 Hello, this is Gerd Leonhardt. Welcome to another edition of Meeting of the Minds. Today I have with me from Sydney, Australia, Ross Dawson, futurist, author, strategist and a good friend. So we're in Switzerland today and it's great to catch up with you, Gerd. I spent much of my childhood in Switzerland and now I'm back here. But it's interesting to think about the future of Switzerland. What do you see in the future of Switzerland, Gerd? Well, I'm fully qualified to talk about Switzerland now because I just became a Swiss citizen a year ago. So I'm a Swiss person now. So I'm allowed to talk about Switzerland. I think what we're seeing in Switzerland is a very interesting scenario. It's a totally intact ecosystem of democracy, of values, of people who like each other, take care of each other. And it's a real island of serenity, nature, and people respect the law and they have collective thinking. It's, you know, lots of individual voting on issues, lots of really great things in Switzerland. The thing about Switzerland that really needs to happen is that Switzerland in a way could be a blueprint for a global economy of how this would work across the world at the same time that Switzerland is now in danger to become a theme park and that nature is great here. But that is a major theme in Switzerland. But for example, the banking laws are diminishing now in the secrecy and that means that the bubble around Switzerland is crumbling. So Switzerland is no longer going to be living under this nice dome that we all enjoyed being in it for the time. But it's like visiting and going inside the dome here. You're inside the dome and it's beautiful. It's not sustainable. That dome isn't sustainable because the factors around that kept up the dome, they're removed, you know, the laws and environment. So my view in the future of Switzerland is that we have to get used to that dome is evaporating. We have to reinvent what the island is. I just gave the keynote at a conference in Interlaken and one of the speakers was saying that the future of Switzerland was in swissness and that this quality of swissness of precision and detail and, you know, dedication to work. And I have to say I was a little cautious of this idea because I think that there is some strength in the swiss tradition. You know, the swiss tradition is enormously strong and some of that tradition, I think indeed that idea of, you know, getting things right and doing things well is very powerful. Yet, I think that being overly swiss in the future, as we understand that idea of swissness could actually constrain the flexible, adaptable, responsive organizations and economies that we're going to need in the years to come. I mean, what do you think of this idea of swissness? Is that going to be a strength or a weakness in the future? This is a difficult question. I think that, of course, for swiss people who live here, swissness is a way of life. It's a country brand and Switzerland has been voted year after year as the number one competitive country in the world and also as one of the happiest countries in the world. But the fact is it was based on the fact that Switzerland was just Switzerland. It was by itself. And this was a preferred position and as I was saying, a bubble living in this bubble of 7 million people. And that bubble becomes unrealistic now. So, swissness is a good sort of country brand. But how long will it last, you know, when the conditions for being swiss are gone? I mean, the reason that we have the big pharma companies here are not because they like the Alps or go hiking, because the taxes are great for them. And they can stick their money in the places where they want to stick it without somebody else watching and so on and so on. One thing begets the other. Those advantages are evaporating. So how is Switzerland going to create new advantages? That's my question. It's independence. It's still a strength. And one of the questions for Switzerland has been in European integration and it's chosen not to go that path. And it's unlikely to continue to go that. And I think there is some value in that independence. I think there is clearly this deep knowledge based specialist skills that have been very strong will continue to prosper. But I mean, there's three things that people characterize Switzerland from outside. That is banking, chocolate and watches. And it's interesting how well that Swiss have reinvented the watchmaking industry. That's an extraordinarily good response to the challenges. It's amazing. In the face of digital watches, Swiss actually, a few individuals actually managed to help maintain Swiss as the global center of watchmaking. Banking is under threat as a major center in terms of the secrecy, banking secrecy and their banking future. But I still think this underlying attitude of deep specialization, world-class specialization, is going to be fundamental. And if this applies to some of the new emerging domains around how do we get value from network collaborative economy based on data, then Switzerland can create a very prosperous future. I mean, what do you think of the things we need to do today? It's interesting. I mean, of course, you as a visitor have this view and me living here and being Swiss, German, whatever, seeing it a little bit more from the inside as much as I can. I think that independence is a great thing for individuals to have independence. But for organizations and countries or states or businesses, interdependence is really much better than independence now. Because independence is very expensive. It's very hard to keep up when everybody else is interdependent. And it only works in preferred positions. In this case, the law that allowed a preferred position in Switzerland to exist. When those change, your independence is gone because you cannot sustain that privilege. So my view is that Switzerland needs to learn how to be a player in the interdependent world and create value for others rather than in a world of a protected island. And this is a paradigm question. It has nothing to do with Europe. It has nothing to do with being part of the EU or not. But with creating value that is open in an interdependent world. And one thing that really riles me at Switzerland is the idea of market making, creating a market doesn't exist here. You are market waiter, not a market maker. In some cases, a market taker, maybe. But the idea of what many other countries do is creating new markets. That's just not happening here. And that really needs to happen here. Creating markets, whether it's technology or indeed watches. You know, watches are a great example. They didn't create anything new there. They just do better what they've always done. And magically, it works. Luckily, it works. But they're not creating a market. You know, the new watches are Apple makes a new watch. So what's the summary of what Switzerland needs to do? I think Switzerland really needs to transform from this independence to the interdependence. Finding a way to create volume on a large scale rather than creating value on the choose and protected items. You know, banking watches, cheese and nature. Those things will not go away, thankfully. But the preferred position that Switzerland had as an independent country, that's unsustainable. I think a bit of an example we're seeing around the world in various places. For example, Singapore. Which you could argue now, it's sort of a state-run system. But they've had a very good run at creating the brand of Singapore. You know, the global hub, innovation, bringing everybody there, being international. Of course, they're about the same size, a little bit smaller than Switzerland. So Brazil. Brazil is trying to create a Brazilian brand of what they are the next America, in a way, creating that. And so I think there are some role models. But you could see that Switzerland and Luxembourg, for example, in a very similar situation. They said the dome was removed. All of a sudden, we're in the wild. And everybody's freaking out. So Switzerland has five more good years left, riding on the old money. And then it's crunch time. So this concludes today's episode of Meeting of the Minds. Thanks very much to Ross Dawson for being part of this today. If you want to know more about the show, you can go to meetingoftheminds.tv. We're also taking questions and inputs for the next show. Just use the Twitter hashtag meetingoftheminds, and we'll be responding and trying to work your comments into our next show. Thanks very much for joining us.