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President and CEO, Stephen Salyer, spoke during a June 2016 Board Weekend dinner

Below is a transcript of the remarks provided by Stephen Salyer, President and CEO of Salzburg Global Seminar, during the annual June 2016 Board Meeting.

Good evening everyone.  A special welcome to Salzburg Global Seminar Directors and their spouses, and to the friends, supporters and special guests who make essential contributions year in and year out.  You introduce our work and open doors to leading thinkers, institutions and donors.  You help us persuade the most incredible people in the world to lead our sessions.  You help us identify and recruit astonishing rising stars to become Salzburg Fellows.  This truly is an organization that depends on volunteers of the highest caliber.  We simply couldn’t do our work without you and those you bring to our dance.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  

Let me also recognize the program, hotel, and administrative staff who play leading roles in all our productions – in the Max Reinhardt tradition, our staff paint the scenery, compose and perform the music, move the scenery and props – and yet let our performers – Salzburg faculty and Fellows – take center stage to sing the arias.  Could the Salzburg Global staff here tonight please stand and take a bow?

This is the 70th summer that men and women have walked through the gates of Schloss Leopoldskron seeking fresh perspective and breakthrough ideas.  Every Salzburg Fellow I meet has a story to tell.  Almost all of them give vivid accounts of ideas challenged, friendships built, strategies formed, and collaborations launched.

We recently found out that two participants in Salzburg Seminar No. 1 in 1947 – one from Virginia, Jack Levenson, who came as a graduate assistant to faculty member F. O. Matthiessen, and one from Italy, Vittorio Gabrieli, a renowned Shakespearean Scholar – are meeting in Rome this summer to celebrate Vittorio’s 99th birthday and their 70 years of friendship.  We tried hard to get them here tonight, but they assured us, “Next year!”

Roughly 10 years ago, soon after I joined the Salzburg Seminar, I heard frequently that the era of in-person convening was coming to a close – and with it the need for institutions like Salzburg Global. After all, who needs the cost and aggravation of international travel when you can ‘go to a meeting’ online or listen to an endless supply of inspiring Ted Talks without leaving your home or car?  

What a difference 10 years make.  In a world where digital ubiquity is now a fact of life, a strange thing is happening – the desire for face-to-face engagement is making a comeback.  Why is this?  

We’ve talked about some of the reasons this weekend – a messaging barrage that is unrelenting; shares of attention that are shrinking; smart media that customize an echo chamber of shared interests, viewpoints and entertainment all “just right” for each of us; and lots more that I’m sure all of you can fill in for yourselves.  

But the mission of Salzburg Global isn’t merely to “entertain” or even just to “educate.”  As our mission statement puts it: “Salzburg Global Seminar challenges present and future leaders to solve issues of global concern.” 

Our vision is to “shape a better world” not just by encouraging cross-cultural dialogue and expanding perspectives, important as those may be, but also by “forging breakthrough collaborations.” 

We aren’t a “convener” or a “leadership development” program like many others.  Nor do we invite famous or inspiring people to give talks and sell tickets.  Our strategy is “to convene the world’s most outstanding people in conditions of trust and creativity to help changemakers and institutions achieve results at scale.”

Margaret Mead, at Seminar No. 1, wrote about Leopoldskron acting as a stage on which costumes can be changed, roles rehearsed and new scenes imagined.  In that respect, as it was then, so it is today.  In other ways, Salzburg Global continues to evolve as the world changes, as the stakes get larger, as the need for action alongside thought becomes more urgent. 

Today, as we enter our 70th year, we want our youngest participants – in our media, law and cultural innovator programs – to commit themselves to lives of public service and public good on a global stage, whatever career paths they pursue.

We want our sessions focused on a specific problem, issue, or opportunity, and that gather cross-sector ‘changemakers,’ many at inflection points in their careers, to take the ‘challenge’ word in our mission seriously.  We expect them to take the lead in and across communities in organizing public-private collaborations, creating and implementing better policy, launching startups, and inspiring and mentoring others.   

We want our sessions that gather senior leaders and specialists – such as our annual Finance Forum that will start on Monday – to open space for people at the apex of their careers, in pressure-filled roles, to take a longer view, to confront political and technological disruption, to try out different ideas with assurance they won’t read them the next day in the newspaper, and to ask how to open up opportunity, not close it down.  

Salzburg global is special place.  We are stewards of a unique national historic site. We are inheritors of a creative tradition that blossomed here with the purchase of Schloss Leopoldskron by Max Reinhardt almost 100 years ago.  We have brought together people in conflict and at war, through the Cold War and through the troubles in Northern Ireland.  We have convened people to write an education plan for South Africa at the end of apartheid and to create plans for philanthropists, governments and private sector initiatives.  

We look today toward programs that build on revolutions in technology, life sciences, and artificial intelligence – programs that require changes in how we think about and maximize human capital and how we accelerate advances in health, learning and the future of work.  We believe that cities are where the battle for sustainable growth will be won or lost for most of the world’s population, and we seek to foster innovation in civic participation, the creative economy and urban systems in balance with nature.  We see human security as threatened by widening gaps between 20th-century institutions and 21st-century challenges.  We will seek through our programs to support people and ideas that can help close this gap. 

I want to close with two quotes that may be familiar to many of you but that I think say so much about the traditions we build on. The first from Margaret Mead, written we believe more or less contemporaneously with that first summer of the Salzburg Seminar: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The second is actually featured on the back of our just published 2016 president’s report.  Please take at least one copy away with you when you go – or a second if you’d like to help us spread the word.  “I have lived in Leopoldskron for 18 years, truly lived, and I have brought it to life.  I have lived every room, every table, every chair, every light, and every picture.  I have built, designed, decorated, planted and I had dreams of it when I was not there.  Those were my most beautiful, prolific and mature years…it was the harvest of my life’s work.”

As Helene Thimig, Reinhardt’s second wife, was reported to have said to our founder, Clemens Heller, when he told her about his dream that became the Salzburg Seminar: “You must use Schloss Leopoldskron.  This is exactly what Max would have wanted to have happen there.”

As we share Max’s Schloss with the world, may we continue to inspire performances equal to his extraordinary imagination and sense of invention.

Thank you all for coming.  We will hope to see you next year for our 70th anniversary celebration.