Would you trust this Davos man?

livemint.com:

Now here’s a shocker. The highly credentialed and highly compensated nonprofit executive who tells businesses to stop focusing on the needs of shareholders doesn’t seem to be a very nice boss. In fact he may treat his employees even worse than he wants businesses to treat their owners and customers.

Regular readers know Klaus Schwab as the World Economic Forum founder who hosts a celebrated annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The event is sometimes cast as a gathering of world capitalism. More precisely, it’s an annual opportunity for global politicians and activists to persuade American CEOs to stop being capitalists.

Mr. Schwab’s regular shtick is to tell CEOs that people have lost trust in large institutions like theirs. Then he tells them that to help rebuild such trust, they must stop focusing on the needs of shareholders and instead serve a larger universe of “stakeholders" like him, who may have no stake in the businesses but do have strong opinions about climate and diversity.

Of course if shareholders, customers and voters trusted such policies there would be no need for the Schwab sales pitch. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that American CEOs have no need for his management advice. The Journal’s Shalini Ramachandran and Khadeeja Safdar report on what happened a few years ago when Mr.

Schwab decided his organization needed a youthful makeover: So he singled out a group of employees over 50 years old and instructed his human-resources chief to get rid of them all, according to people familiar with the matter. This, he explained, would lower the average age of the workforce. The HR chief, a seasoned former World Bank executive named Paolo Gallo, declined, pointing out that there has to be a reasonable