As we’re patiently waiting for all the video from the April 28th Symposium to be digitized and put up on Baruch’s Digital Media Library and since we’ve got keynotes on the brain, we figured we’d give you a small taste of the 4th Annual Symposium from way back in 2004. Below is the text from the keynote address by Alan Webber, Founding Editior of Fast Company magazine and an all around fascinating guy. Enjoy. Once we find the video, we’ll put that up too.

I want to talk a little bit about what you all wrestled with this morning and what for the past 20 years or so, I’ve tried to do as a job, and that is to figure out how to put work and business and ideas in a common space. Briefly, my background: About 20 years ago, I went to work at the Harvard Business Review and ran it for about eight years and then left to start Fast Company magazine, which, when we launched it, we thought of it as a cross between the Harvard Business Review and Rolling Stone. And that worked pretty well. For those of you that laughed, you got it. It was an interesting hybrid and hybrids, when they work, are great. When they don’t work, they disappear rapidly.

The last thing I wrote before I left the Harvard Business Review as the editorial director in about 1993 was an essay called, “What’s So New About The New Economy?” It was actually a book review disguised as an essay. There were three or so really interesting new books by Tom Peters, of In Search of Excellence fame, and several other people who were beginning to nibble at the edges of a revolution that was just beginning to be visible in the world of business. I read these books and tried to synthesize what they all had in common; and the punch line of the essay was, “What’s new about the new economy is that work is conversation.” In the old economy, if your boss saw you hanging out at the water cooler, he or she would come up to you and say, “Stop talking. Get back to work.” And in the new economy, if your boss saw you hanging out at the water cooler, he or she would come up to you and say, “That’s great. I’m glad to see you folks are talking with each other. I’ll be you’re going to come up with some really new and exciting ideas.”

And, in fact, one of the hallmarks of the period between 1993 till about 2000 when we went through the Dot Com bust and then a bunch of CEOs got busted, and we sort of forgot about the new economy, was a transformation of the world of work along these lines. For about seven or eight years we shifted gears from an industrial model to knowledge-based model where knowledge really was power, where work really was personal, where you were expected to bring all of yourself to the work place as opposed to checking your emotions, your creativity, your individuality at the door. I remember, vividly, walking through the offices of Steelcase, one of the great, creative furniture companies in the world, and seeing how, as an investment in design creativity, they had built coffee bars all over the perimeter of the office building so that people would stop, get up from their desk, go to the coffee bar, encounter their colleagues, have a chance conversation, a serendipitous discussion, and, in the process, generate new ideas, spark new possibilities, and share knowledge across boundaries.

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