Young Global Leaders

What are you doing to improve the world?

When I joined the Young Global Leaders community of the World Economic Forum in 2005, we were asked a simple question by Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum: “What are you going to do to make the world a better place in the next 20 years?” The simplicity of the question, the urgency implied within it, and the open-ended nature of such a challenge when posed to a group of young (under 40), accomplished citizens of the world pushed many of us towards an early onset of professional “midlife crisis”. It made us realize that while all of us have important jobs or are on promising career paths, we each also have a deeper calling to which we need to respond. At that moment, the privileges that come from being a leader transformed into global and local responsibilities. Ultimately, how we choose to meet these responsibilities will distinguish this new generation of young leaders.

In our initial discussions, we realized that issues like climate change, security, health, education, poverty and governance, that at first seemed disconnected and somewhat insurmountable, turn out to be facets of a multidimensional puzzle with many cross influences. We also realized the uniqueness of the historical moment that we currently enjoy – we have been riding an economic growth curve driven by relative peace and demographic change resulting from the end of global conflicts, and improved medicine and modernization. Yet this moment is now hanging in delicate balance, due in part to the unintended consequences of what first made it possible.

What’s more, during the last 60 years an invisible fabric has held together countries and regions. The fibres of the fabric weave together the political and business leadership in each country through mutual interest, driven by the desire to improve society and generate wealth, translating into an invisible contract between government and commerce – each serving the other. For the first time, business is going global while political systems are struggling with local effects of globalization. Historically, when that fabric has broken or shifted towards one of the axes, the results have been disastrous to both society and business.

Economies are made of collectives of individuals working in an environment driven by demographics and resources, governed by laws, affected by an invisible cultural contract. In our collective past, the abundance of resources, in particular food, determined the behavioural contracts societies took on themselves – foraging or hunting. These days, it is the societal contract that drives sustainable competitiveness in an interesting reversal of our past. Nations willing to accept or even glorify individual failure will have an advantage in generating and attracting technology-driven swarms of younger innovators. Societies unwilling to accept failure will not attract disruptors, will drive away risk and, in aggregate, grow stagnant. In doing so, those societies and economies are bound to miss disruptive innovation waves that will wash away their established industries in what will seem to the incumbents to be an overnight market shift.

Silicon Valley, the meeting place for innovators, venture capital and market makers, is a place where failure is glorified almost as a badge of honour. The emerging model requires very few successful innovations yet allows for many failures, not just at the level of a single investor but as a region. At the same time, the dynamics of over-demand for talent emerging in India create an interesting dynamic of rapid job-shifting, breaking what used to be a lifelong tie between employer and employees but causing a very positive cross-pollination of ideas and societal acceptance of risk. The result is a new mid-class society willing to own and operate their own businesses that grow over the years to become global giants. Or at least that is their aspiration.

China’s transformation from an agrarian nation to the world’s manufacturing epicentre requires an enormous societal shift for all the new participants in its emerging economy. We hear of an estimated need to shift close to 125 million people into new cities over a period of five years. In a sense, China will be adding the equivalent in people of the entire US workforce within those five years. As a result we see the emergence of a consumption society in China and India that, in turn, will inevitably create a wave of mid-size companies growing at rates unheard of in the Western world. At the same time, China and India are starting from two different launch points today, charting a different growth path for each country. China has an incredible head start on infrastructure, with enormous budget reserves; India starts with the demographic advantage of a much younger nation, with a large percentage of the population under 25 years of age, familiar with the Western world and speaking English natively – ready to take on service jobs from the West.

Unfortunately, the fundamental problems facing all of us as a unified global tribe cannot be solved via cross-country competition. The growth we are all enjoying on the economic front takes its toll on our planet and on humanity since we all share the same atmosphere and are all drawing from the same natural resources. The effects of our society, such as climate change or propagation of pandemics, do not stop at country borders. Recognizing the possible effects on our global economy and avoiding the dangerous tipping points on such issues as climate change, energy limits, over-consumption and other global issues will be the most important responsibility handed over to our younger generation of leaders.

The challenge facing this next generation of leaders requires us to engage our collective abilities in a concentrated set of efforts aiming to solve these fundamental problems such as energy, water and climate, and attempting to redesign and establish new modern frameworks for addressing poverty, and improving education and global health. We must see beyond the current drivers pushing leaders into short-term decisions or else this coming generation of leaders will inherit a world where we fight an uphill battle on all macro trends when we inherit the seat of power. It is our obligation as young leaders to lose our inherent fear of failure – a burden that comes with the expectation from extremely successful prodigies – and begin to redress these challenges. If we back away, we will not only see the end of this economic growth wave during our time, but most of these problems will most likely hit their non-linearity points – from ice caps melting and the energy crunch to commerce disruptions as a result of pandemics – forcing us to face reality and deal with it in the form of disaster relief.

If we take on the major issues, on the other hand, we can use economic drivers not only to drive great social impact but also to create and grow many new markets. We can turn this crisis into a mission, a personal calling not just for a young generation of leaders but also to the entire generation, regardless of borders, affiliation or beliefs. If we do so, we will pass a better place on to the younger generation of leaders, our kids.