Dispatch from the First Global Creative Leadership Summit

Monday launched the first Global Creative Leadership Summit in NYC. With just 100 delegates ranging from Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson to Theodore Zeldin, President of the Oxford Muse, the Summit - streaming live at www.creativeleadershipsummit.org - is assembling a dozen scientists, four Nobel Laureates, seven artists and architects, ten CEO's and business entrepreneurs, and numerous political figures, spiritual leaders and minds from all disciplines to try and find new tools to address the challenges of the 21st Century.

To begin this task we opened proceedings with a revealing and open conversation with Henry Kissinger - crossing boundaries between disciplines and highlighting examples from all parts of his extraordinary career. When talking of leadership, Dr Kissinger warned us that we are not about to give birth to a mythic race of global leaders. Our need is for the leaders we have to progressively broaden their understanding and respect for other cultures--to think internationally as well as nationally. It was a point extended later by Professor Theodore Zeldin, who underscored the need to affect change "bottom-up." In a world of more personal power, change comes from reaching people in breadth. Simply, the power of the "leader" may not be what it once was. With the democratization of knowledge through the internet, our challenge is not only to convince our leaders. It is to also inspire coalitions of the power of the many.

Following Dr. Kissinger, we brought together our first panel to ask the question: Who do we want the 21st century citizen to be? - setting the macro challenge for the Summit over the next three days. It is a big question sparked a wide-ranging debate of aspiration as to who we want to become as a culture.

What is particularly interesting is how the challenges--and it follows, solutions--are shared. We will be talking a great deal about the brain and neuroscience during the Summit and, while one might expect Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel to show his huge wisdom on this (as he did in his inimitable style), WPP CEO Martin Sorrell talked about what advertising is learning from neuroscience, Richard Meier spoke on the effect of architecture on the mind, and PlaNet Finance President Jacques Attali covered foreign policy and changing mindsets--all which added up to a fascinating study and underlined the spark and energy that thinking across disciplines can bring.

In summing up this session, asked how the 21st century university can educate a new generation of global citizens, Alison Richard, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, stressed that we should give students and faculty the freedom to think, to learn from each other and to push back the boundaries of knowledge without the pressure to make their knowledge useful. Knowledge for knowledge's sake: this concept - finding new flexible tools for people, rather than encouraging the ability to perform specific task - is at the heart of what the Summit is trying to emphasize. In a world of greater pace and challenge, of so many dimensions and such complexity, it is a new way and highly effective way to approach problems.

We closed with a wonderful quote: hard work is not the same as hard thought. In a world of 24-hour commerce, 24-hour cities and 24-hour news, this was a timely point. We have less space than ever to analyze and to debate. We need to learn to reclaim this need, and the answer can't be asking the world to slow down until our power of analysis catches up. Our challenge is to learn how to train the brain to compete with, and even to overtake, the pace of progress.

The final formal session of day was Theodore Zeldin encouraging the crowd to talk about things that are important, stating "We spend too much time talking about the little things." He could not have given a better close to formal proceedings. His work in developing new ways to converse is cutting-edge. His expertise over the years is phenomenal and his is dedicated to an issue that is extremely important. A new century needs new advances in dialogue.

And so our first day ended with a brilliant commentary from Riz Khan, who took a break from the challenges of an international news station that will have the largest launch in the history of international news, Al Jazeera English, which goes live on Wednesday. His point, well received by the crowd, was that we all (and Americans in particular) need to better understand what's happening in the world around them. This kind of cultural empathy is an answer to the challenges we face. We may live closer together than ever, but that doesn't mean we understand one another better. We need to understand more about the cultural identity of our societies to build a more unified world, where our values, beliefs and traditions are the DNA of our identities.

We see this in action - in a small way - at the reception after Riz. Iranian VCs, talking to Indian NGO leaders; Nobel prize winners speaking to publishers, Abbots talking to authors. We learned during the day how cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue can bring new learning. We learned in the evening they can also be a lot of fun.