Sudhir Venkatesh

At Facebook, Venkatesh’s team handled the major challenges of our times—fake news, terrorism, election manipulation, and hate speech. This gripping story of governing more than 2 billion people includes key lessons every leader should know when harnessing the power of digital.

Over the past two decades, Venkatesh has embedded with the FBI, street gang leaders, Facebook executives, and advertising agencies. His deep immersion results in practical and un-expected insights on how to develop your own voice, brand, and Northstar.

Today’s digital universe—flat and bi-directional—has blown up one-way communication and management strategies. Thriving requires co-creative postures that embrace distributed intelligence and co-ownership. Drawing on his Facebook experience, at Venkatesh offers a roadmap for harnessing co-creation to build robust teams, grow users, and create dynamic consumer engagement.

Everyone wants to understand the minds of the creative investors—the hedge fund traders, the bankers, the ones most people think are at the bottom of our current economic meltdown. Venkatesh looks for some clues in un-conventional places. He spent a decade with traders in the legitimate economy and traders of a different kind—hi ranking drug dealers. They have not only have more in common than you think, but by looking at both, we can get some new insights into how investors and hi-risk capitalists really think about risk and business success.

How do great business leaders cope with high risk and uncertainty? To find their secrets to success, Sudhir Venkatesh spent time with more than 100 business leaders—from the tech sector to old-fashioned manufacturing to the FBI. He provides insights about the strategies that help executives stay calm and get the most of themselves and their team when situations become stressful and pressure-filled. He integrates stories of leaders who surprised themselves by performing beyond expectations.

In this story-driven talk, Venkatesh talks about the surprising qualities of great leadership. For example, great leaders will have a confidante—like Shakespeare’s “court jester” who tells the King the things no one else will say. Great leaders stop and reflect on their failures, and they tie their greatest successes to acknowledging their mistakes. The most active and busy leaders also manage to take a lot of naps. The talk is meant to change our view of the most accomplished executives by showing that successful leadership means being human, making mistakes, but learning how to redefine failure for yourself and your team.

We’re in the middle of a jobless recovery, so we’re told. Behind the media punditry, there’s a real change in how Americans work. Americans are more and more likely to be self-employed, self-made, and moving between two and three jobs. For over a century, your economic position—union worker, CEO, etc.— determined how you voted and what causes you supported. Well, no more. Politics and political action now have strange bedfellows: Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are the new signs of the political voice in America. Venkatesh sheds light on who we are, what we do, and what it means for the election. He draws on his own study of American workers and his own research into Occupy Wall Street protests.