It is worth taking a moment to reflect on the many faces of the Davos experience. Each person attending has many options to choose among, and you can't do it all. Here are just a few of the Davos' I saw in action last week.
Deal Davos (aka bilateral Davos)
You come to Davos to meet with a handful of specific people who are also there at the same time. Your time is dedicated to a moderate room in some Davos hotel, as your team runs a steady stream of key customers, suppliers and potential partners through. Davos as nexus for minimizing global travel.
Political Davos
You see Davos as a place to get exposed to leading politicians from around the world, where you can hear Tony Blair, Angela Merkel and King Abdallah of Jordan and a hot of others. A place where American politicians get exposed to world opinion and protest, not so much from the folks outside the gates of the WEF, but from leading businesspeople around the world.
Educational Davos
You get educated on the big issues facing your business and society (often the same issues). Top experts explain these issues with a depth and sophistication you rarely get elsewhere. You have interactive workshops and role playing with 40 other CEOs, digging into issues from completely different vantage points. I especially enjoyed the Digital Piracy workshop where a handful of us had to develop and present the "Commercial Pirate's Manifesto!"
Sporty Davos
You get to drive fast cars. Ecologically friendly fast cars. Skiing and sledding and snowboarding and cross country. Parties of every way shape and form, especially tuned for customers. Music and arts experiences.
(Global) Society Davos
You can spend all of your time on social issues, hanging with the heads of NGOs (the international name for nonprofits), major labor unions, religious leaders and of course the social entrepreneurs. You can learn more about the environment, about human rights, about development aid, about the digital divide, about microfinance, about healthy food and about disaster response. I was excited to be part of two sessions about improving disaster response through technology and corporate engagement with NGOs.
Ideas Davos
You get to see lots of inventions and new company ideas: a huge variety. I saw a 3 Watt LED light bulb as bright as a 60W bulb but cool enough to hold in your hand. I saw a pair of adjustable eyeglasses for kids in the developing world that cost less than $1 a pair to make. I heard about medical advances to combat strokes and diabetes. My favorite of these was an invention that you swallow and it takes pictures of your digestive tract, instead of needing the dreaded sigmoidoscopy. It was nicknamed "the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Young Davos
You get to meet up and coming business, media and political leaders: the people who will likely be at Davos in the future. I enjoyed seeing Mayor Gavin Newsome and his girlfriend, who I thought was just a gorgeous actress but also turned out to be a top Stanford Business School graduate. Plus, the WEF is staffed by an army of brilliant young people eager to change the world, people like Jesse Fahnestock who used to run Bookshare.org for us.
Friendly Davos
You get to spend lots of time with people you know through Davos over the years or other aspects of your life. The pressures of day-to-day work aren't there, and you can spend an hour impromptu with someone you had always wanted to meet. In a past year, I got to spend an hour chatting with David Baltimore, Nobel Laureate and then-president of Caltech, my alma mater. At an alumni event, I would get 60 seconds!
Conclusion
You can't do it all, as I said above. The hardest decisions to make are what to not do. What blend of the Davos cocktail will you have is a big challenge. For example, I decided this year to avoid political Davos because I thought other things were more important to my work. The richness of the experience lets you give up on some parts and still feel like you didn't shortchange yourself. But, it's very hard to get enough sleep!
I walked away with easily 60 business cards of people with whom I should be following up. Some of them will get involved with Benetech and that will be great. Some will send new people my way and vice versa. Some of them are on similar paths to mine and I know we'll be helping each other advance. Davos is just another branch of the great karma bank.
Hope I get to go back again!
Labels: Davos07
Sunday, January 28, 2007
The Malaysians had brought a dance troupe, and it was fun. It had more of a feeling of a traditional cultural experience than last year's India party (which was Bollywood to the max). After singing some Malaysian songs, the four top singers switched to popular (American) music. Lots of Motown. And of course, we were dancing up a storm. There was also two other venues for music: one was sort of a jazz nightclub with jazz duos and the other had South African singers followed by recorded dancing music.
My challenge on these parties is that they go very late. Because I'm staying at the Schatzalp, the last train up the mountain leaves at 2 am. If you miss it, the next train is at 6 am! And, there were some people who ended up on the 6 am funicular. Of course, I caught the 2 am train and ended up in the lounge of the Schatzalp talking about the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) project and getting a CD of Amazonian music from my Brazilian buddies (the big column in Brazil's major Sao Paolo paper was entitled (Jungle Boys go to Davos!).
Labels: Davos07, Malaysia, Party
I did run into a nice protester on the street. Uli was protesting against the Swiss banks taking five times more money in from the developing world than it puts back out. His direct concern was about corrupt elites that stash their ill-gotten gains in Switzerland. He was advocating for legal changes that would allow more transparency in such cases and permit countries to recover looted assets. We had quite a pleasant chat.
Of course, not all of the interactions were pleasant. One night after a party, one of my fellow social entrepreneurs got hit in the head by a snowball thrown by some punks shouting slogans. However, my buddy felt it was just drunk kids acting up rather than a political act!
Saturday, January 27, 2007
One great example of this was a major reception held last night with the following hosts: Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com), Prof. & Mrs. Schwab, Michael Dell, Peter Gabriel (rockstar and founder of Witness), Alan Hassenfeld (Hasbro) and Marilyn Carlson Nelson (Carlson Travel). The reception was held in honor of social entrepreneurs and marking the release of a new book edited by Marc Benioff entitled The Business of Changing the World, which is a compendium of essays about business people and their engagement with the social sector. I had some great conversations with people explaining what Benetech does.
Talking to other Social Entrepreneurs
At least half of the highpoints of this week in Switzerland are the interactions I have with other social entrepreneurs. I feel very much at home with these folks, which are my peer community. Last night I was talking to John Wood about his book, Amazon.com: Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. He gave me the direct advice of a social entrepreneur in the middle of marketing his first book: immensely useful.
Moving on to dinner, I sat next to Garth Japhet of Soul City in South Africa, a doctor/social entrepreneur who leads an organization that uses media to influence behavior that affects HIV/AIDS. Garth was able to give me (in less than ten minutes) the reason why HIV spreads so much more quickly in southern Africa than in most other places in the world. He explained that immediately after infection, you are extremely infectious for around three weeks until your immune system beats HIV down to nearly indetectable levels. He noted that while southern Africans do not tend to have a larger lifetime number of sexual partners, they tend to have longer term relationships with multiple partners at the same time. Because a person might be with several long term partners in that several week initial peak infectivity, you will infect several people (and you are less likely to use a condom since it is a long term partner and not a one night stand). And if your partners are similarly oriented, they could infect several more people. Garth noted that a single infection leads to many more infections given this profile compared to societies where you might have as many sexual partners over your lifetime, but where the likelihood of having multiple partners during this three week period is much less.
Like many of my conversations with social entrepreneurs, I feel like I have a window into a crucial social issue from someone with an unparalleled vantage point. And, I get to have at least a dozen of these in-depth conversations every time I come to Davos!
Labels: Davos07, social entrepreneurs
Thursday, January 25, 2007
John Markoff did an effective job of telling us how bad things are. Botnets (infected PCs under the control of bad guys) represent over 10% of the PCs connected to the Internet. Microsoft Vista illegal copies are already for sale in China, in spite of Microsoft's efforts. According to Microsoft, over a third of illegal copies of their OSs come with trojan infections pre-installed. He noted that Microsoft has spent tremendous amounts of effort in Vista protecting premium content. By extension, wondered what things would be like if Microsoft had spent as much efforts on protecting your private information. His bottom line:
It's as bad as you could possibly imagine!
Jonathan Zittrain made a strong analogy that the Internet today is as structurally weak as AT&T's telephone network was back in the days when you could get free telephone calls using a Cap'n crunch toy whistle.
I can't quote Vint Cerf or the ITU guy (didn't ask permission), but they brought good perspectives to the panel. Michael Dell stayed on corporate message. Wasn't clear that we made much progress on the stated topic, but I did miss the first few minutes!
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