Notes from the Nordic Business Forum 2016

Attended the 2016 Nordic Business Forum in Helsinki October 6th and 7th and the post-seminar event October 8th. What a great value. I did setup an experiment and challenge for myself. First one, can I stay on the social leaderboard throughout the event among the close to 6000 attendees at the event? Yes, I could. Second, can I end in the #1 spot (almost but actually ended on #2 position). The social leaderboard was a ranking calculated from posting pictures, updates and sharing insights in the event app throughout the event and the competition was fierce.

My main takeaways from all the speeches were to:

iterate, learn, improve

• all speakers touched on this one way or another
• pivot until you are successful, start small and scale (@jessicajackley)
• experiment, measure, learn and change (all speakers touched on this), compare with Demings PDCA, but don’t plan too much, setup experiments instead!
• push yourself to the limit of your potential (@jessicajackley)

do marketing with impact

• Create great products, great content and strong tribes
• Creating a tribe centered around your niche creates followers, you don’t need ads to get follower’s attention (@thisissethsblog)
• Create great products and people will do the marketing for you (@destraynor) (@profgalloway)
• Marketing today must deliver value. Our most scarce resource is time. Stop writing just propaganda. (@garyvee)
• If you do ad marketing, do it on Facebook, it’s underpriced currently (@garyvee)
• create a strong brand and never give it away (@tonyhawk)

nurture individuals

• Let individuals become empowered and self-propelled
• Implement the Pixar Braintrust concept (@edcatmull)
• Trust and care builds the team (@vineetnayar)
• Remove the worries to fail, better fail fast and learn from it (@dickc)
• “At first all new ideas suck, I mean really suck.” (@edcatmull) - Learn to say “That’s an interesting idea, why do you think that?”
• As a leader, model grandma, she is the best leader in the world (@vineetnayar)

challenge your team, with some good questions (@dickc)

• What took us too long to learn?
• Why did it take us so long to learn?
• How do we implement a bias for yes, to allow for more risk and potential mistakes? (as it’s cheaper to fix mistakes than preventing them in the first place)