|
Friends,
I'm writing this note fresh off the busiest season of our convening calendar. Over the past 60 days, our team launched the 4th class of Aspen Economic Mobility Fellows, the 18th class of Aspen First Mover Fellows, and hosted 200 business leaders for the 5th annual Aspen Business & Society Summit. It’s been a whirlwind.
The insights across these gatherings were as rich and varied as ever. But there was something new this year. For the first time, I found myself in multiple conversations with business leaders expressing concerns, and real doubts, about the state of contemporary capitalism.
It’s not hard to find sources of anti-capitalist sentiment. What’s new is hearing expressions of concern from senior business leaders themselves—people broadly committed to using markets for good. After ten years in this field, I’m struck by how many are now questioning the limits and durability of the very system they help perpetuate.
The call is coming from inside the house.
This raises real questions for those leaders, and for the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program. We believe in the power of markets to serve people and planet. We’re committed to helping those in positions of influence wield that power effectively. So how do we create space for a meaningful conversation about how this system needs to evolve? How do we make room for business leaders to sit with the discomfort, and examine their own agency to drive systemic change?
We got a glimpse of what that might look like during the Summit itself. We featured author Eric Ries on stage, who issued a bold provocation to rewire corporate structures. We examined questions of corporate governance as part of a new program for board members. And we explored questions of individual agency during a session titled “Taking Stock of the AI Transformation.”
In that session, we invited participants to imagine a positive future in 2036 where AI helped them deliver positive social and environmental impact. We then challenged them to name the decisions required to arrive there, and to locate their own role in influencing those decisions. Participants left with a deeper sense of the agency they hold in this transition, and greater awareness of how seemingly small individual choices can ladder up to big outcomes.
I think that’s the task in front of us. Not just to name what’s broken in contemporary capitalism, but to imagine what could work better, and to locate our own agency in getting there. Systems pressures can feel overwhelming from the inside. They’re easier to bear when we remember that we built the system, and we collectively hold the power to both build and operate it differently.
Eli
Eli Malinsky
Deputy Director
| 
