The Davos Delusion: When Extractive Elites Cosplay Regeneration
Reimagining the C-Suite for a Regenerative Future
Another year, another pilgrimage to the Swiss Alps. The World Economic Forum in Davos has once again convened the world’s most powerful executives, billionaires, and political leaders. An elite gathering that has mastered the art of discussing global crises while remaining insulated from their consequences.
The irony is thick enough to cut with a Swiss Army knife. Private jets descend upon a mountain resort where champagne flows freely, and the very architects of our extractive economic system gather to workshop solutions to problems they’ve largely created. They speak of stakeholder capitalism and sustainability while their corporations continue to extract wealth from communities, deplete natural resources, and concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands.
The Extractive C-Suite: Titles That Tell the Truth
The language of corporate leadership reveals everything about our economic system’s priorities. Chief Executive Officer. Chief Financial Officer. Chief Operating Officer. These titles encode a worldview centered on execution, financial returns, and operational efficiency—a machinery designed for extraction, not regeneration.
What if we reimagined these roles through the lens of regenerative business practices? What if corporate leadership was accountable not just to shareholders, but to the living systems upon which all prosperity depends?
Reimagining the C-Suite for a Regenerative Future
If we did that, what may these titles sound like?
Chief Stewardship Officer
(formerly Chief Executive Officer)
Leadership as stewardship, not domination. This role would be accountable for ensuring the organization leaves ecosystems, communities, and future generations better off than it found them. Decision-making authority comes with intergenerational responsibility.
Chief Reciprocity Officer
(formerly Chief Financial Officer)
Rather than optimizing for extraction and shareholder value, this role would ensure that wealth flows reciprocally—that value created is shared equitably among all contributors, including nature itself. Financial health would be measured not by profit margins alone, but by the vitality of relationships across the value web.
Chief Regeneration Officer
(formerly Chief Operating Officer)
Operations designed to restore and renew rather than deplete and discard. This role would reimagine supply chains, production processes, and business models to actively regenerate the social and ecological systems the company touches.
Chief Belonging Officer
(formerly Chief Human Resources Officer)
Moving beyond viewing people as “resources” to be managed, this role would cultivate conditions for genuine belonging, collective flourishing, and the full expression of human potential. Workers become co-creators, not expendable inputs.
Chief Systems Intelligence Officer
(formerly Chief Information Officer)
Technology and information systems designed to enhance collective intelligence and systems awareness rather than surveillance, control, and algorithmic manipulation. Data becomes a tool for understanding interconnection, not just optimization.
Chief Commons Officer
(formerly Chief Marketing Officer)
Rather than manufacturing demand and manipulating desire, this role would steward the company’s relationship with the commons—the shared resources, knowledge, and cultural wealth that no corporation creates alone but from which all benefit.
Enter the Chief Flourishing Officer
Now, in an ideal company in an ideal world, we may have all those roles. But we are quite far from that. Yet, that does not mean that we have to give up and give in to the old structures.
We no longer can afford to extract from people, and much less so from the planet.
That’s where the Chief Flourishing Officer (CFLO) comes in. The responsibility? Creating the conditions for people and planet to flourish.
It’s a sort of combination of the above C-Suite into one role. Because human and planetary flourishing depends on all of the above. And if you can’t hire a CFLO (yet)? Well, then I can help as your fractional CFLO.
Where do we start? That all depends on you. A good place to start is typically the company culture. Does it fundamentally create those conditions? Are your people flourishing?
If so, great, and how can it be further improved. Or how can the flourishing of the planet be integrated. If not, then where should we start making changes?
This is how I am of service:
To help you help your people do and be better,
And to help you help the planet.
My goal is to amplify and accelerate your effort for the better. To increase your positive impact on people and planet. Get in touch so we can explore how our collaboration could look like.
Mending the Disconnect
The CFLO and the other reimagined titles represent a fundamental shift from extraction to regeneration, from domination to reciprocity, from short-term profit to long-term flourishing. And they expose the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Davos, that stands for our economic system: you cannot solve problems with the same consciousness that created them.
The global elite gathering in Switzerland this week will undoubtedly produce eloquent statements about sustainability, inclusion, and shared prosperity. But until the fundamental structures of corporate power are redesigned—until the very language and incentives of leadership are transformed—these will remain beautiful words disconnected from systemic change.
There certainly are attendees in Davos who are sincere in their concern, but it remains questionable whether an elite that has profited immensely from an extractive system can truly lead the transition to a regenerative one, or whether real transformation requires a fundamental redistribution of power itself.
Perhaps the most regenerative thing the current C-suite could do is relinquish some of its concentrated authority and create governance structures that include workers, communities, and even representatives of the more-than-human world.
But that conversation rarely makes it onto the Davos agenda. And after this year’s edition I’m more doubtful than ever that it ever will.
And so, the annual gathering in the Alps remains what it has always been: an extractive elite congratulating itself for discussing the problems it continues to create.
It’s up to those not present to mend the disconnect and start building an alternative to a system that is becoming more grotesque by the day and serves less and less people.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller
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