Love Can Do - Why are some companies standing out? | Idriss Aberkane | TEDxRennes

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

The Silicon Valley has very well-known motto, "Fail early, fail often." In this talk, Idriss Aberkane introduces its second motto, "Love Can Do." He explains how the companies that are standing out in this sector are the one doing Love Can Do.

Are you excited or not?

(Audience) Yes.

I try again, are you excited or not?

(Audience) Yes.

You seem really excited, now.

Here is a picture for you to cool down.

Don't laugh; this is where I grew up.

OK, I am leaving!

I grew up there, I have
a very exciting life, in a council flat,

and my grand mother lived
on the 11th floor,

you will be cleverer
when going to bed tonight,

you did not expect to learn
that from a TEDx, I suppose.

This, you will never forget,

Idriss Aberkane's grandmother
lived on the 11th floor of this block.

Why do I show this to you?

Because I am actually convinced
that in the world that surrounds us,

all the objects we create
and that surround us can speak,

we can ask them why they are there.

All the objects we created, which are part
of our daily life, our environment

can be asked, "Little object,
little product, little service,

why are you there?"

I am convinced if we really asked objects
around us why they are there,

the huge majority would answer,

"I am there
because there is a market, idiot."

Check this with the objects around you,

most of them are there
because there is a market.

Actually, the people
who made them don't use them.

The people who built that tower
don't live there, no.

There are objects which are not there
because there is a market,

and then, we have objects one even wonders
why they are there at all.

This block for example,
my grandmother did not live there,

it has been the highest tower
in the Christian world for very long,

Strasbourg Cathedral,

but here, it is an object that if asked,

"Why are you there little building?"

It will answer, "I'm here because mum
and dad loved each other very much."

These are exceptional objects

Whether they are goods,
products, or services,

but it can even be buildings
such as Sydney Opera or the Eiffel Tower,

the Eiffel Tower which was to be
disassembled, since useless.

Ask the Eiffel Tower, "Why are you there?"

"I'm here because mum and dad
loved each other very much."

It's not rational.

With a business plan,
it would not have been built.

I am here to talk about this actually,

what makes TED specificity in general,

why is TED so special?

We will see in fact
that it is precisely passion and love.

But, before that,
I will tell you something

which may not seem exciting.

Right now, we are undertaking
a knowledge transaction.

I give you the knowledge,
and you give me two things in exchange.

Which ones? What are you
giving me right now?

(Audience) Attention, love,

IA: Attention - we will talk
about love later - and time.

In fact, if you want to buy knowledge,

you need attention and time in exchange.

That is the equation
I discovered in Stanford,

it doesn't bite, don't worry,
it is really kind,

it describes what you are going
to do today at TEDx:

you are going to give attention
and time to the speaker.

To buy knowledge, you need to pay
with attention multiplied by time.

Let's check it is indeed a product,

A product means that if one of the 2
is equal to 0, the whole equals 0.

If you give me one hour of your time,
but are not focused,

there will be no exchange of knowledge.

You should give me
your whole attention and all your time.

This is the currency
in the knowledge economy.

To learn something, you have to pay
with attention and time.

And the good news with this equation
is that we all have both from birth.

Yes, the young Somali is not born
with pocket money,

but he has attention and time.

The knowledge economy
is therefore the only economy

where everybody is born
with a buying power,

which is good news!

Under what conditions

do we give our whole attention
and all our time to someone?

How is this called?

Love.

When you love someone,

you lavishly give him or her
your whole attention and all your time.

The knowledge economy is the only one

which maximizes
the lovers' purchasing power.

Literally, if you want to learn faster,

make sure you fall in love first

with the knowledge you will learn.

This is what the story of my work
and my findings are about:

what is the role of love in the economy,
which is supposed to be prosy?

At Stanford, when I dealt with this,
people understood quite well.

But in France when I said, "Well,

let's talk a little about love
in companies,"

no kidding, people would not understand.

So, I told them, "Well, to maximize
the flow of knowledge,

you need to love what you do,

the main point is to love your job,

you will turn out to be more competitive."

But apparently, I had not found
the proper words,

above all with managers, as I was teaching
in Centrale, and it is specific.

So I thought, "We're in Descartes homeland
let's make a diagram,

let's draw something really Cartesian."

I called it, "Love Can Do,"

and I wondered, "What are
the companies with a little difference,

those slightly standing out?"

It is the ones which do what they can do.

So I thought, let's take the Can Do axis:

can I do my job?

But we are going to add another axis,

and we'll stick
to the good old Cartesian diagram,

and we are going to add some love;

forgive me to add some love
into a Cartesian diagram.

Let's consider another thing,
"Let's organize the companies,

or not just the companies,
by the way, but any initiative,

according to what people love to do
and what they can do."

The company which does
what it loves and what it can do

is the company standing out,

that doesn't mean it is the leader,

it means there is you,
and then there's the rest of the world.

Typically, we mention Apple.

What does "standing out" mean?

Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow
have a daughter.

Chris Martin, singer of Coldplay,
and Gwyneth Paltrow, Hollywood star.

How do they call here? Apple.

Who is going to call
their daughter Samsung?

(Laughter)

That is standing out.

It makes you laugh
because it is standing out.

Then, there is the follower,

the one who does his job right,
he can do it, he handles it,

but he doesn't care about love.

And, excuse me,

but Samsung didn't go from
making toilets to making tablets

just because they loved it,
there was a market.

When the market was there,
they just went for it.

That is the case
for the vast majority of companies.

There is a market, they go for it.

That is the follower.

The difference between
the follower and the leader,

the one standing out,

is, "Do I like the job,

or do I only do it
because there is a market?"

Talking of job, you know the joke,

we say the Americans have Steve Jobs
and the French have Pôle Emploi.

(Laughter)

There is no video editing for TEDx,
the joke is on me.

(Applause)

Then, you have other players,

my favorite being the garage
in the Silicon Valley.

All those companies
that were founded in garages.

What does that mean
that today they are there,

I mean up there?

What does it mean?

That means a maximum of love
and a minimum of know-how.

That's how Google and Amazon were created.

That is how Tesla, Apple,
Hewlett Packard and Disney were created.

Yes, Disney created Alice in Wonderlands

in a garage in Los Angeles.

Please, don't look for any wordplay.

(Laughter)

Oh, humor.

The garages in the Silicon Valley
don't do a job

because they know how to,

they don't know anything about it,
but they love it.

The garage is going to select
the ones who love it,

because there are no grades, no prices,

you won't get a regional price
for competitiveness,

you won't get anything,

you won't be able to pick somebody saying,
"I work in a garage."

You cannot write that on your resume.

There is no award,

no grade, no diploma,
there is only what you do.

The garage selects the enthusiasts,
the ones who are passionate about the job,

the ones who love it.

And so, when you mix
love and incompetence,

you get the result,

"Sorry guys, I didn't know
it was impossible so I did it."

That is typical of the Silicon Valley's
companies that were created in a garage.

As we were telling them,
"Guys, that is impossible,"

they just did it because they had
no manuals to hold them back.

Obviously, the worst thing is
that we have those kind of players,

the compelled incomers.

It is easy to sum it up,

if you ask them,
"Why do you make your products?"

"Because I had to.

I wanted to be a vet but I was told
to make that product, so I did."

The best example is,
you might know it, the brand Lada,

or the Russian words in general.

A friend of mine met a marabout in Africa,

and like all great marabouts,
he had the list of all his miracles:

the loved-one coming back, glory,
beauty, ingrown nail healing, all of it,

and his concluding claim was:
can even start Russian motorcycles?

(Laughter)

There is walking on water, and then
there is starting a Russian motorcycles.

That tells a lot about
Russian motorcycles,

and you clearly wouldn't dream
about a Russian motorcycle.

One we have that diagram,

we see that if the follower
wants to stand out,

there is only one question to ask,

and you'll see that it fits
perfectly with this TEDx's theme,

the upward direction --

do you want some self-consistency?

(Laughter)

They have to ask themselves,
"Why do I do my job?"

For the compelled incomers,

the red arrow pointing down
is the path to suffering,

because you get the knowledge
but do not have the love of the job.

You are in this mode,

"Why are you working?"
"Because I have to."

That is suffering, that is
committing suicide at work, it is hell.

The garage in the Silicon Valley,
on the other hand, obtains

all his knowledge out of love.

He does the job because he loves it,

and he is going to get all his expertise
on the path to love.

That path, I called it El Camino Real,

that is the avenue in the Silicon Valley.

That avenue which structures
the Silicon Valley

is called the royal road in Spanish,
El Camino Real,

and that's how I called this transition.

Because the Google, the Apple,
the Walt-Disney, the Hewlett-Packard

have followed this way.

The ones who followed it the most
and which illustrate best Love Can Do,

that's Tesla.

Tesla is typically the company

which didn't know anything
about its competitors..

So almost all the decisions they made

were completely dumb and irrational.

On that frame, you can see
an illustration of Love Can Do.

On this picture, you can see
the Love and the Can Do.

That is what love is, that is this engine.

In fact, when Elon Musk founded Tesla,

he asked his engineers for an engine
that was invented by Nicolas Tesla,

because he is a fan of Tesla,
the second da Vinci of the 20th century.

So he told his engineers,

"I want an engine that was invented
by Nicolas Tesla."

If you think about it,

that is dumb, as dumb as asking Airbus
for a Leonard de Vinci's technology.

So the engineers replied,
"Well, that is dumb."

And Elon Musk said, "I am the one paying,

so you are going to make
a N. Tesla's engine, and shut up."

This engine which gives nightmares

to the entire global
automotive establishment

is an engine that was patented
by Nicolas Tesla in 1896.

That is love,

because it is no rational decision.

You rationally won't beat your competitors
with a thing from the 19th century.

"I am just passionate
about Tesla," so here it is.

Can Do is the battery in this.

You don't see it now,
but they will be put onto the frame

and Can Do is a car with batteries,

we didn't have good returns
so Elon Musk said,

"Wait, does a laptop have a good battery?"

"Yeah, it's not bad."

The new Mac had a good battery.

"Fine, just take some of these
and pile them up."

That's what they did.

Love Can Do.

The epitome of Love Can Do
- we won't talk about it for long,

it would be an inter-TEDx -
it is the Wright brothers,

they were entirely made of Love Can Do,

they had no diploma.

While guys in Polytechnique,
the MIT, the Royal Society

wanted to make their first plane fly,

the ones who made it fly

were two idiots,
60km away from Dayton, Ohio,

and who hadn't graduated from High School,

and that was because they crashed
five times a day.

An excellent TED speaker
said it better than me,

his name is Simon Sinek

- spend a minute with Simon Sinek,
it is better than my TEDx.

I can tell you that,
seriously, Simon Sinek.

The conclusion of Love Can Do for me

is that, no matter the expertise,

you saw it: attention times time,

when you learn something,

your learning, if you are passionate,

is going to take theses steps:

5, 50, 500, 5,000, maybe 50,000 hours.

In 5 hours, you get into any knowledge,

in 50 hours you are autonomous,
in 500 hours you can teach it,

at 5,000 there are the first Nobel Prizes,

and at 50,000 you get what Japanese call

a living national treasure.

I insist on saying that it only works
if you learn because your are passionate,

you have a maximum attention.

I will show you a case
of living national treasure,

Wallace Chan,
the best jeweler in the world.

That guy is standing out,

that guys has 100,000 hours
of doing what he does,

that is exceptional, no jeweler
can do it like he does.

I will just who you one of his creations
that shows Love Can Do,

the guy made a portrait in an aquamarine.

That is called the Wallace Cut,
he can cut out a portrait

that is reflected on all the facets
of the aquamarine.

Why? Because he loves it,

and when you ask him,
"Do you want to go on holidays?"

He says, "In my workshop,
I am already on holidays,

that is the only thing that satisfies me."

Today, you are going to see
lots of speakers

who will illustrate Love Can Do
better than I can.

Because I am only talking about theory,

they are going to talk about practice.

The speaker coming up right after me
will talk to you about love in companies,

and you will see exactly
what Love Can Do can result in.

And so on, for the Veilles Charrues
music festival, etc.

All I want you to do now,

is consider Love Can Do in your life,

and I want you to say
something extremely simple,

that is that every economically useful
human being might not be fulfilled,

but every fulfilled human being
is necessarily economically useful.

So let's value fulfillment
more than economical usefulness.

Have an excellent day.

(Applause)