Got any ideas? Why the Jindals and Birlas were at TEDx

TED Talks likes to pitch itself as an aggregator of ideas worth spreading. So when the popular conference made its way to Mumbai’s NCPA this month, two of the city’s business captains were there to experience it first-hand.

Among them, industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla, who was seen at the gathering along with wife Neerja Birla and his daughter Ananyashree, engrossed in what the speakers were saying. As were Sajjan Jindal and wife Sangita. Jindal struck a dapper fi gure in casual chinos. Both he and Birla mingled with the speakers as well as the audience.

So why were these two corporate mavens, with every kind of management resource at their disposal, so keen on hearing what was discussed at TEDxGateway?

Shashank Tripathi, strategy lead and executive director at PwC, offers by way of explanation: “They live in a narrow industrial world and this allows them to break out and throws them open to a wide variety of thoughts and innovations.”
As the octogenarian Murdoch told Business Insider on spending an entire week at a technology conference organised by WSJ, a group publication from the News Corp stable: “You’ve got to look to the future. You can’t look back.”