There is nothing more valuable on Earth than an original idea. Here we are gathered together where the entire premise of our convening is to celebrate ideas worth spreading. Brilliant ideas, they light up a room. They light us up. Ideas are what rupture the status quo and brighten the future. Given the value of original ideas to our lives and work and economy, it might surprise you, even shock you, to learn that well over half and likely as many as 70% of them are silenced, ignored, never heard from in the first place. More on that stat soon. But first, Why? As in, Why don't we see all those ideas? I've been studying this question since forever. I worked at Apple when I was in college, back when only NASA had the Internet. My job was to do research and administrative support for a small strategy team, and one day, my boss asked me to join the meeting for solving some tough problem, not as a notetaker, but as a participant. The topic completely eludes me, but I completely remember how thrilled I was to be included in that meeting. And so I did my homework, and I showed up to that room, just full of ideas. But I might as well have stayed in the parking lot. No one made any eye contact with me, much less asked me to share what maybe could have been useful, if only as a fresh take from a new voice. "What happened?" I wondered. Was it something personal? Should I have raised my hand even higher? Or was I too eager, in that golden-retriever kind of way? One thing I observed - that the people in that room who got heard, they had MBAs, and that seemed to be their unspoken power. And so I thought, "That's it! I just need to get more credentials." Don't most of us want to believe in the meritocracy of ideas? That if we earn enough credentials, it'll pay off. That if we work hard enough, if we "lean in," we'll get in, or that maybe we just need more confidence in our own kick-ass, badass selves. But I wish I knew then what I know now: it's not all on us. Turns out, we don't fully control the outcome. Because that would deny the other part of the equation: we live in a system of power that shapes things too. How can it be a meritocracy, after all, if just some ideas get heard in the first place? Since those early days at Apple, I've had a chance to work with some amazing teams to ship over 100 products. That's let me sit at a bunch of tables at a bunch of companies in a bunch of industries, and what I know for sure is that what happened in that Apple meeting happens everywhere. Some ideas are heard; most are not. Sometimes it's engineering ignoring the designers or marketing ignoring sales because every organization has a group that's deemed less worthy of being heard. Young people are dismissed as "inexperienced" and older people as "out of touch." Almost always, commonly marginalized people, for example, the disabled or people of color, had their ideas marginalized too. At most tables, the person who's heard? You'll recognize these - the one with the fanciest title, even if their ideas are last year's reruns, or the loudest and most alpha of leaders denying the value of the quiet. It was researchers Adam Galinsky and Joe Magee of Columbia University who named this phenomenon that I had been observing in the real world. They wrote, "Power and status act as self-reinforcing loops. Status directly affects whether one's idea is heard." When I read that, I thought, "Yowza," and I thought through the implications. When you have power, it means that idea gets early encouragement, so your boss, your friends, whoever hear you, and they say something like, "That's so original!" They back you, and they shape it so that idea gets developed enough to become a new reality. Those who are valued get to create value, and that leads to more results and more respect and ... more status. Loop de loop, up and up they go. The reverse trajectory is also true. Those who have low power get ignored, like I did in that Apple meeting, or silenced. And then, even if the same words are used - so, like, "That's so ... original?" - the tone says they didn't actually hear you or it. We're not seeing all ideas. As in that Apple meeting, it's not that the idea is deemed unworthy, it's that the person who brings that idea is deemed unworthy of being heard. This power dynamic? It's encoded in our language. Diverse, unique, left-field - we use these words, even when said positively, to describe certain people and then "normal" for the rest. Normal, mainstream, majority - these are code, those worthy of being heard, and then the rest of us are the other. Other, otherizing, othering - it's language I hadn't even heard until a few years ago. To otherize is to see someone by the group they belong to rather than as the singular person that they are. It is to see someone through a subjective lens rather than as the subject of their own story. To otherize is effectively to reduce someone's power by saying - get this - that they are different from you. But isn't the truth that each of us is different? You, and you, and you? Each of us distinctly and entirely ourselves. And that's why we need to change the language we use to celebrate all difference, rather than weaponize some difference. And that's why I came up with the word "onlyness." Onlyness. Each of us, each of you, stand in a spot in the world only one stands in, and from that spot, your history, your experience, your visions, your hopes, everything that is you informs that perspective. It is that power of place, sort of like this big red circle, that follows you around, that is yours, distinctly one's own, the source of ideas, compared to no one. Want to bring this concept to life a little? I thought maybe, instead of just talking about the concept, I thought I would share a real-life story. A couple years ago, a management type had offered to help me with my second book, and when I met with him, this was his advice: "As a brown woman, your chances of being seen in this world? Next to nothing." It took me a second to realize he didn't actually comment on any of the ideas we had been emailing about; he was spending his time comparing me to those who already had power. And seen through that comparative framework, I wouldn't see my own ideas either. It's why for a super-long time, I've hidden the fact that I'm the daughter of a super-traditional - brown - family, where I was expected to accept an arranged marriage, not go to college like the boys did. But it's also why I notice how much culture shapes whether or not someone even gets to have power in the first place. I am always afraid when I go on stage, always, because English is not my first language, and I'm terrified I'm going to use the wrong word, but it's why I always notice how words encode certain frameworks, how words actually shape our world. I didn't get to go to Ivy League, and sometimes I envy those that did because they have such a great network. I went to community college and then a bunch of evening programs for over 12 years, and yet it was in meeting this incredibly wide variety of students that I know for sure that good ideas can and do come from everywhere. Right? Onlyness - when you center on that spot in the world, only one stands. One gets to define how their own difference matters rather than be dismissed for it. To code rather than be coded. Now, some of you might even be looking at me standing up here and thinking something like, "Well, you've proved him wrong." Any of you thinking that? (Applause) And that's really besides the point. It's the comparative framework that's wrong. It's not enough that a few of us run the gauntlet of power and make it through; we need to open up the aperture of who gets through by centering on that spot of onlyness. Okay, so this source of new ideas that I just talked about, let's go back to that as the context for that statistic that we started with, that well over half and likely as many as 70% of ideas are lost. Demographics are a terrible way of talking about people; no one is best described by their outer shell, like "white guy" or "brown woman," but demographics can be useful to size a problem. There is a group that is only 31% of the US population, yet they hold the vast majority of power in both institutions and society. White men hold 80% of all elected seats, 66% of all Fortune 500 corporate-board slots, and they tell 95% of Hollywood's blockbuster stories. Now, being a white guy isn't the guaranteed ticket to power. Their socioeconomic status, LGBTQ status, age, religion, or even being a non-loud-alpha male can all reduce their power. Still, if we look at that percentage as a proxy for the percentage of people who actually have the power to have their voice heard, we see the magnitude of the problem. It's huge. So, what do we do about it? Let's go to solutions. Well, first - and this is going to be a little revealing story - let's talk about what not to do. You know how when you're watching a cop show like Law & Order and the lead cop, like Olivia Benson, shows up, she screeches up to the building where the bad guys are first, and she knows what she should do: she should wait for backup. But does she? She never does, does she? And I am always wanting to yell at the TV, like, "Were you not here last season!? Don't go in there alone!" Now you know what I do on my weekend nights. This is true for onlyness too: don't go in alone. Here's why. Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School studied "onlys" - so, let's say, the first woman leader in an organization, or, let's say, the only black engineer. And she found three things constrain their ideas. One, they feel watched, so they're super self-conscious; try doing work that way. Two, they are excluded from all those social settings where trust and all that stuff happens, where, you know, work actually happens. Third, they feel extreme pressure to conform to the existing norms. Recipe for success, right? So the thing is, most of us, when we're that only or first, it's not enough; we'll never break the barrier because we'll actually feel so much pressure to conform. Not because we're weak but because we're human. We don't conform because we want to but because we have to; human beings are social beings. Because in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, belonging comes before asserting one's original idea. I worked at Autodesk, and Carol Bartz, who was the CEO at the time, hired me, and she went on to run Yahoo. She was one of the first women CEOs to ever lead a Fortune 500 company, but she mostly mimicked her male peers - golfing, swearing, and wearing these giganto shoulder pads. (Laughter) She needed to belong. And so it's counterintuitive but true that if you want to claim your true, original, full, authentic self, don't be the lonely only. Which is why onlyness is not just a new way of saying, "You be you." It is not about standing out in a crowd; it is about finding your crowd. As you find your people, you get two things: first, you get the power to incubate your idea, and second, you can grow it to be powerful enough to dent the world. So, let's talk about incubation first. A woman had stood up after I'd given a talk a couple years ago, and she shared how she'd just finished helping her husband accomplish his greatest dream by getting his music to the moon - literally, on a NASA shuttle. And then she wanted his help with her big idea, and so she was asking, "What could I change to make that happen?" And I said to her, "If the people around you don't support your ideas, maybe even shut them down altogether, don't change who you are; change who you're with." Now, when I came home and told that story to my husband - (Laughter) he was thinking maybe I was advocating divorce. But no, what I was doing was reminding her, and now us, of the research, which is: if the five people closest to you stop smoking, you're likely to. If they gain or lose weight, so will you. Ideas, they work the same way, and so figuring out how do you find that witness or your advocates, the people who get you, who get what it is you're passionate about, lets you incubate that fledgling idea so it can even have a chance. Second reason to find your people: scale. For a long time, actually for millennia, the way that you actually scaled an idea was either by having power in society - it required that - or having a specific place in an organization, being high enough up. And now connected people can do what once only large organizations could, that gives us new pathways to power. Say you have a status-quo-changing idea. It's possible you could bend the will of the powers that be to you. It's just as likely that the status quo will want to squash, maybe even suffocate that lovely new idea. And now you can actually organize a crew based on what matters to you and what matters to them based on their onlyness and actually figure out how to scale that idea. So, as you find your purpose, you find your people; as you find your people, you find your power. These social-relational human constructs, what I've just described, is what allows that individuality that we all have to actually be expressed in the world today as game changing and power changing. We often describe power as if it's, you know, personal, so we'll say, "He or she has power," but what we've just been talking about for 18 minutes is that power is not simply personal, power is profoundly social, and it's this insight that can tell us what to do next. How do we enable the onlyness of each of us to come out? We create those spaces, those social constructs, that let people, including yourself, contribute from that spot in the world in which only they stand. That's how original ideas get their due. One final story on that. Karim Lakhani and a colleague of his at Harvard Business School had asked 80,000 scientists worldwide to identify their toughest and unsolved problems, and then they opened up those problems to see if anyone could offer solutions, and people totally stepped up: women who love science, but not the sexism that came with it or young people who had been told they were "too young" to add anything of value, other people who were underestimated regularly. And then, within a year, of those 166 unsolvable problems, nearly one-third were solved, and nearly 100% of those solutions came from what the researchers called "left field," but what we could, and should, and will call "onlyness." There's plenty of data like Karim's study. Innovation, progress, solutions, they come from new ideas, and new ideas come from people. And not just "people" generically, but onlyness specifically. As we open up that aperture to look beyond those who already have a position of power in society or in organizations and include everyone so that we can see all those ideas, we can actually figure out how to solve the problems we have and create more opportunites for everyone. I bet those ideas would light up this room and light us up too. Thank you. (Applause)
