Meet Dominic Barton, the leader leaders summon.

I know at least half of this room has employed Dominic Barton at one point or another. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Davos, 2016 

Dominic who? Who is this Canadian that half the elite at Davos have called upon to share insights and grant wishes? He's Dominic Barton, the Global Managing Director of McKinsey & Company (don't call him a CEO) and he is a man worth listening to. 

Dominic Barton was born in Uganda to Canadian parents, grew up in Canada, and has lived and worked in Asia, the UK and Australia. In the past year, he traveled 300 days to 50 countries around the world. A Rhodes scholar, Dominic Barton doesn't think about pinpricks in time when the market reacts to the latest crisis, but contemplates where the world is headed over the next twenty to thirty years. 

Every day Dominic Barton makes a point of speaking to at least two leaders--CEOs or heads of government--asking what's on their minds. Given his experience, knowledge and privileged position as a front-row student of leadership, Dominic Barton should be among the pantheon of celebrity business leaders, but he's not. He keeps a low profile and speaks mostly to academic audiences, pausing frequently to apologize for blatting on.

Perhaps because he's soft spoken and his father was a missionary, Dominic Barton is sometimes referred to as a "choirboy". Or perhaps it's because, while he was head of McKinsey in South Korea, he put an end to firm-funded excursions to whorehouses--a practice known as fücking up the clients. Months after he became global director, when a high-profile insider trading scandal rocked the firm, Dominic Barton prohibited McKinsey employees from investing in client companies, and forced them to undergo training in investment rules. The choirboy was accused of turning McKinsey into a "nanny state".

Those who know him well say that Dominic Barton leads with "personal passion and vision" and speaks with such heart-felt values of optimism, humility and humanity that people are compelled to follow him. In his speeches, he shares a wealth of wisdom that you don't often hear in the business media, wisdom that is often framed in jaw-dropping statistics:

More children will be born in Nigeria this year than in all of Europe. Dominic Barton advises freshly-minted graduates to consider getting experience in the emerging markets of Africa (Nigeria and Ethiopia) and Asia where youth, vitality and commerce will flourish as the rest of the world struggles with more people over 65 than under 14. Trade routes are shifting back to the Silk Road, to the Eastern trade route of 1000 years ago that ran from Turkey to China, and economic power is shifting with it. 

The average washing machine today has more computing power than NASA used in its Apollo 11 mission in 1969.  Technology is moving two to three times faster than management, and some of the biggest innovations in big data are happening in China that has twice as many internet users and more e-commerce than the USA.

If you're not learning, you're dying. In the future, finishing school in your twenties with a degree or two will be considered laughable. People will have four or five degrees sprinkled over a lifetime.

Think in cities, not countries. McKinsey keeps databases on over 4000 cities worldwide. What's the #1 city for launching a sports drink? New York? San Francisco? LA? Try Chongqing. Companies should think of China as 22 clusters of cities--Chinese cities will fuel more than a quarter of world's GDP growth to 2025. 

Diabetes is the largest liability on government balance sheets.

400 million tourists trips are coming from China. When Dominic Barton retires, he says he's going to set up a travel business in Vancouver to cater to intrepid Chinese.

You can't control hungry people. In 5000 years of Chinese history, all crisis can be traced to food price inflation in excess of 14 percent. Food, water and energy represent the largest opportunities...and geopolitical threats...over the next twenty years as 2.2 billion people are added to the global middle class, a force a thousand times greater than the industrial revolution.

The average length of time a stock is held has dropped from seven years to seven months. Institutional investors, many of which are pension funds, have disproportionate power (they represent 25% of investors and 65% of Fortune 1000 ownership) and a notoriously short-term focus that force companies to value a similarly short-term perspective. Dominic Barton is opposed to a short-term, shareholder-first philosophy, asserting that it is narrow and unsustainable. Quoting Adam Smith he says, "It's the duty of the entrepreneur to take care of the society in which they operate."  

And, on a more whimsical note...

Could the corporate sleepover be the latest trend in performance evaluation? Jeff Imelt, CEO of GE, told Dominic Barton that he had his executive team stay, one at a time, at his home for two nights to get a sense for what they're like as people. You may be able to fake it for the performance review, but you won't be able to fake it for two whole days sleeping over at the boss's house. Mind your manners, chew with your lips closed and don't forget to make your bed in the morning.

Although you won't find him on LinkedIn, Dominic Barton is connected to the world's top business leaders. What do all the CEOs he has spoken to at the end of their careers say they wish they had known? 

They wish they had moved faster on people … taken people out faster, moved them up faster and spent more time on people…. 

CEOs may wish they had moved faster, but Dominic Barton's career at McKinsey got off to a slow start. In an "up or out" firm where you get promoted or you're out the door, Barton was rejected twice as partner. He felt like a mathematician being told that he couldn't add, an atomic scientist told he couldn't divide, a Duggar told they couldn't multiply...

I had splinters in my back from going over the bar so often … and I finally realized, you know what, I’m going to set my own bar. And I’m going to make it higher than theirs.

Dominic Barton's failures and ultimate success as he enters his third and final three-year term at the top of the consulting world has an echo in a study in which McKinsey examined employees in fine detail, trying to distill what distinguished those who were most and least fulfilled. The people who were most fulfilled had the most bad luck. Barton's advice, borne of bad luck, is to be ambitious about how you want to change the world in a positive way and to take risks. 

I'll share more about what I learned from Dominic Barton in LinkedIn updates throughout the week, but here's another snippet of wisdom from the man himself.

About the Author. Who cares about the author when the subject of this post is the most interesting man in the world? On Thursday February 4th at 11:45am Dominic Barton will be speaking to an audience at Yale (you can go to the speech via this link). The author be watching and listening. Will you?