Leadership, Work-Life, and Tech Across the Atlantic
What I Expected to Learn as a Marshall Memorial Fellow
This is fellowship diaries, a series of dispatches about my travels as a Marshall Memorial Fellow. In 2022, I was privileged to be selected as a Marshall Memorial Fellow (MMF), the flagship leadership program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
MMF allows leaders from the United States and Europe to explore each other's political, economic, and social landscapes through delegations on either side of the Atlantic.
Notable alums include Former Georgia State Representative and voting rights activist Stacy Abrams and French President Emmanuel Macron.
For the centerpiece of my fellowship experience, I embarked on a three-week European tour through Washington DC, London, Bratislava, Belgrade, and Brussels in September 2023.
I’m documenting my thoughts and learning here.
Brimming with excitement -- and jet lag -- fellows from around the US and Europe gathered at the DC offices of the German Marshall Fund of the US for several days of leadership training, debate, and cultural and geopolitical “compare-and-contrast” before embarking on our respective US and European tours.
We’d spent the last year engaging virtually; this was our first in-person meeting for most of us.
I’ve worked and traveled extensively across Europe for the last decade of my career. So before this tour began, I put forth a few hypotheses that I aimed to test over the following weeks:
Hypothesis #1: Americans are clinging to remote work in a way Europeans don’t have to. Because Europeans already have a healthier work-life balance than Americans, they are engaged in less intense battles over remote work and returning to the office. While American workers are clinging to newfound post-pandemic leverage over their employers, Europe’s emphasis on workers' rights gives European workers less to stick to
Hypothesis #2: European-American technological cooperation is suboptimal. Europe and America have complementary approaches to innovation and technology, so we should work together more than we are now. America is quick to innovate and slow to regulate to the benefit of companies and consumer choice and at the expense of workers and consumer privacy. On the other hand, Europe is slow to innovate and quick to regulate, to the benefit of consumer privacy and workers but to the detriment of consumer choice. American markets need more European regulatory savvy, while European markets need more American innovation energy.
Hypothesis #3: In a bipolar world, every European country must pick sides. The gravitational pull of a rising China is straining the relationship between the US and Europe. Governments of all sizes and levels of influence outside the US and China will be forced to “choose sides.” While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has refocused Europe on its relationship with the US, this is merely a temporary reversal of the trend toward bipolarity.
Hypothesis #4: European corporate governance leads on gender diversity but lags on everything else. While America’s legislative efforts to bring corporate board composition into the 21st century have been subsumed into -- and partially thwarted by -- its culture wars, Europe’s board diversity mandates are humming. On everything else -- from technological literacy to risk management -- European corporate governance lags behind America’s...and both are decades behind the times.