Realising A Vision
Tim Smit, CEO of Eden Project, speaks on “Realizing a Vision” at the closing plenary of the Skoll World Forum. “We all sort of think death is optional, so we piss around wasting our lives away. You need to have the fire, to imagine how many birthdays there are from now until your death, and suddenly you think, ‘When am I going to go to the Antarctic, when am I going to do that?’ And suddenly you are fired up. So many people piss their lives up against the wall because they are too scared to take risks,” Smit says.
With: Tim Smit
Thank you, Pamela. Thank you, Skoll. How scary is it to follow these two wonderful presentations? I thought I'd lower the tone a bit, because I feel a bit short of air. Last November, I had to go and give a speech in a place called Telford. For those of you who are foreign, it's sort of that way, a long way and their idea of regional development was to build an absolutely monstrous conference center which would hold just about the entire population of Telford, and for all of you who know about public speaking, you know you need a couple of minutes just to get in to the zone, you know, to feel those words coming up and get ready.
And I arrived late, because they along with the conference center had built one of the most complicated one-way road systems you've ever seen so I arrived late and I knocked on the door, the stage door. And they opened the stage door and there's this guy in a silver lame jacket and he said "Mate, am I pleased to see you." I wished the feeling had been mutual.
Anyway, I waited for a while, and this guy scuttled up these wooden stairs, a bit like that, and said wait a minute. He opens these velvet curtains and the next thing I hear is "I want to hear a big hand for Mr. Tim Schmidt", and on the T in Schmidt the loudest disco music you've ever heard. And the whole bloody place was just rumbling like that.
And he scuttled down again, and he said, "You're on, mate". And I don't know whether you're whether this has ever happened to you. I walked up the stairs, I parted the curtains and I went blank I mean, utterly blank. I mean, so blank, there was not a single word I could think of. So I thought, "Hold the stage, Tim, look as if you know what you're doing." So I strolled slowly to the middle of the stage and then walked towards the front of the stage, still nothing, absolutely nothing.
I got up to the point where my toes were on the edge of the orchestra pit, I had no where left to go to buy myself the extra few seconds, I leaned forward until it was about to be the point of no return. And I looked at the audience in terror. And I screamed at the top of my voice. you all are going to die.
Well, anyway, there was four thousand people there, right? And they all put their hands on the back of their chairs and started to sit down. I thought, God, what do I say next? I then For those of you who do some public speaking, great tip coming up, alright. I then realized how to buy time, I said "If you, or you." So I kept pointing, right?
I then said, "If you truly feared me, if you really believed you were going to die on April 23, 2023, how many of you would still want to work for this damn company tomorrow? Absolute silence. Anyway, the speech got a bit better after that. But I was actually trying to. I am very frightened of death, and why it was actually quite helpful - and I wove it into the speech - was that we all seem to think that death is optional, so we piss around, wasting our lives away, dreaming of adventures, being in bars talking about what we are going to do the next week or the week after, but we never do it.
Right, we never do it? So you need to actually have the fire of imagine how many birthdays between now and your death and suddenly you say "Christ, when I'm going to go to the Antarctic. When am I going to do that? And suddenly you're fired up. That was the first, no, that's the second really crap speech I made.
I ought to tell you the epilogue to this speech. The next day, I get back to Eden, and the scale of the disaster became apparent, because at four o'clock in the morning there is this email from the Chief Executive of the company I'd addressed and he says, "I've just been speaking to my wife, and I've decided to leave the Company." No, but the truth is, so many people piss their lives up against the world because they're too scared to take risks .
The sort of people they are, that piss their lives up against the wall, use words like this: "Centre of excellence." "Out of the box." "Joined up thinking." "Leading Edge, Bleeding edge." "Cutting edge", which is when I suppose you get too close to that bleeding edge, and then there is "thinking the unthinkable", how cool is that?
Have you ever realised in life that the people who use that language are in inverse relation to the time they use it? and we mostly realize that every parts of the world is unique. Isn't that amazing? Language is everything. The first crap speech I made i'd restored a garden called the lost gardens of Helligan.
And it had been on the telly and everything else, and it was very successful. It had become the most visited garden in Britain. Actually by accident because the television documentary had forgotten to mention that we weren't open to the public. So these people kept turning up, so eventually we ripped the toilet out of the pota-loo and start to charge people to come in and we were still working, so they say what's happening here? And we say no idea, here's a machete, why don't you get it? Budding social entrepreneurs, a great social model they get people to pay come in, and then do the work for you which is a ready one.
Anyway I was invited to historic houses association don't to know. You know the sort of corduroy trousers, the tweed jackets the leather patches and all them who stay at your homes. Most people called Nigel, that's the thing. And I went up and I managed to alienate, the gist of the speech how to open your stately homes and gardens to the general public, and they were hoping for some insight.
And I alienated the entire audience in the first sentence. Because I got up and I said look, if you don't feel like getting drunk in it, you don't feel inspired to dream in it, and you don't desire to make love in it, for fuck's sake, tarmac it. And it went down really... But the point I was actually trying to make is a serious one, OK?
In Britain, if a 1920s car were to go through that wall right now, other than the regrettable loss of life over here, everybody else would say, "Beautiful old car!" The old stuff in Britain is always held up as if the world smelt of baking bread all the time. But, in fact, most of the people in this room would have been put on a stake.
You know that. The future is a beautiful and exciting place and I want to just discuss it in the little bit of time I've got. I run my life in a very odd way. I had a traumatic experience in 1981. I was being driven along the Champs-Elysees in a chauffeur-driven limousine. I was staying in the Plaza Athenee Hotel and I was going to the [xx] to get a gold and a platinum record.
The record at number one was the biggest selling record in French history. The record at number two that was going to knock it off the number one spot, shame, I'd written it too, OK? We're driving and I suddenly burst into tears, uncontrollable tears. I never got to the awards ceremony, I went back to the hotel and I decided to give up the music industry.
There's something really weird has happened. You know when you imagine what you want, it's a bit like Arena's film, when you imagine what you want, material things, the adulation of others, it is extraordinary how much it feels like sand going through your fingers. Because when you get there suddenly your imagining of it is that you are surrounded by the people you love.
But when you see that you are nothing more than a product, and you're a cog in a machine, it tastes very dry indeed. Dorothy Parker, the American writer, once famously described it. She said, "The problem with getting there, is that when you get there, there's no there there", and I think most of us understand what that means, that hollow inside us, and I decided to change my life, and I decided to do something very radical.
Have any of you read Luke Rhinehart's "The Dice Man"? If you haven't you should, it's about a guy who wants to make decisions based on decisions against the diced number, and I decided that I was going to just follow my instincts, whatever my instincts told me to do I would do, so I went to Cornwall, and I bought a farmhouse and I was going to build a recording studio to do film music and I was going to do something else.
Someone gave me a pig, the pig was great, we became friends and I found another pig for it because he was very lonely. They bred, and I wanted to start a rare breed park, and this rare breed park lead me to some land which I wanted to buy to do the rare breed park. The guy who owned the land said, "You can't have that land, but I just inherited an estate next door to this land, which is completely overgrown, it's been overgrown for 70 years, would you like to see it?" And we went in the following day with machetes, 45 minutes later I'd fallen in love with this place.
I couldn't tell you the difference between a Rhododendron and a Sycamore, but I decided I was going to restore it and open it to the public, and eventually it would get opened to the public. I learned a big lesson that changed my future in the middle of that, that I was not as funny to other people's children as I was to my own, because of course the thing about your own children is they're expecting Christmas presents and birthday presents, and you feed them, but other people's children have no such duty of laughter.
And I had three loads of school children to entertain; the most stressful thing in my entire life, until I hit on the secret of communication by telling them about the poisons that would burn through your stomach lining and make you die a painful death. At which point: respect! And I could tell them anything, I understood the power of story, and I understood that by transforming this garden and telling stories, ordinary stories about the ordinary men and women who made this garden, a whole bunch of people who didn't normally go to gardens started to come.
Latin was banned. We just told anecdotes. In the middle of it I had this desire to build this fantastic place in a clay pit, because I wanted to regenerate the middle of Cornwall, with a gang of people, and I started talking about it, and people started leaving their jobs. And at a certain point I had 100 people who had given up their jobs and were helping me develop this idea, called the Eden Project.
And what happened next was very weird. I live my life by three rules: number one is the telling of future truths, which is - other people call it lying but what it means is that you create, you create, the field of change by saying something so outrageous in your ambitions amongst people that you respect so much, that not to do it would shame you.
Therefore you end up doing it. It began when I told a beautiful blonde concert pianist that I was a diving instructor when I was 19 and the most outrageous example of it was in 1997, when we had applied for a grant from the Millennium Commission for thirty-seven and a half million pounds and I bought this brand new fax machine.
The very first fax that came out of it was the decision from the Millennium Commission that was part of the lottery kind of work, which divided all the projects in Britain into Grade A, Grade B and Grade C. Grade A was you got the money. Grade B, "a bit more work and you'll get the money", and Grade C, "never darken our door again".
The Eden Project was Grade C. Well, what do you do? got a hundred people who have given up their lives to come and work with you, to build on this fantastic thing? What would you do? What would you do? Would you just say, "Oh we will explain news guys well you may think it is unethical but I called a news conference and ITV and Sky and the BBC came and all the national news papers, and I thanked the millennium commission for their bold decision, and... but you know the bizarre thing was, three months later the Millennium Commission was convinced that's what it said. But What I want to say to all of you who are considering becoming entrepreneurs, a load of people have stolen the language of entrepreneurship. But the real secret of being an entrepreneur is to realize that the amount of energy you give up in fear of the risks of being one. If you actually did it, the energy that you were wasting on the fear, and then didn't do it, when you then do it the actual risk has been minimized massively, because your body language just changes. Once you got to the top high diving board and you know there's a risk of your underpants coming off when you get in the water, well you already gone, you actually want to do a swallow dive, don't you ? So you don't actually have a belly flop, because that's even worse, because if you do a belly flop you have to make sure it was funny and actually hurts. So, entrepreneurship is actually about taking big risks at exactly the right time, because something happens to your body language, and I cannot tell you if you dont do it. I can not tell you why success happens to those who take risks but it's something about the look in your eye that you know that your burning your bridges behind you, and it some how gives you a swagger of intent that convinces people.
The second rule I have is last man standing. which holds that if you have a certain amount of charm and you don't go away, people will eventually pay you large sums of money to do so. And that that has been one of the top stands in my life the the third thing the third thing I do which is weird the try on.
Everybody talked about their comfort zones, don't they, and how interesting it would be to meet nice other people. And then what they do, they accept all the usual invitations. I have policed myself to do the most radical thing. I accept every third invitation unless it clashes with a family commitment.
How many people here have been forced to judge an orchid show with psychopathic orchid growers? I've had to open an old people's home. I've had to do the weirdest shit. But at each one I have met somebody who has transformed my life, every single weird thing I've done in that way, something's come out of it, 1997 I went to give a talk to 50 people and a dog in a shed in Taunton.
My PA threatened resignation because it was so irresponsible. I said I have to go, it's the third invitation. I came back, and there were indeed 50 people and a dog. And anyway, three months later in Plymouth, there was a European Commissioners meeting to decide how money is going to be distributed around the South West.
Cornwall isn't going to get any money. The Eden Project is going to get no money. And suddenly this old bearded guy gets up, and he says, "My name isHumphrey Temperley. I am chairman of Somerset County Council Council and to my amazement three months ago I went to a talk in a shed in Taunton and this man Smit was there and he's convinced me that he has the widest southwest as his attention span, not just the narrow confines of commerce.
So we in Somerset will drop two of our projects so the Eden Project may go ahead. That one talk was worth 12.7 million pounds. No, but it happens time after time after time. Putting yourself at risk isn't risk at all, it is opening up wonderful possibilities. I have one other rule, which I feel I can share because I'm amongst friends, but I never write about it.
It is kill negative people. You must kill. You know why? Because negative people don't have dreams, and they don't want you to have them either. That's why they must crush them underfoot like and old fag-butt, get rid of them. Because of course everybody who has a dream is insecure inside, so someone like a drip of water like a Chinese water torture, you're not going to go ahead, are you, if people are around you?
I do not let negative people get anywhere near me at work, nowhere near me. Anyway. We opened the Eden project in, well we started working in 1998, we opened fully in 2001, or St. Patrick's day. We've had 12 million visitors since we did that. And if you're to ask me why we did it, we did it because it was a political thing.
I was fed up with people in pinstripe suits, thinking that people who believed in good stuff couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery, and I thought, wouldn't it be great if people like us actually built the most high tech, brilliant, sexy, iconic looking thing the world had ever seen, so they could no longer reject us and marginalize us, that's the way you get marginalized, because they think, oh it's so sweet, so alternative those chaps with their views, and that's my hatred of this social enterprise movement, I loathe it, and you're all here because it's about social enterprise.
Pam is looking concerned, don't worry! What I loathe is that library hush you get from politicians, as if they're talking about the unfortunates and giving them nice jobs. Social enterprise is for people who couldn't get proper jobs, really, the slightly befuddled and vague. I think the big challenge is to stop politicians from getting anywhere near social enterprise.
Because in my book, we should be building huge social enterprises. I would consider "Patch the Water Industry" would be a good start. "Patch the Railways" might be another one. "Electrics" might be another one, and so on. Don't you think? Do you agree? Yeah! But what we need, if you talk about it in a library hush, a lot of people will go and join those companies like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and stuff.
And we want those smart people not to waste their lives doing that stuff, because all of those people are going to be sad gits when they're 60 and we know it. Whereas, if they did really good stuff, which actually used those talents to actually give it back to the people, they would actually feel fulfilled and contented.
And we all know that, don't we? We need to encourage all those bright, smart, young things to actually realize that social enterprize is a dynamic, new point. It's probably the most exciting form of corporate development that's happened in the last 300 years and it doesn't mean you have to do it and always remain poor as a church mouse, as far as I'm concerned, become a millionaire, being a social enterpreneur, be one!
If everybody else has done wacko good, you get your cut, it's just a question of proportion. You don't have to wear a hair shirt. It's OK to like a better quality of wine. You don't have to pretend and lie about who you are, just give back more, that's all it's about, if you can get to that point you're in a really good place.
We built Eden because we wanted to take the most derelict place on Earth and create life in it, and do as I described to you before. And we made 90 thousand tons of our own soil, it's never been done before and that technology's now used all over the world to remediate mines.
The second thing I wanted to do is to show how smart human beings are, because we forget that, we work in such silos that we don't have the chance to actually watch other people working.
It is exhilarating to see how clever people are if you relax out of yourself and say 'wow they're smart'. When you see a mile of foundations being laid on loopy clay with only 10 meters between each bit and you know it's allowed to move by 20 mm by the end of it, and it moves by 8, you think, whoa, we can do stuff on this planet; we're really smart.
The third thing is, I wanted to see whether we could do a social experiment in capitalism. We, my Chairman of Trustees said something to me. He said, we got to 480 staff, and he said, " Tim, you can no longer run this organization like a gang leader. He said, "You've got to become corporate," and I said,"How do you do that then?" And he said, because I've never worked with anybody else you see, and then he said,"Damn it man, you haven't even got any PPIs for anybody," and I said, "Well what are they ?" And he described it and I said, I really, we almost fell out because I said, "Surely if you know what you're doing when you employ people you don't have to give them childish tick boxes of what they've got to do in a year.
They know what to do." And he then looked at me and said very seriously, he said,"Tim, if you don't make this more corporate, one of us is going to have to go." And I didn't understand the hint either, so I said Ronny I'd be very sorry to see you leave. But anyway, I got two bottles of very fine wine and I went home for the weekend, and I wrote a management manual for the Eden Project.
And it comprised about one side of A4. There were rules called the monkey business. And the monkey business is actually about my philosophy of how you should be organizing stuff. So rule number one is how you've got to say hello to, you've got to say good morning to twenty people before you're allowed to start work.
It's not religious, not like some kind of weird religion, it's just to get people communing. Rule number two is you've got to read two books that everyone that knows you would say, well you're completely outside of your sphere of interest and review them for your colleagues. Rules number three, four and five you've got to go and see one movie, one theater bit, one big concert, same rule as number two.
Rule number six you've got to make a speech about why you still feel inspired to work for the Eden Project; if you can't do you have to resign. I find it concentrates the mind. Rule number seven is you've got to prepare a meal for the 40 people who make it worth coming to work. We've shrunk that a little bit on the grounds of some health and safety issues my colleagues, who were just appalling cooks.
But anybody who thinks the breaking of bread is about eating, is an idiot. Every single major decision we've taken at Eden, everything has been taken at night, working by wine light, because, no you see, an awful lot of people get it wrong. They go to work when the sun is up. So they take work person to work.
If you work when the sun has gone down, you allow yourself to bring complete person. Which means that all your life experiences now contributing to the thinking, rather than just your so called profession, yeah? Rule number eight you'll think is awful, I know you'll think this is awful, and this is when you boo me off stage, is you have to commit one act of guerilla good will a year.
You've got to do something unspeakably nice to somebody who will never know you did it, who you don't know, and actually everybody thought it was a bit too touchy-feely for the Brits, but actually we really enjoyed doing it, it's great. Imagine what a country this would be if we all did that? And the last thing is all of my team have to play samba drums.
I have spent a fortune on drums. Really. Yeah, the big Surdo but there is a reason for it. Would you agree with me if I said to you, that almost every child you've ever met was fortunately born between the age of 2 and 6 naturally like to sing and dance?
Have you ever seen the British dancing. What happens? It looks like there is a nervous disease going on. I find that really an interesting question. So I wanted everybody to learn how to do something that would make for the public limelight. So, anyway we get these ten drum captains that take 45 people a piece.
They go into the duh-duh-duh. On the second day, they all get together and as soon as you guys start, boom boom boom boom, and they're stiff. Their veins are like this. Anyway, by the time you get to the kabases, the security guys are going " oh funky". As they realize it's more difficult to go out of time than to stay in time.
By the time you get to the last rhythm, you see 470 quivering English people. They can't wait they can't wait for the last rhythm to come in, and then it comes in they go all crackers. They go like march hares they do, all of us jumping about they go in across the rhythm, you know, that's very, very groovy, and anyway we get together at the end it, and I say why do you think?
Why do you think we did that? This isn't about hippy shit at all. Most of us, most of us have a little grain of self hatred because we know that as a species that we should add up to more. We know that, and yet we are destined to always disappoint, and we hate that disappointment. And what that does we get like all these people doing something that they couldn't have done on their own and it feels huge.
The hair stands up on the back of you neck. So exciting. That's why we do the other two things. I shouldn't finish, shouldn't I? But the other two things that I just got finished with. We make all of our senior teams spend twelve days on the front line. Don't ever let a boss think they're too smart because it will destroy your organization.
Because when you realize what upsets people, mostly you discover it is not about pay. It is about how they are listened to and what is going on. And the other thing we do, which is absolutely mad. Don't listen to this because business schools won't like this. What you've got to do, if you're going to run a really successful organization.
At the moment that you are as busy as busy can be, and every sinew of your organisation is flexed, so the senior people can't do any more, do a fucking huge project. Do you know why? You know why? Because locked in any organisation are a bunch of geniuses who never got letters after their names, and by doing a big project, you yourself cannot do it, like we did Live8 at Eden, right?
In 17 days we did Africa Calling. We raised a million pounds. We had to organize 120 musicians who could come from Africa at a time of high terrorism alert. We had to deal with over 200 film companies. And none of it was done by a single senior person in my organisation, it was all done by juniors who just rose to the top like cream.
Time, she says. Thank you.
And I arrived late, because they along with the conference center had built one of the most complicated one-way road systems you've ever seen so I arrived late and I knocked on the door, the stage door. And they opened the stage door and there's this guy in a silver lame jacket and he said "Mate, am I pleased to see you." I wished the feeling had been mutual.
Anyway, I waited for a while, and this guy scuttled up these wooden stairs, a bit like that, and said wait a minute. He opens these velvet curtains and the next thing I hear is "I want to hear a big hand for Mr. Tim Schmidt", and on the T in Schmidt the loudest disco music you've ever heard. And the whole bloody place was just rumbling like that.
And he scuttled down again, and he said, "You're on, mate". And I don't know whether you're whether this has ever happened to you. I walked up the stairs, I parted the curtains and I went blank I mean, utterly blank. I mean, so blank, there was not a single word I could think of. So I thought, "Hold the stage, Tim, look as if you know what you're doing." So I strolled slowly to the middle of the stage and then walked towards the front of the stage, still nothing, absolutely nothing.
I got up to the point where my toes were on the edge of the orchestra pit, I had no where left to go to buy myself the extra few seconds, I leaned forward until it was about to be the point of no return. And I looked at the audience in terror. And I screamed at the top of my voice. you all are going to die.
Well, anyway, there was four thousand people there, right? And they all put their hands on the back of their chairs and started to sit down. I thought, God, what do I say next? I then For those of you who do some public speaking, great tip coming up, alright. I then realized how to buy time, I said "If you, or you." So I kept pointing, right?
I then said, "If you truly feared me, if you really believed you were going to die on April 23, 2023, how many of you would still want to work for this damn company tomorrow? Absolute silence. Anyway, the speech got a bit better after that. But I was actually trying to. I am very frightened of death, and why it was actually quite helpful - and I wove it into the speech - was that we all seem to think that death is optional, so we piss around, wasting our lives away, dreaming of adventures, being in bars talking about what we are going to do the next week or the week after, but we never do it.
Right, we never do it? So you need to actually have the fire of imagine how many birthdays between now and your death and suddenly you say "Christ, when I'm going to go to the Antarctic. When am I going to do that? And suddenly you're fired up. That was the first, no, that's the second really crap speech I made.
I ought to tell you the epilogue to this speech. The next day, I get back to Eden, and the scale of the disaster became apparent, because at four o'clock in the morning there is this email from the Chief Executive of the company I'd addressed and he says, "I've just been speaking to my wife, and I've decided to leave the Company." No, but the truth is, so many people piss their lives up against the world because they're too scared to take risks .
The sort of people they are, that piss their lives up against the wall, use words like this: "Centre of excellence." "Out of the box." "Joined up thinking." "Leading Edge, Bleeding edge." "Cutting edge", which is when I suppose you get too close to that bleeding edge, and then there is "thinking the unthinkable", how cool is that?
Have you ever realised in life that the people who use that language are in inverse relation to the time they use it? and we mostly realize that every parts of the world is unique. Isn't that amazing? Language is everything. The first crap speech I made i'd restored a garden called the lost gardens of Helligan.
And it had been on the telly and everything else, and it was very successful. It had become the most visited garden in Britain. Actually by accident because the television documentary had forgotten to mention that we weren't open to the public. So these people kept turning up, so eventually we ripped the toilet out of the pota-loo and start to charge people to come in and we were still working, so they say what's happening here? And we say no idea, here's a machete, why don't you get it? Budding social entrepreneurs, a great social model they get people to pay come in, and then do the work for you which is a ready one.
Anyway I was invited to historic houses association don't to know. You know the sort of corduroy trousers, the tweed jackets the leather patches and all them who stay at your homes. Most people called Nigel, that's the thing. And I went up and I managed to alienate, the gist of the speech how to open your stately homes and gardens to the general public, and they were hoping for some insight.
And I alienated the entire audience in the first sentence. Because I got up and I said look, if you don't feel like getting drunk in it, you don't feel inspired to dream in it, and you don't desire to make love in it, for fuck's sake, tarmac it. And it went down really... But the point I was actually trying to make is a serious one, OK?
In Britain, if a 1920s car were to go through that wall right now, other than the regrettable loss of life over here, everybody else would say, "Beautiful old car!" The old stuff in Britain is always held up as if the world smelt of baking bread all the time. But, in fact, most of the people in this room would have been put on a stake.
You know that. The future is a beautiful and exciting place and I want to just discuss it in the little bit of time I've got. I run my life in a very odd way. I had a traumatic experience in 1981. I was being driven along the Champs-Elysees in a chauffeur-driven limousine. I was staying in the Plaza Athenee Hotel and I was going to the [xx] to get a gold and a platinum record.
The record at number one was the biggest selling record in French history. The record at number two that was going to knock it off the number one spot, shame, I'd written it too, OK? We're driving and I suddenly burst into tears, uncontrollable tears. I never got to the awards ceremony, I went back to the hotel and I decided to give up the music industry.
There's something really weird has happened. You know when you imagine what you want, it's a bit like Arena's film, when you imagine what you want, material things, the adulation of others, it is extraordinary how much it feels like sand going through your fingers. Because when you get there suddenly your imagining of it is that you are surrounded by the people you love.
But when you see that you are nothing more than a product, and you're a cog in a machine, it tastes very dry indeed. Dorothy Parker, the American writer, once famously described it. She said, "The problem with getting there, is that when you get there, there's no there there", and I think most of us understand what that means, that hollow inside us, and I decided to change my life, and I decided to do something very radical.
Have any of you read Luke Rhinehart's "The Dice Man"? If you haven't you should, it's about a guy who wants to make decisions based on decisions against the diced number, and I decided that I was going to just follow my instincts, whatever my instincts told me to do I would do, so I went to Cornwall, and I bought a farmhouse and I was going to build a recording studio to do film music and I was going to do something else.
Someone gave me a pig, the pig was great, we became friends and I found another pig for it because he was very lonely. They bred, and I wanted to start a rare breed park, and this rare breed park lead me to some land which I wanted to buy to do the rare breed park. The guy who owned the land said, "You can't have that land, but I just inherited an estate next door to this land, which is completely overgrown, it's been overgrown for 70 years, would you like to see it?" And we went in the following day with machetes, 45 minutes later I'd fallen in love with this place.
I couldn't tell you the difference between a Rhododendron and a Sycamore, but I decided I was going to restore it and open it to the public, and eventually it would get opened to the public. I learned a big lesson that changed my future in the middle of that, that I was not as funny to other people's children as I was to my own, because of course the thing about your own children is they're expecting Christmas presents and birthday presents, and you feed them, but other people's children have no such duty of laughter.
And I had three loads of school children to entertain; the most stressful thing in my entire life, until I hit on the secret of communication by telling them about the poisons that would burn through your stomach lining and make you die a painful death. At which point: respect! And I could tell them anything, I understood the power of story, and I understood that by transforming this garden and telling stories, ordinary stories about the ordinary men and women who made this garden, a whole bunch of people who didn't normally go to gardens started to come.
Latin was banned. We just told anecdotes. In the middle of it I had this desire to build this fantastic place in a clay pit, because I wanted to regenerate the middle of Cornwall, with a gang of people, and I started talking about it, and people started leaving their jobs. And at a certain point I had 100 people who had given up their jobs and were helping me develop this idea, called the Eden Project.
And what happened next was very weird. I live my life by three rules: number one is the telling of future truths, which is - other people call it lying but what it means is that you create, you create, the field of change by saying something so outrageous in your ambitions amongst people that you respect so much, that not to do it would shame you.
Therefore you end up doing it. It began when I told a beautiful blonde concert pianist that I was a diving instructor when I was 19 and the most outrageous example of it was in 1997, when we had applied for a grant from the Millennium Commission for thirty-seven and a half million pounds and I bought this brand new fax machine.
The very first fax that came out of it was the decision from the Millennium Commission that was part of the lottery kind of work, which divided all the projects in Britain into Grade A, Grade B and Grade C. Grade A was you got the money. Grade B, "a bit more work and you'll get the money", and Grade C, "never darken our door again".
The Eden Project was Grade C. Well, what do you do? got a hundred people who have given up their lives to come and work with you, to build on this fantastic thing? What would you do? What would you do? Would you just say, "Oh we will explain news guys well you may think it is unethical but I called a news conference and ITV and Sky and the BBC came and all the national news papers, and I thanked the millennium commission for their bold decision, and... but you know the bizarre thing was, three months later the Millennium Commission was convinced that's what it said. But What I want to say to all of you who are considering becoming entrepreneurs, a load of people have stolen the language of entrepreneurship. But the real secret of being an entrepreneur is to realize that the amount of energy you give up in fear of the risks of being one. If you actually did it, the energy that you were wasting on the fear, and then didn't do it, when you then do it the actual risk has been minimized massively, because your body language just changes. Once you got to the top high diving board and you know there's a risk of your underpants coming off when you get in the water, well you already gone, you actually want to do a swallow dive, don't you ? So you don't actually have a belly flop, because that's even worse, because if you do a belly flop you have to make sure it was funny and actually hurts. So, entrepreneurship is actually about taking big risks at exactly the right time, because something happens to your body language, and I cannot tell you if you dont do it. I can not tell you why success happens to those who take risks but it's something about the look in your eye that you know that your burning your bridges behind you, and it some how gives you a swagger of intent that convinces people.
The second rule I have is last man standing. which holds that if you have a certain amount of charm and you don't go away, people will eventually pay you large sums of money to do so. And that that has been one of the top stands in my life the the third thing the third thing I do which is weird the try on.
Everybody talked about their comfort zones, don't they, and how interesting it would be to meet nice other people. And then what they do, they accept all the usual invitations. I have policed myself to do the most radical thing. I accept every third invitation unless it clashes with a family commitment.
How many people here have been forced to judge an orchid show with psychopathic orchid growers? I've had to open an old people's home. I've had to do the weirdest shit. But at each one I have met somebody who has transformed my life, every single weird thing I've done in that way, something's come out of it, 1997 I went to give a talk to 50 people and a dog in a shed in Taunton.
My PA threatened resignation because it was so irresponsible. I said I have to go, it's the third invitation. I came back, and there were indeed 50 people and a dog. And anyway, three months later in Plymouth, there was a European Commissioners meeting to decide how money is going to be distributed around the South West.
Cornwall isn't going to get any money. The Eden Project is going to get no money. And suddenly this old bearded guy gets up, and he says, "My name isHumphrey Temperley. I am chairman of Somerset County Council Council and to my amazement three months ago I went to a talk in a shed in Taunton and this man Smit was there and he's convinced me that he has the widest southwest as his attention span, not just the narrow confines of commerce.
So we in Somerset will drop two of our projects so the Eden Project may go ahead. That one talk was worth 12.7 million pounds. No, but it happens time after time after time. Putting yourself at risk isn't risk at all, it is opening up wonderful possibilities. I have one other rule, which I feel I can share because I'm amongst friends, but I never write about it.
It is kill negative people. You must kill. You know why? Because negative people don't have dreams, and they don't want you to have them either. That's why they must crush them underfoot like and old fag-butt, get rid of them. Because of course everybody who has a dream is insecure inside, so someone like a drip of water like a Chinese water torture, you're not going to go ahead, are you, if people are around you?
I do not let negative people get anywhere near me at work, nowhere near me. Anyway. We opened the Eden project in, well we started working in 1998, we opened fully in 2001, or St. Patrick's day. We've had 12 million visitors since we did that. And if you're to ask me why we did it, we did it because it was a political thing.
I was fed up with people in pinstripe suits, thinking that people who believed in good stuff couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery, and I thought, wouldn't it be great if people like us actually built the most high tech, brilliant, sexy, iconic looking thing the world had ever seen, so they could no longer reject us and marginalize us, that's the way you get marginalized, because they think, oh it's so sweet, so alternative those chaps with their views, and that's my hatred of this social enterprise movement, I loathe it, and you're all here because it's about social enterprise.
Pam is looking concerned, don't worry! What I loathe is that library hush you get from politicians, as if they're talking about the unfortunates and giving them nice jobs. Social enterprise is for people who couldn't get proper jobs, really, the slightly befuddled and vague. I think the big challenge is to stop politicians from getting anywhere near social enterprise.
Because in my book, we should be building huge social enterprises. I would consider "Patch the Water Industry" would be a good start. "Patch the Railways" might be another one. "Electrics" might be another one, and so on. Don't you think? Do you agree? Yeah! But what we need, if you talk about it in a library hush, a lot of people will go and join those companies like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and stuff.
And we want those smart people not to waste their lives doing that stuff, because all of those people are going to be sad gits when they're 60 and we know it. Whereas, if they did really good stuff, which actually used those talents to actually give it back to the people, they would actually feel fulfilled and contented.
And we all know that, don't we? We need to encourage all those bright, smart, young things to actually realize that social enterprize is a dynamic, new point. It's probably the most exciting form of corporate development that's happened in the last 300 years and it doesn't mean you have to do it and always remain poor as a church mouse, as far as I'm concerned, become a millionaire, being a social enterpreneur, be one!
If everybody else has done wacko good, you get your cut, it's just a question of proportion. You don't have to wear a hair shirt. It's OK to like a better quality of wine. You don't have to pretend and lie about who you are, just give back more, that's all it's about, if you can get to that point you're in a really good place.
We built Eden because we wanted to take the most derelict place on Earth and create life in it, and do as I described to you before. And we made 90 thousand tons of our own soil, it's never been done before and that technology's now used all over the world to remediate mines.
The second thing I wanted to do is to show how smart human beings are, because we forget that, we work in such silos that we don't have the chance to actually watch other people working.
It is exhilarating to see how clever people are if you relax out of yourself and say 'wow they're smart'. When you see a mile of foundations being laid on loopy clay with only 10 meters between each bit and you know it's allowed to move by 20 mm by the end of it, and it moves by 8, you think, whoa, we can do stuff on this planet; we're really smart.
The third thing is, I wanted to see whether we could do a social experiment in capitalism. We, my Chairman of Trustees said something to me. He said, we got to 480 staff, and he said, " Tim, you can no longer run this organization like a gang leader. He said, "You've got to become corporate," and I said,"How do you do that then?" And he said, because I've never worked with anybody else you see, and then he said,"Damn it man, you haven't even got any PPIs for anybody," and I said, "Well what are they ?" And he described it and I said, I really, we almost fell out because I said, "Surely if you know what you're doing when you employ people you don't have to give them childish tick boxes of what they've got to do in a year.
They know what to do." And he then looked at me and said very seriously, he said,"Tim, if you don't make this more corporate, one of us is going to have to go." And I didn't understand the hint either, so I said Ronny I'd be very sorry to see you leave. But anyway, I got two bottles of very fine wine and I went home for the weekend, and I wrote a management manual for the Eden Project.
And it comprised about one side of A4. There were rules called the monkey business. And the monkey business is actually about my philosophy of how you should be organizing stuff. So rule number one is how you've got to say hello to, you've got to say good morning to twenty people before you're allowed to start work.
It's not religious, not like some kind of weird religion, it's just to get people communing. Rule number two is you've got to read two books that everyone that knows you would say, well you're completely outside of your sphere of interest and review them for your colleagues. Rules number three, four and five you've got to go and see one movie, one theater bit, one big concert, same rule as number two.
Rule number six you've got to make a speech about why you still feel inspired to work for the Eden Project; if you can't do you have to resign. I find it concentrates the mind. Rule number seven is you've got to prepare a meal for the 40 people who make it worth coming to work. We've shrunk that a little bit on the grounds of some health and safety issues my colleagues, who were just appalling cooks.
But anybody who thinks the breaking of bread is about eating, is an idiot. Every single major decision we've taken at Eden, everything has been taken at night, working by wine light, because, no you see, an awful lot of people get it wrong. They go to work when the sun is up. So they take work person to work.
If you work when the sun has gone down, you allow yourself to bring complete person. Which means that all your life experiences now contributing to the thinking, rather than just your so called profession, yeah? Rule number eight you'll think is awful, I know you'll think this is awful, and this is when you boo me off stage, is you have to commit one act of guerilla good will a year.
You've got to do something unspeakably nice to somebody who will never know you did it, who you don't know, and actually everybody thought it was a bit too touchy-feely for the Brits, but actually we really enjoyed doing it, it's great. Imagine what a country this would be if we all did that? And the last thing is all of my team have to play samba drums.
I have spent a fortune on drums. Really. Yeah, the big Surdo but there is a reason for it. Would you agree with me if I said to you, that almost every child you've ever met was fortunately born between the age of 2 and 6 naturally like to sing and dance?
Have you ever seen the British dancing. What happens? It looks like there is a nervous disease going on. I find that really an interesting question. So I wanted everybody to learn how to do something that would make for the public limelight. So, anyway we get these ten drum captains that take 45 people a piece.
They go into the duh-duh-duh. On the second day, they all get together and as soon as you guys start, boom boom boom boom, and they're stiff. Their veins are like this. Anyway, by the time you get to the kabases, the security guys are going " oh funky". As they realize it's more difficult to go out of time than to stay in time.
By the time you get to the last rhythm, you see 470 quivering English people. They can't wait they can't wait for the last rhythm to come in, and then it comes in they go all crackers. They go like march hares they do, all of us jumping about they go in across the rhythm, you know, that's very, very groovy, and anyway we get together at the end it, and I say why do you think?
Why do you think we did that? This isn't about hippy shit at all. Most of us, most of us have a little grain of self hatred because we know that as a species that we should add up to more. We know that, and yet we are destined to always disappoint, and we hate that disappointment. And what that does we get like all these people doing something that they couldn't have done on their own and it feels huge.
The hair stands up on the back of you neck. So exciting. That's why we do the other two things. I shouldn't finish, shouldn't I? But the other two things that I just got finished with. We make all of our senior teams spend twelve days on the front line. Don't ever let a boss think they're too smart because it will destroy your organization.
Because when you realize what upsets people, mostly you discover it is not about pay. It is about how they are listened to and what is going on. And the other thing we do, which is absolutely mad. Don't listen to this because business schools won't like this. What you've got to do, if you're going to run a really successful organization.
At the moment that you are as busy as busy can be, and every sinew of your organisation is flexed, so the senior people can't do any more, do a fucking huge project. Do you know why? You know why? Because locked in any organisation are a bunch of geniuses who never got letters after their names, and by doing a big project, you yourself cannot do it, like we did Live8 at Eden, right?
In 17 days we did Africa Calling. We raised a million pounds. We had to organize 120 musicians who could come from Africa at a time of high terrorism alert. We had to deal with over 200 film companies. And none of it was done by a single senior person in my organisation, it was all done by juniors who just rose to the top like cream.
Time, she says. Thank you.
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