Click here to view the embedded video.

About Tamara J. Erickson:
Tamara J. Erickson (Tammy) is both a respected, McKinsey Award-winning author and popular and engaging storyteller. Her compelling views of the future are based on extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations work. Well-grounded and academically rigorous, fundamentally optimistic, Tammy’s work discerns and describes interesting trends in our future and provides actionable counsel to help both organizations and individuals prepare today. She is a member of nGenera Inc.

Tammy has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles: “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” (March 2004), winner of the McKinsey Award, “Managing Middlescence” (March 2006), “What It Means to Work Here,” (March 2007), and “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” (November 2007), as well as the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent, published by Harvard Business School Press (2006). She has also co-authored an MIT Sloan Management Review article, “Bridging Faultlines in Diverse Teams,” (Summer 2007). She also authored one of Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Ideas for 2008, “Task, Not Time,” (February 2008).

Read more about Tamara J. Erickson

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Tom Davenport:
Clay Shirky is the author of “Here Comes Everybody”. His consulting focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.” His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC. Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches course named “Social Weather.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Yossi Vardi:
Joseph “Yossi” Vardi has helped more than 40 startups see the light of day, among them Mirabilis (makers of ICQ) and the video companies Scopus and BrightCove. He’s a strategic advisor to Amazon and AOL, and a venture partner of Pitango, one of Israel’s largest VC funds.

He’s a lively presence in the world of tech startups, with an absurd sense of humor and a refreshing set of values (restated in a much-commented-on TechCrunch post in October) that drive his approach to new investments. The takeaways: Judge the individual over the business plan; and don’t shy away from an entrepreneur who has failed before: “It makes them want to win even more,” he said.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Larry Lessig:
Larry Lessig calls law professor Yochai Benkler “the leading intellectual of the information age.” He studies the commons — including such shareable spaces as the radio spectrum, as well as our shared bodies of knowledge and how we access and change them.

His most recent writings (such as his 2006 book The Wealth of Networks) discuss the effects of net-based information production on our lives and minds and laws. He has gained admirers far beyond the academy, so much so that when he released his book online with a Creative Commons license, it was mixed and remixed online by fans. (Texts can be found at benkler.org; and check out this web-based seminar on The Wealth of Networks.) He was awarded EFF’s Pioneer Award in 2007.

He’s the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (home to many of TED’s favorite people).

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Howard Rheingold:
As Howard Rheingold himself puts it, “I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net.” A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.

His 2002 book Smart Mobs, which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in The Virtual Community), he went on to cofound HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. Now active in Second Life, he teaches, writes and consults on social networking. His latest passion: teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we’re all creating together.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Richard Baraniuk:
Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk has a giant vision: to create a free global online education system that puts the power of creation and collaboration in the hands of teachers worldwide. He’s realizing that vision with Connexions, a website that allows teachers to quickly “create, rip, mix and burn” coursework — without fear of copyright violations. Think of it as Napster for education.

Connexions’ open-source system cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share course materials, modify existing work and disseminate it to their students — all for free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing. Baraniuk envisions Connexions as a repository where the most up-to-date material can be shared and reviewed (it’s far more efficient than waiting for a textbook to be printed); it could become a powerful force in leveling the education playing field. Currently encompassing hundreds of online courses and used by a million people worldwide, Baraniuk’s virtual educational system is revolutionizing the way people teach and learn.

He advocates taking problems slowly – noting that expertise comes with approx. 10,000 hours of training. He thereby identifies the ‘mismatch problem’, which is simply the idea that standards used to judge/predict success in a given field don’t match what it takes to be successful in that field.

For example, when diagnosing colonoscopies, it’s how much time the doctor spends on each colonoscopy, not how smart they are, how much training they have, where s/he went to school etc. that determines success. If you spend more than 10 minutes on each colonoscopy rather than one, you’ll find the cancers. However, we select and train doctors for their cognitive facility, for, amongst other things, the speed at which they acquire information and the efficiency with which they go about their tasks.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Malcolm Gladwell:
Malcolm Gladwell specializes in surprises — counterintuitive truths discovered by clever researchers, obscure historians, and ordinary people observing the world. In his first year as a staff writer at the “New Yorker in 1996, he captivated readers with an article titled “The Tipping Point,” which grappled with a mysterious sudden drop in New York City crime, by applying the principles of epidemiology to policing. “The Tipping Point” ultimately became a book and has remained on the New York Times best-seller lists for years.

Meanwhile, Gladwell has gone on to explore similar mismatches — mammography and fighter jets (it’s all about seeing), pit bulls and racial profiling, Wayne Gretsky and Yo-Yo Ma — writing cross-disciplinary articles that illuminate hidden facts about group behavior, business and individual selves. Gladwell began 2007 with a controversial look at the Enron case, distinct from all the reportage that’s come before.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Jimmy Wales:
Jimmy Wales went from betting on interest rates and foreign-currency fluctuations (as an option trader) to betting on the willingness of people to share their knowledge. That’s how Wikipedia, imagined in 2001, became one of the most-referenced, most-used repositories of knowledge on the planet, with more than one million articles in English (compared with the Britannica’s 80,000) and hundreds of thousands in dozens of other languages, all freely available.

The “wiki” in the name refers to software that allows anyone with Internet access to add, delete or edit entries. This has led to controversies about the reliability of the information, prompting the Wikimedia Foundation to set tighter rules for editors, while still keeping Wikipedia open-source. One thing is certain: Wikipedia will never be finished. In the meantime Wales has started working on Wikiasari, a wiki-style search engine.

Click here to view the embedded video.