IRC’s David Miliband: How can leaders meet the moment in a disordered world

David Miliband, IRC More civilians are killed in war today than soldiers. It's a very significant change. More aid workers being killed. The guardrails are no longer there.

That really got me thinking about this bigger trend of impunity not just in war zones but more widely.

A recession in democratic rights, recession in human rights, ends up as recession in property rights. And it's really important because the rules-based order applies internally and externally.

The international order was designed to buttress the democratic order at home. And I think that's what's under enormous strain at the moment. And I think that what's at stake therefore is i is the ability of people to make their own choices. In the end the definition of impunity is that someone else makes a choice for you.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader. I'm Linda Lacina and I am very excited to welcome you into our New York studios at the World Economic Forum for a very special conversation on leadership. This one on accountability.

Meet the Leader turns five years old this year. And, as we have dug into tactics and practical strategies for change, all of that has underpinned a bigger goal: to help leaders and teams tackle the biggest challenges of the day and to help changemakers really meet the moment that they're in.

These past five years have not been easy ones for leaders. They've seen the pandemic, widening economic gaps, climate chaos and increasing geopolitical instability.

David Miliband has thought a lot about these shifts and how they impact people on the ground. He is President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Rescue Committee (IRC).

That is a global humanitarian organization, one whose founding was inspired by Albert Einstein in the 1930s, and this organization helps give aid and relocation assistance to refugees and people whose lives have been turned inside out by war, conflict and disaster.

He'll talk to us about a trend he's tracked for years, the Age of Impunity, one where leaders seem less accountable to the power that they yield. We'll talk about that, how it's impacting humanitarian work and the challenges ahead for leaders of any stripe. Welcome, David. How are you?

David Miliband, IRC: Linda, thank you very much for having me. You're so right. It's the moment; meeting the moment is exactly right. It's actually the theme of our gala dinner this year!

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: That's amazing. Well, I love to be on trend!

David Miliband, IRC: You're definitely with the moment.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Let's talk a little bit about this for people who aren't familiar. What is the age of impunity and why is it so important to understand?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I came to this view, this understanding, not through theory, but through practice. Two of our humanitarian aid workers were driving an ambulance across Western Syria and they were hit by a missile sent by the Russian Air Force that was working on the side of President Assad during the Syrian Civil War. And, obviously the immediate trauma is faced by the organization; we lost two staff members. But there's something I learned in politics, which was my previous career in government, in government, the great advantage is you see the big picture, the dangers, you lose sight of the people.

When you're running an NGO, as I do today, you're confronted by the people every day; the danger is that you lose sight of the big picture. And encapsulated in that – it wasn't a tragedy, it was a crime that afflicted my two colleagues – was a bigger picture, which is that in war zones around the world, impunity was the order of the day. Whatever the rules said, whatever the laws of war said, impunity, which is the exercise of power without accountability (Baldwin, a former British Prime Minister, said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely) was what we saw in that war zone and it's what we're seeing elsewhere, which is that the guardrails are no longer there. And that really got me thinking about this bigger trend of impunity, not just in war zones, but more widely. And, I suppose, that's how I came to christen the idea of an age of impunity.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You work with the Eurasia Group on a special report that tracks all this. Can you talk a little bit about the Atlas of Impunity?

David Miliband, IRC: Yes, I'm grateful to the Eurasia Group, but also to the funders. I chair the advisory board. So it's an independent report that's done every year, that's the Atlas of Impunity. It measures impunity in every country in the world, more or less, across five different dimensions, not just conflict – although that's important – governance, human rights and then two that maybe give this added originality to this atlas, one is about economic impunity, which is about one thing that's obvious, which I suppose is the exploitation of employees, modern slavery being the worst example of that, but also when states encroach on property rights, that's impunity too. So there's an economic dimension. And, the fifth dimension is environment, climate change. We see the abuse of the planet as an example of impunity, impunity from one generation to the next and also from humans to the planet.

So we have this scorecard, if you like, that measures impunity. Some things are obvious, as you expect Afghanistan has very high impunity, Finland has very low impunity, but within that, you have some very interesting trends and the purpose of the atlas is to sponsor discussion and debate about this global issue that we perceive.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Tell us a little bit about how long the Atlas has been being tracked for and what's gotten better and worse.

David Miliband, IRC: Well, next year will be the fourth edition of the Atlas of Impunity. It's quite hard to get the data sets that go far enough back. We have some data that goes back five years, ten years, but with a lot of the data, we use dozens and dozens of different data sets, so it's done in a statistically appropriate way, the five measurements or the five indices.

Here are some things that come out. One is that conflict is actually one of the biggest changes in the last five years. So, there are 60 conflicts going on in the world today. Five years ago, there were 39 conflicts. So, you've got greater conflict, and more and more people displaced by conflict. Five years ago, about 75 million people were either refugees or internally displaced. Today, it's 125 million people. So, you've got some change there.

You've also seen, I think, some very interesting moves in the middle of the atlas. Saudi Arabia has more accountability than it did five years ago. You've seen countries, maybe some surprises, not every democratic country is at the top of the atlas. Singapore scores above some other countries that could claim to be more democratic. So, this is an atlas that gives a different way of thinking about different trends in the world. Some things are common with other very serious work, like the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg. Freedom House, the United States' charity, does very important work about the health of democracy, but that's a subset of this wider set of trends.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And, you mentioned that maybe it's surprising that there are democratic countries there and which ones are maybe higher on the list than others, but what has personally surprised you about maybe some of the changes in the index?

David Miliband, IRC: I think that, when you factor in environmental impunity, you scramble the scorecard a bit. So, a country like Canada suddenly doesn't score as well as you might expect. I think that there are countries in Africa that are high scorers and that are low scorers. It's probably the continent with the biggest spread of the biggest spectrum of performance against these indices.

I'm also struck that countries can move a long way quite fast. And that's also, I think, striking. We don't know what's going to be in next year's Atlas, which will be published slightly later. We want to get more up-to-date data, so we'll publish in July next year for the 2026 -- my goodness, time flies -- the 2026 index.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Sure, absolutely. You have talked a little bit about how the age of impunity has started to evolve into another sort of more difficult age. Can you talk a little bit about that? The age of cruelty.

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I certainly think that the two are associated with each other. One of the things that, since I'm running a humanitarian organization, I'm faced with every day, there are 300 million people in humanitarian need. That means they depend on non-governmental organizations to survive effectively.

The World Bank has recently revised up its estimate of the number of people living on less than $3 a day. So the amount is a pretty stark measure of extreme poverty. That's their measure of extreme poverty – 800 million people, 810 million living in extreme poverty.

And, I think that what we're seeing is that certainly in the world's conflict zones, we're seeing two things that are very, very striking. One is impunity against civilians. So, more civilians are killed in war today than soldiers. It's a very significant change. More aid workers are being killed. So there's that cruelty. But, the second thing that we're seeing is there's this terrible phrase, the tribalization of pain. If it's your tribe that's the subject of cruelty, then it's your problem. If it's not your tribe, then it's someone else's problem.

As a humanitarian leader, I say, look, we're the human tribe. And we were founded by Albert Einstein as the International Rescue Committee, as you rightly pointed out. He founded us as a secular agency, interestingly enough, although the primary job was to help victims of the Nazis, Jewish victims of the Nazis in the main, in the 1930s. But he founded us as a secular agency, because he believed in universal values. And I think that's what's under threat as well.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What is needed to change this, maybe in the short term? Can it be changed in the short term?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I think that in the very short term, we're obviously facing this very striking phenomenon that the number of people in humanitarian need is going up and aid budgets are going down. We're meeting in the US, but it's not just a US phenomenon. And, so I think that the first task really is to make sure that we make the money that we do have go as far as possible. That means focusing on the countries in greatest need, the people in greatest need, the programmes that have the greatest impact.

One of the things I'm most proud of, is that we've grown the International Rescue Committee from being a $500 million organization to being a $1.5 billion organization in the last ten years. We've got smaller this year by about $400 million, so we're dealing with degrowth; having grown fast, we're now shrinking a bit. But one of the things I'm most proud of is that we're the leaders in impact evaluation. And, at a time when aid budgets are going down, it's ironic that we know more about how to make aid go further.

I think we've got a real job to do to achieve that focus on those who are in extreme poverty. We've got to sustain our innovation. I think that's hard to do sometimes when organizations are hunkering down; the danger is that they stop thinking and we're determined at the IRC to carry on thinking. We see ourselves as the innovation leaders of the humanitarian sector, maybe reflecting back to Einstein.

So, I think that's really important, but I also think that there's just a fundamental point about – and this is where the World Economic Forum, the clue's in your name, if those who reap the rewards of globalization don't bear its burdens, then it's not going to survive – and I think that's an important message. That's why I go to Davos and why I participate in World Economic Forum activities. I think it's really important that this ethic of shared responsibility is properly defended.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You talked a little bit about innovation. What are some examples of maybe innovative approaches that you guys have applied recently?

David Miliband, IRC: Yeah, well, today we're using AI to diagnose monkeypox in the Democratic Republic of Congo and you can diagnose it in five minutes, rather than it taking two weeks. I'm very proud of the work that we've done on acute malnutrition to show how we can have 30% efficiency savings by changing the way in which we treat, diagnose and treat acute malnutrition.

I think some of our work on making the humanitarian sector more proactive, rather than reactive, using AI to warn farmers about threats to their livelihoods from climate events, we've shown how that allows them to have a much greater impact on their lives and livelihoods. I think that's very important. And some of the innovation is not about products, it's about the way we do our business.

We work in four East African countries where there's a lot of zero-dose kids; in other words, they're not getting vaccinated. And, we have a tremendous partnership with the Global Alliance on Vaccines, which has delivered 20 million vaccines to 2 million kids at $2 a shot in areas where they were getting no vaccinations at all because government health systems couldn't reach them because of civil conflict.

So the way we do our business, I think, is being changed, as well as what the products are that we deliver.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there a special role that maybe the private sector can be playing that maybe they haven't needed to play in the past, but maybe now it's the moment?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, the private sector is our risk capital. That's the way I would put it. For in some of our most innovative approaches, you just don't know if you're going to succeed and you've actually got to embrace risk and failure. Risks come with the chance of failure; if you're not failing enough, you're not risking enough. And so we have, you know, our innovation funds pride themselves that they're learning the best of private sector risk appetite.

I think that's important. I think that private capital can be our patient capital as well. Often government funding is short term. We often say to foundations, look, go multi-year, that's the way to make yourselves distinct, as well as embracing risk. So I think those are important.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Many humanitarian organizations are, you know, trying to create models that are thinking beyond philanthropy. Why is that so important?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, beyond philanthropy, you mean what?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Beyond maybe donations alone.

David Miliband, IRC: I see. Yeah. I mean, we always say share your ideas, share your people, as well as share your funds. And sharing your ideas is what it says. Share your people. We have a fantastic programme called Signpost, which is now in 25 instances around the world. It's an information service for displaced people, by displaced people.

One obvious issue is cybersecurity. Some of the tech companies have loaned us people so that cybersecurity is there for people. So I think lending your people is as important as well. Giving your funds is obviously important, but I think that your idea about going beyond philanthropy is to say make this a relationship, not just a cheque-writing exercise. And what we find with our best private-sector partners is that they engage their employees as well and that motivates them.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Some donor governments have sort of retreated from a variety of organizations, global organizations. Is that in your mind, is that a sort of weakness in the international system or do you see it just mostly as a failure of political will? Where's the vulnerability?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I gave a speech at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana earlier this month. And I gave a really extraordinary statistic, because you're right, governments are cutting and nowhere more so than the US, but fully 89% of the US public, yes, 89%, including 84% of Republicans and 94% of Democrats, think that 1% of the federal budget, one dollar in a hundred, should go on overseas aid, 89%.

Now, the trouble is the majority, more than 50%, think that 20% of the federal budget goes on overseas aid. But actually, the vast majority of the American public want the money to be 1%, which is the more or less the amount that has been traditionally spent by the US Exchequer on overseas aid. So there's a mismatch there.

The Trump administration's made big cuts, but it's been able to do so, I think, because the impression is that there's far more going on overseas aid projects than is actually the case. I don't want to get into the targeting of individual institutions or individual organizations, in the end, it's taxpayers' money; governments can make their choices, philanthropic money, philanthropists make their choices.

We've had a long-term partnership with governments and with the private sector. We've actually grown, as we've grown as an organization, the share of our income that has been privately raised has gone from about 10-15% to 30%. Obviously, if government cuts continue, that will carry on. Our point is we can have impact and scale, as the example of the $2 a shot vaccinations suggests. I think it's very sad that 300,000 Afghan boys and girls have lost their education because of decisions that were made in government; the US decided it didn't want to spend any more overseas aid money on Afghanistan. In the end, the price is paid by our clients; two million clients have lost access to services in the last nine months.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Why do you think that gap in understanding still exists? That gap between like what is actually given and what people think?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I think that either we've not been spending enough on communications or a half-truth gets all the way around the world before the truth gets its boots on. And I think there's a lot in that, especially today. I think also one's got to understand that we're not living through a global financial crisis, like 2008, but there is a cost-of-living crisis for a lot of families in advanced industrialized economies. And that has meant people have tightened their belts and expect governments to tighten their belts as well. It's been too easy to hit overseas aid budgets. That's why our emphasis always at the IRC is being the solutions-oriented NGO, because I think people are still in the market for solutions.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How do you see humanitarian aid maybe changing in the next few years?

David Miliband, IRC: I think it becomes more focused. Hopefully, it will become more focused on the extreme poor. It becomes more focused on programmes that are proven and cost-effective. I think it becomes more innovative so that it really is at the cutting edge. It would be a double tragedy if the technological revolution passes by the people in greatest need. I think those are the kind of changes that I advocated in this speech I gave at the University of Notre Dame and what we want to see.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: In your mind, given everything that we've seen on the ground with the humanitarian issues, given what you've sort of reflected on the age of impunity, how would you describe the leadership challenge, how the leadership challenge has changed in the last five years?

David Miliband, IRC: I think that the leadership challenge is to deal with more disorder. It's a more disordered world. I don't think we're living through de-globalization. I think we're living through a more chaotic form of globalization, a more chaotic age of globalization. And so the biggest challenge is that you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. It feels like there's more disorder. And the disorder can come internally, it can come externally. I think that's the biggest challenge.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how do we bring order?

David Miliband, IRC: I think you bring order through consistency. I think you bring order through alliances. I see alliances as sort of buoys that can help stabilize the ship when the anchor's pulled up. I think one also has to recognize that we have to look for orders plural, not just order, singular. I think there's gonna be multiple. At Columbia University, Professor Adam Tooze, talks about ordering, not just order. And I think that's a clever point. It's not going to be an age of pure order, but the danger is chaos and that hurts people. And I think we have to be looking for ordering through consistency, through alliances, through keeping the superordinate goals in mind, because it's easy to be tactical, it's hard to be strategic and the superordinate goal is what makes you be strategic.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: If we are able to put in order or orders, if we're able to have a little bit more consistency, what might be different? What might be different, maybe, in 2030?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, there are some known knowns and then some known unknowns. We know that there is a digital revolution of extraordinary reach and meaning that is transforming lives. We know that the rise of the rest is real. America has sustained its share of global GDP in the last 30 years, but Europe, Canada, Japan have lost share of global GDP. So there's a reordering of economic power around the world that I think is translating into shifts in political power. What we don't know is whether coalitions of the willing will be stronger than those who want to flout the rules. And I think that's really important as we look forward.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And if we don't get this order in place, what will happen?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I think that one of the things that I would say, especially speaking to the World Economic Forum, is that recession in democratic rights, recession in human rights, ends up as recession in property rights. The slide doesn't stop at the private sector. And, I think that it's easy for people to scorn public/private partnership, I think it's really important. And it's really important, because the rules-based order applies internally and externally. The whole point of the rules-based order that was built after 1945 was to safeguard liberal democracy, that means pluralist democracy, but also safeguards of property rights. The international order was designed to buttress the democratic order at home. And I think that's what's under enormous strain at the moment. And I think that what's at stake, therefore, is the ability of people to make their own choices, because in the end, the definition of impunity is that someone else makes the choice for you.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: To build on that, you know, so many people think about geopolitical conflict, even the climate crisis, even though it's been sort of hitting people more and more at home. Some of these things seem so big, they seem like they don't necessarily touch them at home. What should they be thinking about? Why should they be paying attention?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I think that's a great point. I mean the late Pope, Francis, talked about the globalization of indifference. Now, I think that's not quite right. I think that it's more to your point, people want to make a big difference, but they don't know if they can. And that's why I think this emphasis on solutions is so important. I think that when governments are in retreat from big global problems, you need NGOs and the private sector to be the solutions merchants, to be the mobilizers of solutions, because I think people are in the market for solutions. Then the question is, how do you give them agency and a sense of really being able to make a difference? And that's why I think the emphasis on what people do together is so important. Alliances are not just between nations; they're also between people.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Not every leader who's listening to this is sort of dealing directly with some of these issues, they might be dealing indirectly with some of these things, but in general, how can any leader be more accountable, right? Can make sure that they are thinking about the biggest picture possible and the biggest impact?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, you have to think big and small when you're leading. You have to think big and granular, maybe that's a better way of putting it. I always think that the best accountability is an accountability that's aligned to your mission. It comes back to the superordinate goal. Too often, accountability is for things that, if not peripheral, they're not actually the real bullseye and I think the most important thing. You know, we exist as an organization to help people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover and gain control of their futures. That's the outcomes that we try and hold ourselves accountable for.

And I can say every single programme staff member is working to a programme with outcomes. Now, obviously, when you're in the leadership level, you've got to make sure that the proxies that you're using are the right ones and that they're actually on the bullseye of what your mission is. I think that intelligent accountability is mission-aligned.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: If there was one question that you would want someone to ask themselves to make sure that they're staying mission aligned, what would that be?

David Miliband, IRC: I think it would be the question I ask myself: am I listening to a broad enough range of people? I think when I was in politics, I learned this, you need a big tent, but you gotta have the flaps open. And if the flaps aren't open, then you're not gonna be hearing a wide enough range of views. I mean the great danger of leadership is you get cut off.

We have one rule in our office, whether you're an intern or whatever, which is if you've got a question, ask it. Don't be worried that someone will think you're stupid. Because, first of all, if you've got that question, probably other people do too, and by asking questions you can find things that are wrong. There's no such thing as a bad question, I think.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Keeping the flaps open, listening to as many voices as possible. Was there a moment maybe in the last five years that was really a turning point for you?

David Miliband, IRC: I was in Sudan last month and we've got 400 staff working for us in Sudan. It's the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, as you probably know, there have been terrible massacres in El Fasha, the capital of North Darfur, and 400 of our staff, 90% of them are victims of the war themselves. So they've lost their homes, they've lost their jobs. And I spoke to a colleague of mine, she said: "Well, you know, I lost my home in Khartoum, I was a banker, I lost my job as well." I said: "Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry about that." She said: "No, no, don't be sorry. I'm a humanitarian aid worker now." And so she'd lost her profession, but she found her purpose. And that sticks with me, I think.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How do you make sure that you're keeping exposed to the widest number of influences?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, one can always do better. You never give yourself an 'A plus' for anything. But funnily enough, I'm just talking to my team, we have new country directors, I want to be meeting them. I also did a thing, I was trying to remember when you asked me the earlier question, we got the IT department to send a random email every Monday to ten people in the organization, we were at the time about 15, or 16,000 people, to say, tell me what you're doing today, tell me what I could do to make it better? And things like that, which can seem like a bit of a gimmick, and actually not everyone replies. Some people think it's a fake, but actually, you get interesting stuff coming out from that. A good example of opening the flaps.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What was the thing that came up from that that you wouldn't know about?

David Miliband, IRC: Oh, I think that it was our expense module that people were complaining about, which wasn't working on our system. There were ideas about how different teams could work together. There was a hunger on the part of staff who were called quote/unquote support staff, they wanted to feel more connected to programmes. So some things that are obvious, some things that are less obvious, that help us get them right.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And what prompted that?

David Miliband, IRC: I think this thing of how do you open the flaps, how do you stay fresh, how do you keep in touch with a big organization? Because when people say, I didn't go to business school, but they tell you, apparently, communicate, communicate, communicate. The danger is that's just you talking. And I think you can't be a good leader if you're not a good listener, but you've got to make sure that you're listening to a wide enough range of people.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What are other ways that you create opportunities for listening?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I think that you can't have a listening session if you've got a thousand people in the room. So, you've got to be willing to curate the right kind of forums, the right kind of avenues. I mean the good thing about internal messaging is that anyone can message you and sometimes they do. So I think that you've just got to be proactive about it and I don't think any leader's ever good enough at it. You've got to keep on at yourself.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How have you changed as a leader? What's something that you do now that maybe you wouldn't have done?

David Miliband, IRC: I think the biggest thing, ironically, is that in person really matters. There's no substitute for it. Now, we're an international humanitarian aid organization, as well as a refugee resettlement agency in America, so we could never have everyone quote unquote in the office or in the same office. We always need to work across time zones, across distance and the fact that the technology is so much better is fantastic, but like you asked me earlier, what was the conversation I remembered? I remembered a conversation in person with the banker-turned-humanitarian aid worker in Sudan. I didn't say, Oh, I remember a really good Zoom call. And, it's not Zoom's problem, it's that being in person is when you realize that or when you hear that someone's got a challenge with their kid who's ill, or someone's moving, or someone's got a real trauma that they're trying to overcome or someone's got a bigger idea that they didn't know how how to put it. So I think that it's really, I don't know, reinforced or enforced, that finding time to be in person really matters.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Are there moments at the IRC that you guys really prioritize, hey, these are the things we do in person?

David Miliband, IRC: Yes, but you know, you can't say to every country director we want to all be in the same room. It's hard because you're taking them away from their work, so we find times to do that, but you've got to really prepare to make the most of the time that you have together. And, I think -- you know, we're all trying to feel our way into this new future. When people say, "Oh, I'm going hybrid," Everyone's hybrid these days. The question is, does the online time and the in-person time work to maximum effect? And for creativity, for figuring out risks, in person can really help.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What do you think leaders will need in the next five years to meet the moment?

David Miliband, IRC: I think a bit of luck. There's no question about that. People say, culture eats strategy for lunch. I think strategy frames or creates the context for culture. If your strategy is to hunker down, you need a different culture than if your strategy is to stride forward. And so I'm big on good strategy. I think that without that you're lost. That's your compass.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: So strategy is linked to your mission?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I mean, by definition, the strategy is bankrupt if it's not linked to your mission.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there a book you recommend?

David Miliband, IRC: I read recently rather a sobering book, but a clever book, by a man called Ivan Krastev called The Light That Failed. And it's about what's happened in Eastern Europe since 1990. And it's quite sobering about how democratic norms take root, how they can be upended, how public-private partnerships develop and how it gets rolled back. And the light that failed is the idea that there's a single light. One of his arguments is that the idea that there was no alternative to open markets, liberal democratic political politics, that was really dangerous and that created a backlash. It's an interesting book.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how would it change someone who read it?

David Miliband, IRC: I think that they'd never say there is no alternative. There are always alternatives. They may be worse, but that doesn't stop people from plumping for them.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there a piece of advice that you've always been grateful for?

David Miliband, IRC: I think if you overcalculate, you miscalculate. Someone said that, which I think is good advice.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How has that helped you?

David Miliband, IRC: I think it means that in the end you have to really trust that if you feel that something's awry, you're probably right. And, if you feel that something's right, it gives you the determination to follow through on it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And your last question, if you could issue one challenge to CEOs attending Davos in January, what would it be?

David Miliband, IRC: The challenge would be: what are you doing to bear the burdens of globalization, not just reap the rewards?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Thank you very much, David. I very much appreciate you being here today on this fall day here in New York. And, thank you so much to all of our listeners and our viewers. For more video podcasts, check out the World Economic Forum's YouTube page. And for more transcripts of Meet the Leader and our other podcast, Radio Davos, go to wef.ch/podcasts.