Watch Robert Scoble's video blog interview with Lance Knobel, the Forum's Special Adviser on the Annual Meeting Programme, 1999-2000, on how to get the best out of Davos. Scoble will be attending Davos for the first time in 2008.
K. Vaman Kamath, CEO, ICICI Bank and one of the Co-Chairs for the Annual Meeting in Davos in January says social and economic inclusion is key for continued future global development. "The top issue in the world today is inclusiveness,” he said.
Amazing how fast we slide right back into "real life." Davos was only a couple of days ago and already I'm neck deep into my normal work.
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 planning on advancing films on social issues. 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!
The Fate of the Universe and the Search of Life by Sir Martin Rees and Christopher Chyba. What recent scientific discoveries have changed the plausibility of extraterrestrial life ?
Yossi shows his revolutionary personal pocket assistant
Every year there's a big party at the WEF on the last night (Saturday). Countries vie to sponsor the main event, throwing a big show and serving up their best food. Of course, the reason is economic development. After the opening show, we were treated to a short video extolling the virtues of investing in Malaysia. Knowing their audience it prominently featured a beautiful golf course (and of course beautiful Malaysian women). I was surprised how attentive the audience was to this commercial. Willing participants in a transaction of an evening of entertainment for a four minute video. 
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 with 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!).
Over the five years I've attended the WEF, the level of protesting has gone way down. I like to think that inviting social entrepreneurs and other representatives of wider society has played a role in this. Of course, the issues are different and the U.S. presence seems lower. 
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!
It's just a glorious morning here in Davos. The sky is dark blue, the sun shining high in the sky and the snow is deep. It's like a picture postcard and people are rushing off to ski.
It's such a difference from earlier in the week when the snow was absent and there was talk of gloom for the tourist industry and real concern about the
changing climate.
Delegates at the World Economic Forum pushed climate to the top of the agenda but rather like the sunshine there is a genuine feeling of cautious optimism
between delegates of all sectors. Everyone agrees that action is urgently needed and there is a commitment from business and government leaders to put
into practice what they are preaching.
The message that the planet has finite resources and our behaviour is affecting everything really deeply has finally sunk in. It seems that the leaders will
act immediately and that what's causing this sense of optimism. Many deleagtes speak of this being the best annual meeting for many years.
Tony Blair's keynote address from yesterday was well received. He seemed relaxed in his delivery and his words about the tasks ahead made absolute sense. He spoke like a real international statesman with a grasp of the global agenda.
If only he hadn't embarked on that mad adventure in Iraq with George Bush then he would be regarded as the leader of this generation, remarked one delegate from the USA over coffee afterwards. It will be interesting to see where Blair goes when he leaves office later this year but many people at Davos would like to see him play the role of international statesman and leader on the globalstage - maybe a little like the role Bill Clinton currently plays.
Asking a question for the floor another delagate praised his efforts forencouraging and supporting multi faith dialogue amongst the religious leaders. He caused much laughter by claiming that if Blair hadn't been Prime Ministerhe's have made a very good cleric!
As the tables are packed away and the vast security arrangements are taken down, Davos is returning to normal. Let's hope that the wave of optimism turns into action and that next year delegates can talk about what plans have been implemented during 2007 and what's planned ahead. The snow of course is
guaranteed next year - let's just hope that the plans being laid now mean that the climate remains secure and that Davos retains its picture postcard
landscape with white snow all around for decades to come.
Mel Young - President and CEO, The Homeless World Cup
Today I watched the webcast titled A Business Manifesto for Globalization again, and I tends to agree with what Carlos Ghosen, CEO of Nissan and another car manufacture in France, he claims that while people dealing with globalization today, those who are benefiting from globalization do not feel it, and those who are being hurt by globalization do feel it, and scream about it. Indeed there are cons and pros of globalization, there are pains and gains of globalization, there are joys and sadness of globalization, and there are winners and losers of globalization. However, if we look at globalization deeply, we will find that there is one thing is for sure, that is, the Commoditization of the Elite Class under globalization, for country, for business and for people.
In terms of countries, G7 used to be the elite class club, and with the addition of Russia, now it’s G8, and people are talking about to expand G8 to include Brazil, Indian and China (BIC), some people even go further, they want to see a G13, can you believe that? There will be more and more countries that can be categorized as elite countries, and that means the commoditization of elite class at the country level. It is the change that brings to us by the globalization.
At business level, if you look at the change of entry barrier of being a Fortune 500, you won’t be surprised we could easily expand Fortune 500 to Fortune 1,000 in a just a few years if we do not raise the bar for the entry. Each year you can see more and more startups go public, being listed in many stock exchange markets worldwide, such as NYSE, NASDAQ among others. On the hand, competition in virtually every industry becomes more and more fierce, more and more business have to go and find their own blue ocean by combing the overall cost leadership and differentiation as competitive strategy in order to gain their competitive advantage. That means the commoditization of elite class at the business level.
Now if under globalization, some countries gain more through their business expansion in other countries, while some other countries lose because of their loss of domestic markets; at individual-level, that mean more job opportunities or less job opportunities, increasing salary or decreasing salary, hence better living standards or worse living standards. In those developed countries, while their transnationals are gaining more market shares in those developing countries, not only their blue collars in the manufacture sector, but also those white collars at the service sector, such as lawyers, doctors, dentists, issuance agents, stock brokers, journalists among others, are feeling being threatened on job security since more and more jobs in their sector being outsourced to those emerging countries, such as Indian and China. That is a crystal clear demonstration of the commoditization of the elite class at the individual level. I believe most of the negative side of globalization are coming from the individual level, since democracy in those developed countries drive those politicians to speak up for their fellow citizens, the used to be elite class, now the scapegoat of the globalization
While all of the above all are true, personally I am quite optimistic on globalization, since I believe everything might be outsource, however, you could not outsource your innovation, and if you are good at innovation, which could serve as your unfair advantage, then no one could replace you being as part of elite class, whether as a country, a business, or an individual.
So under globalization, what are we competing for? No overall cost of leadership any more, it is Innovation that could truly make us standing out in a crowded and commoditized world.
This concludes my Davos Forum series, hopefully see you in person at Davos Forum 2008 on site, and I shall report for you live there at that time
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