From Tom at TED: Running out of Ideas?
Dear Laura and Smartplanet readers,
My name is Tom Rielly community director of TED. I read your article avidly, and would like to share a few thoughts.
1. The idea that our conference or anyone else is running out of ideas is prima facie nonsensical. There are literally billions of ideas on the planet, and discovering the great ones and the people who thought of them is what we love to do.
2. To conclude from the fact we were conducting global auditions meant we were running out of ideas is like saying a newspaper investing in foreign correspondents is running out of stories.
3. For the FT to somehow imply that speakers from other parts of the world identified through this process are less worthy than our previous lineups, personally I find this notion patronizing at best. See for yourself: check out every audition from every city on ted.com.
4. The first bullet about pricing conflates the fee for attendees and process for admitting speakers, who are always our guests. The inference that we've had to lower our price or relax our admission or speaker standards is simply not true; in fact both processes get more stringent every year.
5 The tough part for us is the opposite of what the FT.com asserts: it's incredibly hard to choose 100 speakers from all the folks we'd love to have onstage.
6. While the article said that other conference have few female speakers, I can happily TED does not share that problem: approximately 33-40% of our speaker for the last four conferences are women. And our research shows that the majority of female speakers are sharing an idea at TED for the first time.
7. We're not a business, but a non-profit. This allows us to make decisions that maintain high quality with no need to compromise.
I welcome further conversation, more in the spirit of My Dinner with Andre than Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon.
Respectfully
Tom
PS Happy Days really WAS great until the last season.
