Here’s finally some words about the St. Gallen Symposium (SGS, #sgs10) as promissed.
The week before I started my work att the Chamber I had the opportunity to attend an amazing conference in St. Gallen, Switzerland. SGS, which was held for the 40th time, is a student run conference where the leaders of today meet the leaders of tomorrow to discuss questions related to the topic of the year. This year the Symposium had the topic “Entrepreneurs – Agents of Change”. And thanks to my work with YEoS and some great portion of luck I got invited to attend along with 199 other ‘leaders of tomorrow’ and approx. 400 ‘leaders of today’ from all over the world. Truly amazing people! Starting with the people in my age, some (not one, but three) started their first business by the age of 9(!!!). How is that even possible? What was I doing then? Inspiring but in the same way kind of sad.
Paul Bulcke, CEO Nestlé on stage (see speech below)
Out of the 200 leaders of tomorrow, half of them qualified by writing an essay (the other half were carefully selected/headhunted). Some skilled people there from universities like Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Stanford and a bunch from Chinese and Indian universities (which I’m to ignorant to remember the name of) to mention a few. And we were quite a few young Swedes; Erik Fjellborg, Gustav Borgefalk, Claudia Olsson, me and three others.
There were some pretty noble guests among the older participants too, CEOs and chairmans for some of the biggest companies and organisations in the world, like Nestlé, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Peugeot, the Republican Party of California, UBS, Royal Dutch Shell etc.
Christian von Koenigsegg, founder of Koenigsegg and a bit overexcited me
The 4-days-conference was really inspiring but also very challenging and it drained me completely of energy. My friends who met me in Zurich the day after the event had some good laughs to my attempts to speak English or even communicate for a while.
As you can image the event had some pretty good speakers. All of the speeches can be found on SGS website and their YouTube channel. I have posted three of my favourites below. Enjoy!
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Morten Lund (entrepreholic and one of the first investors in Skype) on the life of an entrepreneur
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Paul Bulcke (CEO Nestlé) on how to constantly adapt to new challenges in order to maintain long term growth
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Prof. Niall Ferguson (Harvard) on entrepreneurial freedom in the new global financial system