Politics

Society feels broken because society is broken. When the most powerful nations in the world are spending billions of dollars on ways to kill each-other, and a fraction of those resources on ways to heal each other, we're broken.

Author of "A Return to Love" & Spiritual Activist

It's not enough to sit in our ivory towers or offices and think we have to go out and talk to people who are affected by a problem to understand what's going on, on the ground.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

Distrust in government is very dangerous – what follows is the ability for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government to take control, and that doesn't do anybody, any good.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

We need to shift our thinking about what government does, and what civil servants do, away from this relentless focus on policy and ideology and onto project management and problem solving.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

The danger is that when we jump too quickly to the solution, not only is the floor littered with the inventions that never worked, but we risk designing solutions that never fit the problem.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

The old diplomatic model where only representatives of states have a formal role cannot work in today's world. We need open, democratic platforms that allow everyone to participate – it could be a young activist or a business leader, it could be a scientist or an indigenous leader.

Former President of Iceland (1996-2016)

The ice is neither left nor right, it is neither Republican nor Democrat, it is simply melting. The consequences of the sea ice melting are enormous and will be felt everywhere from Texas to China.

Former President of Iceland (1996-2016)

We've had a collective gap of imagination around economic bridges. We know how to build bridges; we just don't build them.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

If you eliminate dynamism, you don't have growth for anybody, everyone loses. Rather than just having some people who are disadvantaged, everyone becomes disadvantaged.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

Politics is not about management – it's about creating a narrative that can inspire and can bring people along in a certain direction.

In these political times, that's more difficult, you must plant your flag somewhere, and someone will get upset. You have to be able to take that in your stride.

We're starting to realise that business is a major force in deciding the sort of society we live in- and so the role of business must be more in tune with political, social and moral norms of the day.

We need a change from managers to leaders. We need people who can understand the political and moral structure of their companies, and who can motivate and bring people to go in the direction of those values. That's true leadership.

There's a delicate balance between making sure our values are encoded in these technologies as they come out- and not constraining them so much that we lose the technological race to other nations who don't hold our values.

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

Power is relational; we talk about seizing power but ultimately – at least in democratic societies – you need the followers to be powerful, and it's important therefore for us to understand the cognitive biases that mean that we keep gravitating towards people who are clearly unfit for the job.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

Digital media has allowed a complete bypass of those structures – there's less control around power – and people can amass huge followings for totally irrational reasons.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy