Instead of me going to them, finally my customers came to meJ I actively participated in two working sessions, one on gender equality and one on innovation; met with several ministers from Turkey and the region; and also met with CEOs of companies we do business with. The gender equality session had a strong voice on what had to happen, but all the strong women in the room, all running companies or NGOs asked the same question, ‘where are the men to discuss these with us?’. The innovation session had a process I never experienced before. We split up based on regional segmentation and looked at how innovation can flourish in that particular region. The northern and western European regional output was that there needed to be more energy, risk taking and ‘hunger’ to succeed in these mature regions and innovation will only flourish then. The output from Middle East regions were more on the side of infrastructural issues like education system; judiciary changes as well as cultural barriers. Culturally Middle East is used to getting decisions from top and much less focus on individual and what he/she can achieve alone; hence taking initaitaive and innovation is largely curtailed. How do we change that as nations? Also a quote that I loved during the session was ‘need less government, more governance!’
My interview for Bloomberg HT about WEF