The Thought Leader Forum brings together clients and thinkers from beyond the world of finance, to explore the "building blocks" that have had a significant influence on our investment thinking. The Concept Cards, created by Sente Corporation and presented here, are an illustration of John Holland's "building block" theory.

Holland describes innovation as the creative combination of familiar building blocks. For example, the human face can be divided into ten components - eyes, nose, lips, chin, cheeks, etc. Each of those components has a variety of options, or "building blocks". Eyes, for example can be blue, brown, wide, narrow, heavy, etc. Almost any face can be assembled through different combinations of a relatively small number of building blocks.

The great innovations, according to Holland, are rarely entirely new creations. Frequently the great advances in technology and science are the unique and creative combinations between technologies or disciplines that are already familiar to us. The "digitization" of the world in the last ten years, according to economist Brian Arthur, is the result of the combination of communications technologies and computational technologies. Advances in either discipline are interesting, but mapping one onto the other created the opportunity for vast networks of computing power and emergent behavior in these complex networks.

Sente's Concept Cards illustrate the themes of the Thought Leader Forum presentations using both a diagram of the idea and language from the speaker’s presentation. The narrative record of the event (the transcripts of the presentations) serves as an interesting resource, but may not serve the function of a useful tool. The speakers weave their ideas into a compelling narrative for their presentations, but the ideas may be more functional when presented as individual, discrete concepts. While the context of each of these concepts is important, it is the concepts themselves that we hope to combine and apply metaphorically. The structure of this website is intended to accomplish both goals - to present the concepts in context, and to present them as discrete ideas that are useful for creative combination.

Click here to download a PDF of all of the 2007 Concept Cards.

Steven Crist
Publisher and Columnist, Daily Racing Form

Clayton M. Christensen
Professor, Harvard Business School

Antonio M. Perez
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Eastman Kodak Company

Matthew Szulik
Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President, Red Hat

Dave Mandelkern
Chief Executive Officer, QuickHealth, Inc.

John Donahoe
President, eBay Marketplaces

Bill Miller, CFA
Michael Mauboussin
"Thought Leader Forum Wrap-Up"

Legg Mason Capital Management ("LMCM") is comprised of (i) Legg Mason Capital Management, Inc., and (ii) LMM LLC.

The comments, opinions and any forward predictions presented about any particular security, the economy or "the market" are based on the analysis of the speaker. These are not necessarily the opinion of, and should not be construed as a recommendation on the part of Legg Mason Capital Management or any of its affiliates.