Director of Innovation & Social Business, AMP Services Ltd
BCom (Unisa)
Annalie Killian addressed graduates from the UTS Business School and UTS Law School in the Great Hall, University of Technology, Sydney on , on Wednesday 1 May 2013, 5.30pm.
Our speaker today is Mrs Annalie Killian.
Annalie has worked at AMP since 2000 as the Director for Innovation, Communication & Social Business. During her time at AMP she founded and introduced the Amplify Festival and over the past eight years, it has become the largest corporate learning and innovation platform in Australia today.
The Amplify Festival leads businesses to a discovery of the future and disruptive trends, enables learning in experiential ways, experimenting with new ideas and integrates emerging technologies into the way people work.
Annalie has led AMP’s award-winning corporate intranet and Enterprise 2.0 adoption and founded AMP’s crowd-sourcing innovation programme for employees. As a member of the AMP Innovation Board, she champions an eco-system approach to innovation, culture transformation and partners with business teams to anticipate the impacts and opportunities that technology brings.
Annalie became a Fellow of the Aspen Institute’s First Movers Entrepreneurship programme for global leaders working at the intersection of business innovation and social impact in 2011. She also serves on the advisory board of several Australian start-ups and social ventures and mentors young leaders. The Hargraves Institute for Innovation awarded Annalie the 2013 Lawrence Hargraves Award for her contribution to the Innovation Agenda in Australia.
It gives me great pleasure to invite Mrs Annalie Killian to deliver the occasional address.
Speech
Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, members of the council, distinguished guests, graduates, family and friends.
Once upon the time, the world had an edge and sailing beyond it meant only one thing, a certain death.
Today, we know differently. We navigate a global sea of infinitely connected intelligence, and the edge and danger are no longer out there, it has flipped and is now dwelling inside of us.
Today, the greatest risk comes from not exploring the edge, not pushing the boundaries, not collaborating with others and sinking into an island of obscurity. As a species, the edge dwellers today are open sourcing intellectual property and even creating new species. Crowd funding is dismantling the habit of hierarchy and power bases that thrived on take not give. They’re cultivating co-working spaces, collaborative consumption models, and a confluence of creative collaborators that national borders cannot contain.
Yes, we are living the modern renaissance and what strikes me most is the power of one in a network of many, and how each networked individual has the potential to change the world.
Our new tools of digital creation, collaboration, and connectivity bring knowledge further and faster than ever before. And with it comes an unparalleled and exponentially accelerating pace of progress.
As we reflect on the pace of progress, we realise that the future is not a linear extension of the past but radically and structurally different. Leaders at the edge are beginning to recognise that the most valuable resource we have is the human creativity and ingenuity innate in every person.
On this graduation day, as we celebrate the reward of your hard work for the last few years to attain this degree, let us also celebrate the beginning of the rest of your creative life and the future that is yours to own and shape.
The point of education is no longer to fit yourself to a career but to give you a foundation so that you can create your own path. You are now explorers who will push the limits of current understanding. You will be the pioneers of new thinking that will allow the world to leave old problems behind, and you will uncover new truths and be the ones creating the future.
Why? Why is creating and innovating essential? And why you?
Being a creator is the best path to happiness and becoming the best person you could be. I draw here on the acclaimed academic and researcher, Abraham Maslow, who said “My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy self-actualising fully human person, seems to be coming closer and closer together and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.” If the purpose of each generation is to leave the world a better place than we found it, to be happy and fulfilled people, then what will you create? What will you connect? What will you catalyse?
Here are a few lessons that I have learnt in my first half century. They all start with a “C”, and while “C” also stands for chocolates and cat videos, I’m not going to cover that today; I’ll leave that for self-study.
The first one is cultivate curiosity. We know you majored in something, but what will you minor in? Seek a career counterpoint to ensure you do not just grow older from here on, but as you grow older, you keep growing.
Prioritise learning and discovery over efficiency because mistakes, whilst they are the enemy of efficiency, are the fuel for learning. Granted, there’s no need to keep refuelling at the same pump more than once, so it is important to seek out paths of excellence. When you choose the path of steeper achievement, when you get there and look down on the path of mediocrity, believe me, there is no better high.
Second, create something, grow something, make something. Preferably, make something in the physical world. It practices your complex problem solving skills and means you do not lose touch with all of your senses.
Think with your hands, make an object, challenge yourself, go and exhibit it, sell it at the local market. Try it on Etsy, make a blog, make a film, build an app, grow an audience, and grow customers. Start a company instead of writing a resume and rescue yourself from a career of following someone else’s orders and rules and just make something. This is the stuff of legacy.
Three, communicate. The ability to communicate is a foundation skill of the human operating system. Nothing matters more if you want to make a difference. It sets high achievers apart from the rest. It causes motion and action in others with just a few words and ideas. Even if you don’t love it, master it, learn to communicate, invest in it and practice, practice, practice.
Four, connect and collaborate with others. Be a giver, not a taker. Use the word yes and connect with people. Each discovery you personally make can benefit everyone collectively.
Share knowledge freely when you do not need anything in return. Cultivate ties outside of your domain because creativity happens at the edges and intersections between disciplines and between people.
You need your tribe, but you also need those that are different. Always give more than you take and your net influences score, not that you will be keeping score, will always be positive.
Five, cool it. Carve out spaces of silence and solitude in order to do the deep thinking that creates meaning out of chaos. Emptiness is powerful and sacred, the birth place of new possibility. Make those spaces for yourself.
Build in your own periods of digital detox, protect and defend them, use the word ‘no’ to protect your space, your work, your time and your relationships. Inside every ‘no’ is a ‘yes’ to something else and know what that is.
Six, courage: from the French word cœur, which means heart. Live at the edge with passion. Do not let someone who gave up on their dreams, talk you out of yours. Let your passion and compassion serve as a compass, when you seek beauty, meaning and step off the well-trodden path to blaze new trails.
We know that passion is the key to personal growth; it’s what gives us that courage to take risk, overcome our fears and try things never done before. When that happens, passion transforms even the passionate.
Go figure out your soul signature. Define a statement that crystallises the essence of whom you are, and what you can be when you are at your best.
Live every day so that you can infect others. As Gandhi pointed out “your life is your message, make it epic”.