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Klaus Schwab
Schwab in 2011
Chairman of the World Economic Forum
Incumbent
Assumed office 24 January 1971
Preceded by	Office established
Personal details
Born	(1938-03-30) 30 March 1938 (age 86) Ravensburg, Free People's State of Württemberg, Germany
Spouse	Hilde Schwab ​(m. 1971)​
Children	2
Education	ETH Zürich (Dr. Sc. Tech) University of Fribourg (Dr. Rer. Pol) Harvard University (MPA)
Klaus Schwab's voice Schwab introducing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the 2012 World Economic Forum Recorded 26 January 2012

Klaus Martin Schwab (German: [klaʊs ˈmaʁtiːn ʃvaːp]; born 30 March 1938) is a German mechanical engineer, economist, and founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF). He has acted as the WEF's chairman since founding the organisation in 1971. In May 2024, WEF announced that Schwab will move from his role as Executive Chairman to chairman of the Board of Trustees by January 2025. No successor has been named yet.

Early life and education

Klaus Martin Schwab was born on 30 March 1938, to Eugen Wilhelm Schwab and Erika Epprecht in Ravensburg. His parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order for his father to assume the role of director at Escher Wyss AG, an industrial company and contractor for the Nazi regime. Although his father was baptized Lutheran, Schwab was raised Catholic. Although having three Swiss grandparents and two Swiss brothers, he is a citizen of Germany and has declined multiple offers for naturalization, from both Kurt Furgler and Ueli Maurer.

Schwab attended first and second grades at the primary school in the Wädenswil district of Au, Zürich, in Switzerland. After World War II, his family moved back to Germany where Schwab attended the Spohn-Gymnasium in Ravensburg until his Abitur in 1957. In 1961, he graduated as a mechanical engineer from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, with a doctorate in engineering, with a dissertation titled Der längerfristige Exportkredit als betriebswirtschaftliches Problem des Maschinenbaues (Longer-term export credit as a business problem in mechanical engineering). He also earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Fribourg, and a Master in Public Administration degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. While attending Harvard, Schwab found a mentor in future National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Career

Schwab was professor of business policy at the University of Geneva from 1972 to 2003, and since then has been an honorary professor there. Schwab and his wife Hilde created the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in 1998.

World Economic Forum

In 1971, Schwab founded the European Management Forum, which was renamed as the World Economic Forum in 1987. Also in 1971, he published Moderne Unternehmensführung im Maschinenbau. In 2003 Schwab appointed José María Figueres CEO of the WEF, as his successor. In October 2004, Figueres resigned over his undeclared receipt of more than US$900,000 in consultancy fees from the French telecommunications firm Alcatel while he was working at the Forum. In 2006, Transparency International highlighted this incident in their Global Corruption Report.

Schwab founded the Global Shapers Community in 2011 within the WEF to work with young people in "shaping local, regional and global agendas." In 2015, the WEF was formally recognised by the Swiss Government as an "international body".

As author

Schwab has authored or co-authored several books. Some consider him to be "an evangelist" for "stakeholder capitalism". The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the subject of a 2016 book he wrote, is an idea he is credited with popularising. In January 2017, Steven Poole in The Guardian criticised Schwab's Fourth Industrial Revolution book, pointing out that "the internet of things" would probably be hackable. He also criticised Schwab for showing that future technologies may be used for good or evil, but not taking a position on the issues, instead offering only vague policy recommendations. The Financial Times' innovation editor found "the clunking lifelessness of the prose" led him to "suspect this book really was written by humans—ones who inhabit a strange twilight world of stakeholders, externalities, inflection points and 'developtory sandboxes'." The political scientist Klaus-Gerd Giesen argued that the dominant ideology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is transhumanism.

Criticism

Salary level and lack of financial transparency

While Schwab declared that excessively high management salaries were "no longer socially acceptable", his own annual salary of about one million Swiss francs (a little more than US$1 million) has been repeatedly questioned by the media. The Swiss radio and television corporation SRF mentioned this salary level in the context of ongoing public contributions to the WEF and the fact that the Forum does not pay any federal taxes. Moreover, the former Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung journalist Jürgen Dunsch made the criticism that the WEF's financial reports were not very transparent since neither income nor expenditures were broken down. Schwab has also drawn ire for mixing the finances of the not-for-profit WEF and other for-profit business ventures. For example, the WEF awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to USWeb in 1998. Yet shortly after the deal went through, Schwab took a board seat at the same company, reaping valuable stock options.

Allegations of employer misconduct and harassment

On June 29, 2024, The Wall Street Journal published an article, authored by staff reporters Shalini Ramachandran and Khadeeja Safdar, stating that Schwab is accused by former WEF employees of having engaged in two instances of sexual harassment. Furthermore, a former employee alleges that she was "pushed out" from her role as leader of an initiative for startups, following a brief trial period, after telling Schwab she was pregnant. Schwab grew upset that she would not be able to continue working at the same pace, people familiar with the incident said, and told her she was not suited for her new leadership role. A fourth allegation was that Schwab ordered the firing of all individuals over 50 years of age at the WEF, which then HR-chief Paolo Gallo refused to do. After this, Schwab allegedly fired Gallo. The article then went on to discuss alleged misconduct by other high-ranking WEF officials, which was not directly related to Schwab. The WSJ article quoted the WEF's response to the specific allegations against Schwab, which the authors had gathered before publishing the article, as: "Schwab has never made sexual advances toward an employee and the women's allegations were vague and false" and that “Mr. Schwab does not and has never engaged in the vulgar behaviors you describe”. Three days later, the WSJ article was reported on, separately and respectively, in Swiss daily newspapers Tages-Anzeiger and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, where WEF further commented that "it is deeply disappointing that the WSJ made provably false allegations" and that there existed a zero-tolerance policy for this sort of misconduct.

In the aftermath of these revelations, some commentators pondered the future of the WEF.

Controversies

Controversy with Davos municipality

In June 2021, Schwab sharply criticised the "profiteering", "complacency" and "lack of commitment" of the municipality of Davos in relation to the WEF annual meeting. He mentioned that the preparation of the COVID-related meeting in Singapore in 2021/2022 had created an alternative to its Swiss host and sees the chance that the annual meeting will stay in Davos at between 40 and 70 per cent.

Awards and honours

Among other awards, Schwab has been conferred with the French Legion of Honour (knight distinction), the Grand Cross with Star of the National Order of Germany, and the Japanese Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun. He also was awarded the Dan David Prize, and was recognized by Queen Elizabeth as an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. Schwab has also received honorary degrees from various universities, including the National University of Singapore and Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania.

Publications

Articles

• "Global Corporate Citizenship: Working with Governments and Civil Society." Foreign Affairs, vol. 87, no. 1 (Jan–Feb 2008), pp. 107–18. JSTOR 20020271.

Books

• The Global Information Technology Report 2001–2002: Readiness for the Networked World | Berkman Klein Center with Geoffrey S. Kirkman, Peter K. Cornelius and Jeffrey D. Sachs, New York, Oxford University Press (2002). ISBN 978-0195152586, ISBN 0195152581.
• The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Geneva: World Economic Forum (2016). ISBN 978-1944835002.
• Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with Nicholas Davis. New York: Crown Publishing Group (2018).
• COVID-19: The Great Reset, with Thierry Malleret. Forum Publishing (2020). ISBN 978-2940631124.
• Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley (2021). ISBN 1119756138, 978-1119756132.
• The Great Narrative: For a Better Future, with Thierry Malleret. Forum Publishing (2022). ISBN 978-2940631315.

Personal life

Schwab married Hilde Schwab, his former assistant, in 1971. The wedding took place in Sertig Valley at a Reformed church. The couple live in Cologny in Switzerland. The Schwabs have two adult children, Nicole (born 1975/1976) and Olivier. Nicole Schwab co-founded the Gender Equality Project.

References

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External links

• Klaus Schwab at IMDb
• Appearances on C-SPAN

• Business and economics
• Switzerland
• Biography

• 1938 births
• Living people
• German businesspeople
• German economists
• German male writers
• German philanthropists
• ETH Zurich alumni
• Harvard Kennedy School alumni
• Grand Cordons of the Order of the Rising Sun
• Honorary Knights Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George
• Honorary Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• Knights Commander of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• Members of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco
• Members of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group
• People from Ravensburg
• People from the Free People's State of Württemberg
• University of Fribourg alumni
• Academic staff of the University of Fribourg
• World Economic Forum
• German people of Swiss descent