Torres has spent years analyzing what makes a great leader. What she’s found is that companies are investing more resources than ever in leadership training, but are failing to produce effective leaders.

That’s possibly because they’re ignoring three fundamental questions, which she summarizes in her talk:

1) Are you anticipating new trends that will affect you and your team?

2) Is your network diverse, made up of people who are very different from you?

3) Are you brave enough to change your strategy, even though it’s made you successful in the past?

The idea, she says, is to prepare yourself “not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow.”

In his talk, Sinek, a leadership expert, asks why the modern workplace doesn’t look more like the military. The answer, he says, boils down to a difference in management strategy — in the military, leaders put their subordinates first.

“When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first,” he says, “to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen.”

Sinek argues that the key elements of any successful organization are trust and cooperation. That way, employees spend less time competing with each other and more time collaborating to protect themselves from the potential danger outside. It’s the leader’s responsibility to create a culture like this, starting by putting the organization’s interests above their own.

Pink is a motivation expert whose talk focuses on the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Basically, it’s the difference between doing something because it matters to you and doing something because you’re getting rewarded for it.

According to Pink, there’s a ton of scientific evidence suggesting that intrinsic motivators — not rewards and punishments — are the “secret” to stellar performance. But you wouldn’t know it from spending time in a typical organization.

“If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does,” he says. “What’s alarming here is that our business operating system — think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources — it’s built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks.”

Pink suggests that organizations give workers significantly more autonomy. He cites Wikipedia, where people contribute information without compensation, as an extreme example of the kind of environment organizations should create. No economist could have predicted Wikipedia’s success, Pink says, but it shows the power of that inner drive to create and succeed.

If you’ve ever left the office after a full day at work and realized you got precisely nothing done, you can probably identify with Fried’s argument.

According to Fried, the author of “Rework,” modern offices just aren’t conducive to optimal performance. That’s because we’re constantly getting distracted — by our boss checking in on us, by pointless meetings, by coworkers with urgent requests, etc.

“You don’t have a work day anymore,” Fried says in his talk. “You have work moments. It’s like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits, because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there.”

To remedy this problem, Fried advises organizations to implement half-days (or more) of complete silence, during which employees can work uninterrupted. Moreover, he recommends doing away with most meetings entirely so that people have time to actually think.

Hill is a management professor who studies the factors that lead to innovation. In her talk, she says that the key is being able to celebrate differences and generate what she calls a “marketplace of ideas.” It’s not about brainstorming and suspending judgment — instead, it’s about having constructive debates.

Hill highlights Pixar as an example of a company that has refined its creative process. At Pixar, “they have developed a rather patient and more inclusive decision-making process that allows for both/and solutions to arise and not simply either/or solutions.”

The leader of an innovative organization must create a space where even the lowest-ranking employees feel compelled to share their ideas. That way, everyone’s strengths combine to create works of collective genius.

This unconventional talk is given by an Israeli symphony orchestra conductor turned business consultant. Talgam outlines what organizational leaders can learn from conductors, namely that you don’t tell your team members what to do so much as create the conditions that allow the team to lead itself.

In other words, your role as a leader is to enable your employees (or musicians) to shine.

“You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body. You have the story of the audience as a community. … You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience. … And all those stories are being heard at the same time. This is the true experience of a live concert.”

By treating your employees as partners rather than true subordinates, you create harmony among your team and give it a better chance of success.”

Gross, a serial entrepreneur, says there’s a reason most startups fail: It’s not the right time for them to exist.

Gross analyzed 200 companies (he helped start 100 of them through his company Idealab) and found that the most successful were all started at a point when there was a genuine need for their product or services. In fact, he says in his talk, timing accounted for 42% of the difference between success and failure.

Other factors — like your team and your business model — matter a lot. But Gross advises entrepreneurs to think hard about whether it’s exactly the right moment to launch their business.

“The best way to really assess timing is to really look at whether consumers are really ready for what you have to offer them,” he says. “And to be really, really honest about it, not be in denial about any results that you see.”

Anderson’s talk is an ode to the power of extreme networking. According to Anderson, a Forbes columnist, great things don’t happen through individual effort. Instead, she says in her talk, it’s about connecting with people whose strengths complement yours, so that together, you create something big.

She calls it becoming an “opportunity-maker.”

Opportunity-makers, she says, are “not affronted by differences, they’re fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset.”

That’s how we end up creating things like drones and curative drugs, she says. “They can be devised by more people and cheaper ways. … It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling.”

At this point in his career, Manwani understands that profit isn’t enough to sustain a business. Every organization, he says in his talk, needs to make a difference in the world. It’s up to organizational leadership to ensure that this happens.

Manwani is the COO of Unilever, and when he started there as a management trainee in the 1970s, he didn’t quite get this notion of changing people’s lives while making money. Today, he helps lead Unilever’s program on hygiene and health that reaches half a billion people across the globe.

“You need businesses that can actually define their role in society in terms of a much larger purpose than the products and brands that they sell,” he says. “Values and purpose are going to be the two drivers of software that are going to create the companies of tomorrow.”