TED Talks for Project Managers

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to the dissemination of ideas.

The importance of TED in the United States is comparable to that of the World Economic Forum in Davos in Europe, one of the most prominent forums for information exchange across sectors and interdisciplinary boundaries. However, TED has evolved from the progressive, liberal, tech-savvy environment of the West Coast, and so TED is much more about inspiration, positive thinking, "looking forward", and networking with other "changemakers" than Davos is.

True to the motto

Ideas worth spreading

an exclusive group of professionals from a wide range of fields share their ideas in the form of short (maximum 18 minutes), powerful talks at the annual innovation conference. The best of these are later published on the TED Talks website as free videos.

Over the years, the scope of the Innovation Conference has expanded to include not only technology, entertainment and design, but also business, global issues, culture, art and science. Speakers range from scientists to entrepreneurs and activists, from designers to artists.

Since 2009, the TED Foundation has allowed independent organizers to hold their own conferences under the TEDx license. In addition to the design of the stage, the specifications include, for example, the following.

• Presentations are published as videos.
• Profits from TEDx events are not allowed.
• Speakers at TEDx events do not receive compensation for their talk.

For quality assurance, the number of participants for the TEDx license is limited to a maximum of 100 people. A special license is required for a larger conference. Like TED, TEDx are non-profit organizations.

Target audiences for TEDx include those at universities, schools, businesses, libraries, and communities or groups of all kinds. The goal is to create a local platform for the exchange of ideas. For this reason, the TED Foundation only licenses events that have the name of the city in the title in certain cases. At large TEDx events in Germany - such as TEDxBerlin, TEDxHamburg, TEDxStuttgart or TEDxMunich - speakers and audiences come from the respective city or country as well as from other parts of Europe and the world.

A number of TED Talks have already been published for the field of project management as well. The selection is certainly subjective, but in our opinion the following talks are absolutely worth watching.

We hope you enjoy watching.

If you would like to participate in a TEDx event, you will find an overview of all scheduled events on the following page: ted.com/tedx/events