Davos - A Meeting of the Great and the Good

“Davos is full of people who are more successful than you. It is full of successful people who are used to everyone standing to attention when they walk into a room. But in Davos, no one looks at you.”  Quote by a senior politician.

Do you know about Davos? It’s where all the movers and shakers in the world of business gather to talk about who knows what, whilst the world is collapsing around them. This annual conference happened last week. It’s called the World Economic Forum.

It wasn’t always like this in that sleepy, snow covered corner of Switzerland. Last year, and the years before were a ‘doddle’ as we say in Glasgow. You turned up as one of the 1500 invited CEOs of some company or other, along with a smattering of world leaders and had great working breakfasts, wonderful working lunches and then were feted at night over wonderful working dinners.  If you were really special you would be invited to speak at one of the many ‘workshops’, although I reckon pretty well 99% of those attending had never seen a proper workshop in their lives! If you were extra, extra special you were asked by one of the more serious newspapers to write a blog where you could tell the world who you had dinner with and who the cabaret star was in the evening. And if you were super-special, you would be invited onto business TV to tell the viewers what was going on and what agreements had been discussed, not made, discussed, and which would change the world as we know it, if only they could be agreed and implemented.

I’m sooooo jealous. Although I say I don’t miss BT, I do actually miss the various junkets we went on – like Davos only less pretentious but still important all the same. The Sales Conferences in Barcelona and Prague. The meetings in New York and Amsterdam. The 3 day seminars in Southampton and Birmingham. Bit of a come down those last two eh?

At these events, one can suck up to senior management or one can be one’s self, and I,  definitely fell into the latter group. The number of times a director of BT has come up to me at one of these events and uttered the words, ‘Oh Tom’, after some social indiscretion on my part, is beyond calculation. I reckon I could have been at Davos, if only ….. if only!

So how would I have fared in Davos? Well, I probably wouldn’t have gone to many of the sessions, sorry, workshops. I’d have been off skiing with some of the secretaries and PAs (both male and female) and would have had long boozy lunches in some mountain restaurant. In the evening, I would have hosted a table of like-minded, fun-loving souls and we’d have set the world to rights in our own way, right there over a few drinks.

The thought of another CEO telling me how much he earned the previous year when the world was falling apart would have been too much for me. The bankers telling me that the sub-prime crisis was totally unforeseen and the credit bubble in the UK was caused, not by irresponsible lending, but by people spending asset wealth rather than earned wealth, would do my head in.

At the end of the week, they would get into their limos with blacked out windows to go off to the local airstrip where their private jets would be waiting to whisk them back to fantasyland and funnymoneyland.

And me? I would still be in the bar with my mates talking about football or the day’s skiing. And that is precisely why I retired at 56 instead of running IBM or BT and why I was never invited to address the world’s great and good at Davos!   

Davos link here…..

http://www.weforum.org/en/index.htm