Where the Elite Really Do Meet
Over dinner recently in this quiet resort high in the snowy Swiss Alps, Nobel Prize-winning scientist James D. Watson discovered a new friend in Frank Gehry, the distinguished Los Angeles architect.
“We learned we have a lot in common,” said Watson, the 67-year-old DNA expert and president of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. “We both love physical exercise. Did you know he learned to play hockey at age 63?”
The laws of personal chemistry were on display the same evening in another Davos restaurant, where Jean-Daniel Tordjman, France’s ambassador for international investment, found himself seated next to an Italian industrialist--the same man Tordjman had been trying to meet for months.
By dessert, a multimillion-dollar venture in France was on the table. “The Italians love France,” Tordjman explained later. “But it helps to have someone like me to help them through the bureaucracy.”
Welcome to one of the largest, most sophisticated and most elite networking bazaars in the world. Every winter, nearly 2,000 business leaders, politicians, scientists, artists, educators and journalists converge--and sometimes collide--for six frenetic days in this small ski resort. The results have, over the past quarter of a century, opened doors to billion-dollar deals, resolved gritty business and scientific problems and even spawned international peacemaking.
Officially, it is the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, a Swiss-based association of business leaders. But among participants it is simply “Davos,” a word that has become synonymous with exponentially high-powered networking among business, government and academia.
“We live in a world where getting people’s attention is the single most valuable thing,” said Arno Penzias, Nobel laureate and chief scientist for AT&T;’s Bell Laboratories. “There’s information all over the place, but the difficult thing is to get it. And this is a place where you can get people’s attention.”
Indeed, the forum’s 26th annual meeting, which concluded this week, was a high-tech greenhouse for making contacts. World leaders were thrown together over meals at hotels and in the meeting rooms, open spaces and quiet corners of the conference center. An eclectic program featured nearly 500 sessions, with topics ranging from cosmology and cancer genetics to U.S. politics and corporate spying.
But the most important goal this year, as in the past, was “to get people together, one on one,” said Maria Livanos Cattaui, one of the managing directors of the forum. “We try to make the program structured, but we also allow time for people to bump into each other. And you have to build a structure so people can find each other.”
The delegates from 106 countries had the means to find each other at their fingertips. A 3-inch-thick book listed participants along with their accomplishments and photographs. And the easiest way to arrange an introduction was to use one of the 35 Pentium-chip computers stationed in the conference hall or the 18 others at nearby hotels.
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Via the bar code on their name tags, delegates could send and receive personal messages and peruse each other’s personal and professional profiles. No electronic mass mailings are permitted. By meeting’s end, participants had logged 25,000 messages, or 12 per person, a forum record.
The Davos networking system works thanks to an absence of interference. The rules bar secretaries, aides and other staff who--outside Davos--work together to control access to corporate executives and government ministers. Even heads of state are allowed only a single aide or interpreter and minimal personal security.
“Everyone here is equal,” said Claude Smadja, another managing director of the forum. “We don’t allow anyone to bring their overwhelming entourages because that just creates barricades between people. So here you can find yourself elbow to elbow with people you wouldn’t normally be able to approach without long, circuitous effort.”
The networking operates on multiple levels. Many executives come prepared with detailed lists of the people they intend to meet and the things they want to accomplish. They roam the hallways in that effort, pausing only to take calls on their cellular telephones.
In this environment, the heads of major corporations--among them Air France, Toyota, the German chemical company BASF and American textile maker Fieldcrest Cannon--can chat privately or in small groups with government figures--such as Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, German Bundesbank President Hans Tietmeyer and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh.
Alongside the government and business leaders are an assortment of invited guests, whom Cattaui calls “the best minds in the world.” This year, they included the heads of unions, think tanks, hospitals and talent management agencies as well as diplomats, economists, newspaper columnists, futurists, Nobel Prize-winning scientists and an array of artists, from South African author and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer to Irish flutist James Galway.
Gordimer, Galway and Gehry joined sculptor Dani Karavan and a dozen other cultural leaders for a brainstorming session with small groups of conference participants. Another session, on the 1996 American presidential election, featured U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed and William J. Bennett, former U.S. secretary of education and co-director of the conservative advocacy group Empower America.
In past years, the neutral location and atmosphere of Davos have helped hasten efforts to reconcile some of the world’s most difficult political disputes. Greece and Turkey signed a declaration here in 1988 to end hostilities. In 1989, North and South Korea chose Davos as the place to meet for the first time at the ministerial level.
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The process of German unification was accelerated in 1990 by a meeting of the heads of East and West Germany. And in 1994, Peres and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat reached a draft agreement to bring Palestinian autonomy to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Jericho.
While Davos occasionally makes headlines, the World Economic Forum keeps a relatively low profile. It doesn’t make things happen but rather creates a rich atmosphere in which things can happen.
“It’s rarefied air, and that’s part of its utility and its charm,” explained John R. O’Neill, president of the California School of Professional Psychiatry and the author of books on leadership. “I suppose I could go around hustling my books here, but that would be dumb. I’d rather spend my time talking to physicists and political leaders.”
The World Economic Forum was started in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, a Swiss professor of business administration, as a way for European business leaders to devise a common way to take advantage of the international marketplace. It expanded to include businesses worldwide with a broad range of interests.
Businesses that are members pay from $14,500 to $17,000 in annual dues to the nonprofit association, which has 70 full-time employees. Members pay an additional $8,000 to attend the conference, which is invitation-only. This year, organizers invited 250 public figures as well as 300 “media fellows” and 200 “foreign fellows,” regular participants from outside the business world. The public figures are selected based on the conference program and participate in several panel discussions.
In recent years, as executives and politicians have found themselves more pressed for time, the need for simple networking has become all-important.
“We live in a world where the two most important assets are information and networking capability,” said the forum’s Smadja. “Here you can enhance both. In three or four days here, you can accomplish the same things that would require I don’t know how many trips around the world.”
A few years ago, for instance, a Swedish businessman came here after wasting eight days in a hotel waiting for a promised meeting with the finance minister of an important Persian Gulf state. Within hours of arriving, the businessman was having breakfast with the minister.
More recently, a chance meeting between Tordjman, the French ambassador-at-large, and the head of Toyota led to the construction of a Toyota factory in France.
David Saul, the premier of Bermuda, met Dean LeBaron, chairman of Batterymarch Financial Management Inc., a global investment advisory company, over ice cream a few years ago. LeBaron’s firm has been sending investors to Bermuda ever since.
“You literally bump into people here, maybe in the gentlemen’s or on the steps,” said Saul, a friendly, silver-haired man in an English tweed coat. “Certainly for me, coming from a little flyspeck on the map of the world, this is important.”
Roy M. Huffington, head of a Houston-based oil company and former U.S. ambassador to Austria, has been coming for 15 years.
“You can talk to heads of state and they say, ‘Look me up,’ ” he said. “They don’t know me from Adam’s oil box. But this is a relaxed way to get to know each other. And it can pay off.”
Stuart Reeves, senior vice president of EDS Corp., the Dallas-based telecommunications firm that does business in 40 countries, finds it “a humbling experience. If you want to go someplace and realize you’re not a big cheese, this is it.”
Many participants bring their spouses, creating a social atmosphere that only later creates business. “Personal contacts are the key things that move business forward in this day and age,” Reeves said.
Others, many of whom feel isolated by their high-pressure jobs, relish the chance to meet important people from other walks of life and talk about anything except business.
“I met Arno Penzias here,” said Reeves’ wife, Jennie. “Can you imagine? A Nobel Prize winner. Now he and I are like old buddies.”
Watson, who won his Nobel Prize in 1962 for mapping the molecular structure of DNA, shied away from scientists and instead took the opportunity to hear a debate on religion between the head of the Christian Coalition and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who is a humanities professor at Boston University.
“Frankly, I thought before I came here that Wiesel was overrated,” Watson said. “But when I heard him speak, I was impressed. The chief benefit of this place for me is to change my attitudes about high-profile figures.”
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Like Watson, many participants seek out leaders in other fields, people whom they would never have the chance to meet if not for this elite melting pot. Scientists turned up at sessions on “power couples,” and corporate executives listened to experts discuss “designer babies.” Forum organizers had to turn away dozens of participants who wanted to attend an overbooked dinner session to discuss “objective truth” with Wiesel.
“Some people call this just a gift exchange,” Penzias said. “And it’s true that it’s just people telling each other stuff, like writers sitting around a cafe. But it’s still worth it.”
