Pendulum Summit event highlights
Brené Brown
Brené Brown stole the hearts of the Irish on Friday as the keynote speaker at Pendulum Summit. My LinkedIn feed has been flooded with photos from those who attended the meet-and-greet, alongside powerful stories of how she inspired them to lean into their vulnerability.
Brené’s ability to deliver years of research through storytelling makes her work deeply relatable and memorable, especially when paired with her brilliant Texan sense of humour.
One of the questions she says she is most frequently asked by CEOs is:
What skills should we be looking for in future employees, beyond the CV, to future-proof our businesses in an AI-driven world?
According to Brené, the skills now required at C-suite level are:
- Anticipatory awareness
- Situational awareness
- Temporal awareness
- Systems thinking
To explain why these matter, Brené, the passionate sports fan that she is, likened many C-suite boardrooms to a five-year-old’s football match: balls flying in from all directions, leaders scrambling to react, desperately searching for an AI strategy to deal with constant disruption.
(Side note: according to the latest MIT Sloan study, 90% of AI investments made in Q4 2023 and Q1 2024 failed.)
Brené challenged CEOs and leaders to honestly assess which of these awareness skills they already possess — and which they still need to develop. Using a football metaphor, she explained:?“You can settle yourself, settle the ball, read the pitch, move decisively and thoughtfully at the same time and win.”
This, she stressed, requires deep discipline and self-awareness.
In sport, teams that play not to lose experience 60% more injuries than teams that play to win. The same applies in business. Senior leaders need learning agility. We need learners, not knowers, people who remain curious rather than defensive.
Brené also highlighted the urgent need to improve how we work with AI, particularly in prompt writing and prompt engineering, reminding us that attention is now the most valuable commodity.
Her closing call was clear:?We need to go deep: Deep thinking, deep time, and deep collaboration.
Marc Randolph, Co-Founder of Netflix
Marc shared how he used to carpool to work with his friend Reed Hastings. During these drives, Marc, very much the ideas man, would continuously pitch concepts, while Reed offered feedback.
One of those ideas became a DVD-by-mail business, which eventually evolved into what we now know as Netflix, a true market disruptor at the time.
Like many founders, Marc was repeatedly told, “That will never work.” He later turned that phrase into a book title and has been running a podcast of the same name since January 2011!
Marc highlighted two essential traits for business success:
- A tolerance for risk
- Confidence
He joked that when you share a new idea with friends and family, they will often say, “That will never work.”?And most of the time, they’ll be right, but NOT ALWAYS!
Amy shared her deeply personal story of resilience. After launching her career as a therapist at just 22, her mother died suddenly when Amy was 23. Three years later, her 26-year-old husband died of a heart attack.
To cope with her grief, Amy began writing a blog, a list titled “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” The post went viral, leading to a bestselling book and an international platform.
Amy later found love again and now lives on a sailboat in the Florida Keys.
She shared five actionable lessons from her list:
- Challenge your unhealthy beliefs
- Identify one small thing you can give up, start with your worst habit
- Don’t ruminate; change the channel in your brain
- Ask yourself daily: What did I do today to grow mentally stronger?
- Aim to be just a little stronger than yesterday
Norah Patten
Motto: “Dream Your Own Dream & Shoot for the stars!”
Ireland’s first citizen astronaut and a global ambassador for aerospace innovation.
Norah is living proof of what happens when curiosity meets determination. Inspired by a family trip to the US at age 11, where she visited NASA, her future career path was set.
She went on to study Aeronautical Engineering and, in 2010, completed a nine-week Space Studies Programme at NASA. During her talk, she shared fascinating insights into testing microgravity on both humans and objects, including cracking an egg in space to observe how it behaved.
Norah spoke warmly about the fan mail she receives from children and shared that later this year, she may take her first space flight!?
Rhys McClenaghan
Rhys was born to be a gymnast. From receiving his first trampoline to training 30-hours a week by the age of 10, his dedication has been unwavering.
He demonstrated his mastery on the pommel horse, recreating how that misplaced hand, less than a centimetre off, cost him a place at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. He shared how he rebuilt his stamina, resilience, and mindset to return stronger, and then show us his level of perfection on the pommel horse.
Rhys is now the only gymnast in history to win Olympic, World, European, and Commonwealth titles on a single apparatus, a remarkable achievement.
The new one-day event format was a huge success.
See more breaking stories here.
