Davos Newbies

Blogging an event

I may have been perverse over the years in turning down a couple of invitations to Richard Saul Wurman’s TED conference. The timing has always been bad for me: too close to a week away in Davos to justify nearly a week in California, however nice that would be. I generally hear good things about TED, and this year (even if slightly late) I’ve been able to get a good sense of things from David Weinberger’s weblog of TED 12.

Davos Newbies during the actual Davos meeting has generally been far more impressionistic than Weinberger’s account. That is partly forced by the nature of the event. Davos is a multi-ringed circus, while I know Richard Wurman’s philosophy is that everyone should share a common experience. I’m not certain one idea is better than the other, but it does create a distinctly different climate.

Weinberger’s call for longer time slots is one with which I sympathise. A lot of the best Davos experiences come from uninterrupted time with a wonderful thinker, such as Daniel Kahneman this year in New York.

The country blacklist

John Plender makes an important point in the Financial Times about Calpers’ decision to rule out investment in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines (second item in column). “Blacklisting countries rather than individual companies is a little like red-lining — the practice whereby home lenders ostracise complete neighbourhoods regardless of the creditworthiness of individual inhabitants.”

 Of course Calpers is under no obligation to go to the trouble and expense of researching individual companies in distant markets. But celebrating (and investing in) the well-run pioneers would do far more for the cause of economic and social reform than shunning the entire market.