Davos Newbies

There are more blogs from Davos than you can shake a stick at these days, which is great. If you want some perspective, hurry over to David Derrick, who reflects on 14 years at the Annual Meeting.

People have been saying that “Davos” is on the decline for a long time, and new reasons are constantly given. It isn’t. Nor is it the special retreat that it was when participants skied down to the Congress Centre to have their badges written out by Maria Cattaui as they were handed a cup of Glühwein.

I went to an interesting unconference on talent today at Electronic Arts. I was involved in a discussion on “the big pipe”: the need to reform the US education system so the country can have the talent necessary to thrive in the coming decades. One point we agreed on was the need for companies both to understand and lobby about the importance of education.

An executive from Starbucks made the excellent point that CEOs have a limited bandwidth for issues. For many, healthcare looms far larger than education. After all, she said, Starbucks spends more annually on employee healthcare than on purchasing coffee.