Lessons from Davos Leaders ahead of Annual Meeting 2024

David Rubenstein, Carlyle Group: It’s amazing how many people show up in a small city in Switzerland for a couple days a year.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges. Today, ahead of the 2024 Annual Meeting, we share lessons learned from Davos leaders.

Subscribe to Meet The Leader on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And don’t forget to rate and review us. I’m Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum - and this is Meet the Leader.

Achim Steiner, UNDP: People can change the world. And movements don't start with a million people marching. They start with one person talking to the next person, and before you know it, you have movements and you have citizen power. And I think that ultimately, in some of the worst moments in history, that’s what has allowed us to step back from the precipice and look for better ways forward.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: As I record this, we are just days away from the Annual Meeting, a week where the world’s top leaders from government, business and civil society come together in snowy Davos with one goal in mind: To build solutions to the world’s biggest problems.

Each year, my colleagues and I cover every announcement, every panel and every speech, helping to put the world’s biggest changes into context. I personally think I have the best job of all of these, as I get to bring some of the most interesting voices of the year into my podcast booth and talk to them face-to-face. Just last year alone, I spoke to CEOs, scientists, an astronaut, a commercial fisher and a founder who essentially taught himself how to run a supersonic aviation startup. It’s a good crew.

Davos is always an inspiration and to get you into that mindset, I thought I’d put together this collection of moments from past Davos interviews and the lessons that these conversations drove home for me.

It’s a unique look at how some of the world’s biggest innovators approach problem solving and and how they make the most of their own chance to learn new perspectives.

We’ll get started with Matthias Maurer. He's an astronaut with the European Space Agency and when I talked to him last year at Davos he'd just gotten back from 177 days in space. He drives home lesson number one: that big solutions require big collaborations. I’ll let him explain more.

Matthias Maurer, ESA. We need to bring the decision makers together. We need to bring the scientists together because it's quite often that we have science on one side, the experts, but they don't really have the oversight or not the direct contact to the decision makers. And that that's also one of the reasons why I'm here in Davos, trying to connect to decision makers, trying also to lobby for what we can do to help them solve their problems. Our problems, I should say.

As an astronaut, my leadership training focusses very much on international cooperation and collaboration. By doing things together, we are way more efficient. We can solve problems that nobody can solve on its own. And looking at planet Earth, and especially from the vantage point of space, our planet is so small, but it's the only place that we have where we can live. So we need to take care of it. And that only works if we all work together.

To put it in space terms, we learned our space station, the International Space Station, can only be safe if we all work together as one team. We have Russians, we have Americans, Canadians, Japanese, Europeans, and many guests from other countries. And we demonstrated that for the last 20 years, on a day-to-day basis, what we can achieve by working together. And for us looking down to planet Earth, we see our planet is also a spaceship, just a bigger one. And for us, it's somehow supernatural to believe that fighting or war is absolutely no solution to no problem at all. We need to work together. We need to establish again a basis where we can cooperate for peaceful means.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: The second lesson Davos leaders have driven home to me is to make time for connection. So many leaders I have interviewed have stressed how important it is to meet new people and get new perspectives. You can do that in any role, no matter where you are based. Here's Roy Jakobs, the CEO of health tech company Royal Philips, on a way to check in with yourself to make sure you're making that happen.

Roy Jakobs, Royal Philips: I think there's a very honest moment if you just look at where you spent your time. Yeah. So as a leader, I think if you look into what you are busy with when you go through your week and when you realise that you are being left by the day-to-day and at the end of the week you might have an afternoon left for your strategy, you're definitely not on the right path.

So, I think be upfront about your planning, make sure that you actually box the time to really think, actually to reflect and also to engage. Because the other thing I think which is crucial for thinking about long-term is actually do take the wider perspective. And for that actually you need to be out there.

So actually being here at the WEF is therefore an excellent opportunity where you can engage with all the different stakeholders around the ecosystem to actually get their perspectives and also to jointly define how you take this up, because no one can solve these challenges by themselves. You cannot do that as a leader in your organisation because you need to actually have your organisation coming with you along, but also if you serve the health care system, actually, you cannot do that as a technology provider alone. You need to think about the nurse, you need to think about the doctor, about the funder, the government that actually has certain requirements. How do you serve it across the different places around the world? So, I think taking that partnership approach is really fundamental.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Alex Liu is the managing partner and chairman and global consultancy Kearney. I was struck by a comment he made last year on the polycrisis and it’s relevant to leaders no matter the year, no matter the economic climate and no matter the geopolitical climate. It brings us to our latest lesson: the solution to any problem is to leverage the power of people.

Alex Liu, Kearney: None of these problems that we have out in the world, these polycrisis, permacrises, are going to be solved unless the people have the energy to actually solve that. That to me is the big bottleneck.

So a big issue for businesses and leaders is how do you unlock the people power. You know, this joy power, Because it's just too hard.

If you're in the middle of the company, which is where the power of the company actually resides. These are the people that actually get stuff done. They say no, they resource, they don't resource. They agree or they don't agree passively. I'm not going to promote someone who doesn't look like me. I'm not going to fix a supply chain that's been fine for 50 years. Nothing's going to happen. No progress will be made.

So, I think the number one issue is getting everyone bought into whatever your business vision is. The crises, the opportunities, the three-year plan, the ESG imperative, you know, the geopolitical shocks, the resiliency of your inventory and your pricing and your customer strategy, these are all solvable, manmade human-made problems.

So getting the people on board is right.

There's going to be another set of challenging issues that we would not have foresaw three months from now. I don't even want to go down that list. That's a wargaming exercise that can be done academically. But the real world leaders have to make decisions and lead their people in times that are partly cloudy like now. so that when it does become partly sunny they can hit it hard and avoid the rainy day.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Ashleigh Streeter-Jones is the Founder and CEO of social enterprise Raise Our Voice Australia, helping to make sure that elected leaders better reflect the people they represent. She drove home to me lesson 4: the ultimate opportunity leadership presents: to rise to the occasion. Here’s Ashleigh.

Ashleigh Streeter-Jones, Raise Our Voice Australia: I strongly believe that the role of public leaders is to lift the floor, not just smash the ceiling. I think that we need to be creating better outcomes for everybody. And there's nothing wrong with being the first. Being the first is a great thing. But what I'm fundamentally invested in is the last. I want to see the last person living in poverty, the last girl who can't go to school because of the leadership in her country or because of period poverty. I strongly believe that we need to be bringing all people with us and we can't move forward if such a big portion of the world is held behind.

Many of our challenges, of course, are global and it does require us to work together and it requires public leaders to be brave, to be bold, to think really critically about the challenges that we are facing, and also challenge their understanding of these problems. We don't get it right all the time and we must be open to admitting mistakes. I think that's fundamental for trust between public leadership and civic society. But also look for spaces to go back to people, to check in with them, to see if we are making the difference that we want to make in lifting that floor as we make some of these courageous and sometimes very hard decisions.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: AI was already becoming a hot topic last year when I talked to Priya Lakhani. She's the founder and Chief Executive at Century Tech. She has a platform that uses artificial intelligence and neuroscience to create constantly adapting pathways that better educate students in schools and universities. She reminded me of something all leaders can stand to hear again and again: we should embrace the game changing tech, but we should never forget the problems you're trying to solve. Here’s Priya.

Priya Lakhani. Century Tech: I think to start from the problem that you want to solve. Start from what we know our goals are as a policy leader and then think, okay, how can I enable that using these solutions and these technologies? Or what can we go to innovators with and say, “Hey, we need solutions to this?”

Because what you find here, for example, is it's swarming with innovators. The World Economic Forum is a place where people, very much what I've seen, you're not forwarding your own agenda. You're not there. People aren selling their businesses.

We're here to move forward and we want to move the dial. So come with these problems, come with these goals. And there are lots of people that want to help solve those for you.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: I spoke to Achim Steiner ahead of the May 2022 Davos. He heads up the United Nations Development Programme. His work puts him into contact with leaders of all stripes all around the world - and he talked about how those meetings have shaped him and inspired him, and the importance of all leaders to build hope.

Achim Steiner, UNDP: I am somebody who has been inspired by so many individuals that I have had. I had the privilege of meeting in my work sometimes community leaders, visionary reformers, a new president who, you know, after years of living under a dictatorship or an authoritarian regime, suddenly politics changes. They are given the opportunity to lead the country.

But I'm also somebody who has often thought of people like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela or Wangari Maathai, not as the people they were by the time they were at the end of their lives, so to speak, but who they were when they were literally no one. You know, Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa got beaten up in the streets. Nelson Mandela got locked up for almost three decades in a jail. And Wangari Maathai began as a young girl in a village in Kenya and became a Nobel Prize laureate.

These stories, I think, you know, are not unique. They are not singular. They're in their thousands every day. Not everybody becomes famous. So that is my conviction for why we need to give hope to people. We need to give them reasons for optimism.

That is not always to say things are okay. Things are not okay. But people can change the world and movements don't start with a million people marching. They start with one person talking to the next person, and before you know it, you have movements and you have citizen power. And I think that ultimately is in some of the worst moments in history, what has allowed us to step back from the precipice and look for better ways forward?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You've worked with top leaders around the world. How have those experiences changed how you lead?

Achim Steiner, UNDP: Well, first of all, when you have the privilege of working for the United Nations and therefore have the ability to literally visit countries across the globe, meet people in completely different settings from your own. I think one of the things you learn is that you need to carry a great deal of empathy with you.

I think empathy is a very defining element of credible leadership because, leaders sometimes are judged by how loudly they speak or how, you know, confidently they project. That's a communication skill, but true leadership, I think and the way people responded to it, is if I have the feeling that somebody actually listened to me first is informed by what I might think and then forms their opinion about what their role is in this context, be it in a company or in a society or on a particular issue.

So I think, having grown up, professionally speaking in so many different parts of the world, I've had the privilege of living in many communities, societies and countries over the last 30 years certainly has changed my outlook and it has made me, I think, far more, of a listener than I would have been without that.

Secondly, I think authenticity. None of us, I think, should pretend that we have all the solutions. I think what people expect from us is a degree of honesty and integrity that perhaps authenticity best captures. Because honesty is a foundational part of how people rely that trust you and trust is fundamental to leadership. And frankly speaking, I also once attended an executive development programme at some of the best business schools of the world that the then World Bank president Jim Wolfensohn had organized for world bank staff and invited some externals to participate.

And I was already struck then that, you know, the principles of good leadership are actually not fundamentally different, whether you are a CEO in a company, whether you are a minister or a prime minister, or whether you're a leader in a civil society organization or a movement.

And I think that is something that, to me, it has been quite revealing because it shows that leadership, ultimately, is something that has a great deal to do with how people see you and how you are able to interact with people. And, you know, everything else flows from that.

I think the willingness to look at something for a moment from a totally different vantage point simply broadens your own spectrum, your own understanding. I think I certainly am not a teacher about listening. These are just my own, let's say, reflections on how encounters between people that sometimes believe they have nothing that they agree on or nothing in common, can start on a very different footing, if one takes that kind of approach.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Makhtar Diop is the managing director of the International Finance Corporation. We talked last year about moving forward in a world wracked by economic, geopolitical and climate crises. As we continue to grapple with these challenges, we can remember the lesson he drove home to me. crisis is an opportunity to help the underserved. I'll let him explain.

Makhtar Diop, International Finance Corporation: With the right reforms and the right measures and the right coordination internationally, we can really make progress and be able to tackle them.

In spite of this difficult time, some progress has been made by some countries in electricity access. To accelerate this progress, the world needs to really put much more resources towards less advanced countries. We need to really be less risk-averse when it comes to investing in developing countries and somewhere somehow realise that things will not be a repeat of the past.

This crisis is an opportunity to change fundamentally and structurally the role of some of the countries in the world economy and to make sure that developing countries are an integral part of the supply chain and are given opportunity to increase the value addition of the products that they are generating in the economy.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader We’ll tie things up with David Rubenstein. He's the co-founder of global private equity firm The Carlyle Group and host of Bloomberg's The David Rubenstein Show. He’s written his own book on leadership and has more than 20 Annual Meetings under his belt. When we talked ahead of the spring Davos in 2022 - the only one to be held without the snow and ice - he talked about the courage that’s needed to make change happen - and making sure you have a vision that others are compelled to follow. Here’s David.

David Rubenstein, Carlyle Group: Why do people want to be leaders? Presumably it's because they think they can do something useful for humanity. But sometimes people are more interested in doing something useful for themselves.

But sometimes a profile in courage is required, and there aren't as many profiles in courage as I would like to see. And sometimes you just have to do something that you think is the right thing to do, even if in the end it's unpopular. I think if you do that, you're more likely to be proud of what you've done with your life, as opposed to just saying I was a congressperson or senator for X number of years. But you've got to plough through that resistance if you're actually going to accomplish anything. And nothing was ever done that's meaningful in life without somebody providing some resistance to it. But if you're going to change the status quo, you got a push. And so pushing something forward is not that easy to do. And it takes some courage sometimes and willingness to sacrifice your position.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: If you were going to define leadership, what would you say?

David Rubenstein, Carlyle Group: Leadership is when somebody or some organisation, but typically one person, is trying to get other people to follow him or her towards a goal. So, you're trying to say, I want you to march here, I want you to do this. I want you to have this thought. I want you to understand this. It's when you're trying to convince people to do something that they might not otherwise do.

And so unless you're really able to push somebody forward, you're not really going to be a leader. You've got to figure out how to cultivate people and get them to do something they might not otherwise do. And that's what leadership is all about.

We're advancing in many ways, and as we advance, we can advance slowly or we can advance better ways. Or are we going to bounce in bad ways? But we should figure out how to advance in a good way. And that's what we should probably want our leaders to do, is try to figure out how to convince civilisation and move civilisation forward in a progressive way.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Those are just some of my top Davos leadership moments. Find a transcript of this episode - as well as transcripts from my colleagues’s podcast Radio Davos - at wef.ch/podcasts.

Me and my colleagues are covering the Annual Meeting all week so make sure to follow on social media with the hashtag #WEF24 or online at www.weforum.org.

This episode of meet the leader was produced and presented by me with Juan Torran as studio engineer for interviews recorded at Davos. Taz Kelleher served as editor, and Gareth Nolan drove studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.