Boardroom Talk
Davos Diary: Day Three
Alec Hogg gets tips from a global IT giant on how to live on four hours sleep a night; makes a mental note to look into DiData; and hears more good news on Africa.
By Alec Hogg
DAVOS – It’s Friday and cracks from sleep depravation are starting to show. To make matters worse, somewhere among the dozens of handshakes a nasty lurgie penetrated my body’s lowered defences.
So when the alarm buzzes four hours after I finished the previous day’s commitments, the immediate response it to roll over and miss another breakfast session. Sanity soon prevails. It’s not just any session. This is when I get to see and hear the richest man in the world, Bill Gates.
7am – The World Economic Forum’s annual meetings are easy to criticize. The rich and powerful are accustomed to the best and they get in abundance during the four days when they converge on the Swiss village.
For some it’s all a bit much. And the WEF opens itself up to the occasional swipe by insisting on treating the reporting media like, well, workers. This ranges from imposing restricted access and even forcing them to use a separate entrance to the conference centre.
But for the select group of “media fellows”, Davos provides a turbo-charged injection of distilled knowledge. Gained, sometimes, in the most unusual places. Like 7am when waiting in the icy cold to get through security at the Belvedere Hotel.
Despite the ungodly hour, a well-groomed gent behind me in the lengthy queue was enthusiastically swigging at a can of Diet Coke. Bit early to be imbibing, I ventured. “Naw”, came the broad American accent, “I do a lot of huntin’ and fishin’ and Coke’s the best way to get my caffeine.”
Why not coffee? “It smells mighty fine, but I don’t like the taste,” he responded, before thrusting out his hand, “John Chambers, Cisco, pleased to meet you.”
As though he knew what was going through my mind, one of the most powerful CEOs in the global technology sector proceeded to explain he always gets by on four hours sleep a night.
Is it healthy? “Both my parents are doctors,” Chambers continued, “and they tell me it isn’t. But there’s just so much to do………”
Another interesting aspect of this chance meeting was Chambers’ enthusiasm about South African group Dimension Data. “They’re our best partners. Yes I mean our biggest partner worldwide. We’re like family, we have our squabbles, but there’s a lot of loyalty. I’ve been friends with Jeremy (Ord) and Doc (Watson) for many years; our companies are close.”
Make a mental note to have a look at the way DiData’s share price has been performing relative to Cisco. There used to be a time when it tracked the US-based giant closely. But not so lately. Maybe investors have forgotten about the close ties. An opportunity lurking?
Chambers is in the queue because he has a 7am meeting shoehorned into another long Davos day. I’m there because of a special “media fellows” breakfast where Microsoft’s Bill Gates will be interviewed by New York Times columnist and best selling author Tom Friedman.
What I thought would be rather private is anything but. It turns out half of Davos got the invitation to the Gates breakfast. The queue takes forever and in the only technical mix-up of the week, the computer says I’m not on the invitation list. That’s quickly sorted out and I eventually find a place at a table near the front, but with my back to the two players on an elevated stage.
Although the table has been shorn of virtually all its nutrients, even on an empty stomach Gates is full value. He reckons the best way for America to beat off the ChIndia challenge is by maintaining its lead in education.
But there’s much work to the done at high school level, Gates says, and he has strong ideas on how to reform the US education system – smaller schools; more specialized curricula. Ideas should surely apply equally in SA.
Gates says Microsoft is already funding 1500 US schools to help them through the transition. Hopefully Team Thabo has heard about it from Gates himself; the US is not alone in needing to counter the developing economic powers from the East.
It’s a wide-ranging discussion. Another issue that resonates is on energy where Gates argues that higher levels for crude oil “are not a one, two year spike. People are under-estimating the impact of the rising demand.”
To address this, Gates believes finding alternatives to oil are critical and notes: “Various conversion technologies to do with coal and so on are getting a lot of attention.”
He returns to the subject when asked about Africa: “There are a lot of good things going on in South Africa,” Gates said, “like coal conversion.”
It’s yet a further instance of how much attention is now being paid to Sasol’s oil-from-coal process. Later in the day I ask Sasol CEO Pat Davies if there has been direct interest in doing business; he’s coy but struggles to hide a smile. Davies did say, though, Sasol expects there to be many other opportunities after the Qatar project comes on stream later this year.
Next it’s off to the update on Africa, a session that’s so popular among Davos participants that the 400-seater hall is full, more than a hundred are standing at the back and dozens more wait hopefully outside. Glad I had the good sense to book and arrive early.
Even though Africa is very much off the agenda, the mood in the packed hall is jubilant.
Nigeria’s President Obasanjo is visibly moved: “I never thought so many people in Davos were still interested in Africa.” Of course the audience didn’t know Obasanjo’s term of reference was the previous day’s media conference when only myself, the guy from Bloomberg and a press-ganged Swiss bothered to show up.
British Prime Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown sums up the thrust of the session saying the international community must make sure promises of 2005 are translated into action this and next year. He shouts, to spontaneous applause: “The real question is real empowerment; to move from aid to empowerment plans for things like universal schooling and free healthcare.”
Musician Bono has the audience in stitches with clever one-liners but makes the deadly serious point that European cows are subsidized to the tune of $2 a day – which is more than the earnings generated by a third of the people on earth.
Reuters chairman Niall Fitzgerald adds that the subsidy in Japan is $7 per cow, emphasizing that best way to help Africa would be by leveling the trade playing fields. He pleads for a killing of the rich world’s “illiterate” agricultural subsidies which “benefit only rich landowners and large corporations.”
Alert the Moderator
About this blog
Disclaimer and Guidelines
