Hi, I'm Rich Lesser. I'm here in Davos at the end of a week
at the World Economic Forum.
They're starting to dismantle all of the various displays,
and people are going home.
But we're still here for a bit longer
to share some impressions.
I'm joined here with Martin Reeves.
He's the chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute,
and he's been a participant here for many years
and connects across such a broad network
of CEOs and academics and NGO leaders and many others.
So Martin, what were your key impressions from the week?
Well, it's very different from last year.
I mean, as always, everything,
everybody's discussing everything.
But the emphasis has changed.
So I think two years ago we were discussing the wonderful
promise of all sorts of technologies
and the need for new business models.
Last year, there was a big shadow, which was short-term
economic risk,
which hasn't actually materialized.
There's been a lot of uncertainty, but that's gone
out of the spotlight this year.
And then this year, it's about the very broad canvas
of society and planet.
People are concerned about the long-term
sustainability challenges.
And actually it's quite convincing in the sense
that it's not just the official agenda
and the names of the sessions,
that is actually what people are talking about
in the side conversations.
Clearly, I had the exact same.
So much of the discussion this week,
with a real bias to what can we actually do.
And an encouraging thing and a broader discussion,
didn't you think?
Like nature-based solutions, different ways to tackle it.
But also a recognition of the challenging context
with governments being in very different places,
trying to get various different stakeholder communities.
It's actually quite surprising how much progress
we've made in terms of embracing the problem,
quantifying it, realizing that corporations should
do something about it.
And making progress on a lot of solutions, too.
Actually it's quite impressive in some sense.
There are some major remaining problems
like the coordination challenge.
But we've come a long way.
I think the difference now is a few years ago,
I don't think, first of all, the urgency's gone up.
Not just by the leaders here in Davos
but by pressures from the world.
Greta was here today.
I don't know if you saw her across the street
a little while ago.
But also recognition that most of the levers
to tackle this from a technology sense
are within our grasp.
And the economics of addressing climate change
are relatively small, certainly compared to the magnitude
of not addressing it.
Then you get into the coordination challenges
across governments in particular
but also the investor community, others.
I think people also acknowledge there are just
huge challenges ahead to make that happen
at the speed and depth we need to.
I want to come back to one other theme.
A year ago, you and I had just written our article together
on winning the 20s.
And we introduced it a year ago.
But in the year since then, with the BCG Henderson Institute
and colleagues around the world, we've been going deep
on each of the five themes.
And I know that was a large part of
your discussions this year.
A year in, what are your takeaways for where people are at
and where you're even at on that winning the 20s framework?
Right, so just reminding people,
we had sort of five major themes.
One was the need to compete on learning,
because there's going be so much change,
we need to learn new things.
The second one was creating learning organizations
and combining machine intelligence and human intelligence.
The third one was being more scientific about
the change processes, because change is important
and unpredictable.
The fourth was harnessing human diversity.
And the fifth was business and society.
So coming to Davos, we could've found out that actually
the whole thing was completely wrong
and that it was something else,
but we actually tested this last night at
the CEO dinner, and we just got the results back.
And we asked the CEOs, what was your resolution
for the next decade, and actually the biggest resolution
was pillar five.
It was business and society, as we've just
been talking about.
And then the second biggest components were pillar one,
which is learning,
competing on learning,
and building the hybrid or the bionic learning organization.
The change and the diversity were there,
but at a slightly lower level.
So I think actually we called it pretty right,
if that's not immodest.
I also think that there's an enormous energy, I find,
maybe because it's a decade turning
or maybe because people are so aware of all the
changes coming. I think people really want to engage,
not just about 2020 as a year,
but about how to think a bit more out there to make sure
that the changes they make in 2020 are actually
creating organizational success for the longer term.
And while I agree, or I'm sure in this survey diversity
did come up, I spent time at Female Quotient,
which is a group down the street.
I was amazed at the level of energy
and the engagement on what does it take to make
diversity really work in organizations,
create inclusiveness.
It was probably my favorite conversation of the week,
with the founder of that group.
It's quite interesting.
I agree.
I also saw an openness to,
and I'd say even an appetite and a curiosity, to redefine
the managerial, the leadership agenda
for the decade.
We need it, and there's an energy and enthusiasm around it.
Thanks, Martin, good travels home.
Thank you.
And thank you, everybody.