Article written by Marie-Clare Byard, Now Media who reviews Pendulum Summit. She teaches business owners and photography lovers how to unlock their creative side, capture and edit standout content on their smartphone using core photography principles, less gear, more creativity! https://www.linkedin.com/in/

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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:

1. A tolerance for risk

2. 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 Morins

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 b...