The Longest Run

In the spirit of saying hi from remote locations.....hi from Stockholm!

At dinner last night we had a short performance by a winner of Sweden's Pop Idol. Marie Picasso did three songs, including a cover of the Jackson 5's I'll Be There. Enjoy.

I've had a great day in Stockholm; very busy and very thought-provoking.  The theme of our conference is growth through innovation. We started the morning with a presentation by Bertelsmann's CEO, Hartmut Ostrowski, who talked about why innovation and growth are important for Bertelsmann. Following Hartmut, there were presentations on managing innovation (by a professor from HBS) and on the evoluton of the web from Web 2.0 to Web 'New Generation' (by a board member from Nokia). Following lunch and some breakout sessions, we had two more terrific presentations, both of which addressed how technology is totally disrupting media businesses and forcing the development of new business models. Though I didn't hear anything fundamentally new, the presentations were interesting as they confirmed a lot of the ideas and issues we've been discussing in our day to day work. As I've written about before, we're in the middle of a transformation of how media busi...

I'm in Stockholm for a conference on innovation hosted by Bertelsmann. The meeting officially starts tonight; in the meantime we've had the chance to take a short bus tour to get an overview of the city. I'm traveling with a number of Random House colleagues; pictured above are Matt, Chris, and Nihar.