I suppose someone needs to address the big picture – but the big picture tends to be so big it shapes itself. I was not at The Davos World Economic Forum last week. Valuable for networking no doubt, but competing for 30 seconds attention with the ‘great and the good’ is hardly my scene, unless there was an opportunity to meet someone really special – like the Chinese President Xi Jinping, or New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key.
Then, of course, I have consequently missed all those highly engaging talks about the “multipolar world”, “leadership in crisis” and “should business lead the social agenda?”. I suppose I could have got some welcome sleep in during these sessions, but a $60,000 attendance fee would buy me a lovely week in the sun.
So why do we do it? Such gatherings seem largely a badge of status for those who hardly need to establish their credentials. I do not think the Economics Minister of a developing country is going to turn down a one-to-one meeting with the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company whenever it was convened? So why use a business summit to break the ground? Perhaps the only reason to be at such public events is because they are public. What world leaders crave more than anything else is global visibility and recognition? What they do not realize, of course, is that by inviting the press and media they are drawing attention to their high living as much as the issues they claim to be there to debate.
A few years back I had a meeting with the CEO of a major US multinational to discuss the outcome of an assignment I had carried out for his board. When I arrived things did not seem quite right and eventually I learnt that there had been a “night of the long knives” and the CEO had departed the day before. Many years later I met the former CEO in an airport lounge. He had gained another position in a much smaller company and tried to shrug the past episode off. He seemed the shell of the person he once had been. What this made me reflect, however, was that any greatness we gain can be just for a moment and then gone. Goodness, on the other hand, can last a lifetime.