there a solution for who has an idea that can utilise both happiness with the economic needs of the business, without using the word "balance"?

CLIVE HAMILTON: I think you can. Of course, you have to focus on fulfilling worthwhile jobs so that people want to go along and work at the places. Of course, you can create such an enterprise or such an organisation and be destroyed by financial factors but I am sure - listen to Steve Vamos on this, I think it is true, although a bit clichéd and more asserted in theory than in practice that happy organisations with happy people do tend to perform well. There is an interesting parallel here with equitable investment. I notice often in the newspapers, in fact there was one in The Australian the other day talking about how ethical investment funds have performed as well, in fact a little bit better, than unethical ones, but that is an accident. I mean, if you were going to put your money into an ethical investment fund because you think you are going to make more money, then you are defeating the purpose, but it is gratifying to see that ethical investment funds are being well managed and doing well financially as well, even though that is not their principal purpose.

TERRY DAVIS: Listening to Clive, I am actually depressed, because I am not sure whether I can't go into Mark's place tomorrow and buy some clothes or that I should never eat or drink again. Conspicuous consumption aside, I am not sure how people pay for things if companies don't make profits and allow them to employ people.

CLIVE HAMILTON: The alternative to conspicuous consumption is conscious consumption. Of course we all have to consume but as long as we understand why we are doing it, we have made a careful decision about it rather than being influenced by advertising, then of course we can consume and be happy as a result, rather than go home, having indulged in retail therapy and feel depressed when we realised we spent all our money and we didn't really want it.

FIONA WOOD: We have got to collaborate. We have got to actually identify and work together, bring together the community, the corporate sector and the Government, articulate the problems in such a way that the people in positions of governance and accountability make the right decisions, and it is all our responsibility, every one of us, to actually make sure it is articulated appropriately and followed up with enough energy that keeps it going, that it doesn't get too hard and so you walk away. So it is collaboration and maintains it all the way.

Q: I would just like to hang this comment on in the context of growth and asset. We find it difficult to grow the economy without growing the amount of natural resources and energy and the like. Do they have any comments, thoughts, big ideas on that?

CLIVE HAMILTON: I think it is an extremely pertinent point and the obsession with growth is illustrated very well by the refusal of the Federal Government to ratify the Kyoto protocol. The Federal Government says, "We cannot do it because it is not in our economic interest". It commissioned some economic modelling to work out to what extent it is not in our economic interest, and this is what the results were.

The model showed that if we don't ratify the Kyoto treaty and just go on as we are, then on 1 December 2020 Australia 's GDP will have doubled. If we do ratify the Kyoto protocol and take measures necessary to reduce our Greenhouse gasses, then the size of our economy will not double until 30 January 2021, eight weeks later. This is the modelling the Government itself commissioned.

I mean this is madness, isn't it? The Government says it is not in our economic interest, we are not willing to wait an extra eight weeks to double our income in order to make some contribution to tackling the most important environmental problem facing the world.

Q: My question is to Mark - you said that fierce competition in an organisation brings out the best in people but you were also nodding when Fiona said that collaboration is the key to success in business, and I was just wondering whether or not you thought that competitive collaboration was an oxymoron?

MARK McINNES: I think when I was talking about fiercely competitiveness I wasn't talking about within an organisation for the jobs. I was talking about the organisation being fiercely competitive in the market place that it operates in, and in fact you have to channel your people's energies away from their own need to be competitive with their colleagues to in fact making sure that they understand within the role that they play what the industry is that they operate in, who are their competitors and how can they challenge energies for that organisation to be competitive.

So in that sense I don't think it is an oxymoron because I believe that organisations need to create a competitiveness for themselves in the markets that they compete in. I believe that employees within the company need to collaborate for that outcome.

ADAM SPENCER: What I am going to do to wrap this up, it has been quite an amazing and very in depth discussion on a wide range of issues. We have got six amazing panellists here. What I am going to do here is sweep down from you, Terry, back to Steve to finish it off and get you to leave these 1100 people here tonight with one big idea. It doesn't have to be the most important one; it doesn't have to be the one we have already talked about. Give them one idea each with which to leave them, which will be a significant issue in Australian business in the next five years. Starting with you, Terry Davis.

TERRY DAVIS: For all those unhappy people out there, follow the passion because if you follow the passion the ideas will come, follow the ideas and the execution will come from that.

FIONA WOOD: Share the energy.

CLIVE HAMILTON: Ideas are powerful; they change the world. So pursue an idea.

JILLIAN BROADBENT: Make sure you are in the right environment, which is receptive to ideas.

MARK McINNES: Focus on the job you are doing not the job that you want.

STEVE VAMOS: I think that I would say that we are all working harder. I think it goes to Clive's point and I will kind of agree a little bit with him, but just a little, very little, but at the end of the day it is not how hard you are working, the satisfaction comes from how much of your potential as a person is being received and contributed to the organisation you work for, and leadership has to change to enable that, to enable people to give more of what they can give and then their satisfaction will increase and hopefully they won't have to work as hard.

ADAM SPENCER: We have tackled some big issues. It has taken a very impressive panel to do so. Can we please have a massive round of applause for the panel? Thank you all very much for your contribution. Thank you for coming along. See you later.

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