Leadership during crisis - Futurist Gerd Leonhard, April 18, 2020

We're now moving into an entirely different world. There's a world before Corona, and there's a world after Corona. And everybody that's out there waiting, basically saying, you know, we're gonna wait this out and it's gonna go back to normal, will be heavily disappointed, right? I read up on this yesterday, and Bill Gates says 18 months for a vaccine. Other people are saying 2 years for kind of an economic recovery. So you may be able to go back to a restaurant, you may be able to go into a small venue, but traveling like we used to, 1,000-people events, music, you know, people are suffering for money, this is a real deep cut. And this cut requires leadership. It requires us to do things that we didn't used to do before, like this, right? This is what we're doing now. So we are working remotely, which is bizarre when you think about it, because it's very hard to actually connect with people. You know, like I do usually on stage, I see people crying or falling asleep. I can react to it here, but I can't see you. So I think this is a new way of working that requires different kind of leadership. And I've recently started calling this the kind of area that we're in right now, not the Great Depression, which some people are saying, or the Great Recession, but I'm calling this the Great Transformation. I think we're going to take all the pieces of the ecosystem that we had before, money, healthcare, government, security, safety, energy, and all of that is in the process of reboot, right? Just imagine, for example, the role of government, you know, how dramatically that will be enlarged in the future, whether we like it or not. I mean, that's of course, if you have an autocratic government, that could not be such a good thing, right? But the role of government is growing. And this is crucial, I think we can expect that to be a major, major thing in the future, this sort of great transformation of things that's coming. And I think it's really quite clear, this quote here from Milton Friedman, which I don't usually like quoting, but Milton said this years ago, and I think the '60s, "Only crisis produces real change." And when that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. And that's what leadership is to me. The ideas that are lying around today, we have to put them out there because this is the time where people are going to say, "What is lying around, right? What can we do that is different than before?" We're not gonna go back to the old normal from last year, no matter what we're saying in terms of economic projection. There's so many things like, for example, once people are used to working from home, you know, will they continue to work from home? Yes, yeah. Do they have to ask their bosses for permission? And then of course we have huge power shifts in politics, right? I call this the Suez moment for the US. You know, the Suez moment was for the UK in the '50s when they didn't react correctly what happened with the Suez Canal, right? And then afterwards, the UK was no longer an empire. And now we're here in America, we can safely say America will no longer be an empire for many, many reasons, right? But for reasons of saying, how did they react to this crisis? I mean, we'll talk about that later, right? Losing leadership. Losing leadership on this topic is a Suez Canal moment for the US. And now we have Harari, for example, the Israeli author. He writes that in this battle against the virus that humanity lacks leadership. And I would say that's partly true and partly not true, but it's a little bit polarized right now. But I do see people coming out and taking leadership that I didn't expect. And also positive things, but generally speaking, that is a concern, especially for us here in Europe. This is the European map, just in case you didn't recognize it. So Europe, I mean, this is the make-it-or-break-it moment for Europe. I mean, what we need in my view is unconditional solidarity to show leadership to absolutely everyone. $500 billion in all kinds of whatever they come up with, that's not gonna be enough. It's $2 trillion in the US. We're gonna have to figure out how to take leadership and the Commission needs to really get on with it. And the Germans and the Dutch and, you know, we need solidarity, right? This is true leadership in the age of crisis. Because this kind of idea that I've talked about for years, this is either gonna happen now, which I think it will, or it's gonna crumble. Because the Commission and the European government really has to make sure that we feel united. If you can say one thing about America, right, Americans usually do the wrong thing, this is what, the right thing, is what Winston Churchill said, but after they've exhausted all other possibilities. Which is an interesting quote, right? So you can see they have $2 trillion now coming in funds, right? And this is, by the way, this is kind of like, you know, we are dumbstruck. We need to really step this up and come together as a European nation because in the end, this is what is defeating the virus, right? Global collaboration, Leadership in healthcare, leadership in science, believing in science, you know, this has sort of gotten lost in America to some degree, right? And that is the future of connecting with each other. Look at this stat here from Statista. Half a billion people could be pushed into poverty. This is why I don't think we're gonna go back to normal. I mean, here in Switzerland, we don't have poverty in that way that you have, but think about Brazil, India, Nigeria, and that wave of COVID is just about to hit them. We're gonna need some serious leadership to equalize and create equality after this. This is a huge opportunity, but also clearly solidarity over money. That's a tough one for Germany, for example, given what has happened in Greece before. So the other thing that's coming after COVID is this, right? I mean, we have to be sure that this is the next big crisis. It's gonna be another pandemia, of course we will have those, but climate change is 1,000x of the challenge of Corona. And it's right here. Now we're learning how we can do emergency things like stay at home. The next thing is going to be climate emergency, carbon taxes for flying, and that is going to take a huge amount of leadership. Imagine just politicians, public officials, mayors, ourselves. And clearly climate change is the next big thing coming up. So yeah, I would safely say that the future is not an extension of the present. No matter what you think of the present as being good or bad, the future will be different because all of the conditions are changing around it. And right now I would say as a futurist, right now is the time where it's almost impossibly hard to say anything about the future, 'cause it's all up for short-term change, could go either way. I think we need to have leaders that understand the future. Political leaders, practical leaders, business leaders. And when you watch Bill Gates, for example, he's been on various shows last week, you can clearly realize that he has an idea of what's coming. An intuition, an imagination, not just a calculation. And here's the good thing. In the world's fight against corona, female leaders are showing the way. This has been a fantastic thing the last 3 months, not just Merkel, but of course Jacinda in New Zealand, then of course Finland's Sanna Marijn in Denmark, in Belgium, in Iceland. I think this is clearly showing now the combination of EQ and IQ that men are sometimes missing, and women are coming in and taking over. I think this is the future. And younger people. And we see that happening everywhere. And I think this is the end of populism, by the way, also as another discussion point. I'm gonna wrap up by saying, here in beautiful Switzerland, where I'm sitting right now, my view isn't quite like this, but the trust question is a big question. And you can safely say that Swiss people generally trust the government a lot. This is completely different than many other countries. Also, of course, because we're a rich country, right? But again, Harari says about this, today humanity faces the crisis not just because of the virus, but due to the lack of trust between humans. And I think this is one thing we have to do as leaders. We have to generate the trust between humans. And that's how we're gonna get to solutions. And that's, in my view, very much a human thing. So here, this is a piece of content taken from our latest movie on COVID-19, the post-corona future. So I think what we need to do is reinvent. This is a great time to reinvent. To talk to each other, collaborate, to go on with our lives, to trust each other— very, very big point, I think— and to also be human. I think this is the key part. The last part is the key part because I think it is human to make mistakes, but it's not such a good idea to keep repeating mistakes.