I received my programme preview for Davos in New York this morning. Here are some first impressions.
The professed commitment to a more interactive Annual Meeting, largely through workshop-type sessions, has been fully demonstrated. Most of the sessions outside meals are workshops. As a result, the “traditional” Davos-type sessions (three or four speakers with a moderator on a reasonably defined topic) are few and far between.
I understand what provoked the wholesale shift. For years, participants have been asking for more interaction, fewer talking heads. At the Forum’s Southern Africa Economic Summit, ordinary sessions were totally eliminated, and the achievement was widely praised. I retain an open mind about the shift, but in the “Davos” context, I am concerned about the balance. A workshop, by its nature, is a reasonably large-scale event. On the preview, a typical workshop has a dozen so-called discussion leaders as well as a facilitator. I’d guess that 100-200 participants will join a typical workshop. There’s less opportunity in such circumstances to be exposed to something new and startling. It’s better, however, for arriving at some kind of conclusion an end the Forum dearly wishes to achieve.
Partly because of the shift to workshops, I have less sense of the crafting of the programme. When you have the number of discussion leaders that a workshop requires, you don’t have to be so picky about how gets a programme role. Of course, this gives a greater chance for a true diversity of voices, but there’s less sense of a controlling intelligence behind the scenes (which some may welcome).
The other big change is the virtual exclusion of topics which don’t fit into six “global agenda areas” (defined elsewhere as “gravity themes”):advancing security and addressing vulnerability, restoring sustained growth, reducing poverty and improving equity, sharing values and respecting differences, re-evaluating leadership and governance, and redefining business challenges. As a result, many of the oddball sessions, of which I was so fond, have vanished.
On first reading here are my good and bad points. Good: lots of meaty topics, fewer “duty” plenaries (if it’s a president or a star CEO, he/she “has” to have a plenary), more design for true participation. Bad: loss of idiosyncratic sessions, particularly those on personal topics, lack of variation on type and scale of sessions, too many Americans.
All that said, having a real programme in my hand begins to make Davos in New York a reality for me. I’m excited about the experiences that await me and other participants.
Addendum: Along with other close readers of the programme, I’m intrigued at the Monday lunchtime slot. There’s only one event scheduled: a “special address”. Nice slot for a US president, if he should agree to come.
David Hale has an interesting perspective on Argentina. “Argentina’s deflationary economic policies ended in riots because George Soros and Julian Robertson retired from active management of their hedge funds nearly two years ago.”
As David writes, if Soros and Robertson had been around to mount an attack on the peso, the currency regime would have collapsed 12-18 months ago, presumably sparing some national agony.
The more important point he makes is that Argentina’s collapse should not be read as a failure for free-market policies. There was plenty wrong in Argentina, but that does not mean that a retreat to protectionism, nationalisation and a planned economy is the better alternative.
I missed Anthony Lewis’s valedictory column in December. Bill Safire is more quoted, and Tom Friedman gets around more, but for 32 years Lewis has been one of the true voices of reason and sanity in the American press. And two of his books Gideon’s Trumpet and Make No Law are eloquent testimony to the value of a nation contructed on law.
Appropriately, his final column is a lament that the US is losing its faith in reason. Listen to his final words: “In the end I believe that faith in reason will prevail. But it will not happen automatically. Freedom under law is hard work. If rulers cannot be trusted with arbitrary power, it is up to citizens to raise their voices at injustice. The most important office in a democracy, Justice Louis Brandeis said, is the office of citizen.”