Back home

I’m back in London, trying to collect my thoughts on the week of Davos in New York. I think there are two extraordinarily positive developments for the Forum itself. First, the week in New York raised the profile of the Forum in the US — the most important market in the world — to an extent another 30 years in Switzerland would not have accomplished. That will bring some problems (a lot of Americans who were allowed in by the comparatively open door policy in New York won’t get near Davos), but the benefits will be far greater.

Second, New York will solve one long-running problem. Each year, a key issue for the Forum has been, “What do we do for an encore?” As long as the Annual Meeting was running in an unbroken string in Davos, the internal and external pressure for steady and visible improvement was becoming stifling. New York has broken the pattern. Of course, expectations will be high when the meeting returns to Switzerland next year. But I don’t think there will be problems of comparison. And that’s a very healthy development.

More Davos blogs

I missed, in the frenzy of Davos, Business 2.0’s Davos blog. The more the merrier. In fact, when I was an employee at the Forum, I argued that every participant should be given a weblog and encouraged to write up her or his experiences. I’m sure only 5-10% would have taken up the offer, but those 100-200 running perspectives on the event would give a fascinating insight into both the participants and the meeting. The other executives at the Forum didn’t see the point, and a number of them, in fact, worked reasonably hard to get Klaus Schwab to prohibit me from writing my Davos Newbies. “No one’s approving what he’s writing,” they complained. Klaus, to his credit, told me he’d looked at the site and enjoyed it.