Transcript: In the book, I sort of thought that the only way out would be not to try to extrapolate the nation state and _________ system all the way to the global level – because I don’t think that will work – but to actually think out of the box in terms of expert systems. In other words, not through representation systems, but expert systems. So I described in the book an idea which I call “global issues networks” where one would, for each of these 20 urgent global issues, set up a body of the world’s best experts in that area. So let’s take the example of fisheries depletion, which is a very serious problem which is about to become irreversible. The idea would be that one of the international institutions – it doesn’t matter which one because they would only be involved as facilitators . . . So if it’s fisheries depletion, it could be FAO in Rome which is a UN outfit, or the World Bank. I don’t care which one it is. They’re just facilitators. Let’s say it’s the World Bank. The World Bank would essentially gather 30 of the best experts it knows of in the fisheries management area. Ten would come from governments that have a lot of experience in fisheries management; 10 would come from the NGO area – the international civil society area – _______________; and 10 would come from business. Whether business is part of the problem or part of the solution, it doesn’t matter. Business has a lot of knowledge about fishing techniques and so forth. And these 30 experts would create sort of the beginning of a global issues network, which would then go into a second phase where some . . . another 60 experts would be co-opted. So you would have 90 – a third from government, a third from business, and a third from the NGO world. And it’s very important to say that these 90 experts would be essentially gathered by the international organization and then later by the early on experts only on the basis of their knowledge. In other terms, I happen to be from Luxembourg as we said earlier. I would not a fisheries expert from Luxembourg government to be in there because we don’t know anything about fish. But I would want an expert from Iceland, from Mauritania, from South Africa, from Portugal, from Spain to be in there. So it’s really an expert-driven . . . expertise-driven concept. And these 90 experts, once gathered, would go into a seclusion mode for two, three years. Not this off and on mode of the international system now which is very shallow; but essentially they would spend the next two or three years of their lives forgetting where they came from – whether they came from this or that government, this or that company, or this or that NGO; but represent all of us in terms of representing all of us in the humanity of this planet to solve this fisheries problem once and for all.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: I think that when you look at these various curves of sort of world population curve, or the curve that measures economic activity, you see something that rises very slowly for 2,000 years, then picks up steam around the Industrial Revolution – the old one, the 18th century one. And then you have the curve goes up and up, and now we’re in a period of human history where the curve goes straight up. Straight up meaning going suddenly from three billion people in 1960 to nine billion people in 2050. That’s an extremely fast runoff, and the same is happening on the economic front as well. And so to give you a sense of how steep the curves are, just consider the fact that for instance today, we have six billion people, as I said, on the planet. The world GDP is $40 trillion. And at this rate, we’re using 1.25 planets in terms of the ecological footprint that we have. Whereas 30, 40 years ago we were using roughly half a planet. And if you go from now, which is 2007, to 2050, and you make some modest assumptions as to what will happen in between to growth rate and population, you come up with the staggering figure that in 2050, we will have nine billion people. The world GDP will be $140 trillion. In other terms, more than three times bigger than the one we have now. And unless we do something about the ecological footprint of humanity, we’ll be at 2.25 planets, which is absolutely impossible – 1.25 is already impossible. But going towards two is the end of the system. So that is what’s happening, is that we’re now in the part of the curve where the curves go straight up. And that is absolutely unprecedented. There is nothing like this in human history before.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: I think in terms of what we need for this planet to have a future and solve these big issues before it’s too late, we need two things. We need this new methodology of some kind that I mentioned earlier, and brining up a new methodology of global problem solving. Whether it’s the global issues network idea that I mentioned or some other idea, that is for the heads of state to deliver or the Prime Minister of this world to deliver on. And individuals in that area can be active as voters, as lobbyists, as civil society and help push towards that direction. But the main way in which individuals can help is with regard to the second thing we need to have a future on this planet; and that has to do not with methodological changes, but with mindset changes. The type of individual we need from here on is an individual who feels that he or she is first a global citizen; second only a national citizen, and third only a local citizen. Right now we have it the other way around, and the other way around is deadly for this planet. And so we should all try to – through education systems, through our children, through the next generation – to push for that sort of mindset. Because without that sort of mindset – that global citizenship mindset – even the new methodology like the one I described would not be enough. You need the combination of the two.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: I remain an optimist. And my book is actually an optimistic book even though the diagnosis is quite stark. I believe that the technique I’m describing could be booted up very quickly. It’s easy to set up networks of experts. You don’t start a new institution, which would take forever. So there is something in the network technique, and in the waiting technique which is quick and efficient. And I think one could do that while keeping the existing international system, but boot up these networks on top of it and do it pretty quickly. On that I’m optimistic. Secondly I’m optimistic – and even more so when I was when I wrote the book – because something happened in terms of the awareness people have about the seriousness of the issue . . . of these issues. And that’s awareness raising. It really goes back to one or two years ago, including because of Al Gore’s movie on global warming which has caused an atmosphere in the U.S. where everyone is obsessed about global warming; where two or three years ago when I was giving speeches on this, people were yawning and believing I was overdoing it. Even the Chinese government – even though it’s not been very forthcoming on a Kyoto-like solution – will discuss in its 11th Congress social harmony and environment. So the . . . I think the atmosphere is one now where there is more awareness not only of the seriousness of these issues, but also of the fact that we need some new global governance mechanisms. Because if we leave things as they are, we will not make any progress on any of these issues. So I think the . . . I’m rather more optimistic than I would have been a few years ago. This being said, we are still far from having a real debate about the global problem solving methodology, which is a debate I think we should have at the G8 level, at the UN level, and at least among 30 or 40 heads of state. I think that is the next step. Not to discuss any of the 20 issues in itself, but to discuss how we create a more effective navigation problem for this planet in this unprecedented period that we talked about earlier where the curves are going straight up; and when you can’t afford time delays and navigation hesitancies and more.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: It’s a question that really preoccupied me when I wrote the book. In other terms, I don’t think we can do away with the nation state system. As I said, it’s brand new and it happens to work quite well for internal management of countries. And we don’t have a better system to manage a very complicated world population; but what we must find is some way to put pressure from above on the nation states and on the politicians so that they are more long term minded and more planet minding than they normally are. And when I ask myself what the source of that pressure could be, the first thing you think about is you set up . . . the setting up of a world government that would sit on top of the 185 or 190 nation states and force them to be serious about global problem solving. That solution, I think, doesn’t have a chance in the world to materialize. And if it does materialize, it would not be in this 20 year window that we have. It would be taking 50 or 100 years. And it’s probably a bad idea in the first place to have a global government. So I’m trying to find other sources of pressures from above, or from anywhere, on nation states and their politicians. And that’s . . . that is one solution going into that direction that I described in my book. Whether that solution will be enough or not, I don’t know; but it has to be in that direction we have to go. We should have a world government, but we won’t have one. So what other systems can we use to put ourselves at the nation state level, and the pressure to be much more global citizen like and much more serious about solving these big, urgent issues before it’s too late?

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: The dangerous climate change issue is one where the failure is the most glaring. It’s a failure on the U.S. side to be part of the Kyoto Treaty. And it’s a failure that actually already occurred during the Clinton presidency and was then magnified under the Bush administration later. But it wasn’t alone. Australia isn’t in the treaty, and all the big developing countries are not in it either. And China – which looked until about three weeks ago as if it was going to be interested in a second Kyoto after 2012 – now says it’s not going to do anything to damage its own growth prospect at this point. So it’s not playing ball either. And you could even argue that the Europeans, which spearheaded to Japan and others the Kyoto Treaty, were very unambitious because, as I said, the Kyoto protocol is a mouse of a treaty compared to what we really have to do to cut down emissions of carbon dioxide in order to level the concentration of carbon dioxide at about 500 parts per million 150 years from now. So no country has been very good at this. And for me that is the most preoccupying issue of the 20, and one where this failure of the nation state system to really tackle this issue is the most glaring.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: What’s holding them back is actually the problem which I consider to be the central challenge of our times. And that is that the world has been cut up into roughly 185, let’s say 190 nation states. And it’s a recent phenomenon. The nation state concept is roughly 350 years old. It goes back to the Westphalia Treaties. So it’s still a new concept, and it’s a concept that does very well for internal management of countries. A nation state that is democratically organized is actually a very good machine for solving internal issues. But the problem at the international level is that nation states are by design territorial in their perspectives. They look out for the inhabitants of their own territories, first of all. And the politicians that run for elections in those countries run for elections every four or five years, so their horizon is maximum four or five years. The global issues that I mentioned like dangerous climate change, deforestation, biodiversity losses, contagious diseases and so forth, they are the opposite. They are not territorial issues; they’re cross border issues. They’re non-territorial issues. They got all over the map, and they don’t know about borderlines and borders. And they are long term issues. To solve the global warming issue, it takes a 150 year plan to start today to actually manage the 150 years to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations. So you have this absolute clash between the territorial and short term perspective of the nation states and the non-territorial, long term nature of these global problems. And that deadly clash is something we must get out of the way one way or the other. In other terms, the nation state system, which is perfect for internal management of countries, somehow doesn’t click with global problem solving of the type we need in this period where the curves – the environmental damage curves and others – are shooting straight up.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Question: Where do governments fall short?

Transcript: As I did in my book, I analyzed some 20 global problems in some detail. And about eight of them . . . seven or eight of them were problems of sharing the planet. In other terms, the environmental issues like climate change, ozone, biodiversity losses, deforestation, water deficits and so forth. About a third of them had to do with sharing not so much the planet, but sharing our humanity. In other terms, economic and social issues that take a worldwide coalition to solve, like poverty itself; education for all, which could be the big lever to solve the other issues; peace keeping; terrorism fighting is another one; and many other such issues, including the terrifying issues of AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, SARS, avian flu and other contagious diseases; as well as natural disaster mitigations. Natural disasters are running at 15 times the rate of the 1950s. And then the third group of issues I looked at have to do with regulatory issues where you need some minimal critical mass of global rules. Biotechnology research, for instance; electronic commerce; migration and labor rights, etc. And as I looked at these issues, I found that they all had politically and technically feasible solutions, even climate change. I found that to solve them would take probably only $1 trillion a year, which is roughly three percent of world GDP, and therefore affordable, and a small number compared to the huge cost of not solving an issue like climate change. On the other hand, I find that these were issues that could not . . . We couldn’t wait 30, 40, 50 years to solve them. They had to be solved yesterday, or in five years, 10 years, maximum 20 years. So it’s a one-time window to solve them before they get out of hand, particularly the environmental issues of the first group. And the fourth thing I found is that none of them – with the exception of ozone, which is the exception that proves the rule – none of these 20 issues were seriously being solved by the international system.

Question: Why is that?

Transcript: So I asked myself, “Why is that?” and I took the international system apart into four pieces. The first piece is treaties and conventions, which is the normal way in which nation states get together to solve global issues. And that is a very slow world, and a very ritualistic world, and a very minimalist world. To give you an example, there are some 250 treaties in the environmental area alone that have been put in motion since the ‘60s. And yet there’s been no progress on any front in the environment whatsoever. And that is because treaties are either very small like Kyoto . . . Kyoto is a tiny, tiny fraction of what we ought to be doing to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations. Or the treaties are not so small, but they have a problem because many important countries are missing them. For instance, the Fisheries Treaty of December 2001 looks okay; but then 15 of the top 20 fishing nations are not in it. Or you have the treaty that looks alright, but it has no enforcement powers. So the treaty system itself does not produce the solutions to these big, global issues. The second part are the big UN summits, which are not very good at coming up with crisp solutions to issues like global warming or drug trading, etc. They’re just good at elevating awareness for a few weeks, but they’re too shallow to be good at deep down problem solving. The same goes for the third part of the international systems like the G8 – or the G20, which is an offspring of the G8 – which are the closest we have to world government, but they’re very shallow as well. They’re much more interested in announcement defects than in long term brainstorming on issues like the ones I mentioned. And finally you have 45 or so international organizations – IMF, World Bank, WTO and many UN agencies and programs. And those are doing good work like by the way the G8, and the treaties, and all the other things I mentioned. But they’re not able to take on an issue like deforestation and say, “I am the World Bank. I will now solve the deforestation problem,” because they are not independent enough from the owners of this institution, which are the 185 or so nation states. And they’re very small. Despite the fact that we often talk about the IMF and the World Bank and others as these huge bureaucratic machines, they’re very small when compared to these issues that I’m talking about. So you have a four part international system which isn’t bad in itself, but it’s not been very good at solving these global issues.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: I think it boils down to two huge forces that are dramatically changing the world, and will do so even more over the next 20, 30 years. One force that’s a dark force is the population increase where we had three billion people in 1960, five billion people in 1990, and now we’re at six billion or a little more. And we’re headed straight to nine billion by 2050. So between 1960 and 2050 we will have tripled the world population on a planet that’s already extremely stressed in terms of the environment, arable land, and even social stresses. So that’s one huge force that is a massive force of change, and that clearly plays a role in my world view. The other force is this new world economy that is based on very inexpensive telecommunications and computer technologies, which is a real industrial revolution. But unlike the earlier industrial revolutions that had to do with transforming energy or raw materials, this one goes very deep because it transforms time and distance, and it makes knowledge the biggest factor of production. And that new economy produces wonderful new things, new markets, new ways of doing things. Just think of Bangalore in India producing $15 billion worth of software services from zero 10 years ago. Think of the iPods. Think of many of these wonderful new things. But it’s also a very tough new economy where you have to be agile. You have to be good at networking. You have to be good at constantly inventing new tricks, and you have to be very liable. And so some companies, and countries, and individuals do very well in that new economy. Some fall by the wayside. So it’s a very both positive and negative force, but it’s a huge force. And we’ve probably only seen 20 percent of it. This industrial revolution based on telecoms and computer technologies still has 80 percent to go. And these two big forces, I think, overwhelm the capacity of the human institutions we have to manage them. The human institutions being nation states, the governments, the ministries, the public agencies of various kinds, the international organizations. All that human system of management is overwhelmed by these two big forces. And so I think we are seeing the beginning of a government’s gap – sort of inability to manage the forces which we ourselves have unleashed.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: As I said, being at the Bank, you’re in an outpost where you see the planet more clearly than I think in many other jobs, almost because of the design of the institution and the nature of what it does. And having been around many years at the high level, I had, I think, more of a broad view than most people have. And when I was the European Vice President with Wolfensohn, we went all over the Prime Ministers, and the Ministers, and the G8s, and the European summits and so forth. And at some point I had this feeling which I then wrote about that in a way, there was no pilot in the cockpit on many global issues; that there were these UN summits and these G8 declarations and so forth, but that in true fact, many of the big global problems – like global warming being one – were not being actively solved by the international system as we know it. And so one day I did something I did every year, which was to take a week off to write a major speech. I sat down and wrote a speech about this question of why there were some two dozen issues that were not being solved deeply enough, and fast enough; and why that was and what we could do to accelerate this global problem solving that seems to be so slow to come by. And that speech worked out fine, and then there was an extraordinary moment where Chancellor Schroeder, who was then Chancellor of Germany, asked the World Bank for a briefing, which is remarkable actually. He asked to be briefed on poverty and development issues. And so we had a meeting with him in a restaurant in Hanover – on a Sunday, I remember. Wolfensohn, Nick Stern – who then wrote this famous climate change report for the British government later – and myself, and Chancellor Schroeder and two people. And since I had organized the meeting, I had kept one hour at the back of the meeting for my ideas on global governance and global issues. And so Wolfensohn spoke for three of four hours on poverty and development, and then I started to talk about global issues. And Chancellor Schroeder was very interested, and Jim Wolfensohn was intrigued and interested as well. And in the evening when we had dinner together after a successful day with Chancellor Schroeder, I asked Wolfensohn what to do about it. And he said, “These ideas go far beyond the World Bank, so write them up under your own name.” And that led me to write the book, which is a book that was critical of the G7, of the UN and so forth; but somehow I got away with it while being in the institution as a sitting Vice President. And that shows you one more time how open minded an institution it was at the time, and I’m grateful for that. And then the book led into many speeches, and into a whole campaign on these questions. But that was the origin of it.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: Well I had a long career there. It was some 27 years. And I was . . . I think, among the 20 or so Vice Presidents, I was always the more strategic one, the more out of the box thinker. So I got the Bank into many things. I was one of those who developed its work in developing private sectors and financial sectors, which was not such a well known idea at the time – meaning improving business environments, being very systemic about strengths in banking sectors, launching capital markets in many large countries and so forth. I got the Bank . . . or I helped get the Bank into using the new technologies of telecommunications and computer technologies on a massive scale for development purposes, in education, in health, in enterprise connectivity and many other areas when this was still a gleaming . . . the first sign of an idea. I helped reorganize the Bank in ’96-’97, making it a more decentralized institution. So I was part of the sort of small team of architects at the time. And when I was still at the World Bank, this time as the European Vice President, I helped Jim Wolfensohn, who was the president at the time, make a strong push towards getting Europe and the World Bank closer to each other, because Europe is actually the largest shareholder with some 33 percent of the votes against 16, 17 percent for the U.S. And Europe to this point hadn’t realized that it was the largest shareholder. So I did a lot of things to strengthen that, and in the process launched a parliamentary assembly for the World Bank – a big effort to get close to the young population of the world on the ________ and the use of development. And I did sort of several things to connect the Bank better not only to Europe, but to constituencies like parliamentarians and others that used to be neglected constituencies of the Bank.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: Well I think I could speak for all the World Bank employees. It’s a job that is very . . . It grabs you really strongly. And you do get up early in the morning, and you look forward to a day of very interesting work. Because what could be more interesting than to work on some 150 countries, on about 100 sectors, and on global issues from such an outpost as the World Bank, which is owned by 185 countries of the world, and from which you do look at the world as if it was a whole planet – not from the country point of view but from the sort of overall, global point of view? So it’s a very interesting job to be in, and you get to learn a lot of things about a lot of countries and a lot of people. And the cultures of the institution is interesting. It’s one where there are 150 or 160 nationalities in the house and you never think about the nationality of your colleagues. You forget about it, and everyone has the same jargon and code words. And you forget that someone is Italian, or Bangladeshi or Tanzanian. So it is a little bit . . . It has the culture of the world as I would wish it to have. I would wish the world had that sort of culture one day. It’s beyond a nation state and the nationality culture. It’s one level above. And that also makes it very fascinating. And the third thing that had me taking at the World Bank, it’s a very libertarian institution. There was a lot of room for debates on what worked and what didn’t work. There were a lot of arguments – academic arguments or even practical arguments – one way or the other. And you could do many things, and I did in my time. I pioneered many news things and I was never whittled back. And that was part of the reasons why I so liked the institution.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: The World Bank was created in 1944 before the World War II saga was over. It was created together with the monetary fund – the International Monetary Fund – and what was going to be later the WTO – the World Trade Organization. In the case of the Bank, its main purpose was to borrow money on the markets – in those days Europe more than the U.S. – and to lend this money for the reconstruction of Europe and of Japan and so forth. So it was a very bold design for the times, and it did that in the ‘50s. Mostly it was in the reconstruction business. It financed reconstruction, for instance, of Toyota in Japan. Or the financing for the reconstruction of the French railway system came from there. Then in the ‘60s that reconstruction job was over. It went into developing country business – lending for hospitals, for highways, for ports, for agriculture in the developing world starting mostly in Latin America and then going worldwide. And it really became the World Bank that is known today under McNamara when McNamara came from the U.S. government to become the very famous President of the World Bank in the ‘70s. He made it grow to a much bigger place than it was originally. And originally it had less than 1,000 people in Washington. And today it has 12,000 people roughly. And he got the World Bank into social areas, into education, into health, into nutrition, into what was called basic needs, integrate rural development and so forth. And so it became the largest and most sort of broadest development institution in the world. And that it is still today, even though it’s a very much changed world, there’s still a lot of that work to be done. It still operates by borrowing money in the markets by using bonds, using the money for very long term loans which all have to do with some developing purpose. And then when the loans get reimbursed by the clients, we repay the bond holders. That’s the way the World Bank works. For the very poor countries, it has a special kitty which is not based on borrowing money. It’s based on donated money. It’s called the International Development Association window, or IDA window, and that leads to very long term loans without interest rates. Or on grand terms for very poor countries, under roughly $1,000 per person. So it’s an institution that’s sort of a bank in a way, that has a sort of financing function; but it’s also full of people who have a lot of knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work in education, and road surfacing, in building latrines, in textbook publications for schools, and cataract operations. You name it. So it’s not just a money bank. It’s a knowledge bank at the same time. And lately it has become very active also in big global issues like global warming, the ozone depletion, the pollution of the seas and so forth. So it is still mainly in the poverty reduction business and the developing business, but it’s beginning to become a presence in the global issues business as well.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: I first spent 10 years at the World Bank, which is the job I wanted to do. And I did various jobs in large, industrial projects which was the most businesslike part of the World Bank, and then ended up in the treasury function – meaning in the financial function – of the Bank running the Bank as a bank. And in that capacity I did many things of the type you also do on Wall Street. And so at some point two or three of us left, and we went to the then ________ Investment Bank, which was called Drexel, Burnham, Lambert at the time. And we had a great time. It was a great firm. We were given a lot of freedom, and it was a very different way of operating, even than the other investment banks of the time. And my job had me travel to Europe every Monday and come back every Friday. My office was in Europe but I was still living in Washington. So I did this for three years, and my job was to set up baby investment banks in Italy, in Switzerland, in France, in Spain and watch over the U.K. operation and so forth. And after three years of doing this, one day my three year old asked me after I stayed longer than usual – meaning I stayed a long weekend of three days instead of two days – he asked me, “Why are you staying so long at my house?” So I realized I had overdone it. And at that point I was offered to run the trading room of the World Bank, which was a very attractive position. It was a fantastic trading operation inside the World Bank managing some $30 billion and very actively trading the bond markets of the world. And so I came back almost by accident – partly the pressure of my family, and partly this job offer coming back from the World Bank that I swore I had quit forever. And being there in the trading room for two or three years – three years actually, which I loved – the President of that time was called Lou Preston – he was the former CEO of JP Morgan – asked me to build up a private sector development vice presidency. And that is something I did with great interest. It was a fascinating thing to start a new operation within the World Bank. And so it kept me there until a year ago. And so I had a second career in the World Bank quite unexpectedly because I hadn’t planned it that way.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: Things in the U.S., the contact between people and business is much more direct. It goes quickly on a first name basis. There are no barriers. I remember working in Wall Street and having immediate access to the Chairman or the Vice Chairman of the firm, which in Europe would not be the case at all. There is not only this informality, but there is a sort of culture of going down to business quickly and immediately zooming in on the issues. And as I think about it more systematically, what you have in the U.S. system is a system where money is . . . time is money. When you do business, you don’t use too much time in social chit chatting. On the other hand, you do have legal contract that runs several hundred pages and that foresees every possible contingency in the divorce clauses and so forth. Whereas in the European culture, and probably even in some other cultures including the Japanese, time is not money. Time is space for relationships. So you spend more time developing the relationship before you get down to concluding a contract. And then when the day of the contract comes, the legal agreement is very light – almost skinny. And those are two completely different ways of doing business, and I still don’t know which one is the better one; but I can operate in both.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Transcript: My name is Jean-Francois Rischard. I think my title should be former Vice President of the World Bank and author. Well I was lucky to be born in a very tiny country. My mother, when she would go shopping, could be shopping in a single day in Belgium for butter, in Germany for appliances, in France for meat, and in Luxembourg for vegetables. So you had this concept of a very small country that didn’t take itself too seriously in the overall scheme of things. Moreover, it’s a country that is straddling the German culture and the French culture. And so when I went to school, I had to learn to read and write in German. And then after that the French would kick in. And then by the time you were nine or 10 years old, it was sort of a 50/50 diet between French and German in such a way that you would have mathematics one year in German, the next year in French, and then in German again and so forth. So it was a very multicultural upbringing. And to make it more complicated, during the class breaks we would speak yet another third language which was a local dialect. And so I grew up in a place that is naturally inclined to see the world as one big place. And it’s a place where you don’t have strong nationalistic feelings, in a way. And much of my thinking later has something to do with that. I had already two doctorates when I decided to go to the States. I had a doctorate in Economics and one in Law. And so I did the unusual thing of going into an MBA program. And not knowing much about that world I picked the Harvard Business School because it was the name that was most familiar to me, not knowing exactly what I was getting into. And so I started in the U.S. not speaking very good English. And after six months at the Harvard Business School I thought I was the most stupid kid in the whole class, because it would take me forever to read the cases at night. But then it worked out fine, and I just loved that school. Not that I learned much in the way of academic content that I didn’t know; but I went, like all the other students, through hundreds and hundreds of case studies of practical problem solving in corporations mostly. And I learned to work fast, to cut corners, to deal with very complex documents and bring it down to simple solutions and so forth. So I learned more in this first year of the two year program of the Harvard Business School than I learned in many years before. And I sort of got quite taken by the way of doing business that characterizes the American system. And even to this day, I live in Europe; but when I wrote my book “High Noon”, about which I’m sure we’ll speak later, I wrote it in English for the American market. In other terms, today I’m so on both sides of the Atlantic that I prefer actually making speeches in English. And my way of operating is more American than European, but my deep roots are European.

Recorded on: 7/2/07