I'm Elise Hugh, and you're listening to TED Talks Daily.

Any mapping geeks out there are going to know today's speaker.

It's Jack Dangermond, the head of ESRI, the mapping tools platform.

In his conversation with Ted's technology curator, Simone Ross,

Dangerman talks us through the thinking behind using

data science to solve problems and better understand systems and help us do work better.

It's a talk that goes way beyond tech. Halfway through, he shares a smart gardening analogy

that made me think and feel hopeful about the future.

Jack, I would love you to tell us what ESRI is and also why GIS is so important.

So it is a company. It builds software products that are used by millions of people,

kind of like platform technology, but not literally platform. It builds tools that help people do their work better.

And that's a very general statement, but helps them do their work better using geography as a science and visualization as a science and technology to help them make better decisions or help them be more efficient or help them communicate what they're doing better. It's kind of mapping. I mean, the way normal

people would think of it is map making. So this organization has 350,000 organizations that we support. And they range from NGOs,

thousands and thousands of them working in conservation or humanitarian affairs to large corporations.

But our majority of users are in public sector, in cities, in counties, in national government agencies.

They're basically running the world.

So right now we hear a lot about companies using tech to improve the world.

But it sounds like that has always been baked into your DNA.

I grew up as a young kid in a nursery.

My parents were servants, and they started a little nursery to help put me through school. That's the way I saw it. They were immigrants, and they grew plants. They were attracted to landscaping, which I grew up understanding. So I went to design school, first environmental design school and then landscape architecture and the city planning. And in that progression, I came to understand very clearly the idea of problem

solving, because that's what design really is about. You see a problem and you come up creatively

with something that solves a problem. And at Harvard, I started to get engaged with systems and computing.

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