Where do you take the club from here?
SD: The club is still quite informal now and one of the interesting questions is: do we retain that informality or do we add a layer of formality around it? How do we think about keeping the influence going? Because it’s not just us, there are other things going on in the industry whether it’s the World Economic Forum, or the Focusing Capital on the Long Term initiative which is backed by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and McKinsey.
SN: Up until now the club has resembled the connections or the network of intellectuals in the 18th Century that you’d find in London or Paris at that time. At some stage these became formal institutions like the Royal Academy and it seems to me that we’re on the cusp of trying to become something slightly more formal.
How might you achieve this?
SD: A really simple example is that we’ve introduced a formal peer review process of the papers we produce. Originally people published papers quite individually but
under a 300 Club banner, whereas now a couple of people peer review them before publication.
SN: And the other one is the formal launch of the US Chapter of the 300 Club. That is quite a major thing because it was by definition geographically European although we had members from the US. The membership has grown and the names are impressive. And you have to be careful because, again, people will tend to be impressed by the institutions, but remember this is based on people not institutions.
