And when we think about the best and the worst moments to learn lessons from them that will inspire us to carry on, there is always one element that makes a difference: people, and leaders in particular.

Barça in the times of the Dream Team, the successes of sports personalities such as Rafa Nadal or Roger Federer, or the Barça women's team led by Alexia Putellas and Aitana Bonmatí, are clear examples. So are such diverse long-term business successes as SEAT, Mango, La Fageda and ONCE.

All these have several common denominators. First, they set out with a clear and inspiring purpose that becomes tangible through a set of exemplary and coherent values. Furthermore, they all show long-term vision, ambition in their goals yet at the same time humility to improve day by day and resilience, lots of resilience to overcome adversities. Lastly, they all have leadership and talent as essential catalysts.

In times like these, when new paradigms shake our reality with global challenges that occur at breakneck speed, these ingredients become indispensable.

Great revolutions are changing the world we live in, and there are three in particular that affect us directly: climate change, the fourth industrial revolution and the inversion of the demographic pyramid.

In less than five years, we have come to realize that climate change is not a distant phenomenon that happens at the South Pole or in the Amazon, but the interconnection of all the planet's ecosystems causing a clear impact on our day-to-day existence.

The fourth industrial revolution, in which not only people are connected but also things, opens up a vast array of opportunities around the large-scale use of data for artificial intelligence. But just as big as the opportunities are the challenges this revolution brings in terms of ethics, regulation and the economic, social and labor model. New technologies are changing not only the way we consume goods and services, but also the very dimension of time and space, of how and when we use these two resources to work, interact with others or enjoy our leisure.

These new paradigms are leading to new business models to offer society goods and services that are mass-produced on an individualized basis using real-time data. Nowadays our financial products, the food or the clothes we buy, the films or series we watch, the trips we plan, and even some of our social and affective relationships respond to these new paradigms.

At the foundations of all these new business models we find two basic pillars that will be absolutely imperative for success in any project, whether public or private: a competitive value proposition and the customer's trust when it comes to data sharing.

On a different note, and on top of this, we are witnessing a worrying inversion of the demographic pyramid, caused by the improvement in life expectancy and the low birth rate. This is turning us into an increasingly aged society, without young people. Now, alongside this reality, we find another demographic challenge resulting from the new migratory flows of people leaving their homelands to escape wars, famine or climate change.

All of this poses a huge challenge in terms of the mid- and long-term sustainability of our pension system and our care services, but also our model of integration and social cohesion and our system of education and values.

In this context, Europe needs to rethink its welfare state model and redefine its strategic positioning, driven by a new reality in which the geopolitical equilibrium swings to and fro between two great powers: the USA and China.

We find ourselves, then, at a time of great global challenges that requires large-scale political, economic, social and business alliances. However, it is forecast that by 2050 approximately 80% of the world population will live in major metropolitan regions. Therefore, paradoxically, a very significant part of people's quality of life will depend, now more than ever, on the management of public services on a local scale.

And this is the reason for the creation of the Public Management Lab, a forum for meeting and reflection where the public service sector can stop, look back and take stock, to see where we stand and to dream about where we want to go, and learn lessons from this to face the future in the best possible way.

Because in this context of profound ongoing transformation on a global scale and at high speed, the requirements for the success of any project are specially important in the public service sector. And we cannot take it for granted.

We will need public services to offer a competitive value proposition and be mass-produced yet at the same time individualized by means of real-time data obtained with the citizens' trust.

We need to guarantee this in our hospitals, our universities and schools, our public transport and media, our main infrastructures, the management of resources such as water, energy, etc.

Whether through direct public management or through public-private partnership models, we need the public sector that is called upon to lead these transformations to do so on the basis of the aforementioned requirements for success: leadership and talent as indispensable catalysts of a clear and inspiring purpose, exemplary and coherent values, long-term vision, ambitious goals, humility to improve from day to day, and resilience to adapt and overcome adversities.

It was for all this that the Public Management Lab was set up in 2023, with the aim of strengthening professionalized public service governance in order to face the great challenges of the future and improve people's quality of life.

Today the PML comprises more than 20 institutions with a total of 220,000 workers involved in public services in 10 sectors, and its main objectives are:

• To create a community that identifies good practice, carries out knowledge transfer and establishes alliances, synergies and economies of scale.
• To generate a meeting point between public service management and academia to boost learning for the creation and development of public talent.
• To strengthen professionalized public management.
• To establish a cross-sectional meeting point for shared reflection and the creation of broad consensus with a long-term view.

We have embarked on this journey with eagerness, commitment, a cooperative spirit and a strong vocation to create public value. The future is now today on our agenda for the present!

Marta Labata is CEO of BSM and President of the Public Management Lab