I think social media are both a challenge and an opportunity for HR. Technology, when it first came out, was a source of information. We would Google something, as if it was an encyclopaedia. Then it became a source of efficiency, so people could work at home, or they could source information more efficiently. Today technology in social media is becoming a source of relationships, where people have relationships with each other. I think over time it's a great opportunity for HR. I give one or two examples: when we want to hire somebody, we'd often have to post the job, we'd go to a search firm or a university, we'd advertise. What companies are saying today is: I need an engineer with these skills in this geography, and they go to Facebook, and they scan the Facebook for the profile of the engineers with that skill set, and they call them directly. So it's allowing information to be more radially transferred into the company. Training: training used to almost always be done in a classroom. Well, now what we are finding is that the technology allows people who have attended a classroom to stay connected to each other. At the end of my session I had people email a friend. Well, that's a form of social media - that you connect now with people that may not be in the room together. We were proposing a program for a bank in Australia - this is too long an answer - and in the five-day programme the 20 business leaders, two or three times in the programme, would have an interaction with their people back home, through a video conference, web or other social media, and they immediately applied what they were learning in the course. So the training and the application became the same agenda. And technology breaks down boundaries and allows us to do that.

I frequently talk to the HR representatives of both larger and smaller companies about topics that are important for them, e.g. the new millennium generation. People who will be leaving universities in ten years, are totally different from the current middle-aged generation. They have absolutely different ideas about their lives and their ambitions. Everyone agrees that this is another massive challenge for HR.

I totally agree. I assume that your grandfather, if he worked, worked in the same company for most of his career. My grandfather worked for the government his whole career. Your father also may have worked for the same company his whole career. My father worked in the same company. And I have been a professor at the university for 30 years. None of my children will work in the same company for more than a three of four years. They will change jobs and they will keep moving. I think we've seen in the last generation a shift - it's not about staying with the company, it's about developing my skills. So what companies have to do is to find ways to tap into that knowledge and creativity. My children are much smarter than I was at their age, because they have the Internet, they have experiences I never had. And the good companies will pull out their knowledge and skills even if they are not with the company for 30 years. And I think that's a new generation. There are some great things in this generation - of knowledge, of skills, of working with diversity, of having the courage to make tough decisions, both personally and politically. But it's not gonna be working in the same company for the whole career. I just don't think that will happen.

The issue of cooperation between universities and business is still a very hot one in the Czech Republic. You have worked in the academic sphere for over 30 years. The requirements placed on university graduates change over time. How do you deal with the changing requirements? Do you manage to prepare graduates that the practice and business really need?

Sometimes not so well, because in some cases the gap between academia and industry is getting wider, not narrower, because academics study very narrow things and they go deep. And industry wants very broad things and move quickly. But the best universities seem to have a capacity to focus on current business problems, and look at them through a rigorous set of disciplines, either in engineering, or business or science or economics, and help solve the problems of the future. I hope we will see more of that. I get worried that the gap between university research and industry application is getting too wide. There are folks like me who want to play to bring them together. Sometimes industry people accuse us of being academic and academic people accuse us of not being rigorous enough, and yet we have to find ways to make sure that gap is smaller.

Yes, the situation in both countries seems to be very similar.

It's very difficult because the incentive to be a professor is to publish. And in order to publish, you must do a very narrow piece of research and be very deep in that research. Some of the papers I have published have been very statistical and mathematical models of taxonomy. Nobody in industry cares. And yet the problems of industry are so serious that we need to bring the rigour of academic training into the reality of industrial problems. And there are some of us who try to do that. It is very difficult. Our academic colleagues do not think we're rigorous and our industry colleagues still think we're academic. So we have to find the way to bridge that.

In the lecture, you spoke about the importance of having ambitions, both in your profession and in your life. What are your ambitions for the next five or ten years?

Great question. My wife and I talk about that all the time. In fact we had a discussion on Saturday where do we hope to go. We've been blessed in a very real way with enormous success, both of us. My ambition is to learn, and that's it. I want to learn more about how organisations can be positioned to be successful all the time. I think for the most part organisations are good things. They help people develop more than they can individually. There are examples where organisations have hurt people. But how do you build organisations where individuals can find what we call abundance and purpose? And if you can create that, I think we make a better place. My other learning right now is how do we do that across cultures, how do we build organisations so that what happens in Singapore, in Cambodia, in Hungary, in Czech Republic... how do we get across those geography boundaries and political boundaries to build organisations that work? And I think that economic organisations have the ability to cut across those, because if we can bring a company from the Czech Republic to Germany, to the UK, to the US, we begin to learn more about each other from that process. And that's the kind of learning I'm intrigued with.