Each year, I look forward to reading the assembled perspectives contained in the essays you are about to read. While the content comes from various industries and geographies, it is always interesting to see common threads of focus across it all. How will workforces adapt to both the risks and opportunities of AI and other nascent technologies? Can we embed more democratized access—to food, energy, capital, medicine, housing—into our profit and policy motives? Can we picture a world with less carbon and cancer and more peace and promise? And as this is a compendium of ideas, all of these issues are tackled by the authors with some directional intention of formulating successful outcomes.
But I also pay attention to what’s absent—which themes that seemed so resonant in the past now seem out of vogue, or at least out of view. One subject that received a lot of play in previous editions (they are online at milkeninstitute.org) was the notion of inclusivity; that regardless of industry, addressing unfairness and leveling the playing field was a charge leaders had embraced, particularly through the racial reckoning highlighted after George Floyd’s murder and the seemingly ever-present gender disparities in pay and promotion, not to mention the ebb and flow of attacks against the LGBT+ community.
Challenges won’t disappear just because we stop talking about them, but talking about them might help them disappear.
The advent of instantaneous information and social media has drastically shortened our collective attention spans, but what if the speed with which we constantly encounter new ideas leaves insufficient time to fully remedy the old ones? Then, in our haste to move on to what’s next, we’d leave many existing problems untended and unaddressed. Those challenges of racism, sexism, and prejudice broadly won’t disappear just because we stop talking about them, but talking about them might help them disappear.
The power of this conference, and the written work in this booklet, plant the seeds of solutions, which can be debated, funded, and implemented with the people who can make change happen. Most of the issues you will hear and read about over the next few days are complex, multifaceted, and difficult to solve—but that only renders them even more important to address. Just because we stop talking about a challenge when something newer has displaced it on our to-do lists doesn’t mean it’s been fixed, and I encourage you to look for the throughlines and causal factors that contribute to these issues.
This conference is about shaping the future—please take the time to read through these essays and extract some ideas to start shaping the future you want.