The Power to Convene

Guest post by Erika Karp, Managing Director and the Head of Global Sector Research for UBS Investment Bank. In his play The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare wrote  “If to do, were as easy as to know what were good to do, then churches had been chapels and poor men’s cottages princes palaces.”  In the context of today’s capital markets, the message seems perfectly clear. Vision, mission, and strategy might be easy to state.  But actually executing on them is another matter entirely.  It’s obvious that for the world’s leading economies, companies, academic institutions, governments, regulatory authorities, NGO’s, economic think-tanks and every other part of civil society, facilitating economic growth and global prosperity is a good thing to do. We know that. But how can we get it done? Are all these entities optimally leveraging their most important capability towards executing on the promise?  And what is their most salient, obvious power anyway? It is perhaps simply “the power to convene.” But this begs the question of whether this power is being deployed optimally. This power can potentially do much more. In recent months we’ve seen the “power to convene” exercised to a good degree around the world. For instance, in Dubai last month Klaus Schwab the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF) opened the 2012 Summit on the Global Agenda by welcoming hundreds of Council members to the globe’s largest brainstorming session which has the modest objective of improving the state of the world.  Schwab emphasized a further erosion of unilateral power and formal structures, a technological revolution with dramatic redefinition of employment opportunities, and the broad based acceleration of the complexity of global challenges.  He called for definitive progress in transparency, diversity, and interdisciplinary collaboration.  In this precursor to Davos which sought to elicit practical solutions to intractable problems, Schwab argued as he has for forty years, that unprecedented change implies unprecedented opportunity. This summit did indeed highlight the extraordinary “power to convene”. But will that power fully be brought to bear? At the WEF Council on Financing and Capital on which I participate, we assessed the role of financial institutions in modern society. We attacked the issue of how to facilitate sustainable economic growth. Economic growth which at the same time can address massive societal, environmental and governance challenges. The barriers are myriad; not the least of which is resolving the mis-match of both scale and time horizon for funding small and medium size enterprises around the world. The work of ours and many of the other Councils are extraordinarily interdependent. Conventions such as the Forum generate ideas on subjects ranging from harnessing the power of Hyper-connectivity, Big Data, Design Innovation, Nanoscience and Personalized Medicine, to addressing the urgent need for Social Security Systems, Climate Change, Water Scarcity, Women’s Economic Empowerment, and Fostering Entrepreneurship. And all the progress from each endeavor to generate ideas will depend solely upon actual execution. And there’s the rub. All the meetings, all the brain storming, all the good intentions will amount to naught without great tactics and individual responsibility to execute on strategies both large and small. Together, great leaders, strong tactics, aligned incentives, accountability, appropriate metrics, and personal commitment will be the only way for all this tremendous “power to convene” to truly drive progress. In recent days, the power has been displayed by the European Central Bank with the many meetings of Finance Ministers, by the White House with a recent “Forum on Busines Innovation” and meetings with leaders regarding the fiscal crisis, by leading financial institutions with various industry investment conferences, and by United Nation’s Global Compact LEAD companies and institutional investor signatories of the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment. Is the progress to date from each towards its respective mission enough such that the power to convene has been realized to its fullest?  The potential absolutely exists for an exponential benefit from the networking of all these diverse networks.  Practioners from each of the disciplines represented at these events can take the ideas from the “thinkers” and leverage them with the “doers”.  And very importantly, those with the “power to convene” also need to exercise their power to listen.  That power can too often be forgotten and neglected.  Back to the comments of Professor Schwab from the World Economic Forum, it will be transparancy, diversity, and collaboration combined with very specific individual commitment to action which will ultimately harness the tremendous “power to convene” to more fully achieve the promise of sustainable economic development. Originally published in Forbes.