Schedule
Dent is coming back to Sun Valley, ID in March 2014. We're working on our Dent 2014 Sessions, and in the meanwhile, here's a reminder of our Dent 2013 sessions:
March 25th
Invisible Panel
THis panel exists so that we can add speakers before they have sessions.
March 24th
Photowalk With Thomas Hawk
Meet up in the lobby of the Sun Valley Lodge.
Bring your DSLR, your point and shoot, your Hasselblad, your Holga, your iPhone, or whatever you like to take photos with, and come on out with photographer Thomas Hawk on a photographic tour of some of the most picturesque spots in the Wood River Valley.
Locations will include Proctor Mountain, where the weathered remains of the world's first chairlift are enshrined, as well as a visit to the historic mining town of Ketchum, and then on to the banks and bridges of the stunning Big Wood River.
All photographers are welcome regardless of skill, experience, or equipment. After the photowalk, we'll stop off at the River Run Lodge for lunch where we can hang out, meet up with some of the Dent skiers, and geek out about photography.
Skiing and Werewolf
Dent kicks off with an optional Skiing/Snowboarding + Werewolf day. Sun Valley is an amazing ski destination with a mountain full of high-speed chairlifts and beautiful powdery snow. If skiing or boarding is your thing, join the group for a half-day on the slopes. If not, join the rest of the group of wine tasting and Werewolf in the Lodge.
Opening Reception
Mix and mingle with other Dent guests at the "apres-ski" opening reception. Beer, wine, and bites will be served to the group in a unique and beautiful Idaho mountain setting.
March 25th
Breakfast
Hosted breakfast in the Continental Room at Sun Valley Resort.
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Jason Preston and Steve Broback introduce the conference.
Strategic Digital Advantage: Lessons from the Obama Campaign
The Obama for America campaign is a case study in digital engagement done right. As Harvard Business Review put it: "The Obama campaign's techniques, tools and technologies deserve detailed and dedicated attention from every organization that takes data-driven decisions seriously. There's not a brand manager, health care administrator, CMO or CIO who wouldn't benefit big-time from benchmarking their own operations to this campaign's. It was that good."
In this session, Harper Reed, CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign will discuss what core strategies, tactics, and tools of the campaign can be utilized by organizations of all stripes to help drive engagement, conversion -- and competitive advantage.
The DevOps culture and agile development * Testing vs intuition * Tools and techniques for data capture and analysis * Building predictive models * Integrating social, advertising, and email campaigns * Internal staffing vs outsourcing * Translating insights into action
Managerial Mystique: How Charisma Is Crafted
Research from UCLA Associate Professor Maia Young suggests that we see certain business leaders to be charismatic because of deep-seated patterns of “magical thinking”. Her results suggest that business leaders, much like magicians, can and do create illusions by controlling the apparent means by which they succeed. What makes some leaders charismatic and others not? Why do we think some people have intangible abilities that others do not?
The answers can be scientific - and surprisingly simple. In this session, Professor Young will join us on stage to share her research and its implications for our own habits--how to cultivate others’ impressions of us and how to boost a recommendation for someone else as well.
Fostering Creativity: How Culture and Environment Drive Innovation
In a recent IBM Global CEO survey, creativity was flagged as the most important quality needed by a CEO -- especially in markets and industries facing increasing complexity.
One would be hard pressed to name an enterprise anywhere on the globe that exemplifies organizational creativity more than Pixar. What The Economist called a "creative powerhouse" began in 1979 with the vision of the two cofounders Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull. Ed and Alvy managed the venture from its humble origins in a garage all the way to the creation of their first major motion picture released in 1995, the groundbreaking film Toy Story.
Central to their culture, vision and execution was the harmonization of the balance between art and technology. This is something that has become a major priority for startups in our increasingly app-centric world.
In this fireside chat, Alvy will discuss what practical lessons leaders can learn from his experience at Pixar, as well as his successes in other entrepreneurial ventures. Some of the topics to be covered include:
Integrating artists and technologists * Prioritizing people over ideas * Finding and hiring talent * Integrating artists and technologists * Instilling the "long view" * Overcoming debilitating risk aversion and inhibition * Mining academia * Staying flexible: optimizing for serendipity vs. rigid planning.
Own Your Process, Don't Let Your Process Own You
The best vision in the world with the best possible team behind it will fail without a dedication to process and execution. But process is a fickle muse, and a blind belief in protocol can be as destructive as a complete lack of discipline. How do you create process at the beginning of a venture? How do you contain process as a company grows?
Oren Jacob, formerly CTO at Pixar and now Founder of startup Toy Talk, will take the stage to share his experiences wrestling with the nuances of process both at Pixar under Steve Jobs, and now as the CEO and founder of his own company.
Lunch
Lunch hosted in the Limelight room at the Sun Valley Resort.
How To Redefine An Industry
Bringing a brand new product into a market carries its own challenges; especially a new kind of advertising. How do you sell a risk-averse customer on something they've never seen before? How do you solve the chicken-and-egg problem of building a brand new marketplace where you need both buyers and sellers? In short, how do you talk everyone into it?
Brian Wong is actively changing the meaning of mobile advertisement through his company Kiip. Brian will join us on stage for an interview about his successful strategies for getting buy in from key customers, leveraging those first movers to build legitimacy for his product, and the setbacks and pitfalls he's experienced along the way.
Betapreneurs: The New Instigators
A new kind of entrepreneur is emerging and will soon be the norm. You might dismiss them as exceptionally daring risk takers, but these instigators desire flexibility, community and meaning above all . They are the model for the productive citizen of the future. It is from this new flexible framework that the next-gen worker, the Betapreneur, is emerging.
The Betapreneur is distinguished by an ability to thrive in the challenges presented by our new, volatile labor market. To do so, they willingly launch unfinished ideas, products, and services into the world--they embrace the feedback, learn, and repeat. This means they excel at producing in impossibly tight time frames, embrace failure, rebound quickly, and are experts at creating groups people, organizations and institutions to support their efforts.
Betapreneurs need an ecosystem and infrastructure that will encourage resilient and innovative ideas to form and take root. Such a ecosystem can be understood as both communities and networks of people who are generous, open minded, tough, fearless in their opinions, and eager to engage. This change means that centralized control is a thing of the past. Betapreneurs and the generosity fueled connection economy will emerge in it's place.
The "Business of Breakthrough": Creating a Process for Innovation
In the history of computing, few organizations have made a dent that can equal the impact of PARC. From the laser printer to bitmapped displays and the graphical user interface, the ideas that were gestated in their labs have made their way onto practically all desktops (and pockets) worldwide. This trend continues today as the Palo Alto Research Center and the scores of researchers, ethnographers, scientists and technologists they employ provide custom R&D services to clients like Samsung, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and the U.S. military.
In this session, we'll see how PARC merges elements of the "Open Innovation" model advocated by Dr. Henry Chesbrough with its own agile experimentation framework and human-centered design processes to create breakthroughs in big data, mobile computing, cleantech, printed electronics, and networking which can be applied to any organization who wants to create new markets or business models -- or disrupt existing ones.
Break
Take a half hour to mingle with other Dent attendees.
Innovation is a Unique Combination of Existing Ideas
Too often, we think of innovation only in terms of pulling the next great idea out of the ether. But the most innovative organizations don't waste time trying to re-invent everything. Instead, they look to form new combinations of existing ideas.
As founder of CGM, a design consultancy awash in prestigious awards for world-changing ideas, Carl Magnusson has shepharded this process forward in organizations of all sizes and in a number of industries. He has honed this perspective and skill from his tenure with the Charles Eames office and as former director of design with Knoll. In this talk, Carl will discuss the methods of innovation and explain the process of creating innovative combinations.
Fearless Genius:The Digital Revolution 1985-2000
Doug Menuez’ photography project Fearless Genius chronicles Steve Jobs and the leading innovators of California’s Silicon Valley during the digital revolution as they invented the technology that would change our world forever. Menuez began his project in 1985 when Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple after losing a boardroom battle.
Menuez gained special access to photograph Jobs as he built a new company, NeXT, and a powerful new computer that Jobs hoped would transform education. After three years with Steve, Menuez expanded the project with unprecedented access to document throughout the secretive labs of Silicon Valley for fifteen years. He continued working through the rise of the internet boom of the 1990’s, photographing the over 70 companies, and generating an image archive of 250,000 negatives from which this exhibition was selected. Menuez completed the project in 2000, as a singular era in our history was closing.
In this talk, Doug will share the stories and images of the sweat, work, and motivations from those early and transformative days in the digital revolution.
Extreme Autonomy: New York City (Steady) State
Is it better to be interconnected and interdependent or completely self sufficient? Is Apple's command and control model the way of the future? What if we took the lessons and concepts of "vertical integration" in business and applied them to architecture and city design? What if New York City could be completely self sufficient?
How far can we go locally to provide for our air, water, food, energy, building, and manufacturing, to deal with our carbon and our wastes? New York City (Steady) State is a radical thought experiment from author and architect Michael Sorkin that investigates the possibility of extreme urban autonomy and seeks the forms and technologies that will enable cities to make decisively positive contributions to the fate of the earth.
Dine Around Dinner
Dent attendees will be shuttled to a selection of fantastic local restaurants for private dinners on the town.
March 26th
Breakfast
Hosted breakfast in the Continental Room at the Sun Valley Resort.
Team Dynamics: Communication and Trust Throughout An Organization
Building an environment where trust allows for good teamwork helps to create a focused and effective team. And an insanely focused, dedicated, and productive group of highly talented people will dent the universe time and again. But how do you build such a team?
Steve Jobs once described Apple as the biggest startup on the planet, in that Apple is organized around leadership and teamwork the way a startup is organized. "Teamwork," he shared, "is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time."
Kathryn Minshew, CEO of The Muse and Cathie Black, Former Chairman/CEO of Hearst Magazines (think Cosmopolitan, Oprah, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and 20 others) and NYT best selling author, will share a conversation on team dynamics, motivation, and building environments for the best talent in the world.
Team Motivation and Purpose: The Power of Fulfilling Work
According to Malcolm Gladwell, there are three requirements for a satisfying job: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward. Autonomy and reward are self explanatory, but complexity refers to the need for us to work on something that stimulates us intellectually and emotionally. In short, we must be working on something that matters to us.
How do you, as a leader, connect people to your vision and make it matter to them? How do you give your employees purpose in their work?
In this session Kushal Chakrabarti, founder of the Seattle nonprofit Vittana, will discuss the lessons he's learned in building a vision and a team around a mission that matters, and why it's important that work be fulfilling.
Team First: The Art and Science of Picking People
"The best programmer in the world," Steve Jobs was fond of saying, "is fifty to a hundred times more effective than the average programmer." Jobs' talent was being able to spot the difference, and hire a team full of incredible people.
Projects, and companies, live or die on the strengths of the team behind them. Peter Drucker once said that: "no other decisions are as long lasting in their consequences or so difficult to unmake." How can you learn to spot the kinds of people that will outperform the average by an order of magnitude? How do you go beyond a resume or a list of previous accomplishments to discover people with potential? Is it all a matter of experience and intuition or can data and algorithms increase our success rate in identifying superstars?
Dave Girouard, former President of Google Enterprise and VP of Apps, and now founder of Upstart, a company that allows you to invest in people--literally--will join us on stage to discuss how his experience at Google inspired the algorithms and models he's built at Upstart. Learn how software and data can be used to help grow winning teams and avoid having to "unmake" time-consuming mistakes.
Great Artists Steal
Good design is always effective, but it is not always new. Design that builds on established standards can work better for users than something revolutionary. And each design revolution embeds old standards, even while rejecting them.
For example, typography in e-books and iPads can benefit from 500 years of book design. Traditions and conventions provide hooks that help readers grab on to meaning.
With a redesign, a designer yearns to tear it down and build something new. That’s not always possible; sometimes it’s not wise. Leveraging the equity of a big existing brand can be a challenging assignment. But a wise update can lead to more lasting success than a sudden change.
The hard part is knowing which path to take.
Lunch
Lunch hosted in the Limelight room at the Sun Valley Resort.
Nimble Enterprise: How To Act Like A Startup At Any Size
Apple Computer famously began in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, and through a 36 year journey has become the most valuable public company in the world. Despite its size and wealth, Jobs fought to keep Apple in a "startup mentality" structurally and culturally. What is this startup mentality? How does it differ from the traditional roles of leadership and culture in enterprise organizations, and why is it worth seeking? How can it be achieved?
Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction, will join us on stage for an interview with writer and Teens in Tech Founder Daniel Brusilovsky about her experience moving from the world of enterprise to the world of startups in silicon valley, and what the differences have taught her about how to run a company that can dent the universe.
Harnessing The Next Competitive Weapon: Context
According to a recent Pew Internet Study, as of September 2012 nearly half of all American adults own "smartphones." Whether that means an iPhone, an Android phone, or even one of a variety of other devices, each of these adults is walking around with a portable, wirelessly connected, bundle of smart sensors. And that's just the beginning.
Products and services that tap into the contextual awareness generated by our technology will provide a clear advantage to some organizations by allowing them to create experiences that cannot be created without contextual understanding.
In this session Robert Scoble, author of an upcoming book title "The Age of Context: How it Will Change Your Life and Work," will join us on stage to talk about the upcoming shift towards a contextual world, and how you can take advantage of it.
Break
Take a half hour to mingle with other Dent attendees.
Being The Magician
More and more, business leaders are being described in magical terms. Words like "mystique" and "charisma" are being applied to some of the most respected CEOs.
While there have always been magicians in the world, only in the last 100 years has the perception of magic been a positive one. In only a few generations, we've seen a dramatic cultural shift. Where once we persecuted people with otherworldly attributes ("witches"), we now embrace those with mystical qualities. We pay theatrical magicians to lie to us, and revere leaders who can seemingly foretell the future or project a "reality distortion field."
Stagebill magazine proclaimed that Eugene Burger is "universally recognized as perhaps the finest close-up magician in the world." His deep understanding of the psychology and philosophy behind magic have won him international accolades, cover stories in conjuring magazines, and four awards from the famed Magic Castle in Hollywood. In addition, business leaders of all stripes have attended his lectures at Wharton and other respected MBA programs.
In this session Burger will help us better understand the underlying philosophies and psychologies that both magician and audiences employ in the creation of magical moments. Eugene will discuss key magical philosophies, strategies and tactics that will be revealed in an upcoming book, Be the Magician: The Secret Art of Imagination,’he is writing with David Morey, author of The Underdog Advantage, and John McLaughlin, former director of the CIA.
Habits of Mind: The Lessons of Sherlock Holmes
Careful observation, artful reasoning, and a keen understanding of human behavior -- to say nothing of style and panache -- have made Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes an aspirational figure worldwide. But are his famous abilities achievable for the rest of us?
In this talk, Scientific American columnist Maria Konnikova will build on the ideas presented in her New York Times-bestselling book, "Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes," to help the audience develop habits of mind that can help put a dent in the universe.
Dent Themes and Takeaways
Several of the Dent Advisors will join us on stage to discuss the themes that have emerged from the conversations and talks over the past few days.
Closing Remarks
Steve Broback and Jason Preston offer some closing remarks on the conference.
Closing Reception
A closing reception with food and drinks for all Dent attendees, accompanied by a magic performance from Eugene Burger.
March 27th
Skiing and Werewolf
Dent ends with a second optional Skiing/Snowboarding + Werewolf day. If skiing or boarding is your thing, join the group for a half-day on the slopes. If not, join the rest of the group of wine tasting and Werewolf in the Lodge. If you want to do one of each, that's cool too.