Archive for January, 2007

Last thoughts on Davos 2007

I began this blog on Tuesday by saying that it had started snowing. The big issue for many of the less well-heeled among us — those without heavy duty limos and helicopters — is whether the snow that has built up all day will let us get home now that the World Economic Forum’s meeting is essentially over.

Let’s hope that the Swiss train system handles snow better than the British one handles leaves. (For those of you not familiar with British trains, they get disrupted easily.)

The Davos meeting has had one big achievement, being the locale for the agreement to restart global trade talks. It has also confirmed that climate change is now one of the top items on the world agenda. Africa, we are told, is getting a bit better. But it is still far, far away from being an Asian Tiger economy, or should that be African Lion economy?

There was also a remarkable degree of optimism about the global economy and the prospects for businesses. Sometimes when there is a large consensus, the opposite happens. But there were a few naysayers going around, so not every one is on the same page.

As for this blog, tell me what you think by e-mailing me at jeremy.gaunt(at)reuters.com.

NB: THIS OFFER NOT OPEN TO STAFF OF REUTERS OR THEIR FAMILIES.

Off into the snow, then.

Trading up at Davos

What business wants business (often) gets. Many of the executives popping in and out of panel discussions in Davos this week have been pushing harder than usual for a resumption of the stalled Doha round of world trade talks. Abracadabra! A meeting of government ministers on the sidelines, to use the jargon, agreed to get the ball rolling again.

Some, like Brazil’s foreign minister Chelso Amorim even reckon a trade deal of some sort can be hashed out by the end of March or early April. That would be earlier than the six months demanded earlier this week in a Davos-related statement from top chairmen and chief executive officers.

It all remains to be seen, of course, but the World Economic Forum will see the agreement to restart talks as a success for its annual meeting. On which point, I would add something to my earlier blog about why people come here.

Davos-like events make it easier, perhaps even providing an excuse, for the very busy to get together without calling for a special meeting. Sometimes it’s the big guys like trade
ministers here or Middle East peace plan negotiators in the WEF’s Jordan meeting some years back.

But it also happens on a micro level. One Californian executive told me he had been trying in vain for months to get together with some local counterparts back home. In the end, they got together here.

School’s (almost) out

The snow is falling heavily and there is a kind of end-of-term feeling in Davos as the WEF annual meeting enters its last full day. Not a bad time, then, to ask why people really bother to come here.

There is a lot of scepticism among outsiders that Davos is just a big talking shop, full of self-importance and hot air. Some of this doubtless comes from the way the WEF presents itself. “Shaping the Global Agenda” is hardly a modest goal.

Talk of the “spirit of Davos” can, let’s face it, grate.

But the top business leaders wandering the halls here don’t buy into that wholesale. Chats with a number of them over the past few days have shown a general fondness for the meeting but for interestingly diverse reasons.

First there are the networkers like the European blue-chip CEO who said he goes nowhere near any of the discussion panels and comes simply to meet people. Then there are the sellers like the American hi-tech entrepreneur who was out flogging his latest toy or the Middle Eastern official who said he was tooting his organisation’s horn.

But the intellectual debate available is also a major draw. A leading wealth manager told me that of course he was here to meet clients, but what he really liked was that once a year he got to go “back to school”. Where else can he spend time digging into old issues and learning about completely new ones?

A babble of bloggers at Davos

The idea of bloggers writing about bloggers is less than bracing, but at Davos the phenomenon is so widespread and talked about that Monty Python’s Spam sketch comes to mind – blog, blog, blog, blog etc.

It is actually next to impossible to calculate how many people are blogging the event. As well as high profile media companies, Reuters, the BBC, Swiss TV, Forbes, CNN and so on, there are untold babbles of individuals out there. What is the collective noun for bloggers, while we’re thinking about it? A nuisance of bloggers, perhaps. Suggestions welcome.

Anyway, the Davos organisers have been in at the beginning on this. Their main blog page has more than 15 official contributors and links to many others. The page has had 21,000 hits so far. It also leads you to Davos Conversation, a site set up by the World Economic Forum and others to bring in about everyone else talking about Davos that they can. It’s interesting that instead of taking part in the myriad discussions going on here, many people are diving out to see what everyone’s saying in the blogosphere instead, as this WEF staffer was right next to me (below).

With more than 800 chief executive officers around it is hardly surprising that some of them have taken up the blog. BT Group boss Ben Verwaayen has been blogging for the Daily Telegraph about the diverse types of people here while KPMG International’s Michael Rake has been talking in his blog about the Transatlantic Business Dialogue.

I hope you will excuse the thoroughly shameless plug, but Reuters CEO Tom Glocer is also at it, suggesting that with all the blogging and webbing going on, one day “we’ll all be able to stay home, prevent climate change and just send our avatars to Switzerland“. 

Stars in their eyes

I didn’t come out here to go celeb-spotting but the fact that celebrities are short on the ground in Davos hasn’t escaped the notice of some of the myriad journalists and bloggers following events at the World Economic Forum.

While it’s possibly true that this year’s event may be lacking in true A list attendees my colleague Mark Jones notes there are still plenty of potential stars to be found among those who have bothered to show up in Davos. His trawl of the blogosphere produces a few surprises.

Mark was most struck by Jane Martinson in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, who decides that  a new star is born:

Move over Sharon Stone and Bono. A small, grey-haired man wearing a grey suit and a slightly startled expression was the unlikely star of today’s Davos… A session on “making green pay” starring Sir Nicholas Stern, the former government economist and author of last year’s groundbreaking report into climate change, was standing room only.

Meanwhile Foreign Policy describes its unlikely star as ….

…a homely middle-aged woman from a declining region of the world. Not very stylishly dressed in a burgundy blazer, looking vaguely professorial, thoughtfully and without pretext staring off into the half-distance as she framed her thoughts, she nevertheless held 1,000 people in the Congress Center’s main hall rapt as she spoke about globalization, her own experiences, the relationship between the developed and the developing world, and her sense of Europe’s role.

That’s German Chancellor Angela Merkel they’re describing (below), in case you hadn’t already worked it out for yourself.