Back to Davos: How Leadership Can Mend the Gaps

Another January brings all the hope and challenge of a new year, and after an inspiring 2016 of meeting with Mercer clients around the globe, I’m headed back to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

This year’s Forum is January 17-20, and things have never seemed riper for WEF’s critical mass of insight. In WEF’s words, ours is “an interconnected world where breakthrough technologies, demographic shifts and political transformations have far-reaching societal and economic consequences. More than ever, leaders need to share insights and innovations on how to best navigate the future.”

The future certainly belongs to those who respond to the challenge of the present. Responsive – and responsible – leadership is a daily goal, and I’m encouraged by the Davos leadership efforts Mercer and our parent company, MMC, will make. We innovated in past years at WEF, spearheading the gender equality conversation with data and direction from our When Women Thrive initiative, and we’ll build on that momentum with a January 17 private executive briefing led by Mercer’s global leader, Pat Milligan. Our scheduled panel includes Iris Bohnet of Harvard Kennedy School, Anne Finucane of Bank of America, Alan Jope of Unilever, and Steve Singh of SAP. Mending the gender gap is a crucial priority for business, and so is the financial security of the people who give life to our organizations. Responsive leaders know this. So this year at Davos we’re asking them to focus on global retirement systems. Decisive action is demanded from all stakeholder groups if we’re going to mend the global pensions gap, as corporate pensions, public pensions, and individual savings go underfunded in a volatile economy. Mercer’s health and wealth business leader, Jacques Goulet, leads our January 18 private executive briefing, joined by PensionDanmark CEO, Torben M?ger Pedersen, Old Mutual Emerging Markets Finance Director and Interim CEO, Iain Williamson, and Omada Health CEO and Co-Founder, Sean Duffy.

The leadership goal, as always, is to bring insight to the challenge, so we’ll focus on public pensions, as uniquely tracked by the one of the key innovations we introduced in 2009, the Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index (MMGPI); and private pensions, as tracked by Mercer’s monthly funded status report and pension buyout index. Perhaps most importantly, individual savings will be addressed by Mercer’s new Inside Employees’ Minds? Financial Wellness research, to be unveiled at WEF, in an effort to understand the motivation behind employees’ decision making regarding their personal finances.

Such research tools for complex problems are vital to leadership. But I’m just as inspired – and encouraged – by the simplicity of what financial analyst Rawan Al-Butairi of Saudi Aramco wrote for WEF’s 2016 Global Shaper essay competition. She argues that responsible leadership boils down to two things.

The first is to manage globalization to be more inclusive. The second is for leadership to have “…an intrinsic desire to maximize the economic pie to create opportunities....” These are values that resonate for me and for my Mercer and MMC colleagues. Let’s hope they flourish this year – at WEF and beyond.

Julio Portalatin