"Celebrate your failures"
The 10th Nordic Business Forum with the theme “growth” was hosted by CEOs, business executives, and entrepreneurs like George Clooney, Steve Wozniak, Carla Harris and Alex Osterwalder, just to mention a few. A diverse mixture of speakers inspired 7500 guests, by presenting their insights and stories. Overall, they had a lot of good advices, but most of them had one in common: “celebrate your failures”.
Two days time to make new business contacts
Create and Innovate
”Some of the best products are created when you want something for yourself,” said Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple and Inventor. He talked about the story of Apple and encouraged the audience to stay creative and to create. Alex Osterwalder, Co-Founder of Strategyzer talked in his speech about innovation and transformation: “It’s all about the willpower to transform. When life looks too good, you stop innovating.” Innovation was a powerful word during these two days, and Costas Markides, Professor at the London Business School, helped the audience to understand deeply the word: “Innovation is many things. It can be incremental or radical.”
Over 7500 people were attending
Take risks and grow
Anssi Rantanen, CEO Finland at the Growth Tribe Academy, created a brand and a website with chatbot, in only five minutes on stage, to show how easy it is to reach out to customers. He engaged the audience: “Google did a research on what makes innovative teams successful and according to the study, the best predictor is psychological safety. That means the teams have the ability to take risks and experiment safely, as a team member you feel you have the ability to be your true self and you are appreciated by being so. I strongly feel that future of growth is not possible without psychological safety.” He said, that over 50 % of employees do not speak up, when they have an idea. What a failure for each company! He advises companies to ask about contributions, honest feedback about that and to be as a leader honest about your own failures.
The decoration was inspired by nordic nature
Have no fear to fail
Sara Blakely, Spanx Founder and Chief Executive Officer started off the second day of NBF, with explaining what her father’s most important lesson to her has been: “Overcome the fear of embarrassment and make mistakes without any fear. I try to embarrass myself constantly since I don’t want to live in fear. Fear of failure is a massive roadblock for entrepreneurs. My dad encouraged me to fail and he redefined failure to me. The only real failure is not trying. We have “oops meetings” at Spanx where I share my failures and people share theirs. Businesses should embrace a culture like that in order to innovate.” Daring to fail as a leader, new innovations are only born out of trial and error, and the organizational culture must be built on allowing failure, were the key messages in numerous speeches. Carla Harris, Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, said it briefly like this: “Celebrate the failures. If people are afraid, they won’t try. Fear has no place in your success equitation. Failings gives you the gift of experimenting”.
Announcing next years speakers
Next year again!
In the end of the two day summit we already got an impression, what to expect for next year: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Indra Nooyi, Yuval Noah Harari, Lloyd Blankfein, Björn Wahlroos, Lisa Bodell and many more will be at the NBF 2020 on the 23th and 24th of September. The new topic will be “Rethinking Business” and the purpose of this event theme is to get business leaders to challenge themselves and think about how they can better lead a business in today’s changing world.
We would like to thank the founders Hans-Peter Siefen and Jyri Linden for their contribution and success as well as the CEO Aslak de Silva. Very well done!
We are happy to announce, that Nordic Minds will be taking part next year again!