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Meet our Young Global Leaders for 2020

Mariah Levin, Head of the Forum of Young Global Leaders, World Economic Forum. Each year, the World Economic Forum names its new YGLs Young Global Leaders are under the age of 40. Influential people who want to make the world a better place. What does the winner of the FIFA Women’s World Cup have in common with the prime minister of Finland? They are both young leaders who gained international repute over the last 12 months. And now Megan Rapinoe and Sanna Marin have been recognised as Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum – joining a community of people dedicated to changing the world for the better. Each year, the Forum of Young Global Leaders identifies the world’s most promising leaders under the age of 40 – people driving innovation for positive change across civil society, arts, culture, government and business. By connecting them to a community of remarkable peers and investing further in their leadership abilities, the aim is to create a ripple effect over five years that benefits their organisations and the world. Here are some of the 115 YGLs that make up the class of 2020: Megan Rapinoe – As co-captain of the US women’s soccer team, Rapinow lifted the 2019 FIFA World Cup. Off the field, she advocates for gender equality, including equal pay in her sport, and speaks out on diversity and inclusion. Jesús Cepeda – Chief Executive Officer of OneSmart City, a company that uses blockchain and artificial intelligence to help city authorities provide digital services. Cepeda hopes the technology will create greener cities and stronger institutions in line with the UN goals on sustainable development. Larry Madowo – The BBC Africa Business Editor launched six new business TV shows for African audiences in English, French and Swahili. Madowo is also an on-air correspondent on BBC radio and […]

Lessons from Asian banks on their coronavirus response

ArticleBy Jacob Dahl, Vito Giudici, Sameer Kumar, Vishal Patwari, and Gabriele Vigo Lessons from Asian banks on their coronavirus responseOpen interactive popupFinancial institutions in countries initially affected by the pandemic moved quickly to safeguard their employees, transform their operations, and serve customers in new ways. As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to spread around the world, the humanitarian crisis has been accompanied by immense social and economic disruption. Almost overnight, whole countries have had to accept a new reality: everything has changed, and daily life may never be the same. Asian banks have already had to grapple with all of these factors, taking actions to maintain operations, protect their workforce, and keep customers informed. Their actions could offer a valuable template for banks around the world that are still amid the crisis and experimenting with initiatives. By focusing on three imperatives—ensuring business survival, fulfilling social responsibilities, and adapting to the new normal—banks can minimise disruption and continue to provide vital services to their customers. Ensure business survival In response to the pandemic, Asian banks moved quickly to shore up their operations and implement new approaches to mitigate operational disruptions. They prioritised several areas to identify issues or obstacles to business continuity and then experimented with new solutions and ways of working. Confirm resilience of internal operations To guide the pandemic response, many financial institutions formed a response-management unit composed of executive-level, cross-functional teams. These teams were empowered to make key decisions as well as communicate COVID-19 responses quickly and effectively across the organisation.1 Asian banks also had to shift to remote working for most employees, a move that required IT to ensure the organization’s infrastructure and systems could support such a shift. In defining remote and work-from-home setups, bank executives considered both the level of human interaction required for certain tasks and the degree to which […]

A new network of leaders changing the system together

For over 20 years, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship has recognised social entrepreneurs as a new breed of leader – values-driven, inclusive, compassionate, entrepreneurial individuals who develop sustainable new models in business, social development and environmental initiatives. They have been at the forefront of R&D for society and civilization, accelerating how we solve problems and imagining new futures through experimentation, iteration and practice. In these two decades, we have curated and gathered over 350 leading social entrepreneurs from 70 countries in the Schwab Foundation community and embedded them into the platforms of the World Economic Forum. Together, they have demonstrated significant progress on how we approach environmental sustainability and consumption, health and education, rural development and job training, and finding new ways to advance human rights and equality in different contexts around the world. However, poverty, inequality and climate change are too large and complex for any single social entrepreneur or institution to tackle alone. It should be recognized that many of these issues are interconnected. \The underlying causes also run deep in history, politics and culture, and our best solutions are often constrained by outdated rules and skewed power structures. We are seeing that, in order to create real change, dynamic interactions and multi-stakeholder partnerships across ideological divides are critical to making the radical changes that we know we need. We need social innovation diffused within every sector so we can adopt, adapt, diffuse and scale what this societal R&D has shown to be possible and sustainable – whether it be self-sustaining eco-businesses in the desert, or community-based, tech-enabled healthcare. Those driving the social innovation ecosystem require imagination, compromise, resilience and, above all, committed, courageous innovative people. Therefore, the Schwab Foundation has expanded its remit to recognise and support an ecosystem of pioneering actors who share a common purpose: to accelerate our progress towards the Sustainable […]

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Talking to Strangers : What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

This is the highly anticipated new book from Malcolm Gladwell, No.1 international bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger’s motives? Through a series of encounters and misunderstandings – from history, psychology and infamous legal cases – Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have disastrous consequences. No one challenges our shared assumptions like Malcolm Gladwell. Here he uses stories of deceit and fatal errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown, inviting us to rethink our thinking in these troubled times.

What is ‘ecological economics’ and why do we need to talk about it?

Anitra NelsonAssociate Professor, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University Brian CoffeyVice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, RMIT University As environmental crises and the urgency to create ecological sustainability escalate, so does the importance of ecological economics. This applied, solutions-based field of studies is concerned with sustainability and development, rather than efficiency and growth. Also, given that cities account for 70-80% of global economic activity and associated resource use, emissions and waste, they are central to finding solutions to the challenge of sustainability. Ecological economics recognises local to global environmental limits. It ranges from research for short-term policy and local challenges through to long-term visions of sustainable societies. Ecological economists also consider global issues such as carbon emissions, deforestation, overfishing and species extinctions. Core concepts You’re probably familiar with some core concepts of ecological economics. These include “steady-state economies”, “carrying capacity”, “ecological footprints” and “environmental justice”. A steady-state economy is both relatively stable and respects ecological limits. Drawing on the work of mathematician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, economist Herman Daly elaborated the model, editing a 1973 anthology, Toward a Steady-State Economy. In 1990, Daly co-founded the International Society of Ecological Economics (ISEE). It had three key principles: the human economy is embedded in nature, and economic processes are actually biological, physical and chemical processes and transformations ecological economics is a meeting place for researchers committed to environmental issues ecological economics requires transdisciplinary work to describe economic processes in relation to physical reality. Joshua Farley, who has worked with Daly, discusses some of these principles in an opening address to the Australia New Zealand Society of Ecological Economics (ANZSEE) conference at RMIT University later this month. In a partnership program of several North American universities, Farley teaches Economics for the Anthropocene postgraduates. They apply ecological economics to “real-world environmental solutions”. Some will talk at the conference about their research. Today overconsumption is measured against Earth’s carrying capacity. William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel developed the […]

Why the most successful students have no passion for school

Jihyun Lee is associate professor in the School of Education at University of New South Wales in Australia. Her main research area is developing methodology to increase psychometric properties and usability of survey instruments. She publishes regularly in educational psychology journals. In order to be successful, many people believe, one must be passionate. Passion makes challenges enjoyable. It bestows the stamina necessary to excel. However, there are telling counterexamples where passion doesn’t seem to be a necessary ingredient for success. One such case is academic success. You might think that successful students should be passionate about their schooling, and that this passion for school would account, at least partly, for why some students succeed and why some don’t. But this isn’t right. My research has found that there is in fact no relationship between how well students do academically and what their attitude toward schooling actually is. A student doesn’t need to be passionate about school to be academically successful. My research findings derive from the analysis of a large-scale international database called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes the dataset available every three years. It’s a treasure trove that gives researchers like myself an unparalleled view into what students across the world think about their education. In the most recent 2015 PISA assessment, 72 countries and economies contributed. Reading, mathematics and science tests, along with a questionnaire about attitudes, beliefs, learning habits and the like, are administered to nationally representative samples of 15-years-olds around the world. In previous surveys, four simple options were used to measure students’ attitude toward school: (a) school has done little to prepare me for adult life when I leave school(b) school has been a waste of time(c) school helped give me confidence to make decisions(d) school has taught me things that could […]

“Harbinger households”

In The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure (Sci-Hub mirror), a trio of economists and business-school profs build on a 2015 Journal of Marketing Research paper that claimed that some households’ purchasing preferences are a reliable indicator of which products will fail — that is, if households in a certain ZIP code like a product, it will probably not succeed. The original paper calls these “harbinger households.” In the new paper, the researchers consider very large data-sets on consumer goods and fashion purchasing, house-buying, and political donations, to examine whether being a “harbinger household” correlates to other predictors of failure, and find that these households are also likely to buy real-estate that makes lower profits (or generates larger losses) than nearby properties; they are likely to buy fashion and consumer goods that get discontinued due to lackluster sales; and they are more likely to donate to losing politicians’ campaigns than winners. The researchers also claim that harbinger households voluntarily cluster: that when a harbinger household moves, it is likely that it will move to another habringer ZIP code (and nonhabringers move to nonhabringer households). Moreover, harbingers don’t appear to learn their preferences from one another — a nonhabringer household that locates in a harbinger ZIP code doesn’t alter its purchasing and political contributions to “loser” products and candidates. Harbinger households tend to be white, suburban and headed by older, less-educated single parents. They tend to make above-average use of coupons, and the coupons they use have above-average values. The researchers don’t claim a causal relationship between these different factors — donating to losing political candidates doesn’t make you prefer Crystal Pepsi, for example — but rather speculate that there is an “unobserved intervening variable” that explains both factors. Using data from multiple sources, we have shown that the phenomenon of harbingers is surprisingly widespread. […]

Why today's protests are not revolutionary TM website

Why aren’t today’s protests leading to revolutions?

-Peter McPhee, Emeritus professor, University of Melbourne We live in a world of violent challenges to the status quo, from Chile and Iraq to Hong Kong, Catalonia and the Extinction Rebellion. These protests are usually presented in the media simply as expressions of rage at “the system” and are eminently suitable for TV news coverage, where they flash across our screens in 15-second splashes of colour, smoke and sometimes blood. These are huge rebellions. In Chile, for example, an estimated one million people demonstrated last month. By the next day, 19 people had died, nearly 2,500 had been injured and more than 2,800 arrested. How might we make sense of these upheavals? Are they revolutionary or just a series of spectacular eruptions of anger? And are they doomed to fail? Key characteristics of a revolution As an historian of the French Revolution of 1789-99, I often ponder the similarities between the five great revolutions of the modern world – the English Revolution (1649), American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), Russian Revolution (1917) and Chinese Revolution (1949). A key question today is whether the rebellions we are currently witnessing are also revolutionary. A model of revolution drawn from the five great revolutions can tell us much about why they occur and take particular trajectories. The key characteristics are: long-term causes and the popularity of a socio-political ideology at odds with the regime in power short-term triggers of widespread protest moments of violent confrontation the power-holders are unable to contain as sections of the armed forces defect to rebels the consolidation of a broad and victorious alliance against the existing regime a subsequent fracturing of the revolutionary alliance as competing factions vie for power the re-establishment of a new order when a revolutionary leader succeeds in consolidating power. Why today’s protests are not revolutionary […]

Davos 2020: What mattered

McKinsey global managing partner Kevin Sneader during the 2020 WEF Annual Meeting panel: Leading a 21st Century Corporation, held January 22, 2020. By Kevin Sneader January 27, 2020 Unseasonably and somewhat unnervingly mild temperatures provided a fitting backdrop for what emerged as the top issue at the 2020 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting: climate change and its risks. But that was far from the only topic. At the end of this year’s Annual Meeting, I sat down with Rik Kirkland, our director of publishing, to share my reflections. Climate risk is firmly established as a C-suite issue. Research published in reports like the McKinsey Global Institute’s “Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts” has clearly convinced more and more global policy makers and business leaders that the problem of climate change has moved from a far-off priority to a here-and-now risk that demands action. Personal experiences, whether from watching the wildfires in Australia or California or numerous other small examples, have also brought home the reality that this is a topic that requires leadership from the top. While there wasn’t much debate about the science, executives and investors were concerned about the lack of reliable data on the efforts companies and society are making, not to mention their impact. Greater clarity is required in order to speed development of new standards to help markets act more efficiently and reward progress. Beyond metrics, the leaders I spoke with are thinking about the problem in new and creative ways. They are taking a clear-eyed look at what is driving their carbon footprints, beginning to quantify the cost of inaction, and asking how they can accelerate positive change in a way that fits within their core business agenda. That’s a huge shift in tone from even a year ago. The short-term economic outlook is […]

If you can read this headline, you can read a novel.

Judith SeaboyerSenior Lecturer, The University of Queensland Public anxiety about the capacity of digital-age children and young adults to read anything longer than a screen grab has come to feel like moral panic. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest we must take such unease seriously. In 2016, the US National Endowment for the Arts reported the proportion of American adults who read at least one novel in 2015 had dropped to 43.1% from 56.9% in 1982. In 2018, a US academic reported that in 1980, 60% of 18-year-old school students read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school. By 2016, the number had plummeted to 16%. Those same 12th graders reported spending “six hours a day texting, on social media and online”. American literacy expert and neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes the threat screen reading poses to our capacity for “the slower cognitive processes such as critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that are all part of deep reading”. She asks: Will the mix of continuously stimulating distractions of children’s attention and immediate access to multiple sources of information give young readers less incentive either to build their own storehouses of knowledge or to think critically for themselves? But rather than taking up defensive positions on either side of the digital-analogue reading divide, Wolf encourages us to embrace both. As parents and teachers we can help our children develop a bi-literate reading brain. There are several ways we can do this. Reading pathways Reading is a learned skill that requires the development of particular neural networks. And different reading platforms encourage the development of different aspects of those networks. Screen-reading children, immersed from toddlerhood in the pleasures and instant gratification of skimming, clicking and linking, develop cognitive skills that make them adept power browsers, good at the useful ability to scan […]

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