First Day in Davos

Davos is a very rich diet of people, ideas, events and intense experiences unfolding almost non-stop over very long days. This one actually began for me in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia late last night where I spent the last four days as part of the Global Competitiveness Forum, which Monitor helps organize. (Those days were full of Ministers, Princes and astonishing palaces.) Mike Porter, Mark Fuller and I all came to Davos from Riyadh on the 2 AM flight, arriving in Zurich at 6am local time. Mark and I shared a car for the two hour drive, arriving for a quick breakfast at my hotel. For those who read last year's blog, at least this year there was a room and it has an actual bed not a Murphy bed like 2008. The Esplanade, my hotel is fairly high up on the mountain meaning significant up- and down-hill treks on icy walks and streets...tricky late at night after much wine and exhaustion.

By late morning I was headed down to the Kongress Center and I had only walked a half block on the main street when I ran into Shai Agassi, the innovative and charismatic Israeli-American entrepreneur who is trying to drive the transformation to electric cars. As it happens I was discussing his unique concept for electric cars, (don't recharge, swap the dead batteries for full ones at swapping stations) with the Saudi leadership just yesterday. So I may be able to arrange a conversation with Shai and the Saudi Commerce Minister who arrives in the morning.

Then the connections and conversations came unspooling one after another. I will get to the main event, the speeches by Wen Jiabao and Putin in a moment, but here is how the day felt. A block after running into Shai it was Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, who is transforming software from a product into a web delivered service. We mostly see each other here even though you can actually look into his office in the next building from our main conference room in San Francisco. Marc is a recent father and baby pictures on a Blackberry quickly came out. Marc will reappear later at Putin's party. I managed to get to the Kongress Center without any more major meetings, but hadn't walked ten steps inside when I ran into my neighbor Aron Cramer, and his wife, Barret Ashla. He is the head of Business for Social Responsibility. Another few steps and it was another neighbor Dan Sperling and Frances Beinecke. Dan is a member of CARB, the top guy in the US on alternative fuel vehicles, and just published Two Billion Cars-- a terrific book. Frances is the head of the Natural Resources Defense Council and had blurbed Dan's book. Later other enviros included Fred Krupp, head of Environmental Defense, and Jonathan Lash, the head of the World Resources Institute. With all of them it was the same conversation --what a new world for environmentalists since the Obama inaugural. They were all high with hope. Me too! Frances said she "doesn't have to apologize for being an American anymore."

Got a very different view only a few steps later. Ran into Tom Connelly, EVP and chief Innovation Officer for DuPont. He and I serve on the Research Innovation and Enterprise Council of Singapore. He was chatting with his new CEO (as of Jan 1), Ellen Kullman, one of the first women CEOs of a major industrial company, and another senior VP. They were far less enthusiastic about Obama taking his action on allowing states to act on auto green house gases as high cost and very harmful to the US auto industry. I told them if they didn't like it they should campaign for a national standard. They also did not like what they took to be his anti-business rhetoric during the campaign...not fans. Nevertheless, Ellen came to my session later that afternoon on breakthrough ideas with HBR. Over the next couple of hours ran into Martin Wolf of the FT, Kishore Mahbubani the Dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan (and on my dinner panel Thursday night,) Dan Yergin of CERA, John Negroponte, formerly of the State Dept., Kiyoshi Kurokowa, Chief Scientist of Japan (talked about how hard it is to work for three Prime Ministers in three years), Tom Insel, head of NIMH and Susan Hockfield, President of MIT. It was mostly friendly conversation and I won't bore you with it. But it gives you a sense of the milieu...what it is like to stop to have a cup of coffee and run into David Sifry the writer of Technorati blog and learn about his new business, customized travel guides. I now have one for Davos. Very cool. And as we finished, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, sat down.

My session with Harvard Business Review based on my short article "Beware Global Cooling," in the current issue went well. Good participants and the other authors were lively and interesting. But nothing profound and not worth taking up your time.

The first big speech was Wen Jiabao, the Premier of China. It was a surprisingly good speech. While it had most of the elements of what one might expect from a Chinese leader, flowery Chinese metaphors and long recitations of facts and especially figures, he commented that he liked figures so he wanted to share them with us. His was, as he said, "a message of confidence, courage and hope." He went on to address "real causes of the crisis." He spread the responsibility around and took some for themselves. He laid out a highly detailed stimulus plan for China. When pressed on it he said they expected to achieve 8% growth, but it would take hard work. He talked about industrial clusters, climate change, the scientific approach and win-win ways of dealing with policy and even the need for a global Early Warning System. While obviously serious and concerned it was still a fairly upbeat if humorless speech.

But for lack of humor you had to be at the next speech Vladimir Putin the Prime Minister of Russia. The speech was long, fairly boring but very smooth. The rhetoric, the ideas and the proposals were a curious hybrid of the communist and the capitalist. That came out most clearly in the Q&A, when Carlos Ghosn the CEO of Renault, asked him how he would support all the state companies he had created as national champions. His emphatic reply, "Tax cuts! Take it down from 24% to 20%." But the autocrat and nationalist in him came out when Michael Dell asked him how companies like Dell could help Russia? Putin fired back that Russia did not need his help. That is for the poor and the ignorant. Russian schools are all computer equipped; it makes some of the best hardware and its programmers are even better than those from India, he joked with a barb. He displayed a remarkably detailed level of knowledge and understanding of most of the complex issues that were discussed, a first class mind and supreme confidence. He comes through as a very tough customer.

Then I was off to the Cleantech 100 dinner where George Soros, Sir Nicholas Stern and Joe Stiglitz spoke. Soros was particularly interesting on the interplay of the financial crisis and the opportunities for moving to low carbon energy technologies. He did bewail the fact that we were unable to capture the advantages of the high priced gasoline of last summer.

And the evening ended with Mark and I at the Russian party: good vodka, tons of caviar and a short friendly speech by Putin. Got to meet him- briefly interested, but not charming...a very serious man. Enjoyed more conversations with Larry Page, Marc Benioff, another Saudi Prince, Daniel Vasella the CEO of Novartis, to whom I tried to sell a company, and Klaus Schwab, the Head of the World Economic Forum.

Well its one AM and I have an early session tomorrow, so I have to go crash.