Hi, I'm Paul Verschure and together with my colleague Ferdinand van Siemens,
we are speaking today with Alexander Neuken about collaboration in large-scale
financial transactions such as mergers and acquisitions.
Alexander is a partner at Ernst & Young where he leads lifetime strategy and
transactions for Europe, Middle East, India and Africa.
Would you, as a start, it would really be helpful
i think if you situate a little bit your expertise
by giving us like a very short summary of
of where you're coming from your career development
and how you ended up where you are right now with with your experience understanding
of of collaboration yeah so maybe first of all i can start with my with my career
path um it is really not a straight line i would say the only continuum is life sciences.
That's everything else is basically a little bit, looks like a random walk,
but it adds up to a certain pool of knowledge and experience that's very valuable today.
So I started out as a lawyer. I'm a lawyer by training, not a scientist.
But by coincidence, basically my
first transactions were life science transactions. It was not my choice.
It was just kind of given as a first task, selling a life science business.
And then thereafter, another one and thereafter, another one.
So it piled up that I got very interested.
After a few years, two and a half years of being a lawyer, I switched in banking
through the catalyst of an MBA.
So I did the MBA in Fontainebleau, a short program, 10 months.
And then I basically entered into the banking world at Lehman at the time.
That was when I joined it, a thriving firm, very eager to grow and hunt in the
market, very successfully so.
So 2006, far away from the financial crisis. And then in 2008,
all the engines stopped all of a sudden.
I was involved in great deals, very interesting experience, very intense time,
very many sleepless nights.
So that was a super experience, but it stopped all in 2008 when the world changed
and Lehman went bankrupt.
I was lucky to then be taken over by Nomura, the Japanese investment bank.
So very different culture, very different approach, but they were keen to include
or integrate the Lehman crowd.
And so we had a second life after Lehman.
Then later I moved on to UBS for another three, four years.
And 2015, I joined EY. why and the ask to join you why first of all i was quite
skeptical saying okay i've done,
a lot of i've gained a
lot of transaction experience i'm a banker to some degree a lawyer yes i can
i i can combine those two worlds but for me um the accounting firms were always
doing the financial due diligence which is not my cup of tea so i was kind of
skeptical what to do there but the
interesting there was an interesting proposition um they They came with,
they said, we know very much what we can do.
We are very much self-centered around our competencies, but we don't really
know what the, or we are less good at knowing what our clients really need,
want, and to bring a holistic perspective on to the table.
So we're not talking about our competencies, but more talking about the opportunities
in the market and how to capture them with a joint offering and really connecting the dots.
That was a very appealing proposition to me because I can bring in my expertise
on the sector, my previous knowledge, my network, and combine a lot of elements
throughout the career that I collected.
I joined EY in 2015, and since then I'm running in EMEA, so Europe,
Middle East, India, and Africa, so a pretty diverse and broad sector or broad geography,
the health, science, and wellness, how it's called here now, sector.
So that includes pharma, it includes medtech, it includes consumer health,
so all sorts of different areas.
And on top of it, it also includes healthcare.
So that's healthcare services, hospitals, provider, payer organizations,
which is not so much my area of expertise.
But given the broad perimeter and given my role being based out of Frankfurt,
running a team that is based in London, even before Corona and before we stopped
being able to meet in person, I was already very,
very, very intensively working remotely.
Working connected across regions and developing collaborative approaches that
were new to the firm also.
Also, because originally the approach was very much centered around an individual
with a franchise, with a team underneath, all sitting together at the same place.
And the beauty of the organization is we have so much competency in various
areas that are combined much stronger than separated and on individual pockets.
And combining that, bringing all of that together, and bringing that to the
value of the client, that's basically my task and my journey here. Okay.
So, Alexander, thank you for
that summary. But there's a lot of elements in this and a lot to unpack.
So, maybe as a start, through this whole trajectory, what do you see as the
patterns of collaboration?
If you would give a characterization of how you see collaboration in these different
domains where you're active, so not only you and your team, but also you and your clients,
you and different industries that you might want to bring together,
is there a pattern to what you might want to call collaboration in that context?
Yeah, I think the key element
or the first step is really to get an
understanding of the different interests and
align on goals or how we call it on purpose on the joint key factors that make
people drive and pull the whole carriage in the same direction.
Because that's the center point for being able to collaborate, really.
Otherwise, you're having loose ends or people, in the worst case,
even pulling the string in different directions.
And that's really a bad and not a good start.
We were talking about common goals, right? You said, look, you have to identify
the common goals. But now in the complex structures you're in,
common goals could vary depending on the operating level, right?
The common goal of, let's say, a manager you deal with or a legal expert you
deal with might be different from the more abstract goal of the organization itself.
So how do you then define that?
Those goals yeah i think the
the key is to to um
acknowledge the multiple facets of it
like you described right so um the question is can you combine all the different
ambitions goals intentions into one aggregated bigger thing that's basically
the purpose of of us doing something together,
of an organization being an organization, actually.
There is some bigger goal behind it. And if you can crystallize that,
identify that, and then break it down into different elements that are supporting this,
and then ideally get people excited about the bigger
goal, but recognize that, for example, a smaller goal is my next paycheck, right?
So this all needs to tie together and be consistent.
If you are creating contradictions in between, it doesn't help you.
So being not an inclusive, not diverse environment.
Excluding people, things like that, that's That's all distraction and not helping
to service the purpose and align people behind your goal.
So this is very important that you have this bigger picture,
vision that you can transport and people are aligning behind it.
So that collaboration, on the one hand, you say, is characterized by the sharing of goals.
Yeah. But are there other defining features?
What do you mean by other defining features? I mean, the goals can be multiple faceted. It can be pay.
It can be... If we take goal as one feature, another goal might,
for instance, be, let's say, communication or it might be trust.
Yes, of course. I mean, that needs to be, communication is extremely important,
I think, to transport the goal, to align people behind it.
In particular, when you're working remotely in different geographies,
communication is the key element.
At the moment, it feels a little bit, in COVID times, that we are,
We are chasing our own shadow by lining up call after call,
but to get people who are sitting in a completely different place in a completely
different setting with very different individual experiences,
how that setting works for the one,
for the employee who is alone in his 20 square meter apartment,
sitting there for two years in lockdown.
Down is is a different experience than um for example
for myself with a full house of of kids and and um
and family around me that uh where
you probably less are less dependent on external
contacts let's put it that way right so um everyone has a different experience
there and you need to acknowledge that and you need to to kind of communicate
in a way that you you get the buy-in and the engagement from the various parties.
And in the old times, just anecdotally, when you got the idea of a joint project
and starting something,
the first question of some colleagues was, what's in for me?
So why should I do this?
How much can I earn with it, et cetera?
I think that's the wrong start for that conversation because,
I mean, ultimately that's an important question,
but I think it takes out a little bit the spirit of where we want to go with
the organization or with the collaboration.
And that's something that took me a while to understand how to get that, how to make that happen,
that people are not asking the first question, what's in for me,
but what's the overarching goal,
why do we discuss this collaboration in the first place, etc.
And then, ultimately, it needs to work for everyone.
It should not be a loss-making proposition for any individual involved.
But then you bring it back to goal again, right? With communication,
for instance, communication is often highly structured in organizations.
And to get the buy-in of all the layers of such a structure might require also
a very specific approach towards communication that is serving those goals.
So do you also see that you do that, that you structure the communication process
to also serve this idea of building a sense of common goal?
Yeah, and I think the way to structure this is it's a process, right?
It's not that I have the idea of how it looks like and then basically infiltrate
the team and dump it on the team.
It's an evolution. evolution um and
uh it's it's a process that has lots
of iterations and lots of
uh joint thinking and out of the box thinking um how to how to make this happen
how to evolve it it's also try and error to some degree right so um you fail
on on certain things you you undertake and then you ask Ask yourself, why did it fail?
Why did I not get the buy-in from my counterparty? Why did he not support this?
For me, it was absolutely logical that this is the right thing to do.
And then you get pushback.
So you need to ask yourself, what's driving the other person?
Why is it not feasible to do it this way? And how can we make it work?
Then, in that respect, so that means you have a very, if you want,
customized approach to the communication.
And then a third dimension that speaks, that is, of course, trust.
Because if you try to bring partners together and also deal with this multi-level
structure of the organization, there are many links of trust that you have to
engineer or also assess.
So how do you deal with that? Yeah, that's a good point. And I think when I
joined the organization, it was initially the banker coming into this environment.
Bankers are sharks and they are not really regarded as very collaborative and team able or whatever.
So I had to overcome a degree of skepticism.
And I think the way to,
I solved it as maybe there's better ways to do it I don't know but the way I
solved it I choose the battles where it sounded it looked to me like there's
more promising to get to get collaboration going so I didn't try to run through
the wall with where people were,
reserved and not inclusive and said no we don't want to don't mess up with this
account. We don't want you here.
So I choose opportunities where I could create positive examples.
And I firmly believe in leading with examples or really living the way,
um as an example for for others to
to follow and then um hopefully people
buy in and over time i must realize this is this
has been quite quite successful so people start uh
seeing the the successes seeing how it can work working together and we get
more out of it so uh why not trying it as well with this guy so this is a little
bit that's interesting right because you you take the trust challenge very much
as you as a trusted mediator,
right? How do people trust you as mediator?
Which of course is a necessary condition to get anything done.
On the other hand, you have to bring parties together that might not trust each
other a priori, neither all the players within an organization, right?
So now it's your task as the mediator to have people also trust each other so
the common goal can be achieved.
So do you approach that in a systematic way or do you also leave that to the
organizations themselves?
No, I think the way we developed it from there, so basically first was creating
a few examples, but then trying to systematically scan the market for where
can we create additional cases like that.
So how do we, because it's in various geographies, I created my first positive
examples in the Nordic region.
So I had a few very successful and very, very positive experiences working with
the colleagues in Sweden and in Denmark.
And then I ventured out into other regions to replicate that example.
So basically saying, look, it worked very well working together.
Here's the outcome. This is how we achieved it.
And this is working successful. You get just in deal terms or in transaction
terms, that's my home tab, you get bigger deals, bigger fees. You get better outcome.
You really create relationships with a client that are lasting longer.
You get all sorts of other services included into the mix. So you really can
create a franchise jointly. And that was...
If you just tell them in theory that this can work, people are skeptical.
They have done it a different way over years. And why should this guy who is
coming from the outside be able to change that? But if you can...
Pinpoint certain examples that really bring it to life, how it could look like,
how good it looks like in that term, then people are getting curious and want
to have the same. So people start approaching.
Instead of me pushing at closed doors,
it's more that they invite me me
then to to join the and and replicate this
and this is then taking place in france
in spain in other countries where people realize okay
there's value in working together okay but but that that's if you want the so
so far we looked at it very much from a positive reinforcement perspective right
like you bring people together because they share goals and because they can
achieve common outcomes that they would all value positively.
But the difficulty, of course, of these situations is that there are also conflicting goals.
And there are also conflicts in communication. There are conflicts in objectives.
And then the positive approach might not always work very well.
Because people just look at the world differently. Now, how do you approach
these more conflictuous situations?
How do you resolve them? Is it always about bringing people back onto the path
of the common goal, or are there also negative elements that are part of the
interaction that you say, if we don't do this, we fail?
Look, I think it very much depends on the universe or the environment you're
operating in and how you can sanction misbehavior or whatever.
So if I look back into banking times, it was very easy.
It's a little bit organized like an army. You have the general on top and then
a lot of people marching with marching orders.
And they are given a task. They know the direction.
If they fail to achieve it or if they work not basically in the sense of what
has been given as a task, they usually
very soon lose their role in the organization. So that's very easy.
In a partnership, it's not like that. You cannot enforce things,
in particular if you are not, in a legal sense,
the boss of any of those people you are working with.
So you are more like a peer and you need to make other peers aware.
Realize that it's an advantage working with you. There's no much sanction.
Of course, if someone is misbehaving consistently and not collaborative,
et cetera, on the long run, you will fail, even in a partnership.
But as an immediate way to get people going, there is not so many sanctions you can do.
You can just, and that was a learning I took from one of my mentors when I joined.
He said, identify the 10, 20% of people who are really leading,
who really want to lead this in a certain direction,
who are willing to for the change that's needed, who embrace this opportunity working with you.
50, 60% of the rest of the organization will follow and they will always be
the rest that is never going to follow because they don't want to.
They are not able to. they then leave them
just leave them behind it's not that the organization
will change and and you need to identify those
who are willing to to embrace the change
and and i took that very seriously i don't i don't think it's worth it's worth
spending or wasting your time on battles you cannot win people ultimately then
self-select to be not part of this journey and if they They self-select not
to be part of the journey.
And you will see that ultimately in their performance, in their numbers, and they will fail.
So probably not worth spending too much time trying to pull them also into the
same direction. In default, right.
Do you think that also culture is a relevant factor in this for you?
Because you are dealing with a huge swath of territory from Scandinavia to Africa.
So, is culture an important dimension on which you would approach collaboration across these regions?
Not really. I think the beauty of our organization, we are a global organization.
We are present in so many cultures. I've been working with people in Saudi Arabia.
I've been working with people in UK, in Germany, in Africa, in India.
Yeah, they all have different cultures, but the culture, if we want to be successful as an organization,
we need to accept certain cultural differences on the one side.
But we must not compromise on our values, on our standards.
So even in countries where it's harder to navigate with a Western European mindset,
let's put it that way, and where the country as such is less liberal,
we need to find ways within the firm to stick to our values and live our values
without creating too much of a contradiction to the local setup.
Up yeah so it's a it's a it's a fine line but it's very important that um for
example um we we are in in saudi arabia we are employer of um.
Probably as many women as as men yeah and um
of course we appreciate and acknowledge local
differences so we have working spaces that are reserved for women only if they
don't feel comfortable working next to men etc that's a cultural thing you would
not see that in germany or in other places but um that's the that's the fine
line acknowledge local differences
but don't compromise on what we do
and how we do it and have core values that are globally the same well that's
interesting alexander right because in some sense we have moral norms because
we are part of broader collaborative processes that form our society society.
And that's what you say, right? You try to also adhere to those norms,
even if there are cultural challenges to those, or let's say regional challenges.
But that also might mean that there is a point of contradiction that's just
not sustainable anymore,
and that you would have to choose to either proceed with a project and compromise
your norm, or give up on a project.
So how is that balancing act realized so
our our policy is to not
compromise on our values so if they
have a conflict there then we rather
not do a project even if it would be
a highly profitable project that's
that's very clear um is that
something that uh we we live in every situation i cannot tell because I don't
have visibility on that and I'm not at a level where I have visibility into that.
I can only tell from my immediate environment.
Luckily, I was never in such a conflict yet,
but clearly when it comes to the quality of work and if we cannot deliver the
the quality that I have signed up for and our organization is pursuing or delivering,
then we would rather stop the project.
But would organizations like yours or banks that you worked for also have explicit
protocols and monitoring processes for that that are also effective in those situations?
Yeah, absolutely. We do have a rigorous compliance process that starts with...
The uh really with within knowing your customer no reviewing the background of that customer,
to make i mean for most of the cases where i work
with clients it's not it's not an issue it's the big names um from beyer to
novartis to whoever that they are known in the market and we are working for
a long time together but clearly if there's a new client we would we would,
clearly look into into the background and then there is a there's a rigorous
onboarding process and for every project that's being taken on there is a conflict
check and a compliance process that is very,
very closely monitored.
And any concern from a reputational issue or whatever is being raised and then
may end the relationship before it actually has started.
Right. So we looked at it also rather abstract now, right? So sort of general
principles based on your experience and insight.
But maybe we can also look at more concrete examples.
And I think with the Lehman Brothers example, it's a very dramatic one where
in some sense you could argue collaboration at different scales sort of was
not really sustainable.
So, do you see Lehman Brothers as a failure of collaboration or would you say
that was beyond the control of the organization itself?
I think in hindsight, and it's a few years back, so certainly the dust has settled
on a few questions, but in hindsight it was primarily a leadership failure.
So not acknowledging at the right time that standalone the organization is not.
Not set up to survive given that the organization back then was coming out of a,
environment where long-term commitments
were short-term funded and the the
environment on the funding side and the the short-term funding was no longer
possible there was huge huge mark-to-mark adjustments on assets that were on the balance sheet.
The prop trading activities were basically turning out to be a disaster.
A lot of mortgage loans that were of no value at the time.
And then you have the margin call, and then all of a sudden your funding explodes or implodes better.
So I think that was probably a leadership issue that,
I mean, on that level, you should
have visibility on the factors that are managing your balance sheet,
etc.
And that was far beyond my pay grade at the time. So we are just doing what
we were basically supposed to, i.e.
Advise on transactions. And that was, in principle, a thriving business.
It was just the whole setup was not sustainable at the time.
What is interesting about it, though, is that if we go back to this issue of
building effective collaboration through common goals,
still, that whole organization had structured itself around common goals that
it would have been able to sustain were it not the case that there was a large
implosion of the mortgage market.
And so, in some sense, what is interesting about that, we also look at an artifact of goal setting.
And it has to mean any change in the industries you look at with respect to
goal setting so that these artifacts that are massive disasters can be avoided.
Have you seen changes in that?
You mean in the immediate banking environment or more broadly?
Well, look, to put it more bluntly, you could say, look, the system was driven
by monetary gain at any level of organization.
And that led also to exactly this very risky structuring of the balance sheet.
However this was the way to motivate the
organization and its different members to keep on marching
in the army behind that general now so essentially this was all monetary gain
oriented for the members of the organization and the shareholders and this in
some sense was one of the key contributing factors to the collapse so so then
of course we can now start to generalize and say, okay, has that changed?
Or are we still facing similar risks? Because in some sense,
also the way you described goals, for many economic entities,
it is about value. It's also about shareholder value.
So has that attitude towards setting common goals along monetary gain changed
since your experience at Lehman Brothers?
I'm probably not in a position to give a general answer throughout the industry.
I think clearly regulators have given it a lot of thought what went wrong and
how to prevent this from happening again.
And there's a balance to find, right? The banks are somewhat like fuel to a,
motor, you know, or like the oil in the engine.
It's absolutely needed in order to keep it rolling and going.
But But I mean, there can go a lot wrong there if you don't,
You need to give it the right framework. It's clearly an environment that's
more monetary driven than any other organization I've been working in before.
So law firms and their self-perception are part of the legal system of our Rechtsstaat.
I don't know the equivalent word in English, but basically curator of the legal system to some degree.
So an important stakeholder banks are a similar thing to the economy, right?
They are needed in order to finance growth, finance investments.
Or ultimately the pensions of millions of people in a functioning banking system.
So if you do regulation too tight and prevent them from acting profitably,
then we don't have a bank anymore in Europe.
That's part of the global set up.
So you see that too tight regulation is also potentially damaging.
On the other hand, how do you secure that people are acting ethically and not
only to their own immediate monetary advantage?
To be honest, I can't answer that question.
But you know what? There's an interesting consequence of this,
Alexander. That's not in a leadership position there. No, look,
I'm not asking you, okay?
We're just having a conversation about these issues from our own perspective.
But what you bring up now is, of course, another aspect to collaboration,
which is the extra organizational collaboration.
Because as you say, also a bank has an internal structure, has also an internal
structure to organize its collaboration and interaction with other organizations.
Of its kind, but it's again embedded in a broader structure of collaborative
entities, which we call society.
And actually, these also might have opposing goals. And as a result,
a society might say, well, look, we have to regulate what these commercial entities
do in order to find balance,
right, to find enough local incentive for organizations to push ahead and explore,
floor, while in the meantime, making sure that we don't cause damage.
So how do you see that balancing? Do you think this is something that we have
to put in place properly and that also these commercial entities should contribute to?
Or do you see it more as a competition or an arms race between commercial entities
running ahead and just exploring and societies catching up with trying to regulate? Right.
Look, I think there is a balance that's useful for both sides ultimately,
because if you are acting in a regulated environment and things,
investment opportunities, for example, are thoroughly tested and checked and
tick boxes from a regulatory standpoint.
Point, if the regulation is designed in a sense that they want to basically
make sure that fraud and other elements are extinct and people are not entering
into stupid investments.
Because the risk is beyond their horizon,
they cannot evaluate the risk, then I
think it's useful because it's creating trust and trust is a
very important element also for the for
the one who who is offering the the
opportunity the investment opportunity or the
whatever it is the service that it
is um delivered in a in a regulated tested and monitored environment so that
but basically people who are doing wrong are early identified and excluded from the market.
But do you see this as a competitive process between society and commercial
entities or as also a more collaborative project?
I think in that regard, if it's done in this way, it depends really much on the mindset.
But if it's done in the way I described, it's collaborative because it's also
in the interest of the organization subject to the regulation, right?
Because it gives you a seal of, okay, I'm part of a regulated environment where
people can trust that I'm offering a standardized or systematic offering that people can,
without knowing the details, they can trust that this is properly done while
in a complete kind of free Western style, Western in the sense of.
Cowboy style environment everyone does what he thinks how can an,
Normal person who needs to secure
the little money they have know where to invest and where not to invest.
It's not possible or which service to buy or not to buy.
If there's no common standard and there's no monitoring of the quality, then it's hard, right?
Okay. That's very interesting because that really means that if we want to anchor
trust, then trust is also anchored in regulation that a society provides.
It's not necessarily an intrinsic feature of a commercial entity.
That's good regulation. There's also other intentions on some of the regulations.
I mean, even in the political spectrum,
if I think back on the discussions we had after the Lehman bankruptcy,
I think there have been a lot of voices also who have no understanding of the
banking market and the banking world,
And they were overshooting in their ambitions in order to regulate this.
And that was not with the intention to strengthen the local banking market.
It was rather sometimes with the intention to rather kill it.
So that's a different approach. And we need to be careful,
not everyone who is raising his voice in that context of regulation is actually
doing it to the benefit of the society. They have more...
More a political agenda or whatever yeah that's that's not necessarily positive
but now in your experience so if you look back all such a more recent projects
what do you see as the factors that lead to the breakdown of collaboration.
Um so breakdown of collaboration is really when the um,
when the goals or the intentions diverge. And that can happen even during a process, right?
So people don't see any value anymore in pulling the carriage in the same direction.
They rather want to get some pieces out of it and pull it in a different direction.
That's how collaboration breaks down.
Very often there's a
personal agenda coming to it maybe also
miscommunication leading to to to
kind of uh yeah getting
the transporting the the the discussion on a on a personal level i think that's
that's the ingredients to make it make things fail if if people feel um They're
not recognized properly, valued properly,
have their own agenda above the joint agenda, things like that.
That's where collaboration breaks down and people are reacting quite sensitively on the.
This type of behavior or element factor there's also a fragmentation of that
goal structure right and it becomes more individual goals so that the opposition
gets gets amplified yeah but now so um,
we're still in this sort of covet situation as you also described yourself earlier
do you think that this period has actually told us something fundamental about
how we collaborate is this It should be extract lessons from the current period.
Yeah, I think, of course, there's fundamental changes in how we see this collaboration evolving.
I mean, in the past, you had obviously phone calls, Skype calls,
what have you, were possible.
But usually, people were meeting in person in a conference room.
Lots of internal meetings taking place with people you already know,
you have seen before, you have a feeling for the other person.
And there was a lot of waste of time and resources by getting everyone in the
same room, in particular if you're working across such a big region.
So just a single meeting for
an hour per day is already killing the whole day because you are traveling back
and forth i think this is going away now there will be physical meetings and
physical interactions and they need to be there where you need to build personal
trust you You need to have someone,
really, you have to look into the eyes of your counterpart to be able to get
a feeling for the situation, for the person.
I think these tools, which we are using right now, is bridging that to some
degree, but it will not make personal meetings redundant, in particular not
in a deal environment where you do M&A,
you need to develop you need to,
some people call it you need to eat a steak so basically you know what I mean
really building a personal rapport but in many cases,
We will switch to meetings like this one.
Alexander, this is a very implementational perspective.
But I could also imagine that if you observe how our governments have been handling
this crisis, that as an expert in collaboration, you would think,
well, this could have been done better or this could have been done differently.
Do you have that impression?
Like if we would have left it to you and
your colleagues would we have been coming
out of this crisis sooner i i
don't know i mean the the issue with the crisis is that um no one really had
a recipe at the beginning and a lot was kind of digging in the dark and trying
things and even Even if you look at the vaccination programs,
at the time when the vaccines were ordered, none of them was actually existing as an approved product.
And no manufacturing capability was already available at that point in time.
So it all had to be built. and you are betting basically on something you cannot
predict because the outcome of clinical trials, for example, is unpredictable.
There is some degree of likelihood, maybe, yes, but it's unpredictable.
So in essence, where we are today is...
Is an outcome of too many factors to say, okay, I would have clearly a better recipe.
Maybe I would have been bolder in ordering vaccines.
Maybe I would have been faster in implementing certain measures to really distance people quicker.
Yeah, fine, okay. Okay, but that's all in hindsight and we are all smart in hindsight, right?
So it's very hard to tell, even as of today and with a little hindsight we have on the crisis,
what really would have made the big difference.
And we are living in democratic societies with a lot of room for discussion
and a lot of margin for error and marching in different directions.
And we, to some degree, have to accept that if you want to retain a free country.
You can also rule like in China, but then, you know, what's...
But, you know, what's interesting, though, is that in some sense,
you also can see that collaboration has not necessarily flourished I think there's
some real highlights, right?
I think the way scientists have stepped up to the plate and really delivered is really amazing.
On the other hand, at the pharma industry level, again, we start to see a more mixed picture.
And certainly for logistics distribution, I think,
That could have been handled much better, but okay, fine. This is how it is.
But now humanity is facing a much broader crisis, which is the ecological crisis
we're facing for the planet and also our future generation.
So do you expect, do you believe that humanity overall will be able to ever and on time create
global collaboration to really address this very existential threat that's facing us?
Yeah, I'm a little bit more skeptical on that one.
I think we have a little bit of common sense in most of the European countries in that regard.
But looking at the global debate, it's very tough to find common ground.
I mean, the argument from emerging countries, be it China or other countries,
is clearly that we are coming from a different place.
And for us, it's more easy to demand restrictions and limit ourselves because
we already developed and they are just on the journey and they have the right
to thrive and develop their economy. and they don't want anyone to block that evolution.
Because in most of the cases, on a short- to mid-term basis,
it's more expensive to implement environmental protection.
On a long-term basis, probably the better option, but people don't tend to think long-term.
They don't tend to think in two or three generations. They may regret by then
what they've done before.
And we have a lot of regrets what we've done to our environment here.
But clearly, that's not how governments think and take.
And that's why I'm not so optimistic that we get really something achieved on a global scale.
And again, if we in Europe reduce our CO2 emission by 2%, it's a drop in the
ocean compared to the global scale.
So I think it's the right thing to do.
But again, on a global scale, I'm a little bit skeptic that we'll really achieve
something over the next few years.
But now if you would have a magic wand and you could change one thing.
That would allow humans to collaborate better? What's the one thing you would then change?
Oh, it's a tough one. I don't want to give away my wish so quickly without proper thinking.
To be honest, I don't really know what's the missing link.
Maybe more long-term thinking, more thinking in generations.
We are all here just a generation to pass through to the next one what we have inherited.
And if you don't, that's probably the biggest lacking thing that people recognize
that, that they are not here for their own good.
And yeah, that would be my wish, maybe. I don't know. I need to talk about it.
Good. And I will get back to you on that wish.
But I think it speaks to an issue you mentioned earlier, right?
That also collaboration breaks down because people don't identify with the common
goal, but the common goal collapses into a fragmented set of competing goals.
And I think this is very interesting to see that I think there's a naivete on
our side that we believe people have similar education, similar expectations and norms as we do.
And therefore, we expect that they
might also adhere to our ideas about democracy and fairness and so on.
But that's just not the case. And if you are a farmer in sub-Saharan Africa
and you are practically no subsistence level,
should we expect that person to immediately understand democracy and understand
fairness and global warming and the challenges that go along with it?
So I think there's this huge discrepancy between levels of expectation and knowledge
and also appreciation of these challenges, which is asking a lot,
I think, from us, from us Europeans,
who indeed have profited, of course, more than others maybe over the centuries.
But now we're facing all the same challenge. But I think it's really this issue
of not being able to find the common goals and communicate the common goals.
And what's interesting, of course, if we take your experience as a reference,
there you'll see there's this balancing between the goal structure of an organization
and the regulation around it.
But of course, for global warming, the probability to find regulation that will
work globally is very small.
So it really has to be intrinsic to organizations. And there we see it actually
over at the smaller scale, that's really difficult to accomplish.
So it's a massive challenge. Well, my personal view actually is that just we
have to augment human cognition, that our cognitive machinery is not sufficiently
prepared to deal with the timescales, as you described,
to really appreciate the problem and respond to it properly.
But that's another discussion.
But humans, of course, evolved to collaborate at a certain scale.
I mean, evolution prepared us for running around in the savannah and maybe cooperate
with dozens of others and not more, right?
So our brain has, in that sense, certain biases and deficits that are not necessarily
helping to operate at the scale we have to operate it now.
And that's part of our evolution, I would say. I mean, a few years back,
obviously, communication was much more difficult,
fragmented, and very much relying on personal interactions, which is not possible
at the same scale like we communicate now with this technology where we have video calls,
pulling people in from various...
And a minute later or half an hour later, I have a call with a completely different
setup from completely different continents.
And this is basically going in a row as a whole day from morning to evening. I know.
So I think we are quite adaptive to things, fortunately.
Oh, we are. This is definitely true. True. So Ferdinand, do you have a question for Alexander?
No, I think it was a fascinating discussion listening to you.
And it turns out that I had noted down some questions, but you've asked them.
So I crossed them out. I'm psychic. Very interesting.
So Alexander, I would like to thank you very much for this conversation.
It was really very insightful and a great start for our podcast series.
Hi, you listened to one of our podcasts in the series on collaboration produced
by the Ernst Trommel Forum and the Convergent Science Network.
You can find more episodes on our website.