The Hindu Business Line : Getting ready for Davos 2007

Last year, I was standing in a queue in minus 20 degree centigrade outside Café Schneider, which overlooks Sporthotel, in Davos, Switzerland. They are known to serve the world's best hot chocolate. And, as we were waiting, Bill Clinton and Queen Rania of Jordan joined the queue with us plebs to get a cup!

Next week, the lobbies and lounges of the Congress Centre in the Swiss mountain resort will once again represent one of the great networking opportunities on the planet.

The Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a gargantuan event that attracts more than 2,000 leaders from business, politics, academia, the media and civil society will be held between January 24 and 28, at this bitterly cold and snow-bound village.

The Agenda

This year's theme — The Shifting Power Equation — reflects the elements that will shape the global agenda in 2007. The WEF believes that the shifting power equations arise from the fact that we are experiencing changes not just at the geo-political level, but also at the economic and social levels. The hot topics for discussion at Davos are likely to be nuclear proliferation, climate change, Web 2.0, energy security and the possible US political climate in 2008. Here, in the secluded, avalanche-prone splendour of a town that doesn't have an airport, the planet's most famous and influential dealmakers, politicians, academics, media captains, intellectuals, and religious leaders gather, and create a kind of a central committee of the 21st century. At the registration, participants get an ID badge, which has your picture, name and a built in chip with a wireless antenna. You cannot get near the Congress Centre without the badge. You can't even drive by the Congress without the police stopping you.

All participants also get an IPAQ handheld computer. The IPAQ is loaded with stuff, including detailed descriptions of each session, bios, pictures, and e-mails of the participants. Nearly everybody milling in the corridors of the Davos conference centre will look somewhat familiar because they are known from television, print or online.

Davos moments

The event makes for plenty of Davos moments, these instances could probably happen only here at the WEF. Last year, as I walked into the partners lounge, I saw Ted Turner and Bill Gates leaning against the banister, having a quiet chat. There was Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, except there were no television cameras around them.

Technology moments: I was sitting in a session on digital future — Bill Gates, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Cisco boss John Chambers, and Skype inventor Niklas Zennstroem, are on the panel — and the guy sitting next to me turned out to be Sir Richard Branson, who happened to be a first timer in Davos.

Celebrity moments: Bopping along to a fantastic New Orleans jazz band at the forum's farewell gala, the man you are rubbing shoulders with turns out to be actor Michael Douglas. More than 240 sessions are packed into four-and-a-half days, with events from 7 am until midnight. In recent years, West Asia dominated Davos politics; oil prices, globalisation and the rise of India and China have become big business topics.

Networking capital

The best sessions are the private and industry meetings. It is these meetings that make Davos unique. Between sessions, the halls are a swirling sea of people, where business cards are swapped and old friendships renewed.

It is the sheer concentration of individuals in possession of power, wealth and knowledge that makes the privately run Forum so desirable to its participants. The thousand chief executives who attend its annual meeting control, between them, more than 70 per cent of international trade. I have watched zillionaires and presidents hanging out at Davos and found that with so much power gathered under one roof, each one is rendered just a little bit less special. Davos is a great ego leveller.

It's a place where Larry Page, the founder of Google, hesitantly asks if he can share the table with you. Or where Werner Wenning, Chairman of Bayer, stands in queue to sign up for sessions just like everyone else. The presidents get held up in the crowded streets along with the professors; multi-millionaire Wall Street moguls are just as prone to indecorous falls on the snow as gutsy entrepreneurs from the developing world.

And we have sharpshooters on the roof and on the apartment balconies behind the hotels.

NGOs are present each year and many of their favourite issues — from the environment to third-world health — feature prominently in the programme. One social worker friend remarked to me how hard it had become to organise a revolution when he was not only trading thoughts with Bill Gates on Aids vaccines for Africa and Asia, but was also passing him the canapes.

Indeed, one of the most remarkable and unremarked aspects about the WEF is that Davos has become a neutral venue for many of the world's poor, where they hash out their countries' problems, often amongst themselves. In the last few years, the event has gained such prestige that many corporate heads are willing to pay almost any price to be invited. To be on the Annual Meeting list is to be legitimised as a global player.

(The author is former Europe Director, CII, and lives in Cologne, Germany. Feedback may be sent to mohan.murti@t-online.de)

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