I and NO FEAR were honored to join, for the past 24 hours, to the  YIEF 2011. This event is organized annually prior to the World Economic Forum here in St. Petersburg. The concept of the event is to invite 100 young future leaders to debate and work around future oriented topics.  This years participants came from 30 countries and  were supported by  20 experts/facilitators from different fields of business and education. The list of both the participants and facilitators can be described with only  a one word – amazing.

The topics of NO FEAR were heavily on the agenda, even though participants just got their books to read while flying back home. Because of this fact, it was really good to hear that the voice of this generation (decribed in NO FEAR) is getting even more clear and loud. For me it was also very re-freshing (after being 7 months as non-operative, retired person) to see true diversity in action. First people where shy, but when things got heated, these guys and girls were bold enough to even change the rules of the game and vote some facilitators out from the working room. All this happened based on dialogue, knowledge sharing and a world without any titles. If at the beginning somebody came to the room relying on some fancy titles or millions in his account to back up his/her views, it soon became clear to them that only value creation and domain knowledge mattered in these debates.

This morning teams were also oiled, with two excellent key-notes from Google’s Eric Schmidt and Skolkovo Chairman Viktor Vekselberg. After combining these two messages with a intense debate yesterday, I am even more proud of the digital cowboys of the playstation generation.

The room was loaded with young leaders, who want to make business and money-quite a healthly attitude for a young entrepeneur. Having said that, I was positively surprised about their willingness to talk about values, ethics and also needed changes in leadership styles, companies and even nations. Some of the issues were Russia (emerging market in general) related, but MOST of findings could easily be seen belonging to the whole generation.

VALUES 2.0 is a condenced presentation of the values discussed.  I want to share this with you, because for these young leaders it really matters!  And to be quite frank, it seems to be avfar more important issue than it was for an old fox like me born in the early 70’s. The question is- how do we as older leaders make these values real in our organization and in our own BEHAVIOR and CHOICES? You can get their slides from here.

And lastly, I want to make a clear statement: I and NO FEAR strongly support values 2.0.
Regards, Pekka, St. Petersburg, Russia