1/23/2024 0 Comments Gerd leonhard speaker![]() ![]() The pursuit of profit and growth built the modern world. Capitalism is both the biggest source of prosperity as well as the greatest threat If the stock markets around the globe continue to incentivise short-term profits and perpetual growth at the expense of ‘people and planet‘, the future of our children will be bleak. After all, who can do business on a broken planet? While the rising tide can usually floats all boats, the absence of any water whatsoever will equally impact anyone, rich or poor. This kind of thinking (sorry, Milton) has led us to the anthropocene – it's an outmoded and increasingly harmful leftover of the industrial economy. ![]() To tackle these existential problems, we must address the underlying operating system that created them: Extreme corporate capitalism and Milton Friedman’s enormous influence on the outmoded principle of ‘ shareholder return above all else‘Īs we stand here today looking back at the past 14 months, it is now glaringly obvious that ‘ shareholder return‘ simply can no longer be more important than everything else. Fixing the broken incentives of corporate capitalism will require a complete system overhaulĪlbert Einstein once said, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” And when it comes to problems like climate change, income inequality, polarization, disinformation and algorithmic manipulation we couldn’t agree more. And as Gerd likes to say, Covid-19 a mere test run for the challenges we are facing from climate change ( Moving Beyond Corona has been Gerd's most requested speaking topic of 2020/21). While the crisis has served as a major accelerant of many positive trends (such as faster digital transformation and increased climate change awareness), it has also forced us to pay more attention to those enormous challenges we've been facing for quite some time, already, such as underfunded healthcare systems, unequal access to education, and an over-reliance on just-in-time manufacturing. ![]() All of the trends such as remote work / WFH, the move to digital/virtual everything (watch: ‘ The end of Analog’), and the increasing gap between productivity increases due to technological innovation, on the one hand, and workers' stagnant compensation and declining economic perspectives, on the other hand, were already present prior to Covid. None of the consequences of Covid-19 are entirely new. But is that really possible, and is it really what we want – or indeed, what we need? Was the good old ‘Normal’ really good enough? Was the world really doing that well ‘before covid' – considering the growing political polarization, increasing inequality (especially in the US and Brazil), and the escalating climate crisis? Could it be that because of the hardships and pains of the Corona crisis, we’ve talked ourselves into believing that ‘Normal’ was good enough in the first place? Covid has amplified both the divisive as well as the unifying forces in our society ![]() The myth that many people want to believe is that things will somehow go ‘ Back to Normal’ – that sooner or later, the world will return to its pre-pandemic ways. But then, Covid-19 struck and changed everything as half the world went into lock-down, economies and supply-chains ground to a halt, unemployment skyrocketed, and the world suffered its greatest health/humanitarian crisis since World War II. Written by Gerd Leonhard and Matt Ward Covid-19 has accelerated the demise of traditional corporate capitalismĢ019 was a year of great prosperity and innovation, with stock markets booming, democracy largely thriving (well, apart from what went down in Trump's USA), and unemployment at near-record lows throughout much of the developed world. ![]()
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