Fast Forward: Brainstorm 2002: Changes and Challenges Ahead

To recap, Brainstorm 2002 was last week’s exclusive, invitation-only FORTUNE event in Aspen where a diverse and eclectic group of 160 leaders from business, government, non-profits, academia, technology, and the arts spent two days attempting to scope out the future.

A sense of social responsibility and concern was apparent among the attendees at Brainstorm. During any half hour throughout Brainstorm you could hear tangible evidence of the seriousness with which these business leaders think about the impact of what they do. OK, we selected them partly because of this, but this crew gives a damn. As ever-quotable former congressman Jack Kemp put it during our closing session: “People don’t care how much you know until they know that you care.”

Former President Bill Clinton returned to Brainstorm for a second time. In his talk he said that the biggest change facing the world was a move “from interdependence to integration.” For instance, he predicted, “The WTO will get stronger, and we will have to abide by its decisions whether we like it or not.” He said that the next decade would be a struggle “between people who are trying to break things apart and people trying to put things together.” He also predicted vast changes from what he called the “explosion” at the intersection of nanotech and genomics, a topic to which we devoted an entire session.

If there was one point that emerged most often during the discussions, it was that there is a terrible contradiction between the way people in the U.S. talk about the problems of the rest of the world and the way we actually behave. While many bemoaned the measly one-tenth of a percent of GDP the U.S. has been devoting to aid to developing countries, several pointed out that a more eloquent national statement about our hopes for economic progress in those countries is made by the way we handle our own agricultural subsidies. It probably makes sense for us to devote almost nothing to foreign aid if by subsidizing farmers here we cause them to overproduce, artificially lowering world agricultural prices. That deprives millions of farmers in the developing world of the chance to make a decent living. In addition, tariffs on agriculture and textiles punish poor countries in which those are the only substantial industries. Our behavior makes it clear that as a nation we don’t care. But if Clinton is right about the WTO, we may eventually be made to.

No single line of thought was predominant. But there was a consensus that the abject poverty of the world’s majority remains our greatest challenge. While many spoke of a moral responsibility to help, others posed it as a matter of long-term U.S. national interest to raise living standards elsewhere, lest the poorer world’s problems become ours. A few nuggets on development stood out. Author and corporate strategy consultant C.K. Prahalad said that multinationals face the biggest growth opportunity ever if they can tap into the nascent desire among the poor for high quality at low cost. He brought his friend Vindi Banga, CEO of Hindustan Lever, India’s largest consumer goods company, to talk about its success, for instance, in distributing shampoo in single-use packets that sell for half a cent. Green architect William McDonough made the extraordinary statement that we need to learn to “love all children of all species.” Not ordinary business conference fare. But when he started explaining his own work in developing low-cost versions of critical products like hearing aids, it was clear he works hard to put his idealism into action. He hit it off well with John Doerr, the venture capitalist who has a longstanding interest in products that can improve life in the developing world, especially relating to power and water.

Many at Brainstorm came from the Arab world, including King Abdullah of Jordan and officials from Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, as well as Arab journalists and businesspeople. Unexpectedly, there was optimism that relations between the U.S. and the Arab world could improve. The Arab Thought Foundation, based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, announced new poll results that showed that the U.S. is not, in fact, despised across the entire Arab world. What people despise is our policy in the Middle East, as they perceive it. But in general Arabs maintain a positive view toward the U.S. and its people. The greater their access to the Internet and television, the more likely they are to feel good about us. One Saudi pointed out that it is only in the last 6 months that all Arab nations have openly accepted Israel’s right to exist, creating a fundamentally new negotiating environment. The Arabs in Aspen mostly felt that if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be resolved a vast range of other positive changes in the region would be set into motion-ranging from improvements in the rights of women to a hastening of the pace of economic development. King Abdullah warned that if the U.S. invaded Iraq while Israel and the Palestinians continued to fight, both conflicts would be harder to resolve. His country, of course, is situated between Israel and Iraq.

Shimon Peres spoke eloquently about his desire for peace, but also noted that a terrorist bomb had killed many at Hebrew University in Jerusalem that very day. He said that if Israel “can live in peace with Jordanians, we can live in peace with Palestinians.” He added: “It may seem far-fetched, but maybe the Palestinians will be the first Arab people to adopt a serious democratic system.” The basic parameters of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem to be widely accepted by both sides. What is lacking, as Singapore’s U.N. representative Kishore Mahbubani pointed out, is leadership to drive the solution to completion.

There remains much more to say about Brainstorm, and you’ll read about it extensively in FORTUNE this fall. We’re already thinking about how to make it even better next year. Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com and one of the most energetic young business leaders around, challenged both the hosts and attendees by suggesting at the final session that next year we should ask everyone, before they come to Brainstorm 2003, to formally answer the question: “What have you done differently in the last year based on what you learned at Brainstorm 2002?” I expect some interesting answers.

“Fast Forward” is David Kirkpatrick’s weekly column for Fortune.