Kare Anderson: Be an opportunity maker

I grew up

diagnosed as phobically shy,

and, like at least 20 other people

in a room of this size,

I was a stutterer.

Do you dare raise your hand?

And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us,

because when we are treated that way,

we feel invisible sometimes,

or talked around and at.

And as I started to look at people,

which is mostly all I did,

I noticed that some people

really wanted attention and recognition.

Remember, I was young then.

So what did they do?

What we still do perhaps too often.

We talk about ourselves.

And yet there are other people I observed

who had what I called a mutuality mindset.

In each situation, they found a way to talk about us

and create that "us" idea.

So my idea to reimagine the world

is to see it one where we all become

greater opportunity-makers with and for others.

There's no greater opportunity

or call for action for us now

than to become opportunity-makers

who use best talents together more often

for the greater good

and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own.

And I want to talk to you about that,

because even more than giving,

even more than giving,

is the capacity for us to do something smarter

together for the greater good

that lifts us both up

and that can scale.

That's why I'm sitting here.

But I also want to point something else out:

Each one of you

is better than anybody else at something.

That disproves that popular notion

that if you're the smartest person in the room,

you're in the wrong room.

(Laughter)

So let me tell you about

a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back,

and I met this up-and-coming actress,

and we were soon talking about something

that we both felt passionately about: public art.

And she had the fervent belief

that every new building in Los Angeles

should have public art in it.

She wanted a regulation for it,

and she fervently started —

who is here from Chicago? —

she fervently started talking about

these bean-shaped reflective sculptures

in Millennium Park,

and people would walk up to it

and they'd smile in the reflection of it,

and they'd pose and they'd vamp

and they'd take selfies together,

and they'd laugh.

And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind.

I said, "I know someone you ought to meet.

He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks" —

(Laughter) —

"and he shares your fervent desire

that art should engage and enable people to connect."

He spent five years in solitary,

and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin,

and he's articulate

and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff.

He had workout regime he did every day.

(Laughter)

I think she was following me at that point.

I said, "He'd be an unexpected ally."

And not just that. There's James. He's an architect

and he's a professor, and he loves place-making,

and place-making is when you have

those mini-plazas and those urban walkways

and where they're dotted with art,

where people draw and come up and talk sometimes.

I think they'd make good allies.

And indeed they were.

They met together. They prepared.

They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council.

And the council members not only passed the regulation,

half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards.

They were startling, compelling and credible.

You can't buy that.

What I'm asking you to consider

is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become,

because more than wealth

or fancy titles

or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect

around each other's better side and bring it out.

And I'm not saying this is easy,

and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too

about who you wanted to connect with,

but what I want to suggest is,

this is an opportunity.

I started thinking about it

way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter

and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends

and trends that transcended business

or politics or lifestyle.

So I had to have contacts

in different worlds very different than mine,

because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends.

And third, I had to write the story

in a way stepping into the reader's shoes,

so they could see how these trends could affect their lives.

That's what opportunity-makers do.

And here's a strange thing:

Unlike an increasing number of Americans

who are working and living and playing with people

who think exactly like them

because we then become more rigid and extreme,

opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations

with people unlike them,

and they're building relationships,

and because they do that,

they have trusted relationships

where they can bring the right team in

and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster

and seize more opportunities.

They're not affronted by differences,

they're fascinated by them,

and that is a huge shift in mindset,

and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more.

This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset,

and I believe in doing that.

It's especially important now.

Why is it important now?

Because things can be devised like drones

and drugs and data collection,

and they can be devised by more people

and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes

and then, as we know from the news every day,

they can be used for dangerous ones.

It calls on us, each of us,

to a higher calling.

But here's the icing on the cake:

It's not just the first opportunity

that you do with somebody else

that's probably your greatest,

as an institution or an individual.

It's after you've had that experience

and you trust each other.

It's the unexpected things

that you devise later on

you never could have predicted.

For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned,

and he watched them when they were practicing,

and he was soon talking to Wally,

my friend the ex-con,

about that exercise regime.

And he thought,

I have a set of racquetball courts.

That guy could teach it.

A lot of people who work there are members at my courts.

They're frequent travelers.

They could practice in their hotel room,

no equipment provided.

That's how Wally got hired.

Not only that, years later

he was also teaching racquetball.

Years after that,

he was teaching the racquetball teachers.

What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people

around a shared interest and action,

you're accustomed to serendipitous

things happening into the future,

and I think that's what we're looking at.

We open ourselves up to those opportunities,

and in this room are key players in technology,

key players who are uniquely positioned to do this,

to scale systems and projects together.

So here's what I'm calling for you to do.

Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers.

Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength

and they become pattern seekers.

They get involved in different worlds than their worlds

so they're trusted and they can see those patterns,

and they communicate to connect

around sweet spots of shared interest.

So what I'm asking you is,

the world is hungry.

I truly believe, in my firsthand experience,

the world is hungry for us

to unite together as opportunity-makers

and to emulate those behaviors

as so many of you already do —

I know that firsthand —

and to reimagine a world

where we use our best talents together

more often to accomplish greater things together

than we could on our own.

Just remember,

as Dave Liniger once said,

"You can't succeed

coming to the potluck with only a fork."

(Laughter)

Thank you very much.

Thank you. (Applause)