“Knowledge is critical but its value is limited unless you’re prepared and committed to execution”

Irrespective of what you do professionally, being self-aware and enhancing your personal development is critical to growth and success. The day you put your personal development on hold is the day you decide to the let the competition pass you by. And it’s that fear of lagging behind the competition which motivates me to seek out knowledge and explore new possibilities… every once in a while some morsel of information actually sticks.

Attending the World Business Forum is almost an overload of information. And as someone who has listened to many speakers I have to say this event brings together some of the best thinkers and accomplished speakers to one program.

People like:

• Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and a host of other books. His work is based on empirical data so there’s steak to go along with the sizzle.
• Marcus Buckingham, who specializes in identifying employee’s strength and ways to harness that strength to maximize performance
• Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics; his specialty is identifying how technology affects marketing and innovation
• Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense. During his illustrious career he’s served at the pleasure of eight Presidents. He knows a thing or two about leadership and courage. He gave us some insight into the planning of the Bin Laden mission in Pakistan, and the courage it took for President Obama to give the go order.
• Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s foreign affairs and guest writer for the Washington Post and Time magazine. Zakaria spoke to the global power shift and the geopolitical challenges we all we face.
• Jack Welch, Richard Branson and a host of others. As I said, it was almost information overload but not in any negative way.

Many things to ponder about what I just learned over the last two days but I’ve been able to confirm two things. Firstly, being inspired is an important component of personal development. Secondly, knowledge is critical but its value is limited unless you’re prepared and committed to execution. How many times have you heard someone say about some service or product, “I thought of that a while ago”. Frankly, the honest response to that statement should be, “shame you did nothing about it”.

Until next time

Cheers