Building Bridges in a Fragmented World Economy: The Role of Companies and Business Leaders

This is a highlights video from the conference Building Bridges in a Fragmented World Economy: The Role of Companies and Business Leaders, organized by IESE Business School and Social Trends Institute. In the video, Michael Morris, Professor at Columbia University, explained that today’s tribalism is often misunderstood and argued that human survival had depended more on cooperation than on hostility toward other groups. Sarianna Lundan, Professor at Aalto University School of Business, drew attention to regions and cities that had been left behind economically and warned that this exclusion had fueled more extreme political thinking and deeper fractures within societies and economies. Klaus Meyer, Professor at Ivey Business School, described how weakened property rights, poor law enforcement and unpredictable policies had increased risks for firms, especially in populist environments. Sebastian Reiche, Professor at IESE Business School, examined how governments’ growing intervention in the private sector, through subsidies and tariffs, had been reshaping trade, investment and the business landscape. And Yih-Teen Lee, also a Professor at IESE Business School reflected on the possible decline of US dominance and the disruptive effects this shift could have had on the global order. Jordi Canals, Professor at IESE Business School, explained that the conference, organized by IESE together with the Social Trends Institute, had sought to understand the cultural, political, social and economic drivers of fragmentation and to explore how scholars and business leaders could reconnect across divides. Álvaro Cuervo-Cazurra, Professor at Northeastern University, noted that state capitalism is not new and had placed current developments within a broader historical cycle of stronger government intervention. Francisco Reynés, Chairman & CEO of Naturgy, highlighted the growing strategic importance of regulation, raw materials, technology and trade flows, and argued that Europe needs to adapt to a world in which win-win assumptions can no longer be taken for granted. José Viñals, Former Deputy-Governor at Spain’s Central Bank, described how companies had responded by becoming more national, moving from global to regional footprints, or diversifying supply chains and…