The World Economic Forum gets going tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, but due to a clerical error and/or an extremely generous interpretation of the word “young,” I am a member of group called the Young Global Leaders (YGLs) of the World Economic Forum. And today is the big YGL day. We spent the afternoon trying to solve the global financial and economic crisis. We did not succeed, and now it’s time for drinks and dinner. But I’ll record a couple of things I learned this afternoon.
1) YGLs ♥ Barack Obama. Really. Lots of them think he’s some kind of new template for global leadership.
2) Non-profit organizations are being swamped with job applications from bankers. But what they really need are job applications from agricultural scientists. I think the skill set is similar enough, don’t you?
3) There’s widespread agreement that global governance needs to somehow look different and be more distributed and diverse and effective. But even Young Global Leaders don’t have any clear idea of how to make that happen. Which I guess fits with the argument that governance needs to be more distributed and diverse.
Anyway, I’ll try to deliver less-glib observations later, but my half-hour Swisscom Web connection is about to run out, plus I need a drink.