Harvesting Innovation: From Farm to Fortune 500 | Michel Langlois | TEDxAlBateen
In this captivating TEDxAlBateen talk, Michel Langlois — a veteran technology executive and former leader at Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Calix — shares an extraordinary journey from his humble beginnings on a family farm to the forefront of global innovation.Through personal stories and hard-won lessons, Michel reveals how the principles he learned tending to a farm — consistency, courage, and care — became the foundation for building some of the world’s most resilient and forward-thinking organizations.He unpacks the Lifecycle of Innovation, showing how companies can sustain creativity through every stage of growth by building trust, embracing a no-fear culture, and visualizing the end state with clarity. His message is a wake-up call to business leaders: innovation doesn’t end with success — it begins with trust, humility, and the courage to evolve.Key ideas:- The stages of innovation through a company’s lifecycle
- Building trust as the foundation of creativity and growth
- Creating a no-fear culture that fuels adaptability
- How to visualize and sustain innovation through change
- Lessons from transforming global tech giants like Cisco and Juniper NetworksRecorded live at TEDxAlBateen 2025 — themed “Threads of Us,” celebrating the connections between courage, creativity, and community in shaping a more innovative world.#TEDxAlBateen #MichelLanglois #ThreadsOfUs #Innovation #Leadership #Trust #Courage #Technology #Growth #UAE A pioneering technology executive who has spent 35+ years building and scaling the commercial internet—and the teams behind it. A former senior leader at Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Calix, he is known for turning inflection points into engines of growth: at Cisco, he helped scale the IOSTM software business from ~$1B to $40B+ while leading a global engineering organization; at Juniper, he re-engineered the Junos software pipeline, tripling quality, speed, and capacity; at Calix, he led a subscriber-centric reinvention that grew revenue 4× and market cap 10×.Michel’s teams navigated the dot-com crash, global supply shocks, and the COVID era—proof that disciplined innovation, human-centered leadership, and courageous reinvention can turn crisis into compounding trust and long-term value. A Top 12 U.S. CTO (2022), Forbes Technology Council contributor, and Amazon best-selling author (Beyond the Code), he advises CEOs, boards, and investors on scaling product, culture, and impact. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
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