SAFE Forum from EBIT. The rising generation: what kind of Lithuania will we live in 20 years from now?

Over the weekend, we participated in the EBIT CEO Conference, where we also discussed the growing generation: what kind of Lithuania will we live in 20 years from now?

Participants:

• educator Austėja Landsbergienė
• economist Žygimantas Mauricas
• Laura Duksaitė-Iškauskienė, Chairman of the Board of the Lithuanian Red Cross and Managing Partner of MasterClass Lithuania.

Moderated by Rasa Lukaitytė-Vnarauskienė, Editor-in-Chief of Delfi. Full DELFI article here.

Here are some thoughts from the discussion.

The generation that will take over the leadership of the country in the broadest sense in 20 years’ time is now growing up. What is this new generation, what are its qualities, what kind of Lithuania can it create?

Laura Duksaitė-Iškauskienė:

“We see a huge difference between new business and classic business. New business is about courage and ambition. They no longer see the problem of hiring a German to manage them, they no longer see the problem of hiring an American to manage them, which was not possible for my parents, because my parents were always looking at their neighbours in the West as more experienced, as bigger experts, where we couldn’t really afford to manage them now, let alone hire them in our own organisation. It is now the young people of this generation who are courageous, who see that they are as good as or even better, braver, more creative, more able to adapt more quickly to a changing business environment. And we see this very clearly in our own country, because in the first quarter, we have 3% growth.

We see the ambition of both our new businesses and the people who create them. Because we have a lot of new businesses that are just being set up, new businesses that are being set up by young people who are coming out of university now, and their ambition is always international.”

She stressed that the younger generation’s attitude and commitment to the state is also demonstrated by volunteering.

“Our classic volunteer is a 46-year-old woman. We have 2,000 volunteers in Lithuania at the moment, but when there is a crisis situation – a pandemic, a war in Ukraine – we have 10,000 spontaneous volunteers.

And these spontaneous volunteers are young people, they are the people who say, I come here and now to do the work that others cannot do, but I come for a very short time, I don’t commit myself for a very long time, but when I am needed, I come for my country.

My son is 18 years old, he will finish school next year and he says he will go first to the service and then to study. We have never had this theme in Lithuania, we have never had this kind of commitment to the state in our country.”

Austėja Landsbergienė:

“It seems to me that the narrative is very much in place now that you’d better not do something, don’t take it, don’t drive, don’t take it, there’s a lot of things through the negative and then it’s like the impression is given that the most that I want is some passive income and to stop working as early as possible. I miss that moral ambition that I want to change, I want to create and I want to leave the world behind me better, not just to live a good life myself.

Our main challenge is to keep doing what we are doing now. It is a very beautiful parable that there are these cycles and we should not be afraid of them. Now there is an upswing, maybe there will be a little bit of a downswing, but there will be an upswing again, and the most important thing is just to keep going, to keep moving forward, and it seems to me that as long as we consciously admit to ourselves that our desire is to make the education system better, to make the defence system better, to make the medical system better, and so on, and better not necessarily in abstract terms, but in very concrete terms in terms of what it is we want to improve, then that is all right.

When I look at the children, I am very excited about Lithuania in 20 years, because I think we will be fantastic. Lithuania has never been independent for so long in its immediate history, and it is very important to keep it that way.

Žygimantas Mauricas:

Ž. Mauricas also predicted that Lithuania has a bright future ahead of it, as the next generation deserves many compliments.

“We have created a culture of doing, Lithuanians are doing and talking about doing. Because some 20 years ago, nobody talked about money, investments, it was a private thing. Now people come and say, well, here are the projects, maybe you can invest. And that money is rolling in. I want to emphasise that foreign investment is actually down, and it is an additional compliment to Lithuania that we are turning our money around to a large extent, and we are able to shoot that money out so widely that we continue to expand our economy and our cobwebs around the rest of the world”.

“We have to not give up, because this is also part of the war, we have to keep fighting, the inspiration is that we are in a common union of big countries, we have a very big market in the EU, we have enough. The Irish are like us, they have to be strong. So we have to take that mentality and turn any challenge into an opportunity. OK, national defence, we are funding it, we may become a second Israel. If the Baltic States were Israel instead of the Baltics, nobody would say that there could be any aggression here, they would be afraid that there could be aggression from us on the other side. It’s just a matter of time, 5-10 years and everything will be fine”, Ž. Mauricas.