Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

Chapter 3

Rudderless World

Angry Populism, Incapacitated Government, and Stray Capitalism

We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.

—Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and former President of the European Council

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

—George Santayana, Spanish-born thinker and Harvard professor

The natural state of men, before they were joined in society, was a war, and not simply, but a war of all against all.

—Thomas Hobbes

To paraphrase the Beatles, you say you want a revolution? Well, today streets around the world are filled with enraged people, but unlike the 1960s protest movements, this rage doesn’t seem to be leading to any particular destination.

SOURCE: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images.

In Davos about 10 years ago, I caught the whiff of something reminiscent of my college days in the late 1960s in Chicago: tear gas. I was in the famous Swiss ski village for the World Economic Forum’s annual confab, a place where you can indeed meet more CEOs and movers and shakers and pick up more new stimuli in several days than you can in a year of traveling. The country is justly famed for an orderliness bordering on the obsessive-compulsive, and for this annual event, ...