we're going to get started now welcome everyone to the first talk of the town of bent i'm natalie lane oh chair of the vision twenty one implementation committee and i'm doug john a member of that committee or vic as we refer to it our team has designed this event as a response to residents feedback from the working vision for belmont's future survey you told us you wanted more opportunities to build community and what better way to do that than by getting to know each other tonight tonight we are pleased to present fo notable residents each will speak of a topic of personal and professional interest we truly appreciate their time and generosity in sharing themselves with us tonight before we begin we'd like to thank our co sponsors belmont public school and now for a few housekeeping now for a few housekeeping items first please look around and locate the emergency exit closest you can do the airplane thing please silence any and all devices you may have with you local media are covering this event and the belmont media center is taping it absolutely no other photography or recording is allowed and now it is my pleasure to introduce jane clayson johnson who will tell us more about this evening format jane began her network career news career with a b c news covering among other things breaking news such as the presidential campaign and o j simpson civil trial and overseas nato airstrikes on kosovo the macedonian refugee crisis and indonesian dictator so hard to fall from power from one nine hundred ninety nine to two thousand and four she co anchored the early show on c b s with bryant gumbel and was a correspondent for forty eight hours and i on america she was on air live on september eleventh two thousand and one and covered the terror attacks then and in the weeks that followed jane has also interviewed many artists and entertainers covering the kennedy center honors and presenting at the academy of country music awards the grand old opry and more while raising her family here in belmont jane has hosted w b uars radio boston and is the primary f thank you it's really wonderful to be with you all here tonight we appreciate you coming and we hope that you enjoy the evening i've really been looking forward to hearing some of the many talented and accomplished belmont to residen tonight i heard someone refer to this evening is belmont's version of ted talks three of our panelists have actually given ted talk so we're in for a treat tonight as for the format of the evening i will introduce our speakers one by one i will ask one or two for questions at the end of each presentation and then we'll move on to the next so we begin tonight with clayton and kristiansen kim b clark professor of business administration at the harvard business school clayton christiansen is regarded as one of the world's top experts on innovation and growth his ideas have been widely used in industries and organizations around the world born in salt lake city utah clay has among other things been a missionary in korea for his church a white house fellow the recipient of five honorary doctorates and an honorary chaired professor a consultant the bestselling author of eleven books and more than one hundred articles and the recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the tribeca film festival in two thousand and ten he has served the boy scouts for twenty five years as a scout master cubmaster den leader troop and pac committee chair he and his wife christine are the parents of five children and five five grandchildren no set of seven  knows on a personal note in the year two thousand my husband started a company with clayton and in all these years that i have watched and interacted with him the most accurate description of clay and the best way to introduce him beyond his many accomplishments and his brilliant mind is to say that he has a heart that just wants to help people and so i introduce you now clayton christians thank you well i'm honored that i would be asked to do this with you i thought i'd just offer two thoughts gene mentioned teach at the harvard business school and one of the things that i have studied there is why is success so hard to sustain if you look across the of business history most companies which at one point were widely regarded as unassailably successful a decade or two later you find them in the middle of the pack and often at the bottom of the heap so the question is why is success so hard to sustain and the answer oddly is that what causes successful companies to fail is that the do everything that the professors at the harvard business school teach managers to do and so i'd like to explain why that is i'm going to describe how this process of successful companies failing by going through the history of the steel industry so on the vertical axis of the  c measure the quality of steel over time and in every market and it's certainly the case in steel there are tears of the market so at the bottom of th steel industry is concrete reinforcing bar or rebar very simple we can make rebar today here if we want it and then as you move up to market you find more sophisticated products so structural steel is used to make big buildings like this and at the high end of the market is sheet steel that used to make cars and appliances that is very difficult to make historically almost all of the meals the the world steel was made in integrated steel mills where they did everything and i just described there are one me integrated steel company it would make to y it would cost today about ten billion dollars to make an integrated steel mill starting in the late one nine hundred sixty s a different type  of process for making steel lemurs and we called it a mini mill and what a mini mill does is it finds scrap and melts it in electric furnace and you c in this description of an electric furnace you could put about ten of those in this room because you can make molten steel in such a small chamber they don't have to scale up the downstream processing steps and that's why they call these things many males the most important dimension of a mini male is you can make steel of any given quality in a mini mill for twenty percent lower cost than you can make it in an integrated mill so think about this for a minute these guys are making commodities here is a technology many mails that would reduce the cost of making this commodity by twenty per cent don't you think that all the integrated steel companies would just pop on it and reduce their cost to it turns out that nose integrated steel companies has yet invested in a mini male and this is my sense for why something that makes consummate sense is been almost impossible to do so because of these many mills scrap  steel out of scrap when they see emerged in the late one nine hundred sixty s the quality of the steel that the mini mills made was pretty crummy in fact only the market would produce that was concrete reinforcing bar at the bottom because there were almost no specs specifications for rebar to begin with and then once you buried it in cement you couldn't verify whether it had meant specter or not so it was a perfect market for crummy products and is the integrated many mills attacked the rebar market the reaction of the integrated steel companies on the left was they were just delighted to get out of the business because they could make only seven percent gross margins in many meals in rebar and it made no sense to go after defend a seven percent business rebar lines down because it just didn't make sense to defend at least profitable business so as the integrated mills got out of rebar their profits improved by getting out and the mini meals because they had a twenty percent cost advantage they made a lot of money by getting in and it really just seemed like i'm a marriage made in heaven until  the price of rebar collapsed by twenty percent and the reward for the mini meals for their victory was they couldn't make any money because it was just low cost commodity competing against low cost many male company in a commodity business so for a while the many males just tried to survive by becoming ever more efficient but then one of the me met many males that looked up market and realize you guys look at the us if we could just make bigger and better steel we'd make money again because up there they're making margins of twelve percent and so the mini mills figured out how to make bigger and better products and is the attack that tier of the market over on the left hand side their reaction to the integrated steel companies was they were just happy to get out of that business because it was a dog eat dog commodity and it made no sense for the integrated steel companies to defend that here the market when market in structural ste profit improved and is the many males going into the business to integrate the people got out of it their profitability improved it felt good to get out and good to get in and that was a good relationship until one thousand nine hundred eighty four that was the year when the mini mills finally succeeded in driving the last high cost integrated player out of those products if you look at what happened to the prices of not in one nine hundred eighty four of a go buy or rail and ride those prices collapsed by twenty percent and the reward for the many males for their victory was they couldn't make any money so what are those poor suckers going to do well one of them what duck and said you know what if we could just make bigger and better steel we'd make money again because up there they're making margins of eighteen percent and the reaction of the integrated mills was what a relief to get out of that is this because it was such a dog eat dog commodity and why would we ever defend it crummy eighteen percent business weapons structural steel they could make twenty five and thirty percent returns and so is that many males expanded their capacity the integrated mills seems likely told you this story before does the year when the last integrated steel company operated by bethlehem steel got out of structural steel and the cost of steel structural steel collapsed by twenty percent and so what are the many mills like nucor going to do they just got to go market and they wouldn't defend a crummy commodity part of this huge steel business they focused instead in specialty steels where the margins were higher and so here we are today the mini mills account now for nearly seventy percent of all of the steel made in america it's kind of neat isn't it we think of ourselves as wasting our environment and yet we really really cycle seventy percent of us steel but all but one of the integrated mills has gone bankrupt and there are many males control seventy five percent of america you notice that i was able to tell the whole story without using the word stupid managers ones because the integrated steel companies did everything that we teach managers that they should do and that is the investor in the margins are most attractive and yet doing the right thing clearly was the wrong thing if we had time today we could look at where else this phenomenon called disruption has occurred you guys are looking at what you wear tonight most of you must have alexis's but there's a company in japan called toyota and they didn't invade north america in the one nine hundred sixty s with lexus as did they rather they came in to the bottom of the market with rusty little subcompacts called the corona remember those and then you had one i was just going to say that hundred sixty s and seventy's they were making the full range of the products but as they saw the toyota come up market they had the same problem they had to make is the integrated steel companies should we invest it  to to protect those subcompacts or should we bigger it make even bigger s u v s and pickup trucks to sell for even bigger people and it made no sense for them to the low end of their business when they had the option of making bigger cars for bigger people and then toyota came up from the bottom step by step and essentially have disrupted and thrown out of the market by step is getting out of the low end or the small parts of their businesses and and then the chinese are coming after the koreans and think goodness we don't have to worry about them so i had some students asked me if i ever see it looks like i see disruption wherever i look as if those diagrams are in my lenses and i realize that i actually do look at the world through those lenses in ways that i never imagined so this is one conclusion that i made and that is people who have a high  need for achievement which includes at least one hundred percent of us when we have thirty minutes of time or an ounce of energy we will instinctively spend our time and energy in doing things that give us the most immediate intangible evidence of achievement just like these guys spend their time and energy and money in whatever provides the most important the highest rate of growth on their money we spend our time and energy in whatever time and energy we can that gives us the most tangible and immediate evidence of achievement and it turns out that our professions provide the most immediate intangible evidence of achievement every day presentation we ship a product we finish a design we get promoted we get paid in our professions are just field with activities that provide the all but literally every day they misbehave we think we finish the job and then we're not care to finish the job and it really was isn't until the kids are twenty years old that we can put our hands on her hips and look at our children and say boy have we created a great young woman or man but on the day to day basis there's just no evidence whatsoever and so when we have this time or energy and we have after we ask ourselves how do we spend our instinct is to spend that time on our professions because we can focus on making our children better starting tomorrow and it's a very hard thing for people like you and i to invest in the things that we know we ought to do i have a deep belief that the deepest happiness in our lives come from the close intimate relationships that we have with our family and yet so many of us including me if i'm not careful spend our time in doing things that is not what we want to do and i see this happen at the harvard business school all the time the harvard business school every five years i've gone with christine to the reunion so that i can write a check and i remember when we came back for the fifth reunion and saw all of our friends and all my guys everybody was at the top of their game most of my friends had gotten their spouses who were much better looking than my friends were their career was on target but then i remember when we came back for the fifteenth and then the twentieth and twenty fifth more and more of our friends never showed up to the reunion and i'd ask them where is so and so and more often than i ever imagined the answer was well he's in a messy divorce or he just doesn't want to talk about his family they got divorced she remarried they're raising our children on the other side of the glow i still want to be there and i know with perfect certainty that none of my classmates had a strategy when they graduated they did their strategy was not to go off and get divorced and raise children who hate their guts but a shocking proportion of my classmates implemented this strategy that they did not intend to do because of this instinct we have of spending time to provide the most immediate and tangible evidence of achievement and so chris and i thought about it and we concluded that i needed rules and one of the rules was i will never work on saturday that would be a day for family and sunday which we would dedicate every day for god and i would never work on saturday or sunday and christine was had left her profession and was a full time homemaker and after i graduated from b the school i got a job with the consulting firm boston consulting group and after i'd been there about a word a month my project leader right came up to me and said  going to have a meeting on sunday at two pm so we have to give big presentation to the client on monday and we've got to be sure that everything is in place and i said to my oh my gosh mike i think i forgot to tell you this but i can't work on sunday and he went bonkers and he asked me why in the world even think about that and i said well i made this commitment that i won't work on sunday because i'm a religious guy and that was what i what we did and he said i can't can't you just this once i make an exception to your whatever it is and i said w made this commitment to me said i don't know anything about your religion but in my religion if we have to do something like this we just do it and then we find a priest somewhere and confess and then go on with life and i said i've been looking for that in the mormon church for a long time and i don't think we've got a lot but anyway we argued about it for a while and he blustered away and he came back about an hour later and he said look i talk to everybody else on the team we understand so we'll meet on saturday to hang in there and i did this again and i said oh my gosh i made a commitment to chris that i would work on saturday either and he really went bonkers everybody works on saturday and i said yes they do but the purpose of my life is not to make the partner on this client become rich you know and my strategy is not to have an unhappy family and i just have to not do it and it once again he said just this once can't you and i said i can't so he blustered away came back an hour later and he said look i talk to everybody you happen to work on fridays anyway why do we tell you this crazy story that the answer is that that was a decision not to to adhere to the standards  chris and i set for ourselves and it would have been so easy in this particular extenuating circumstance this just this once it's going to be ok and the reason why that decision has been so important to me is my whole life has been and doing stream of extenuating circumstances and if i had said just once i would have done it over and over again and there's we now look back as our children now vall left home are so grateful that we made that decision and that's what i wanted to share with you one question for you clay what are the lessons from your research at harvard business school or elsewhere that would make belmont a better place boy you're tough it takes a lot god doesn't hire accountants in heaven and where this idea came from is i realize that you and i because we faith we have finite minds in order to get a sense for what's going on in our world we have to aggregate up and so i can't keep track of all of the invoices that are coming in or going out and thank goodness we have accountants who can add up all of those numbers and tell us we have more come in the end and go on out and we can look at last year's number versus young number and say we're doing better or we're doing worse but we need to aggregate up because we have finite minds and we get a sense in our lives that because we're aggregating up that people who presided over bigger numbers are more important to mankind than people who preside over smaller numbers and so a lot of us feel like the measure of our success is to just get to the top of the pyramid and then i realized the reason why god doesn't need a higher accountants is god has an infinite mind and what that means is that he doesn't have to aggregate up above the level of individual people to have a perfect understanding of what's going on in the world and and so that's why he doesn't need accountants because he doesn't need to aggregate i do and then i realized that when i die and i have my interview with him he's not going to say oh my goodness the professor at the harvard business school clayton christensen that's not going to come up in his interview with me but really all that he's going to say is clay i stuck you in this situation can we just talk about the individual people you helped to become better people and then i put you in that situation can we talk about the people there who you helped to become better people and then lest you forget i gave you and christine five wonderful children can we talk about what you did to help them become magnificent adults but the way god will measure my life isn't with numbers but he will just talk about individual people who i help to become better people and when i realize that that is how god would measure my life then i'd better spend my life every day trying to help somebody to become a better person because that is how god will measure my law and i think how it applies to my living here is we're just surrounded by opportunities to help people become better people medical career began at cambridge hospital where she completed a community psychiatry residency following graduation from harvard medical school in the years that followed she's worked with patients written for the op ed page at the boston globe on topics related to psychiatry psychology and mental illness issues and has contributed to n p r s all things considered most recently she founded the w b our remembrance project telling the stories of ordinary new englanders who've recently i'd like to tell you stories we usually go to fresh pond early in the morning before the crowds descend there is a sense of spaciousness especially for the dog and benches have been placed a low to the ground at aesthetic intervals one day last spring a short man began to live on one of them he parked a shopping cart next to it filled with bags of clothes a couple the hangers i could see the tip of a toothbrush dangling out of the winter coat he always wore we gave him a lot of space when we passed sometimes he sat on the bench gazing at the reservoir sometimes you sprawled across it sleeping sometimes he paced in front of it mumbling the lines of property ownership were clearly drawn one morning the dog broke free and ran towards him he stopped what he was doing and let her sniff is that a golden he said where i come from it's mostly rottweilers we exchanged a couple of thoughts about dogs and people and agreed that rottweilers got the short end of public scrutiny it was the perfect introduction after that whenever we passed by if you wasn't preoccupied or asleep we'd share a couple of sentences one day we came upon him on the bench with one shoe and sock off examining his foot it looked like someone had taken a filet knife to it and sauteed what was left here was a private man in a public space with a bench for a bed room and no door privacy and yet he was a gracious host i was recovering from an upper respiratory virus and my voice was hoarse when i asked if he was going to get some treatment he looked up from the bench all he said you have a cold psychiatrists listen to people all kinds of people it's a lucky profession that way though don't get me started on electronic medical records over the last twenty five years i work in a state hospital where patients lived for years a street shelter where they stayed for a night or to a clinic for young people with their first episode of psychosis it used to be that schizophrenia was nothing more than six months of hallucinations and delusions but that doesn't begin to touch the tip of a person let me tell you about someone i met twenty years ago he is always always losing his teeth it loses them in the day hall during groups he loses them on passes with his family he loses them on his meal tray then an hour later the unit gets the call from food services like animal rescue calling about a constantly strained pet when we met him he came with nineteen years of records institutionalized since adolescence unremitting delusions admissions to the medical i c u for overdoses days at a time in restraint he was tall and toothless with an italian english dictionary in one hand and a bible in the other i'm a rocket scientist he said i cure retarded children i don't speak english iraq in the day all over a copy of people magazine introduced himself and community meeting as a savior and one side passed him in the day hall on the pay phone collect from jesus he said and i wondered how often they placed it it was strange pharmacological luck when he began to suffer side effects from a medicine for schizophrenia we were forced to take it off him and try him on another we feared the worst instead and very slowly he began to clear he rocked less he combed his hair his words became tangible a moroccan scientist he said maybe then he asked for a set of teeth the fitting and refitting took weeks the teeth were quite tender at first but eventually man in mouth began to look pleased with themselves and to want to talk more i've been in a terrible state of shock he said what do you see when you look in my eyes do you think i have a marvelous personality the problem was that after so many  god in his talking way he had to take them out of his mouth and hold them in his hands to say everything he wanted to then he had to put him down to free his hands for enthusiastic gesturing then the tea started to appear in the day hall without him sometimes we'd find them on other people's food trays as if they were inspecting dining possibilities the teeth were a metaphor for his wandering in hungary awakened self the other day we were in the canteen having a cup of coffee his teeth were out on the town again nowhere to be found he looked at me well he said you have nice big teeth everyone has a beautiful feature i said what's yours it didn't take him long oh he said it's all  three years ago i began a series of short radio pieces called the remembrance project it was my husband's idea actually when a beloved landlady of mine died i wrote a tribute for her chemistry professor died he used to pretend to drink a beaker of blood in front of the freshman inorganic class and i wrote a tribute for him my husband pointed out that we read obituaries but we rarely of them and the obituaries we read are usually of the wealthy or well known it would do us good he said to hear about ordinary people who've lived extraordinary lives so i brought a couple of these pieces to w b you are and sure enough they agreed since then there's been almost two hundred remembrances a pakistani poetry scholar a senegalese drum master a professional skateboarder a high school valedictorian a man who was falsely convicted of child molestation and jailed for twenty years a firefighter here's the first remembrance that was recorded it's a personal one more a shapiro died november tenth two thousand and twelve in dallas texas he was one hundred three years old and my grandmother's baby brother age is such a funny thing i was afraid to tell uncle morris when my father died i didn't know what he would say honey he said when i called him how old was she she was eighty four uncle morris i said  so young until a few months before his death uncle boris flipped his own balances manage his own stocks and took his neighbors to dicky's barbecue every thursday everything he did interested him he would lie in his king sized bed in his pajamas marveling at nature shows in cash cab on t v he especially marveled at sports in the beginning they were his passion and when the world began to narrow they became his salvation honey he said when i called him in the rehab where he was battling renal failure i saw a toe ripped set of tennis today then they took me to the dining hall and i largish my uncle maurice didn't marry until he was in his late fifty's but when he did he and his wife were joint hip to hip for the next twenty years and he cared for her so tenderly that when she was dying of cancer and couldn't apply her make up anymore he put it on every morning for her after she died he found a love again right outside his garden apartment he fell in love with his neighbors and they fell in love with him they called themselves team morris they took him to appointments cooked for him shopped for him cleaned out his ears and when he was in the rehab wanting to come home at the end they renovated his apartment to make it possible sometimes i worried that morris didn't love himself as much as we loved him one day when he was ninety nine or maybe a hundred and one i asked him what he thought would happen after he was gone we were lying on his bed watching t v he closed his eyes i thought he had fallen asleep what do i think will happen after i'm gone you said a couple of months after i'm gone no one will remember who i was well it's been more than a couple of months now and everyone who knew uncle morris remembers him listening to people for a living is such a lucky life though do not get me started on electronic medical records sometimes though i worry that we've become a little self satisfied and so i need to end humbly i was standing at a party talking to a man i hardly knew we were speculating about the romances and upheavals of variable everyone around us behind us that noise was allowed in by v a ships i knew this man professionally but his personal life was a mystery to me while he wondered about the love lives of everyone else i wondered about his we were on the third cup of punch talking about secrets he leaned in and lowered his voice i have a secret he said you do i do are you telling i will he leaned in more and lowered his voice further i am having an affair was susan he said susan was a woman we both worked with well that's what he said but that's not what i heard what i heard him say was i've come out of the closet i knew it i had always known it there was something  i'm not surprised i said his eyebrows went up you guessed i always knew i said i had some menacing he said well i am a psychiatrist thing he said i haven't told a soul she hasn't been as private she i felt a sudden imbalance like someone who is striding along and notices they have  it's over a cliff you didn't hear about us through her jew he said no i said no i didn't because she's told a lot of people not me i said because it's ok if you know that's ok but i'm not ready for everybody else you know what i mean you're sledding down a hill at seventy miles per hour and a tree suddenly appears in front of you you must divert catastrophe sure i said sure sure i know exactly what you mean thank so i have to say i love remember this project it's an amazing idea next to story corps must it's must see listening to me how do you make it so easy to talk to people about  well of course you don't talk to people you listen to but my observation after doing this now for a couple of years is that the experience many people have had is that after someone that they love dies they talk about it a couple of weeks or a month everyone is interested they want to know and then they ask and then they stop asking but the people that i talk to still want to talk about it and so when someone comes along six months later or a year later and asks them for them it is like an opening up and although ninety nine point nine percent of what we talk about never makes it to the air i feel that something between us has happened in a very small and personal way and if the goal of our of our purpose here is to help with the individual lives around us that this is something that maybe takes a step towards that thanks to your husband for a great idea and you for the execution thank you thank you very much  our next presenter is alfie cohn alfie cohn is an author and a lecture on education parenting and human behavior the author of fourteen books including the myth of the spoiled child punished by rewards and the schools our children deserve he has been described in time magazine as quote perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades and test scores through his writing and extensive lecturing at universities schools and corporations and appearances on hundreds of t v and radio programs alfie has helped to shape the thinking of educators parents and managers across the country and around the world he is the father of two children one of whom is a junior at belmont high school and he lives virtually you can find him any time at alfie cohn dot org mr co oh thanks so much delighted to be part of this evening i normally speak as i guess most of these folks do for an hour or two often like to start with a joke here i have much less time so i'm going to have to cut directly to the punchline rabbit oh i thought you said rob all i i often thank you you'll be surprised how long it takes to craft just a punch line i often begin a presentation to parents or educators by asking a deceptively simple question how many of you are parents of kids eighteen or younger and i see him how many of you are educators for a living ok how many of your grandparents have kids eighteen or younger so the question is what are your long term goals for your child or children or if you're a teacher for your students how would you like them to turn out after they've grown up and possibly even moved out of the house is there a word or a phrase that leaps to mind that captures for you an overriding  about the the way they'll turn out i've done this activity hundreds of times for teachers and administrators parents of younger and older kids in urban suburban and rural areas and you'd be amazed if i had more time i would do it with you at the consensus i would guess estimate that eighty percent of the items on on any list are on every list or ever i go people say i want my kid or kids to be happy to be ethical to be independent and self reliant but also caring and compassionate and empathic i want my kid to be curious creative a problem solver a lifelong learner and so on what's interesting is when i asked teachers this question most of their answers to or about the kind of people they hope their kids will be not just the kind of learners and when they do talk about learning issues they say things like lifelong learner or creative nobody ever says i want my students to be able to convert a decimal into a fraction and note parents ever say my overriding goal is for my kid to be able to afford a summer house on the cape or the fanciest possible car and so i guess what i do for a living on different issues and with different audiences just to say to people you say you want this so why are you doing that for example every study on the subject that i'm familiar with has found that students who go to traditional schools that give grades tend to become less excited about learning compared to those lucky enough to go to schools or have teachers who never use letter or number grades the other thing that undermines interest in learning is whole work forcing kids to work a second shift after spending a whole day in school no study has ever found any benefit of any kind to any homework given below the high school level newer research fails to find evidence of benefit even in high school the only thing you do tend to find is that homework systematically snuffs out curiosity so if you say you want kids to become lifelong learners then you have to as a parent or teacher question traditional practices like grades and homework you can't have it both ways and so at deceptively simple exercise like what are your long term goals turns out particular about the goal many people act as if they had which is conventional success for their kids clayton christensen began by asking why is success to sustain my question is why are we so willing to uncritically accept conventional definitions of success when we push our children do your homework study hard try to do well on the test get good grades why well so that you can get into a selective college why given that selectivity is not at all the same thing is excellent as well so that you can have a successful career and and what do you mean by successful and for many of us without thinking it has to do with money now  college for the last twenty years with his colleagues has been doing research that has found the following the more someone values financial success in life or fame and other external goals attractiveness and so on the more likely they are to be anxious depressed report lower levels of well being have more behavioral issues and physical discomfort as compared with people whose goals are to be in caring relationships to contribute to the community to become self aware in fact one of their studies even found that by the way this cuts across age it cuts across nationality it's been replicated all over the world and it even cuts across income the issue is not how much money you have the issue is how much does money matter to you the more money matters to you the worse off you are psychologically speaking one of these studies found that eighteen year olds tended when they value if they valued financial success as a goal in life to have had parents who were more controlling then nurturing almost as if they were searching in external directions to compensate for that sense of security and worth a lot of us have heard a very rich man who came from very troubled backgrounds and these are always presented to us as examples of people who made good who purser vera who showed grit and ended up spewing successful despite or maybe because of their bad upbringing and their troubled start except that this research calls that frame into question maybe these people didn't turn out well after all maybe they just turned out rich which leads me to the ultimate cautionary tale for us as parents and educators the guy in the white house even before he ran for president as his first elected position donald trump for many of us was exhibit a for how you can be rich and famous and be successful as a human being by any moral or psychological standard here is a man particularly competitive seeing the whole world as divided into winners and losers and regarding everyone he comes across as a potential adversary to be bested and as we know only losers ever back off from things they've said or apologize here is a man who doesn't merely love like compulsively but seems somehow  unaware of his own dishonesty as if in his disordered mind the fact that he said it or believes it makes it true here is a person who has a sense of absolute entitlement if i find a woman attractive of course i get to kiss her or grabber which is to say molest her a man with that a lack of shame humility curiosity empathy capacity for self scrutiny donald trump is an exquisitely example of the kind of human being all thoughtful parents hope their children will never be anything like but my point today is not just to talk about what is so frightening about someone with this set of character disorders in a powerful position this is a man to rancid to be president of a condo association what does it mean when someone who has these characteristics and sees the world in a childish sense of us against them isn't a position we are consensus and collaboration are required folks it's not a coincidence that today and in history world leaders with his profile are always dictators this is a man fundamentally incapable of participating in democracy but that's not tonight's presentation tonight's presentation is he should be a big north star for us to god on us to realize that if we're pushing our kids merely to be conventional in the six or is successful in the conventional sense of that term as he is we are clearly pushing in the wrong direction it's time to rethink that and so the moral for us and now each of the items that i'm going to mention is the subject potentially of a lecture in its own right or a book in some cases books that i've actually written to think about what it means and others as well have to question what does it mean to question our notion of success as the tacit goal of what we're doing with our kids in the case of trump his lifelong campaign of self congratulation and self aggrandizement needing to slap his name on everything he does obviously and attempt to compensate for deeply rooted fears of in significance he can't conceal this desperate craving for attention and approval that would almost be sad except for the the damage that damage people can do but here's the key point this is not a man with too much self esteem which plays into the rightwing trope or narrative about kids think too well of themselves without any achievement blah blah blah blah this right wing sensibility has become the mainstream wisdom even of politically liberal people my last book the myth of the spoiled child unpacks that constellation of beliefs one at a time the point is what produces health or at least is strongly correlated with psychological health is an unconditional sense that even when i screw up or fall short i still have a core of belief in my own value that allows me paradoxically to be humble to deal with setbacks to acknowledge when i've screwed up on conditional self esteem is the kind that doesn't have to be earned it has no strings attached and the most successful way to raise or teach kids like that is to accept them unconditionally accept not just to love our children but to love them for who they all are not for what they do their surest way to produce a many donald trump is to make kids jump through hoops and rely on a do we need to approach to discipline based on rewards including praise and punishments including timeout to accept kids conditionally to say good job i really like the way you dot dot dot according to research makes kids more focused on self interest less concerned about the impact of their actions on other people because you've told them the goal is to get the sticker or the star or the a the dollar or the patronize and pat on the head rewards and punishments are not opposites they're two sides of the same coin and that coin typically for parents is about either producing short term compliance which is what praise is about praise is not about encouragement praise verbal dog biscuit for jumping through mind who and typical punishment and reward parenting is about producing success in the conventional sense of the term the kind of parents who focus on long term goals such as kids who are happy and caring and responsible and curious and all of the rest of that tend to use a working with approach to parenting more than a doing to approach to parenting and they tend to accept their kids and make sure their kids feel accepted in a way that is never talk to a specific viewer that they have to and act or admit those kind of parents also typically bring kids in on decision making because kids learn how to make good decisions by making decisions not by following direction it's convenient for us to get them to jump through hoops but that tends to be awfully problematic in terms of the long term approaches we have to align our practices with our long term goals to help them turn out that way and the same thing is true for educators if we want our kids to be successful in meaningful ways the ways that most people acknowledge are their goals if you start there and ask them that question as i love to do then you have teachers who question traditional practices and realize that it's not just a matter of attitude it's not just a matter of kids who show grit and self regulation or have a growth mentality the mere focus on mentality you say is the problem is in the kid there are school systems where kids are stressed out where they're cutting themselves bingeing or starving themselves drugging themselves desperately on a stressed out and the school offers a nice evening of coping mechanisms to deal with the stress this is like a it's like a factory pumping pollutants out into the air but being kind enough to offer the neighbors gas masks the problem is with the structures built into traditional education the homework none of which is necessary the grades the best schools have moved away from that the tests tests typically measure the intellectual proficiency is that matter least which is why the best teachers i know never give tests they don't need them because of the way the classroom has been structured and that any information they get from them mostly tells them how many forgettable facts kids have crammed into short term memory dreamed they will be so on the one hand we have to rethink the structures that we have in the schools and on the other hand the attitudinal barriers which begin by acting with our kids and grand kids as if the point was just to be a success and we need to remember always success can produce a donald trump  thank you nothing so you're a parent of a bellman high school student as i mentioned a well rated high school and by many accounts intense with high expectations right lots of homework lots of tests much of what you described here tonight what would you change about teaching and learning here in belmont at belmont high school the same things i encourage people all over the world when i'm invited to speak i do this for a living i've never been invited to speak to belmont teachers of course no man a prophet in his own way and even though i've offered to do their for free what i do all over the place to ask people to question those assumptions beginning with what constitutes success there first of all when we say that belmont or any school or district is successful we have to ask again what does that mean typically it means only high scores on standardized tests standardized tests which is a two hour presentation measure two things one is how large the houses are near the school which is a cutesy way of saying that eighty to ninety percent of the variation in test scores is purely a relationship of a reflection of socioeconomic status and the second thing that standardized tests measure is how much time has been taken away from real learning to get kids to develop the skills that are good at taking standardized tests every hour teachers spend getting kids ready for the end calf's is an hour not spent helping them to become deep thinkers curious creative critical people and in part that's why there's a growing movement across the country for parents who don't want that kind of education test prep to simply boycott the tests and opt out of them but i've got loads to say about each of the of the ingredients of the filament so that cable that you've described what do great teachers do instead of grades how do teachers wean themselves off of making kids do more academics at night even though i'm going to say it again no research has ever found any benefit to homework at least below high school it's literally all pain and no gain how do teachers get rid of the tendency to just lecture the best teachers know that they spend most of their time listening and can do most of the talking that is if we want them to be thinkers as opposed to  memorize ors of facts and practicers of skills so those are partly a reflection of attitudes partly a reflection of pressures placed on teachers i have talked to more than one teacher in belmont who whispers to me i know what you say is true i see it every day but this is such a conservative community so focused on they don't put it this way conventional success that the parents are demanding the homework and grades even though the research shows that only are mourning the growth of their own children the teachers point to the parents the parents point to the teachers i'm not out to bash any constituency but to invite everyone to ask the basic question what are we really looking for and what this research and experience suggest is the best way to get there become thank you very much our last presenter tonight is ru paul patel our voices matter both literally literally and figuratively they are part of our identity and most of us take our voices for granted but this is not so for two and a half million people in this country and millions more worldwide who rely on the use of computerized generic voices working with scientist those voice donors  patients roopa patel has created a technology that personalizes computerized sound to create a more natural voice and therefore a greater means to self expression she says it's a synthetic voice as unique as a fingerprint ripoll is the founder of vocal id that's the company that's developing her solution she is also a professor at northeastern university in the department of communication sciences and disorders and in the college computer information science she and her husband who's also a scientific scientists studying language have two young children ripple voices and down one in our community and i hope that we get to hear more voices throughout this as the vision committee to sort of take a look at how we can interact with each other more personally so today i want to talk about voice and prime not going to go deep into what the other speakers are talking about in terms of how we can help but there is a community message in what i have to say as well so as jane mention i'm going to be talking mostly about vocal idea although my laboratory at northeastern university does  variety of work in the area of the intersection between communication disorders and sciences and technologies that can help people who are unable to speak naturally those voices though our voice is really what makes us unique and makes us distinctive and there's a reason for the for why our voices are so unique to each of us it kind of goes back to evolution everything always goes back have a lesion in some ways you know initially our voices may be may have been there to signal danger or to communicate our needs even babies have unique voices that tell us about which cry it is whether they're hungry or they're upset or they're wet and then voices were as we distinguished more more and interacted more with our vocalisations they were allowed us to communicate our needs and in talk about the difference between species to differentiate between species as well as within species and so what i want to talk about is that there are many of us every one of us in this room has a unique voice and that conveys our age or gender or ethnic background are even our aspect and intellectual abilities but there are tens of millions of people around the world who are unable to communicate using their natural voice they're not necessarily they may be speechless and in some cases also unable to use their voice for most things that we would naturally take for granted so they have to use devices to communicate that may be a child born with cerebral palsy or about a third of those individuals who have autism also you may acquire speech disorders later in life such as if you have head neck cancer you may not be able to communicate same with a degenerative disease like a last so they use these devices to communicate you can see this girl delaney here using a typing or what we call a talker they type out a message if they have the ability to control their l if not they might actually use their eyes to generate a message and then that message then is spoken out loud by a computerized voice the options though on those devices that speak for them or speak allows him to interact  world kind of sound like this time three twenty seven turn left onto beacon street i am an american english boy i'm siri how can i help the generic sounding right and the reason for the generic voices are clear obviously they're well understood but the problem is that creating a synthesized voice is actually very labor intensive and time consuming so it takes a voice actor several hours to record sentences sentences sometimes that make sense other times that are random sentences that allow us to capture all the sounds and sound combinations in our language that allows us then to a series of engineers and linguists will pour over those recordings and cure rate them so that they can say that we can type in any message and it can be spoken out loud in this voice all we get at the end is a generic one size fits all voice and actually apple paid millions of dollars to create that siri voice but at the end you got one sort of forty something american white female voice right but there's so many voices in this world how do we create voices for people who are unable to speak for themselves so that's why we went back to the drawing board with that can we use science here so when we started we use a theory of speech production called the source filter theory of speech production and each one of us produces speech in this elements in the source filter theory are that the source which is that the vocal folds create energy that energy is then passed through the chambers of your head and neck to create con these are modified that sound source is modified if you just listen to the sound source itself it would sound like a mechanical buzz but when we speak we don't hear mechanical buzzes we hear constant in vowels and in melodies and that because the head and neck the muscles of the head  are actually shaping that found this typically happens in one individual and what we learned through years of research is that individuals who are unable to speak can still control relatively well the source of their voice so they can make sound they can make certain vocalizations that are distinctive to them so if you heard someone non speaking maybe in a in a special education classroom where you're walking down the hallway and they would make a vocalization toward you you would know it's bearing versus joni right you would know the difference between them because of the distinctiveness of this voice so we were capturing a harnessing this little information that we called for their vocal d n a what we've decided that we can do because this is in the digital realm is we can take the sound source that's preserved in the individual who's been able to speak and then borrow from a surrogate donor we call these a voice donor someone similar to them in age in gender and in demographics the clarity of their speech so that's the filter the combination of the source and filter produce speech but now in the digital realm we can take the story from one person and the filter from the other this is science right so i was really fortunate people to talk about the science of the ted days actually was an n p r reporter that first heard about our research then she reported on and on morning edition and then it led to the opportunity to speak at ted the cool thing about this is at the very end of the talk i was asked what do you do with this how can you people like i like us to help and i said well what if you could donate your voice and within months we had thousands of people wanting to donate their voice and some people had never even heard that you could do such a thing and we didn't know how we can do that at scale who we were calling in people into a laboratory and we were asking them to record each for us but we could do a few dozen people not thousands of people so we realized then that this needed course we set up shop in belmont well what downtown belmont as i call it is our headquarters right behind us because l we a vocal idea is now at ten maybe eleven individuals  couple in europe the others are here and some of my colleagues are here with me today where a growing team and if you're a software developer please c s f doors and what we're doing is we're we're set out to create these custom boyce's and but they're not just it's not just the technology what makes vocal a special is it requires a village actually a community of people to come together to share their voice so the very first thing we needed to do is figure out a way that we'd be able to collect the voices of people from around the world so what we did is we said we needed to create a virtual recording studio and the virtual recording studio is basically a place where you can record your voice from the comfort of your own home it needs to be it can have that dog it can have a siren going around it actually needs to be a quiet room because of recordings you make are going to be used to create a voice for someone who's unable to speak so we don't want to every time they say hi we don't want to know if you know so we want to make sure a clear sounding voice so the recording studio has a series of messages or sentences that we ask people to say and the back wall what we have here is what we call the periodic table of speech sounds and they sound will day based on the sounds that you faked so it's kind of like a progress bar so we ask people read several hundred sentences that contain all the sounds and sound combinations in our language and that allows us to then create a voice where you don't it's not only what the individual said when they were recording for us but we can now create any novel text from it that's the beauty of generative speech synthesis so as you fill this up you are able to see that you progress through the entire database with about seven hours of speech that we need so right now we have about twenty one thousand people at some point in the voice donor process over the last couple of years which is exciting for us and this map is a map of where all the voices are voice donors are coming from that's nine point seven million sentences around three hundred voice drives from one hundred ten countries at the fighting's i'm going to let you listen to the texture of the human voice the more voices you have in the voice bank the more unique and individualized voices we create imagine if you lost your voice today would you want a voice that is just a generic voice or would you want one that conveys who you are your ethnicity your religious background whatever it may be that makes you you right ok so let me just backtrack again to just explaining how a voice is made and let you listen to some of our unique voices what we do is we take a really small segment of sound that isn't someone who is unable to speak can still produce this is what we call that vocal d n a this is sometimes very very difficult to extract from someone who can't speak and we want to village can only ask them to produce the sound but once we get it that's the seed we use that seed and then we find a voice donor in our voice please tell me you don't understand what i am saying and we mix both the recordings of the voice donor which is ours and recording with the sound samples that we got from the recipient so that we can using our matching algorithms and blending algorithms create a voice that's unique need i feel happy that's a nine year old well now eleven year old girl who is using our voice and you know her sister had actually reached out to me when we way before this was even a company and she said i want to donate my voice for my sister and that kind of was one of these this this stimulus is to actually get this thing going here is what our early adopters are saying they are saying that they're talking more not a little bit but up to three hundred percent more they're talking to their friends they're talking to school at school they're talking to strangers they're at their ordering their own meals when they go to a restaurant they're not ashamed or embarrassed of the dot of the talking voice they're actually proud of it because it's an extension of who they are and that i think is really the outcome or the benefit that we're looking for with this customization you know one of the moms of a young girl that we made a voice for said to me my son used to always make fun of my daughter's talk you know if he'd mispronounced it and tend to lead to sort of tease has his sister now that that voice is built with a little bit of her sound he wouldn't dare do that these are the kinds of things that are not there are small but there have huge impact and then there's a gentleman that i fear i'm very close to his name is john john and his wife linda are two remarkable people that have gotten no in this journey john was diagnosed with a last eight years ago and his his disease progressed very very quickly and he was unable to bank his own voice the sometimes if you have enough time if you bank your own speech you're at were able to create a voice for you that is actually your recordings that we can replicate in a digital voice it lacked a little bit of the emotion and tone but it's as close as we can get right now with the technology we have at hand john with unable to do that in the video i'm going to show you his first talking with a generic voice he uses the voice is called ryan and the couple calls it the third voice in their relationship and in the second part of the video you're going to see the voice we've created for john and his reaction and his our work is not over we're continuing to make voices we have over one hundred twenty something voices now that that we're in the process of creating which is really exciting to see this vision from a small thing to a lot bigger  and then this summer we're launching a program that we call speaking foreign speaking forum is a youth action group and in this program what we're doing we're taking aspiring young leaders or use leaders who will really want to have social change in the the combination of stem and social change what we want to do is have these a nine month fellowship where young youth will understand that what communication impairments are the technology and also lead a social change campaign where they can help us create  voice drive to rape to get more voices that are young voices because a lot of our customers are actually young people who need voices if it weren't for voice donors this technology really wouldn't be accessible to the average person i said earlier it's ten if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this but we're trying to scale that to fordable to the individual and the only way we do that is by having individuals contribute their voice so what we're hoping to do with this program is really kind of get more people engaged in this process of how do we make social entrepreneurs out of our community the other thing we're doing is we're reinventing a little bit or redesigning the voice donor platform to get more engagement currently we have about fifteen percent completion rate which means that it takes a long time to record all those sentences and it's a tedious task and so we've been trying to think about and listening to the feedback that we've been getting from our voice donors for ways in which we can make this more engaging and more of a reciprocal agreement where people are learning something while they're also donating their voice so we're actually calling out to writers and authors and asking for stories and content so that we can make this more of an interactive platform and maybe it's the remembrance projects or i don't know what it is by its ways in which we can get people to be reading out loud content that they find meaningful and interesting to them that also works for those who are banking their voice for themselves so for some people if you those messages that are very very meaningful to you you'll have access to those when you have a sense of size boyce's well so with that i'm going to and to say that you know at vocal id we don't believe in generic voices we believe that every voice deserves to be heard because individuality matters and it always will thank you really amazing what you have done it is just incredible couple questions how long does it take for one person's to do you said hours it takes a long time how long exactly yes so it takes about six to seven hours to complete the voice recording process but people do it in small snippets of at least about ten to twenty minutes at a time so a few weeks and the best way to do this is actually in a voice drive so get together a community of people and encourage each other because it is a tedious long task right and you're just reading so ways what we've found is really effective is when people compete with each other to kind of get at a certain level so that's an effective way and so you know volunteer boyce's what's the business model for the patient how are you sustaining your company so right now we're funded by small business innovation grants through the federal government both an agent and a stuff and what we're doing is offering the voices at a subsidized price to our air individual recipients  over time we hope that we can get more customers and also try to get that technology to be more efficient so that we can create more voices at a faster pace it's amazing so what's the next frontier here what are other applications for this technology yeah well there's actually a broadening pool of devices and things that talk right we've now heard or seen i think i want to go beyond the information delivery devices that talk to us like i'm not talking about  as and things that talk at us i'm talking about technologies that help us connect to people people to people i i think that custom voices would be important let's say to talk to a loved one who lives in a different city and if you can connect with them by texting a message and then it comes out in your voice there's a social type of connection that happens through voice that we hope that custom voices can make those are some of the applications education is another application potentially of making you know if you hear individuals who are similar to you there's more trustworthiness in that and that might help with distance learning as well so there are broader application that we're pursuing in the future but today this is our main target patients the illest patient the reaction just speaks for itself that was remarkable what you've done thank you so much so that concludes our evening i just want to say thank you again to our presenters clayton christensen elicit you lie alfie cohen and report patel and thanks to all of you for coming we'll see around belmont thank you hang on one second everybody just a couple of quick announcements before you go first thanks so much again jane and all of our speakers were absolutely thrilled at the response tonight on the back of your programs you'll see a little survey we love if you could fill it out and drop it at the baskets at the door and finally clayton christiansen and alfie cohn have books available outside and roopa patel will have a sign up sheet for anyone interested in volunteer him to read for vocal id and please feel free to stay and mingle with our speakers and members of the vision twenty one implementation committee and finally please save the date for the meet belmont community information fair which will be on august twenty ninth thanks so much and have a great evening thanks again for coming