At the age of 50, is Davos going through a midlife crisis?
-The Annual Meeting in Davos remains as vital as ever.
-In the next decade there will be a massive transfer of economic and political power to the next generation of leaders.
-Stakeholder capitalism is taking root around the world.
The famous meeting at Davos in the Swiss Alps, first convened in 1971, this year celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Nevertheless, the conviction with which nearly 3,000 participants from 130 countries participated in this year’s event – which boasted the highest concentration of economic power in the world – suggests the World Economic Forum is not experiencing a midlife crisis.
On the contrary, the Forum’s vitality resembles that of a young and successful entrepreneur with dreams, energy and the ability to change the world.
Over five days, 60 heads of state, 250 ministers, 1,000 CEOs and 800 vice presidents of global companies, 300 young leaders and 450 representatives of civil society, media and the academic sector discussed the main challenges of society, their paradoxes and possible solutions.
We are at the beginning of a new decade. A decade in which we need to deliver results. The decade in which we must build an economic system capable of repairing our wounded societies and the diseased planet. Companies have a huge responsibility in this process. The private sector cannot solve all of society’s problems, but most of the structural problems that afflict us cannot be solved without the private sector.
The Forum was the first organization to defend the idea of stakeholder capitalism in 1973. The 2020 meeting focused on renewing the license to operate – not of any specific company, but of capitalism itself.
The US Business Roundtable, the most influential group of companies in the US, recently announced that it would embrace stakeholder capitalism. The question that arose was what impact this will have in practice. The Forum’s platform has the content and the power to convene that can make this commitment a global reality, enabling the transformation of companies so that they continue to be the engine of society’s development as they have been for the past 150 years.
Professors Paul Collier and Colin Mayer, both from Oxford, illustrated the case in a debate on Davos’ first day with a good dose of English humour. The two professors explained that in the traditional view the boss of a company knew what had to be done, but that the “evil employees” did not want to follow the path he proposed. This conception of the world was based on the idea of “homo economicus”, present in economic theory since Adam Smith and his invisible hand.
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