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Davos Forum Founder Klaus Schwab to Step Down
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Klaus Schwab, 86, founder of the World Economic Forum, will resign as executive president after more than half a century at the helm of the world’s most prominent business conference.
Schwab has presided over the annual gathering in the Swiss ski resort of Davos since its founding in 1971, turning it into an extremely profitable company owned by a charitable foundation with annual revenues of €500 million. He will step down in January and take on a new role as chairman of the WEF board of directors.
Børge Brende, president of FEM executive board and a former Norwegian foreign minister, will take on the role.
“The organization has undergone a planned evolution of governance, from a founder-run organization to one where a president and board of directors assume full executive responsibility,” the WEF said on Tuesday.
Schwab helped transform the WEF from modest beginnings as the European Management Symposium – a conference for European businesspeople to exchange strategic ideas supported by the European Commission – into a conference attended by senior executives, bankers and policymakers.
At its last meeting earlier this year, the forum attracted more than 50 heads of state, including President Javier Mileilawmakers, including European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, and dozens of business leaders, including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan and Satya Nadella of Microsoft.
Companies pay up to SFr600,000 ($658,000) in annual membership fees, and participants often pay huge additional sums to secure accommodation.
A German-born mechanical engineer, Schwab founded the conference while working as a professor of management at the University of Geneva. Davos, the remote village he chose as home, was immortalized by German writer Thomas Mann in his novel The Magic Mountain, in which a sanatorium of eccentrics satirizes a European society rushing toward war.
Targeted by climate activists, populists and anti-capitalists, the conference has recently struggled to keep your fascination as geopolitical tensions and protectionism undermine its pro-globalization mantra.
Schwab has also been criticized, both for his 1 million Swiss franc salary and for walking a fine line between the forum’s work as a charity and the private ventures linked to its founder and his family that operate near it.
The WEF’s relationship with Davos is under increasing strain: the village plans to hold a referendum for residents this June, which could drastically limit the number of people attending the conference, restricting the rental of facilities to official guests only.
Schwab threatened to move the conference elsewhere – pointing to the success of its meeting in Singapore during the coronavirus pandemic.
Semafor first reported that Schwab would step down.