I ' m going to talk about some of my discoveries around the world through my work . These are not discoveries of planets or new technologies or science . They ' re discoveries of people and the way people are and new leadership . This is Benki . Benki is a leader of the Ashaninka Nation . His people live in Brazil and in Peru . Benki comes from a village so remote up in the Amazon that to get there , either you have to fly and land on water , or go by canoe for several days . I met Benki three years ago in Sao Paulo when I ' d brought him and other leaders from indigenous peoples to meet with me and leaders from around the world , because we wanted to learn from each other . We wanted to share our stories with each other . The Ashaninka people are known throughout South America for their dignity , their spirit and their resistance , starting with the Incas and continuing through the 19 th century with the rubber tappers . Today ' s biggest threat to the Ashaninka people and to Benki comes from illegal logging -- the people who come into the beautiful forest and cut down ancient mahogany trees , float them down the river to world markets . Benki knew this . He could see what was happening to his forest , to his environment , because he was taken under his grandfather ' s wing when he was only two years old to begin to learn about the forest and the way of life of his people . His grandfather died when he was only 10 . And at that young age , 10 years old , Benki became the paje of his community . Now in the Ashaninka tradition and culture , the paje is the most important person in the community . This is the person who contains within him all the knowledge , all the wisdom , of centuries and centuries of life , and not just about his people , but about everything his people ' s survival depended on : the trees , the birds , the water , the soil , the forest . So when he was only 10 and he became the paje , he began to lead his people . He began to talk to them about the forest that they needed to protect , the way of life they needed to nurture . He explained to them that it was not a question of survival of the fittest ; it was a question of understanding what they needed to survive and to protect that . Eight years later , when he was a young man of 18 , Benki left the forest for the first time . He went 3 , 000 miles on an odyssey to Rio to the Earth Summit to tell the world what was happening in his tiny , little corner . And he went because he hoped the world would listen . Some did , not everybody . But if you can imagine this young man with his headdress and his flowing robe , learning a new language , Portuguese , not to mention English , going to Rio , building a bridge to reach out to people he ' d never met before -- a pretty hostile world . But he wasn ' t dismayed . Benki came back to his village full of ideas -- new technologies , new research , new ways of understanding what was going on . Since that time , he ' s continued to work with his people , and not only the Ashaninka Nation , but all the peoples of the Amazon and beyond . He ' s built schools to teach children to care for the forest . Together , he ' s led the reforestation of over 25 percent of the land that had been destroyed by the loggers . He ' s created a cooperative to help people diversify their livelihoods . And he ' s brought the internet and satellite technology to the forest -- both so that people themselves could monitor the deforestation , but also that he could speak from the forest to the rest of the world . If you were to meet Benki and ask him , " Why are you doing this ? Why are you putting yourself at risk ? Why are you making yourself vulnerable to what is often a hostile world ? " he would tell you , as he told me , " I asked myself , " he said , " What did my grandparents and my great - grandparents do to protect the forest for me ? And what am I doing ? " So when I think of that , I wonder what our grandchildren and our great - grandchildren , when they ask themselves that question , I wonder how they will answer . For me , the world is veering towards a future we don ' t much want when we really thing about it deep inside . It ' s a future we don ' t know the details of , but it ' s a future that has signs , just like Benki saw the signs around him . We know we are running out of what we need . We ' re running out of fresh water . We ' re running out of fossil fuels . We ' re running out of land . We know climate change is going to affect all of us . We don ' t know how , but we know it will . And we know that there will be more of us than ever before -- five times as many people in 40 years than 60 years ago . We are running out of what we need . And we also know that the world has changed in other ways , that , since 1960 , there are one - third as many new countries that exist as independent entities on the planet . Egos , systems of government -- figuring it out -- massive change . And in addition to that we know that five other really big countries are going to have a say in the future , a say we haven ' t even really started to hear yet -- China , India , Russia , South Africa and Benki ' s own Brazil , where Benki got his civil rights only in the 1988 constitution . But you know all that . You know more than Benki knew when he left his forest and went 3 , 000 miles . You also know that we can ' t just keep doing what we ' ve always done because we ' ll get the results we ' ve always gotten . And this reminds me of something I understand Lord Salisbury said to Queen Victoria over a hundred years ago , when she was pressing him , " Please change . " He said , " Change ? Why change ? Things are bad enough as they are . " We have to change . It ' s imperative to me when I look around the world , that we need to change ourselves . We need new models of what it means to be a leader . We need new models of being a leader and a human in the world . I started life as a banker . Now I don ' t admit to that to anybody but my very close friends . But for the past eight years , I ' ve done something completely different . My work has taken me around the world , where I ' ve had the real privilege of meeting people like Benki and many others who are making change happen in their communities -- people who see the world differently , who are asking different questions , who have different answers , who understand the filters that they wear when they go out into the world . This is Sanghamitra . Sanghamitra comes from Bangalore . I met Sanghamitra eight years ago when I was in Bangalore organizing a workshop with leaders of different NGO ' s working in some of the hardest aspects of society . Sanghamitra didn ' t start life as a leader of an NGO , she started her career as university professor , teaching English literature . But she realized that she was much too detached from the world doing that . She loved it , but she was too detached . And so in 1993 , a long time ago , she decided to start a new organization called Samraksha focused on one of the hardest areas , one of the hardest issues in India -- anywhere in the world at the time -- HIV / AIDS . Since that time , Samraksha has grown from strength to strength and is now one of the leading health NGO ' s in India . But if you just think about the state of the world and knowledge of HIV / AIDS in 1993 -- in India at that time it was skyrocketing and nobody understood why , and everyone was actually very , very afraid . Today there are still three million HIV - positive people in India . That ' s the second largest population in the world . When I asked Sanghamitra , " How did you get from English literature to HIV / AIDS ? " not an obvious path , she said to me , " It ' s all connected . Literature makes one sensitive , sensitive to people , to their dreams and to their ideas . " Since that time , under her leadership , Samraksha has been a pioneer in all fields related to HIV / AIDS . They have respite homes , the first , the first care centers , the first counseling services -- and not just in urban 7 million population Bangalore , but in the hardest to reach villages in the state of Karnataka . Even that wasn ' t enough . She wanted to change policy at the government level . 10 of their programs that she pioneered are now government policy and funded by the government . They take care of 20 , 000 - odd people today in over 1 , 000 villages around Karnataka . She works with people like Murali Krishna . Murali Krishna comes from one of those villages . He lost his wife to AIDS a couple of years ago , and he ' s HIV - positive . But he saw the work , the care , the compassion that Sanghramitra and her team brought to the village , and he wanted to be part of it . He ' s a Leaders ' Quest fellow , and that helps him with his work . They ' ve pioneered a different approach to villages . Instead of handing out information in pamphlets , as is so often the case , they bring theater troupes , songs , music , dance . And they sit around , and they talk about dreams . Sanghamitra told me just last week -- she had just come back from two weeks in the villages -- and she had a real breakthrough . They were sitting in a circle , talking about the dreams for the village . And the young women in the village spoke up and said , " We ' ve changed our dream . Our dream is for our partners , our husbands , not to be given to us because of a horoscope , but to be given to us because they ' ve been tested for HIV . " If you are lucky enough to meet Sanghamitra and ask her why and how , how have you achieved so much ? She would look at you and very quietly , very softly say , " It just happened . It ' s the spirit inside . " This is Dr . Fan Jianchuan . Jianchuan comes from Sichuan Province in southwest China . He was born in 1957 , and you can imagine what his childhood looked like and felt like and what his life has been like over the last 50 tumultuous years . He ' s been a soldier , a teacher , a politician , a vice - mayor and a business man . But if you sat down and asked him , " Who are you really , and what do you do ? " He would tell you , " I ' m a collector , and I curate a museum . " I was lucky ; I heard about him for years , and I finally met him earlier this year at his museum in Chengdu . He ' s been a collector all of his life , starting when he was four or five in the early 1960 ' s . Now just think of the early 1960 ' s in China . Over a lifetime , through everything , through the Cultural Revolution and everything afterward , he ' s kept collecting , so that he now has over eight million pieces in his museums documenting contemporary Chinese history . These are pieces that you won ' t find anywhere else in the world , in part because they document parts of history , Chinese choose to forget . For example , he ' s got over one million pieces documenting the Sino - Japanese War , a war that ' s not talked about in China very much and whose heroes are not honored . Why did he do all this ? Because he thought a nation should never repeat the mistakes of the past . So from commissioning slightly larger than life bronze statues of the heroes of the Sino - Japanese War , including those Chinese who then fought with each other and left mainland China to go to Taiwan , to commemorating all the unknown , ordinary soldiers who survived by asking them to take prints of their hands , he is making sure -- one man is making sure -- that history is not forgotten But it ' s not just Chinese heroes he cares about . This building contains the world ' s largest collection of documents and artifacts commemorating the U . S . role in fighting on the Chinese side in that long war -- the Flying Tigers . He has nine other buildings -- that are already open to the public -- filled to the rafters with artifacts documenting contemporary Chinese history . Two of the most sensitive buildings include a lifetime of collection about the Cultural Revolution , a period that actually most Chinese would prefer to forget . But he doesn ' t want his nation ever to forget . These people inspire me , and they inspire me because they show us what is possible when you look at the world , change the way you look at your place in the world . They looked outside , and then they changed what was on the inside . They didn ' t go to business school . They didn ' t read a manual , " How to be a Good Leader in 10 Easy Steps . " But they have qualities we ' d all recognize . They have drive , passion , commitment . They ' ve gone away from what they did before , and they ' ve gone to something they didn ' t know . They ' ve tried to connect worlds they didn ' t know existed before . They ' ve built bridges , and they ' ve walked across them . They have a sense of the great arc of time and their tiny place in it . They know people have come before them and will follow them . And they know that they ' re part of a whole , that they depend on other people . It ' s not about them , they know that , but it has to start with them . And they have humility . It just happens . But we know it doesn ' t just happen , don ' t we ? We know it takes a lot to make it happen , and we know the direction the world is going in . So I think we need succession planning on a global basis . We can ' t wait for the next generation , the new joiners , to come in and learn how to be the good leaders we need . I think it has to start with us . And we know , just like they knew , how hard it is . But the good news is that we don ' t have to figure it out as we go along ; we have models , we have examples , like Benki and Sanghamitri and Jianchuan . We can look at what they ' ve done , if we look . We can learn from what they ' ve learned . We can change the way we see ourselves in the world . And if we ' re lucky , we can change the way our great - grandchildren will answer Benki ' s question . Thank you . ( Applause )