I work at walmart. I have been there for about 23 years, and in the last five years i have been responsible for international business, and in february i assumed responsibly as ceo. Maurice . My name is maurice levy. I have worked at publicis, and i am about to change companies because i thought it was the right time at this point in my career to move to another job. I will step down from my position as ceo to be a coceo of a Company Called publicis omnicom, which is about to be born in the next few weeks months. Paul . Paul jacobs. I am the chairman and ceo of qualcomm, and i have been at the company basically since the beginning. We started in 1985, and i have been ceo since 2005. I am just about to step down as ceo and remain executive chairman so i can spend more time focusing on technology and innovation and less on some of the other parts of the ceo job i did not like as much. [laughter] peer . I am peer schatz, ceo of a Company Called qiagen. We are in the area of life sciences, and we work with Genetic Information. I have been doing that now for 20 years, and i also built the company basically from its start. We are particularly active in the area of personalized medicine, using Genetic Information for health care, in particular diagnosis. And for many people, they hear about Disruptive Innovation all the time. We thought we would begin with a visual to help you understand what bloomberg thinks it means. So a buddy of mine, andy, i will be honest his name is not andy, his name is max, and he is an engineer, and he wants, like all engineers, to start a company, and he wants to start one that makes limbs not limbs, prosthetic limbs, you cannot make limbs, that is crazy talk. And he has a business plan, which is pretty good for an engineer. And he thinks that he can make it big, but first you need cash. We all do. So it is obvious answer go to a bank, go for a loan, but that is going to take too long. So he has this idea list it on a crowd funding website, and then lets say euros maybe he is american the dollars, or even bitcoin comes flooding in, and it success, is a real success story, an american, european success story, whatever, but now he needs a prototype. He thinks he needs to send it to a lab. Time is the enemy in all these things, and it is expensive, so he ends up making his first prosthetic artificial leg on a 3d printer. Crazy, i know, stay with me. The clock is ticking, though, in terms of the customer wait a second, is that the phone ringing . Yep. That is one of good old maxs first customers, and he is getting the word out about his company because of an online viral campaign. He is always chatting with his customers, and that is how he manages to give them exactly what they want. That is breaking down Disruptive Innovation. At the end of 2013, i made a pledge that i was no longer even going to say it anymore, because i was so sick of it. I felt like it was overused and low and behold i arrived and they said Disruptive Innovation, that is what you are going to participate in. I want to help the audience get in on understanding. I want to put some meat behind it. What does Disruptive Innovation mean to you . Doug. Creative in change is what comes to mind first. In our space, the customer is for filling consumer demand, it is changing rapidly. I talked to a lot of people this week and over the last few months better going through the same types of disruptive change and what the internet makes possible, what Technology Makes possible today, and what it will make possible tomorrow is very different than what we could have done before. For us that walmart, our responsibility is to connect customers with products. How we do that, the speed with which we do it, the price at which we do it that is all going to change a lot in the future, and our job as leaders is to go from yesterday into tomorrow, using what is possible today. I think about our job, that transformation is very much on her mind. Creativity is at the core of what we do, and in everything we do, we have to think reasonably and to try to invent new ways of working and to be at the forefront of innovations. So innovation for us we have to think innovatively on everything we are doing, including the organization, the way we work, and possibly when it comes to service our clients. We have to think how we can have them connecting the right target at the right time, and making sure that they get the right idea of what the brand is all about. And all of this nowadays at the cheapest points. Innovation is not only using the most innovative tools and internet or cell phones or whatever innovation is on everything we do and creativity is in everything we think about. Was your merger really a defense of murder to protect yourself against Disruptive Innovation from silicon valley, from the googles of the realworld taking over the advertising space . No, not of all, our merger is an offensive move to lead a future possibly in this area. You see the fact that we will see big data is becoming one of the most important aspects of the future. This requires that we invest heavily in these fields and that we have the size in order to invest at the right level. So we are partnering with the googles, the facebooks of the world, we have extremely good relationship. We have been the first to sign strategic agreements with innovators, and we believe that we are part of the same group of people. You cannot think about delivering the metrics without putting together the medium, the client, and the advertising agencies with all the constituencies. Dr. Paul, what does Disruptive Innovation mean to you . The mobile industry moves so quickly, so you have got to be able to keep on your toes. I think for us, we want to make sure that so many people are putting money into r d in the industry. We want to make sure that we are not thinking linearly about where we want to go because our competitors are going to go there, so to me, Disruptive Innovation, you know, it is really about doing something people do not expect. And changing the game, and in this industry, when we have an idea for technology, it might take eight years after getting wireless operators to do, handset manufacturers to do it, so we are having to think pretty far out into the future about what a mobile device can be, what our experience of interacting with Digital Technology and doing it in a very personal way, and it has worked so far for us, so it is really about not getting commoditized and changing the game. You have got 45 patents alone. Is that a race to own the technology that you create . Yeah, the idea is you have to get out there early. You have to invent the future. If you are not doing that, if you are just following, you will not be a will to build up at the position, and we will shelby jets and we write some the technology, and the reason that people pay us for our technology is because every year we are coming up with the next new thing because they do not want to get commoditized either. If there commoditized, they are not beholden have the margins that they want to do to continue to invest in research and development and drive the future. Peer, what does Disruptive Innovation mean to you . In the life sciences, we are currently seeing an increase in knowledge. We are generating more data this year than we have generated in all of mankind together in the lifetime in the life sciences. This is going to increase going forward. 20 years ago, we were young hipsters who disrupted an industry. We Creative Solutions ubiquitously used, solutions to process nucleic acids, today pretty much standardized around certain technologies that we created. But we are also faced with new technologies emerging that potentially could disrupt future applications. We have an organization. We are trying to disrupt ourselves constantly, so we are challenging ourselves to disrupt our current this is is to try to find new ways to create Better Solutions than what we have created before, which we standardized. And this is new for us as an organization that traditionally came from the innovative phase and is now also assimilating other technologies that are trying to disrupt its own businesses. Is Disruptive Innovation before companies are only good for the consumer . And your case, doug, the consumer has more power than ever in choices and prices. Does it have you just racing to catch them and you have lost people . It is good for companies that stay ahead, and we have got a history of doing that, and what we are trying to do right now is to make sure that whether it is the Digital Asset of the relationship, and to what degree we can provide some level of personalization to help people save time, get the information they need together with the physical side of it, have what they want, when they want it, how they want it. Bringing all those things together is where the inner dash is where the opportunity is. We see the opportunity to win in the future is that connection, that merger of digital and physical, which in some ways will blur to just be one customer relationship. So being truly customer centric, i think, is what the market and the customer will reward. Maurice, how important is it to have personalized advertising . And can you see numbers rise . The most avoided aspect in advertising is to make sure that you are talking to the right person. And that he or she has got the message and is reacting to the message and changing their behavior. With all the new technology, this kind of quest of the holy grail that we have been looking for for many years is something which is about to happen. We can now understand exactly where the consumer is, who he is or she is, and what she is doing at the very moment. I am saying she because 85 of what we sold in the world is both influenced by women. Too bad women dont make more money they could buy more things. Extremely important in our world and in yours. We must define exactly how we can get a hold of her and make sure that we deliver the right message. The new technology is offering a lot of opportunities. You can reach out to the consumer by cell phones, smart phones. You can reach her when she is shopping, and you can deliver the right message on order that she acquired exactly the product that you want to. This makes time more interesting. And we can merge all the steps. This does not mean that the Media Digital has no future. It just means that all the Digital Tools and media are helping us to define strategies which are extremely finetuned and which help us deliver exactly the right effort at the right moment. As businessmen, it is clear you can see the positives and all of this personal information, but as humans, all of you, are you comfortable with the fact that because of technology, we know exactly when we are in a parking lot, what we are thinking about, what our hand is on . At some point you start is say i am not comfortable with this . We have been Building Technologies now, which actually preserve anonymity, because there are these issues where you want to get access to information, but we actually built, for example, a beaconing technology, which will tell you when i am close to an in gap in a store. We have built it in a way where there is codes that you cannot find out unless the person opts in and they say i am willing to say this code is something that i am interested in and i am willing to do people even know if they are opting in, though . It is going to happen, it is the next phase. You will get notifications whether it is to your phone, to your watch because it is much easier when you get it on your wrist, you do not have to unlock your phone and everything. And you will be able to say yes i want this or know i do not want this. If you do not want to, you drop those on the floor and nobody knows. I think what people need to understand is that we are people, we have families, we do care about these things, and ultimately we understand that trust is a huge issue. When you say we, do you mean as a company . As a person a company is made up of people. We not only know what the requirements are but what is right. Trust is the ultimate access will suck if you lose it, all of your business is at stake. So when we think about opting in, transparency and clarity, what we have got to make sure that every step along the way, we are Building Customer trust. They do want to save time, they do want to have access to information, they want some of these things, and we want to provide it to them. People love to say in theory they have issues with privacy and they dont want people infringing on their business, but at the end of the day, you have the big data. What is more important to the consumer a coupon that he or she likes, a great deal, or their privacy . I think that is an individual answer. People are going to process this new world in their own way and make tradeoffs, but i think for business, if we dont take advantage of the opportunity to serve people more effectively using data, we will get left behind. So we just have to take a step at a time and make sure that we are not getting ahead of where the customer is as it relates to this issue. Peer, when you look at personalized medicine, the idea that for people who do not know, they think of it as something highend, something people cannot really afford, but really if you have personalized medicine, you could be saving those patients money, they could be getting something specifically for them, and there is not anyways. Do you think people realize that . I think it has to do with the term personalized sounds like tailored, sounds like expensive. What it actually does is dramatically reduces the cost on the Health Care System. Were currently working with Health Care Systems that are up to 18 , 19 of gdp and growing. They are going to bankrupt our systems going forward, and one of the reasons why we are facing these rising costs is because we are not using information adequately. The use of information in the Health Care System, to guide better decisions, is about 1. 5 of healthcare costs. Just to compare that, the i. T. Department in banks are typically 9 of their costs, up to 10 of their costs. It is a small fraction of what other industries are using as being deployed to better allocation of 18 of our gdp. This has to change. Obviously, and personalized medicine, what we are doing is we are currently trying to understand disease. We are not as much looking at the patient, so we are sequencing tumors, we are sequencing bacteria, viruses that are causing disease or we are analyzing the disease itself. These are not necessarily protectworthy genomes, but these are hybrids of disease at the moment that do not have privacy issues or should not have privacy issues because they are disease. They are pathogens. And we are allocating then the appropriate therapies toward these diseases or these pathogens or these tumors. This, in my view, has very little to do with protecting privacy, even though this is often misunderstood. At some point in time, we will definitely have to go to elucidating more of the patients, but for that, i am very much looking forward to better technologies like many here are developing. I am very confident we will have those and be able to protect privacy to a substantial degree. There will obviously be issues going forward, but as a citizen of the world community, i see the major issues that we have with health care and the necessity to use information better than what we are doing today. Paul, what industries do you think are the most vulnerable right now because of advanced technology . When the internet first took off, it was somewhat obvious newspaper business, record labels, the travel industry. Now i do look ahead in the coming years, what do you think will really get hurt . I dont think chipmakers. [laughter] chipmakers are in a great position. It is not necessarily about getting hurt. I think mobile is now an enabling technology for many industries, and actually i think is one where we will see massive improvements because you are going to have real time monitoring, not that your doctor is going to be watching you all the time, but if some out of norm condition happens, somebody can be notified and something can happen to you. Or if you have a chronic condition. A lot of times the issues with chronic condition a lot of the money gets spent on chronic condition. It is because people are not necessarily following the treatment regimen as well as they should. If you are a diabetic in your blood glucose levels go out of range, you are actually much less healthy and much more expensive to take care of. So if your watch is watching that, and that gives you a little notification you are loving that watch. I am telling you, this is the future. We have this idea that the internet going into phones many years ago, people used to laugh at me and i that i like to play with it, and everybody think that is normal. The future is you will get notifications all the time for things around you, for breaking news you are interested in, for health, poor things you can control in the environment around you, and it is not going to be because you can pull your phone not because it takes you 15 seconds to unlock the screen. It is because it will be coming to your wrist cover your ear, coming to your glasses, and i can interact with it in a second. Yes i am interested, no i am not, i flick it away, and things will happen like that. So health, though, that is really a critical area because there is so much money being spent in health care and it is not being spent efficiently enough, and that is bankrupting the developing countries, the developed countries, and the developing countries cannot afford it. So we need to make fundamental changes there, and i think mobile technology will do that. How does management embrace the future . Doug barton of mackenzie said technology moves five times faster than management does. So in the healthcare industry, for example, as you have these extraordinary advances, doctors can they keep up with what you are doing . That is definitely one of the issues that we have. If you look at the typical education of physicians that happened 10, 20, 30 years ago, for the average physician, there is a certain amount of reeducation that you constantly have to do and in a very disseminated market. That is definitely a major issue. Innovation can be created by companies, but the translation into broader uses is always a challenge. Health care is a very regulated industry, a very sluggish industry. It is one where decisionmaking is extremely decentralized because of the decisionmaking authoritys position. While we can have great ideas in our ivory towers, the translation into practice is what were focused about. The promise of these new technologies can only come to utility if we create it in a way that it can be broadly applied. If and only creates utility for a few very wealthy people, it will not create the disruptive change in the Health Care System that we need. And this is a balance we always have to focus on. Doug, walmart is a behemoth. How can you stay nimble and embrace technology when you have to run such a Massive Organization . When you walked into walmart in 1984, you could not have imagined your job would be running this type of business today. It is amazing, and it is one of our big challenges. Figuring out how to manage a business well and change it at the same time is something everybody i talk to is thinking about, and i think as leaders, we have to be forwardlooking, and we have to think about who we talked to, what information we put into our minds so that we can develop a vision, but we also have to think about the role that our teams play and who is working on today, who is working on tomorrow, how do you make sure that those teams Work Together in a way that is seamless because at todays pace, which i think is extraordinarily fast and probably only going to get faster, you have to be able to do both at the same time. And clay christensens book, the innovators dilemma, comes to my mind all the time how do you manage through that change, manage through that disruption so that you are ready for the future . I think it is a huge issue and a big part of our challenge. Paul, are we moving too quickly in terms of disruption . Bitcoin comes to mind. People are so crazed for it, and others say it simply does not work. Just because something is disruptive or innovative, does that mean it is smart and is going to have longevity . Of course not. I mean, there is plenty of technologies that are in the dustbin of history but it feels right now we are just in this disruptive fever. If it is new and different, everyone just wants to buy into it. I wish that was true that every new technology we came up with everybody wanted to buy, but we will see, and what happens often with these technologies is you have an imagination of what the consumer may want to go for, but it does not end up that way. And like i said earlier, we start maybe eight years ahead of time developing these new technologies. We are not going to get that right every time. We had a system, which i thought was going to work. We built out a whole Television System in the United States for cell phones, and it had great quality and you can get all the stuff that you wanted on it, but it turned out consumers were not very interested in paying an extra fee on top to get that size screen of video. So we took that technology and merged it directly to the cellular system and made it so that the operators could use a broadcast technology when there is a thing like a game or breaking news are like that, and the rest of the time, we just gave a lot more capacity so people can get access to youtube videos or whatever on demand kind of videos that they want to do. So we learned from some of these technologies that we think are going to be great that turn out that you have got to take a slightly different path. That is what happens in the technology industry. Generally we are very good at being flexible and adaptive to what actually turns out to be acceptable to people. Peer, you have had 30 m a acquisitions on your watch at qiagen. Do you think acquisitions are the best way for innovation for you . No, i think acquisitions only really work if you have a Solid Foundation and organic innovation. They can be used to catalyze certain things, but the organization itself also has to be able to adapt by itself. I think few people appreciate that companies are constantly betting the farm, and companies that do not do that they risk becoming obsolete. Certainly in the High Technology area because we are constantly challenged with new technologies. We are constantly challenged by new Business Models. If we are not part of the game, we will lose out. So we have to think ahead, and we have to make big bets for the organizations, and if we dont do that, we go under, like the innovators dilemma typically would apply. We started out as a chemistry company. We then saw that our technologies were used in biology, so we became a biology company. We then saw that people wanted to use our biology in machines, so we became an engineering company. We then saw that our machines were being used in hospitals and clinics, so we became a medicallyoriented company. Now currently we are in a fascinating shift again where i personally believe that tools to analyze information, sensors are going to become commoditized, and we are becoming a software company. A large part of our employees are today in software to analyze information to interpret it. Companies have to go through these changes over time while still staying loyal to their core company. If they lose one of these megashifts in technology, they potentially can become obsolete. So qiagen is a software company. Doug, do you think walmart is a Different Company than it was a few years ago . I think we are becoming even more of a technology company. Would you ever think a few years ago walmart, a technology company. Doesnt that just blow your mind a little . You have not seen our Information Systems budget. [laughter] it is big and we have a team that does a great job there, but they do have to reinvent what we are doing everyday. So i think this use of information, the way you optimize supply chains requires mass and a different skill set, so the people we are hiring in the way we think about our business is changing and has changed a lot. Help us understand, when we read walmart labs, when i read walmart labs, nike, everybody has labs it makes me roll my eyes. Just because i do not know, what really goes on . What does it mean walmart labs . We made an acquisition, a small capability to help us deal with information through social heading toward personalization. When my thought in the past that there was a conflict between personalization and relevance to cost structure, but now we have the opportunity again through the acquisition of talent, the development of talents, to be able to apply the tools of today in a way that add value to the customer and ultimately that is the way we look at it. Not from walmart out, but from the customer in, and what she wants is great value, service that is morphing into different types of service, many of those aspects being digital. She wants to save time. Some people do not want to spend an hour and a half in a Walmart Store wondering around. They would like to get in and out. We were in the u. K. On our way here, and we have a Retail Business there, asda, and we were going through our drivethrus and looking at how a customer can order through a mobile device, which is headed through the roof in terms of growth within the u. K. Half of our orders that we received digitally this christmas were on mobile devices rather than online, and then they want to come through the drivethrough at asda and pick up their groceries and other items, so customers are coming through, they have an expectation about how fast they can pop and get in and out of there. Moms in particular. So this intersection of physical, how do you get them through the store because sometimes they are not home for a delivery . We do grocery Home Shopping and delivery in the u. K. As well as we have been doing that for many years. We have seen that grow and reach an important level in terms of our business, but we are also finding that people are saying well, im not at home, i want to do this on my schedule, not yours, so please create a situation where i can order online at the beginning of the day, pick up on my drive or on the way home, otherwise im just going to sit in the drivethrough for three minutes to five minutes and then im out of there. I think that is an example of how markets will mature, the u. K. Being more mature than our business in china, or brazil for example. Maurice, just as mature, where is the divide between these young technologists or social media gurus and those who truly understand business or have been in business for decades . It sort of makes you feel so tense when you watch ceos in the last year and all give their 2014 outlook, and they talk about the importance of social, and you can watch their necks tense up because they say god, do not ask a question about it because i do not use the facebook. Where is the marriage between the two . Whatever they say the before facebook, you know they are in trouble and that is when you are ready as an interviewer. I will Say Something i am not on facebook and i am not on twitter, however, personally, i consider that i have nothing to do, and they cannot use it, and they dont want to use it. This does not prevent me from understanding what is going on and to try to be on top of what is happening. Doug, how did you approach this . What i think about walmart, the amount of data you must have has to be staggering. How do you break down where the valuable data is . Part of the key is to find the problem statement or ask yourself and your team good questions, and then use the data to help steer that strategy. What do you mean . If you just think of it as a sea of 0s and 1s, it is overwhelming, but if you still down to what problem are we trying to solve, what customer issue are you working towards, then you can approach it more strategically and parse out what you really could use them put to work. What data can you trust what people like or what they pay for . There is a difference between behavior and intent, and i think that is one of the reasons why testing is so important. It is dangerous to guess. Having multiple paths and parallel processing, Different Solutions to use real information we do it all the time with what items we sell. When new Technology Comes out, like the watch paul is wearing, you cannot guess as to whether or not the customer wants it or not. You have got to put it on mine, put it in stores and let them respond to it. You may not invest 10 million in inventory yet, you may test it and then respond, and i think ideas and formed by data are kind of the same. Maurice, advertising is about desire and you want people to desire things and try them, but you want to advertise for things that people are actually going to pay for. I like gucci shoes. I shop at j. Crew. [laughter] you must make the difference between attitude and behavior. People are going to say and this is true in commercial terms as well as in political terms, people can like someone and do not vote for him, and like some product and buy some others for whatever reasons, or think that they are rationalizing a buy, and in fact they have made that Decision Just on impulse because they like it or they desire it. Try to make a rational decision between the gucci i think you will have a big difficulty. The reason is not because that this shoe, the leather, or the shape or whatever, but the idea that you have of the brand. I think this is the most interesting part of our business, and i hope that it will remain difficult and its cure because i think it is very important that there is this part of humankind, which is at the end of the day, what i want, and you advertising people, retailers, technologists, go to hell, i do what i want and how i like it. And this is making our job extremely interesting because we have to find the emotional link, and we have to find the right way of delivering the message. So i dont believe that we will through mathematical formula find the magic solution. I think there will always be some uncertainties, there will always be some areas of experience, which will last or not. You were mentioning bitcoins. May i remind you what was happening a few years ago . Here in davos, everyone was talking about second life, and second life will be the thing of the future. Where is the second life today . Where is the money of second life . Vanished, disappeared. So we have to accept that a lot of people experience a lot of the same because they have something that we must never forget they are human beings. They have the right to change, they have the right to think differently, and they have the right to think with their emotions, and that is where we as advertising people have a role because we understand that much better than anyone else. Im sorry to say that, but because we are the convergence a lot of people, areas, technology, etc. , and at the end, they read the kind of alchemy, which is delivering these methods to the right person. So it will be always a difficult combination, and the idea that a good mathematician will find a solution, i think, is not do you believe the decisions are made based on desire and not on necessity . I would say they are made on both. Again, it is not all, it is and, and. People are making decisions based on necessity. I dream to have this car, but i have not the money for, so i will have this one, which is a lowerpriced one. That simple because that is what life is all about. So you have to make tradeoffs, and sometimes you cannot acquire something, but you will make tradeoffs on other aspects of your conception because you want that. And that is always what i consider being the good uncertainty of life. You cannot measure, you cannot put into boxes the people, and you have to accept that they have different behavior according to the moment, and i am sure that you your self, you are having not only onstage but also in some moment in your life that you think you will be doing, and there are things that you will have to do differently simply because they are some impulse. That was mentioned fact that people are ordering doug was mentioning the fact that people are ordering by cell phone and taking the product at the drivethru. That is nice, and it is growing. The problem with that how are we managing impulse . Impulse is important. I dont know how many what is the share of the space of walmart, that has not been predicted by the people that enter into a Walmart Store with the idea of buying one thing, and they are getting out with two . I would like to open it up for q a, and when you have a question, someone will come with to you with a microphone, and if you could first introduce yourself and your organization. Thank you. My question is about cost of socalled Disruptive Innovation. Innovation is great, everybody is very excited about innovation, but all the innovation means you have to discard a part, just like, you have a lot of offline shopping centers, and those are established, so how do you balance the part and the benefit of innovation . That is one of the big challenges. I think the alternative of not investing is even more concerning, though, so you have to find a way to make the right Capital Investments so you can steer the company for the future. It is very important to keep your current business, your core business strong so that helps fund the future. And as leaders, we need a lot of help from investors and from our own finance team helping make a straight up decisions. Peer, do have to discard the old . I think you do. If you look at classical investment financial analysis, what you typically try to discard is not some pastorals of you do not include the some cost in your analysis of the opportunity going forward, so by simply applying that basic method, you would not you should not look at what that means for a business but look at what it means for the future for the investment. Because somebody, at least in technology, will choose that path, so if you do not do it, somebody else will do it, and if you do it, you have a chance to potentially mitigate the impact, protect potentially synergize with the rest of your portfolio and make it a lot more positive for you then if somebody else disrupts the market for you. That is why i typically ask our people not to look at the impact that a new technology or a new Business Model has on our end on our existing is this but to actually improve the maximum impact. Dr. Paul, do you want to weigh in . If you look at things you have built in the past, technologies you have built in the past, some of them are technologies or foundations for the next for the next technologies that youre going to build in the future. So the radio technologies we started our company building, those radio technologies are still in the phone. They morphed a little, they have gotten more sophisticated over time, but the newest thing that were doing today about this merging of the physical world and the cyber world, those have their roots in that stuff that we did in the past. So you have to choose coming you have to pick and choose what of the past that you retain and build upon, and what of the past that you need to discard. The other aspect of that is, you know, there are a lot of cell phones out there, and they continually come out with new ones, and people discard those, and so it is a question of sustainability. As an industry to really try to focus in on that more and more. I wanted to ask you a question about innovation. Ive read a book about innovators, and the thesis was that innovators usually fail in business, and it is usually the strong Number Two Company that takes over the idea and turns it into a success. I think economically that makes a lot of sense, but i also see society and consumers are looking out for new ideas and new signatures. I just wanted to hear what you think when we talk about innovation and powerful businesses that you have, what your strategy is on those really good initial ideas and how you can capture those . Ok, i will take a shot at it. Innovation is probably the most difficult decision that the ceo has to make because it is a disruption, and the easiest thing is to say ok, i am going to do what is disruptive, but disruption does not work all the time, so it is always a tradeoff, and you have to make the right decision. We were talking about steve jobs, but steve jobs has been out of apple for a good reason he failed, and he had to come back because the other one had failed, and there was something which was incredibly strong with him. I had a meeting with him only once, and one thing it is his obsession and his focus. So he was an innovator by essence. We are not innovators by essence, not all of us, and we have a Company Walmart has been an innovating company in its own right and in its own field, and is now moving to new disruptions and the disruptive ways of working. The same is happening with publicis group, the same with qualcomm, the same with you, and i think you have to accept failures. You have to have people are supporting the idea that you cant accept failures, you are born, must accept that you can fail, and it is only at this point that you can succeed. But obviously if you fail to often, that means you have a problem. [laughter] so making a decision on innovation is probably one of the most difficult things that you have to do when you are running a company. It is not the same when you are a startup. A startup can make in some areas they fail, they fail, and they start something else, and they go and maybe they will find one day something, but when you have a business with thousands of people or millions of people working in the company, you have not the right to fail to often because what you are putting at risk is the life and the jobs of many, many people, and also the trust that a lot of people have in you and your shareholders. So it is very complicated man making the right decision when it comes to going in an area that you dont know anything about, you must feel very strongly, this is where your guts are very important. Either you have the feeling that it will work and you understand how this will contribute to the future, or you do not feel it enough, and you do not go, and maybe you made the wrong decision not going in, so it is complicated. Ok, were going to end all the importance of your guts. I want to thank everybody for participating, and generally, peer schatz of qiagen, paul jacobs of qualcomm, maurice levy of publicis, and our own Doug Mcmillon of walmart, these guys, thank you. [applause] tonight on titans at the table we talk football and the big apple. There will be a coin toss right here. With the man who is bringing it all together. Jonathan tisch, cochairman of the Loews Corporation and coowner of the new york giants. He was born and raised in a new york family. In 1959, his family branched out and bought loews theaters. Today the loews have billions of dollars in assets that generate the team billions of dollars in annual revenue with interest from everything in hotels, insurance, oil and gas, to theaters. Jonathan tisch runs the company an
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