Tim Renner and me have cooked up a cool new offer for clients who want something different than the usual keynotes: Tim and me will present for 15 minutes each, followed by a moderated discussion with live audience interaction. Check out the PDF!
More about Tim and Gerd here and here.
Capitalism as we know it is not sustainable and has no future. All around us, exponential technological advances are reconstituting business models, reshaping consumption habits, upending politics, questioning our limitations, and challenging our assumptions about work, jobs and education.
Is there such a thing as ‘sustainable capitalism’? What could that even look like?
In the West, our traditional economic model more or less got us through the 20th Century, but will it stand up to a world where ten billion people are connected to very-high-speed internet, where 70% of all new jobs are yet to be invented, and where intelligent machines do most of the routine work?
Our world is being redefined by powerful, global technology platforms that are revolutionising literally everything around us: What we read, see and hear, how we make decisions, how we travel, how we communicate… from commerce to agriculture to media and healthcare. These companies are immensely powerful: they employ Millions of people, they are the top-spenders in government-lobbying, and of course they are the top performers on the stock markets around the globe.
We’re still mostly enthralled by them, yet some of their practices and unintended consequences are clearly starting to threaten our democratic process, eroding our social contracts and gradually dehumanising our society.
Over the last century, “shareholder primacy” remained the conventional business wisdom. Times have changed. That change, you might recall started with a speech Bill Gates gave in Davos in 2008, in his last year of full-time service at Microsoft, calling for a new “creative capitalism.” Capitalism, it seemed, was desperately in need of a make-over. Gerd and Tim are now asking the fundamental questions about how well capitalism is serving society in a world full of abundance and exponential technological change. Today, 64% of Americans believe that a company’s “primary purpose” should include “making the world better”. 41% of Fortune 500 CEOs are saying that solving social problems should be part of their core business, and capitalism’s crisis of purpose has prompted as much soul-searching among authors, futurists and academics as it has in boardrooms.
In this riveting session, Tim Renner (a leading German politician) and Gerd Leonhard (a global futurist, author and humanist) will discuss the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, each offering unique insights on what we need to do to make sure that human flourishing remains the core objective of all technological progress.
