Sunday, February 1, 2009
Reality not an Abstraction
Davos this year was a least as much about doing things rather than talking about things. Over its several decades of life. Davos has been a place to have a good conversation about things. And over time the conversation got both wider and deepr. That long history served it well this year when it served a new function. At Davos this year the convesation was not an abstraction of the real world in order reflect upon it and understand it. It ws the real world. Real conversatons intended to enable colaboration among governments, companies, NGOs were actually playing out in real time. The rest of us were there to inform and facllitate that conversation. There is no where else on Earth where the nearly full range of actors can be brought to the table. Gordon Brown commented on it. The World Economc Forum has become an actor in the game. I must say this year it felt more serious as a result. It was not merely a sense of dread, but of serosness of purpose.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Day Four: The Nerds dinner
The final day for me ends with an event I always look forward to, the nerds’ dinner, but more on that later. Before I get down to today, I forgot something from last night that was very interesting. At the Accel party I met Hugh Herr from the Media Lab, who had been on a panel on human enhancement. He is among the first enhanced human beings. He lost both legs beneath the knee in a climbing accident. Hugh has increasingly high tech prostheses, which he showed me. He is just now working to electronically link his nervous and muscular system with his prostheses. He had the most elegant and personal formulation of the human future. He observed that the upper part of his body deteriorates as he ages, but the lower part continues to improve. In fact due to a rapid innovation cycle, his lower legs get better every three months.
The day began with a great conversation with David Ignatius who was still reeling a bit from the international incident yesterday. Some people were still blaming him for the walk out of the Turkish Prime Minister. He is very energized about the new administration. He recently wrote a book with Brent Scowcroft and Zbignew Berzinski about the challenges facing Obama. We talked abut the complexity of these challenges, but that the team moving into place seems likely to be able to at least understand them and perhaps even manage them.
This was followed by an interview with a Danish journalist in preparation for my speeches in Copenhagen in May. As we finished Nellie Krose and her aid came over and joined me. Nellie is the Competition Minister of the European Union. Before taking up this post a few years ago she had been an advisor to Monitor and I had met her then. I also met her again recently at a small dinner at the home of the Dutch Prince Friggo in Brussels. We talked mostly about what it would it take to manage the need for rapid and collaborative action among the large number and disparate group of nations in the G20. Like the others she agreed that she and her fellow Ministers in the EU were making it up as they went along and were not at all confident in the outcome. And that managing the complexity of relationships and interests was going to be so complex that it would slow things down. She and I then went off to catch the end of the Martin Wolf panel and to hear Gordon Brown, the British PM.
Martin’s panel was a group of high-level economists, central bankers, and Ministers. The conclusion was basically the same, but Martin put a positive spin on it. The consensus was that indeed they did not know what they were doing, but at least that was less likely to produce bad outcomes than believing that you do when you don’t.
That was followed by a surprisingly interesting interview of Gordon Brown by Christiane Amanpour. He argued that this was really the first truly global financial crisis. The globally interconnected markets that allowed spreading the risk around also allowed the spreading of the contagion. It has become a crisis of trust and confidence. There are three key things that need to happen, stop the collapse, manage the macroeconomic policies right and enable the expansion of lending. We need to be careful to avoid financial protectionism. He also said, which attracted a great deal of attention, that our set of global economic institutions like the IMF and the World Bank and we need to reinvent the architecture of the system. But importantly he said that it was not like the 30s because there was a good climate for international collaboration to deal with the crisis. Indeed many leaders had taken the opportunity of being in Davos to enable conversations of the right sort to take place. As for the future, Brown had three suggestions. We need some form of international financial regulation, perhaps, a council of regulators from a number of countries acting in concert. We need some form of early warning system to enable prompt action. And we need some mechanism to assure access to capital for the emerging economies. I had the opportunity to ask a question from the floor and I asked, “How we would rebalance the imbalanced trade and capital flows, especially between China and the US.” I think he gave a waffely answer.
The Japanese Prime Minister came on next with mainly a PR presentation….boring, boring, boring . Missed the mark altogether. I left during the irrelevant Q&A.
In mid afternoon there was a good panel on the politics of water, which included Peter Gleick and Jakob Ibrahim. In the end it was a discussion of the politics of the pricing of water. The contrast between India where water is subsidized not priced and Singapore where the reverse is true was clear with the latter far better off in every way. The right price helped manage supply and demand. No price or the wrong price messed up both. At the end of that panel I ran in to Tony Tan, the Deputy PM of Singapore, also a friend and had a chance to do a bit of planning for my work ahead in his country.
Over the course of the day had a wonderful conversation with EO Wilson about our mutual friend Isabella Kirkland’s amazing biological paintings. Also Rich Muller, UC Berkeley physicist and author of Science for Presidents. We talked at length about what the quality of the public debate in science and the advice given to policy makers. He bemoaned both. Just before I returned to the hotel to get ready for the Nerd’s dinner I ran into Nick Kristoff of the times and talked about his columns on the sex trade in SE Asia and the impact they were having. The issue was beginning to get on the agenda. I wrote the above in the early evening and then it was out into the cold.
Well I just returned from the Nerd’s dinner and it is one AM…remarkable evening. Tonight the wine was even better than last night thanks once again to Joe Schoendorf. The evening is about amazing conversations at the table punctuated by brief remarks, especially from the first timers and we had some astonishing ones tonight. At our table there was Frances Collins head of he Human Genome Project and likely next head of NIH, Sir Martin Rees the Astronomer Royal, Rich Muller the Berkeley physicist and Dan Sperling who is driving the transformation of California auto emissions rules. Larry page joined us part soon after we started.
Paul Romer provided an insightful analysis of both the long and short-term analysis of the crisis. He had one original idea. The government should not bail out the old bank. Rather use the money to create new ones, “good banks.” Francis described the consequences of our new genetic knowledge in terms how it will impact human health moving more from cure the disease and is impacts to highly targeted prevention. Tom Insell the head of NIMH talked about the research moving us from a soft concept of mental disorders to a problem of crossed neural wiring. Martin described the new tools that will soon be available to see earthlike planets around distant stars, where life was likely to be common. Mark Zuckerbeg described his vision for Facebook in terms of the explosion of human interconnection that has been achieved by the software he created. Frances Beinicke, head of NRDC and Dan Sperling spoke about the politics of climate change and how difficult but vital both the Copenhagen talks and the implementation of California’s new laws on CO2 reduction. Mike Gazzaniga who was one of he discoverers of the right brain left brain phenomenon, challenged us with the legal and ethical implications of the new neurology. If we are controlled by our biology what does responsibility mean? Paul Jacobs the CEO of Qualcomm described the dramatic changes coming in the cell phone platform over the next 18 months. Larry Page regaled us with the struggle the various parts of the information services industry have against each other. And I ended up with a short talk on why the Long Boom is back…why the crisis is saving it and not killing it. We are accelerating technological innovation and defending globalization, both of which were weakening. The crisis creates room to grow. When growth returns after the reset we may be surprised at just how high it is. The evening ended with our usual contest. Last year we were asked to make predictions for this year. Question one was the price of Gold at the end of the year which Sergay Brin got closest to. The second question was the Google stock price at the end of the year. I won it with a guess of the $325 when the right answer was S330. And the prize was one of those great bottles of wine.
Tonight’s dinner was one of the best. The quality of the conversation is what Davos is about. And while it is true that a fair number came from my neighborhood in Berkeley, the range and depth of the participants could only happen at Davos.
I ill wait until I get home to reflect back on Davos. But overall two things dominated Davos this year. You could not talk about anything without linking ether to the CRISIS or to Obama or to both. It was the Crisis/Obama Davos.
The day began with a great conversation with David Ignatius who was still reeling a bit from the international incident yesterday. Some people were still blaming him for the walk out of the Turkish Prime Minister. He is very energized about the new administration. He recently wrote a book with Brent Scowcroft and Zbignew Berzinski about the challenges facing Obama. We talked abut the complexity of these challenges, but that the team moving into place seems likely to be able to at least understand them and perhaps even manage them.
This was followed by an interview with a Danish journalist in preparation for my speeches in Copenhagen in May. As we finished Nellie Krose and her aid came over and joined me. Nellie is the Competition Minister of the European Union. Before taking up this post a few years ago she had been an advisor to Monitor and I had met her then. I also met her again recently at a small dinner at the home of the Dutch Prince Friggo in Brussels. We talked mostly about what it would it take to manage the need for rapid and collaborative action among the large number and disparate group of nations in the G20. Like the others she agreed that she and her fellow Ministers in the EU were making it up as they went along and were not at all confident in the outcome. And that managing the complexity of relationships and interests was going to be so complex that it would slow things down. She and I then went off to catch the end of the Martin Wolf panel and to hear Gordon Brown, the British PM.
Martin’s panel was a group of high-level economists, central bankers, and Ministers. The conclusion was basically the same, but Martin put a positive spin on it. The consensus was that indeed they did not know what they were doing, but at least that was less likely to produce bad outcomes than believing that you do when you don’t.
That was followed by a surprisingly interesting interview of Gordon Brown by Christiane Amanpour. He argued that this was really the first truly global financial crisis. The globally interconnected markets that allowed spreading the risk around also allowed the spreading of the contagion. It has become a crisis of trust and confidence. There are three key things that need to happen, stop the collapse, manage the macroeconomic policies right and enable the expansion of lending. We need to be careful to avoid financial protectionism. He also said, which attracted a great deal of attention, that our set of global economic institutions like the IMF and the World Bank and we need to reinvent the architecture of the system. But importantly he said that it was not like the 30s because there was a good climate for international collaboration to deal with the crisis. Indeed many leaders had taken the opportunity of being in Davos to enable conversations of the right sort to take place. As for the future, Brown had three suggestions. We need some form of international financial regulation, perhaps, a council of regulators from a number of countries acting in concert. We need some form of early warning system to enable prompt action. And we need some mechanism to assure access to capital for the emerging economies. I had the opportunity to ask a question from the floor and I asked, “How we would rebalance the imbalanced trade and capital flows, especially between China and the US.” I think he gave a waffely answer.
The Japanese Prime Minister came on next with mainly a PR presentation….boring, boring, boring . Missed the mark altogether. I left during the irrelevant Q&A.
In mid afternoon there was a good panel on the politics of water, which included Peter Gleick and Jakob Ibrahim. In the end it was a discussion of the politics of the pricing of water. The contrast between India where water is subsidized not priced and Singapore where the reverse is true was clear with the latter far better off in every way. The right price helped manage supply and demand. No price or the wrong price messed up both. At the end of that panel I ran in to Tony Tan, the Deputy PM of Singapore, also a friend and had a chance to do a bit of planning for my work ahead in his country.
Over the course of the day had a wonderful conversation with EO Wilson about our mutual friend Isabella Kirkland’s amazing biological paintings. Also Rich Muller, UC Berkeley physicist and author of Science for Presidents. We talked at length about what the quality of the public debate in science and the advice given to policy makers. He bemoaned both. Just before I returned to the hotel to get ready for the Nerd’s dinner I ran into Nick Kristoff of the times and talked about his columns on the sex trade in SE Asia and the impact they were having. The issue was beginning to get on the agenda. I wrote the above in the early evening and then it was out into the cold.
Well I just returned from the Nerd’s dinner and it is one AM…remarkable evening. Tonight the wine was even better than last night thanks once again to Joe Schoendorf. The evening is about amazing conversations at the table punctuated by brief remarks, especially from the first timers and we had some astonishing ones tonight. At our table there was Frances Collins head of he Human Genome Project and likely next head of NIH, Sir Martin Rees the Astronomer Royal, Rich Muller the Berkeley physicist and Dan Sperling who is driving the transformation of California auto emissions rules. Larry page joined us part soon after we started.
Paul Romer provided an insightful analysis of both the long and short-term analysis of the crisis. He had one original idea. The government should not bail out the old bank. Rather use the money to create new ones, “good banks.” Francis described the consequences of our new genetic knowledge in terms how it will impact human health moving more from cure the disease and is impacts to highly targeted prevention. Tom Insell the head of NIMH talked about the research moving us from a soft concept of mental disorders to a problem of crossed neural wiring. Martin described the new tools that will soon be available to see earthlike planets around distant stars, where life was likely to be common. Mark Zuckerbeg described his vision for Facebook in terms of the explosion of human interconnection that has been achieved by the software he created. Frances Beinicke, head of NRDC and Dan Sperling spoke about the politics of climate change and how difficult but vital both the Copenhagen talks and the implementation of California’s new laws on CO2 reduction. Mike Gazzaniga who was one of he discoverers of the right brain left brain phenomenon, challenged us with the legal and ethical implications of the new neurology. If we are controlled by our biology what does responsibility mean? Paul Jacobs the CEO of Qualcomm described the dramatic changes coming in the cell phone platform over the next 18 months. Larry Page regaled us with the struggle the various parts of the information services industry have against each other. And I ended up with a short talk on why the Long Boom is back…why the crisis is saving it and not killing it. We are accelerating technological innovation and defending globalization, both of which were weakening. The crisis creates room to grow. When growth returns after the reset we may be surprised at just how high it is. The evening ended with our usual contest. Last year we were asked to make predictions for this year. Question one was the price of Gold at the end of the year which Sergay Brin got closest to. The second question was the Google stock price at the end of the year. I won it with a guess of the $325 when the right answer was S330. And the prize was one of those great bottles of wine.
Tonight’s dinner was one of the best. The quality of the conversation is what Davos is about. And while it is true that a fair number came from my neighborhood in Berkeley, the range and depth of the participants could only happen at Davos.
I ill wait until I get home to reflect back on Davos. But overall two things dominated Davos this year. You could not talk about anything without linking ether to the CRISIS or to Obama or to both. It was the Crisis/Obama Davos.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Climate, food and science
The third morning began even earlier with a breakfast meeting organized by Nestle to discuss the mounting food crisis and what to do about it. Talks by the CEO, the head of he FAO, and a few more. Most of what was said was fairly familiar and obvious. But one speaker, Dr. Robert Berendes (who happened to be sitting with me at last night’s dinner) and is the CEO of Syngenta a Danish agribusiness gave the most interesting talk on the technological potential to improve the productivity in the growth of wheat, rice, corn, soy, etc. His analysis was very specific and fairly optimistic. He saw no big leaps but a fairly steady if small increase in annual productivity that over the long run will make a very large difference.
The next session was on the future of science chaired by the editor of SEED, Adam Bly. The first talk was by another friend Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and head of the Royal Society in Britain, talked about how much they were refocusing on using science to make a difference in a number of areas of human need, e.g. health, environment and poverty. Shirley Jackson the President of RPI observed the importance of the new science team of Obama, after nearly a decade of ideological bureaucrats in many science policy posts. Brian Cox, of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider (also spoke with me at TED last year) gave a terrific presentation. Too much funding can be bad as it leads to conservatism and does not enable the kind of serendipity that is often the source of scientific advances. He also said that in five years we will finally know what mass is and it is only 20 years to practical fusion. John Gearhart the Director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Penn was also glad for a new administration because he had had to testify before congress 160 times in the last eight years because of their work with stem cells. Tom Insell the Head of NIMH observed that it was only in the last eighteen months that we had discovered that over 80% of our DNA is not human. It is in the vast population of microorganisms that inhabit the human body and live in harmony with it. This opened up huge new questions and new possibilities.
After a few conversations I will return to later, I went to a significant presentation in the main hall on a new initiative on global governance. It was organized by the Forum and led by the foreign ministers of Switzerland and Qatar and the Environment Minister of Singapore, Jakob Ibrahim (whom I met with later in the day). They are setting in motion a task force to help build the next generation of global institutions. It has the possibility of being quite important.
This was followed by a big panel chaired by Tom Friedman, on the coming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. It began with the PM of Denmark, Anders Rasmussen who laid out very specific things the negotiations needed to accomplish, set long term targets like an 80% cut in CO2 by 2050, intermediate targets, with developing countries having lower targets like 20%, the financial mechanisms needed to finance the transition to a low carbon society, He also suggested that we use the summits like the G8 as laying ground along the way. Al Gore was great. He focused on the huge change in the administration, linking the climate and economic crises by talking about subprime carbon investments. And we might be seeing a double collapse, economic and ecological. Al said that what was needed from Copenhagen was a clear vision. Jeroen Van Der Veer, the CEO of Shell, also a friend, told the full hall that a shared vision had come together for the nearly ninety key companies of Europe and they were already working on collaboration with the Climate Action Partnership here in the US. In developing countries the focus ought to be on key sectors rather than a broad strategy. And the UN Rep, Yvo De Boer, argued that the keys were creating a financing mechanism to enable the rich to finance the poor.
In the afternoon had a deep conversation with Tom Friedman. I don’t want to scoop his column so I won’t say much about that. The Steve Roach of Morgan Stanley who said that Japan was falling fast and that he agreed with Martin Wolf that we are in uncharted waters. This was followed by a discussion with Jakob Ibrahim on the current climate change debate in Singapore. He said that they were moving in a number of areas and that our major study had made a big difference. Floyd Norris economic columnist for the NYT on his approach to his column and Hamish Macrae who writes one for the Independent and I also discussed the options in this crisis. The afternoon ended with a conversation with Mike Porter.
The evening was mainly around two receptions, Accel Partners and Google. Accel has the best wine and you can actually talk in the lovely setting of an elegant modern art museum. The wine is actually spectacularly good…the sommeliers were from the French Laundry. Just across the street in the grand old hotel was the Google event. It is the party with cache. If you weren’t on the list you could not get in. And the mob trying to get in was intense and inside even more so. More time with HRH Haaken, the Crown Prince of Norway who is working on education to teach children about human dignity. Dan Yergin…more on the economic crisis and Nelson Schwartz NYT writer who is looking at an apt in the same building where Cathleen and I lived in Paris. Arianna Huffington who was there with two other very outrageous and powerful looking women…we came in together. Talked with her, but never met her mates. And Jimmy Wales and his views on how Wikipedia and the Smithsonian could interact. The Google and the Accel Parties were only slightly less lavish than last year.
Well 1:30 again, but tomorrow is not so ferociously early
The next session was on the future of science chaired by the editor of SEED, Adam Bly. The first talk was by another friend Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and head of the Royal Society in Britain, talked about how much they were refocusing on using science to make a difference in a number of areas of human need, e.g. health, environment and poverty. Shirley Jackson the President of RPI observed the importance of the new science team of Obama, after nearly a decade of ideological bureaucrats in many science policy posts. Brian Cox, of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider (also spoke with me at TED last year) gave a terrific presentation. Too much funding can be bad as it leads to conservatism and does not enable the kind of serendipity that is often the source of scientific advances. He also said that in five years we will finally know what mass is and it is only 20 years to practical fusion. John Gearhart the Director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Penn was also glad for a new administration because he had had to testify before congress 160 times in the last eight years because of their work with stem cells. Tom Insell the Head of NIMH observed that it was only in the last eighteen months that we had discovered that over 80% of our DNA is not human. It is in the vast population of microorganisms that inhabit the human body and live in harmony with it. This opened up huge new questions and new possibilities.
After a few conversations I will return to later, I went to a significant presentation in the main hall on a new initiative on global governance. It was organized by the Forum and led by the foreign ministers of Switzerland and Qatar and the Environment Minister of Singapore, Jakob Ibrahim (whom I met with later in the day). They are setting in motion a task force to help build the next generation of global institutions. It has the possibility of being quite important.
This was followed by a big panel chaired by Tom Friedman, on the coming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. It began with the PM of Denmark, Anders Rasmussen who laid out very specific things the negotiations needed to accomplish, set long term targets like an 80% cut in CO2 by 2050, intermediate targets, with developing countries having lower targets like 20%, the financial mechanisms needed to finance the transition to a low carbon society, He also suggested that we use the summits like the G8 as laying ground along the way. Al Gore was great. He focused on the huge change in the administration, linking the climate and economic crises by talking about subprime carbon investments. And we might be seeing a double collapse, economic and ecological. Al said that what was needed from Copenhagen was a clear vision. Jeroen Van Der Veer, the CEO of Shell, also a friend, told the full hall that a shared vision had come together for the nearly ninety key companies of Europe and they were already working on collaboration with the Climate Action Partnership here in the US. In developing countries the focus ought to be on key sectors rather than a broad strategy. And the UN Rep, Yvo De Boer, argued that the keys were creating a financing mechanism to enable the rich to finance the poor.
In the afternoon had a deep conversation with Tom Friedman. I don’t want to scoop his column so I won’t say much about that. The Steve Roach of Morgan Stanley who said that Japan was falling fast and that he agreed with Martin Wolf that we are in uncharted waters. This was followed by a discussion with Jakob Ibrahim on the current climate change debate in Singapore. He said that they were moving in a number of areas and that our major study had made a big difference. Floyd Norris economic columnist for the NYT on his approach to his column and Hamish Macrae who writes one for the Independent and I also discussed the options in this crisis. The afternoon ended with a conversation with Mike Porter.
The evening was mainly around two receptions, Accel Partners and Google. Accel has the best wine and you can actually talk in the lovely setting of an elegant modern art museum. The wine is actually spectacularly good…the sommeliers were from the French Laundry. Just across the street in the grand old hotel was the Google event. It is the party with cache. If you weren’t on the list you could not get in. And the mob trying to get in was intense and inside even more so. More time with HRH Haaken, the Crown Prince of Norway who is working on education to teach children about human dignity. Dan Yergin…more on the economic crisis and Nelson Schwartz NYT writer who is looking at an apt in the same building where Cathleen and I lived in Paris. Arianna Huffington who was there with two other very outrageous and powerful looking women…we came in together. Talked with her, but never met her mates. And Jimmy Wales and his views on how Wikipedia and the Smithsonian could interact. The Google and the Accel Parties were only slightly less lavish than last year.
Well 1:30 again, but tomorrow is not so ferociously early
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Many Panels
The day began as the sun lit the top of the snow covered peaks turned gold in the dawn light. Today was one of the clear, blue, cold days in the high mountains of Switzerland. Today was the most intense in terms of planned activities. I had three panels. On one I was a member and two I chaired, with the last being the most fun. The first was a panel called "Can you trust your model?", which included Nassim Taleb, Patrick Cronin from the National Defense University whom I know, and a very interesting epidemiologist from Oxford, Angela McLean. The conversation was fairly deep on what models are good for (learning how things work) and what they are not(predicting).
The second panel, which I chaired, was over lunch and the topic was "Rising Population: Overload or Opportunity." The panel was quite diverse including two from the Middle East, Nigeria, Britain, India, a labor leader, and a social entrepreneur. The group was modestly optimistic. The focus should be on family size and form because that helps enable woman to gain more control of reproduction. It will lead to a steady slowing of population growth. There was even a sense of a bit of progress in some places like Saudi Arabia. The best moment came when the observation was made that the Catholic countries of Southern Europe had the lowest growth rates and that they clearly were not following the Pope's guidance. One of the participants from Portugal responded, "We may be Catholic, but we're not stupid."
The final panel over dinner was on "Extreme Events," and was massively oversold because the panelists were academic rock stars. Not only Nassim Taleb, but historian Niall Ferguson and Yale's Robert Shiller. While I tried to get them to focus on why decision makers did not pay attention to their perceptive and timely warnings of imminent crisis, they actually focused mainly on the psychology of looking ahead. Nassim took a mathematical approach, Niall, a historical approach, and Shiller an economic approach. They were all articulate brilliant and witty, the arguments strong, but at the end of the day I think that Niall was most convincing with his arguments that a deep understanding of history can lead one to the right analogy that clarifies the nature of the moment, what could happen, and what the consequences of action might be.
The most dramatic moment of the day came during a panel on Gaza when Erdogan, the PM of Turkey, stormed off stage after a confrontation with Shimon Peres and the moderator, my friend David Ignatius of the Washington Post. No one had seen anything quite like it at Davos.
President Obama sent his friend and advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to address a very full hall. She gave a terrific speech, telling us that we need to understand Chicago to understand Obama, that for him the key word was responsibility, that they were trying to forge a holistic strategy and rebuild trust in many venues, and that he intended for the US to lead on climate change. It was well received.
And all during the day, many interesting conversations. While I was discussing Putin's speech with Georgetown professor Angela Stent, Al Gore came up and gave me a big hug. He is looking almost svelte. There was another Dutch Prince, the Norwegian Crown Prince, Tim Garton Ash from Stanford and Oxford, and water expert Peter Gleick. We will be posting a great water video he did on the GBN website.
Toward the end of the day I caught up with Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson. Peter, a new daddy (boy Luc), is working on a new album of covers with people like Paul Simon and David Bowie playing each others songs. It's called something like Scratch My Back. Richard and I mostly discussed the work of The Elders and how to move it forward. The day finally wound down at the Oxford University night-cap. Another great conversation with Martin Wolf. His key point was that the nature and scale of the credit crisis is so novel that it is not clear that we know what we are doing when we try to stop it. He is deeply worried. And that worries me.
It's 1:30 time for bed.
The second panel, which I chaired, was over lunch and the topic was "Rising Population: Overload or Opportunity." The panel was quite diverse including two from the Middle East, Nigeria, Britain, India, a labor leader, and a social entrepreneur. The group was modestly optimistic. The focus should be on family size and form because that helps enable woman to gain more control of reproduction. It will lead to a steady slowing of population growth. There was even a sense of a bit of progress in some places like Saudi Arabia. The best moment came when the observation was made that the Catholic countries of Southern Europe had the lowest growth rates and that they clearly were not following the Pope's guidance. One of the participants from Portugal responded, "We may be Catholic, but we're not stupid."
The final panel over dinner was on "Extreme Events," and was massively oversold because the panelists were academic rock stars. Not only Nassim Taleb, but historian Niall Ferguson and Yale's Robert Shiller. While I tried to get them to focus on why decision makers did not pay attention to their perceptive and timely warnings of imminent crisis, they actually focused mainly on the psychology of looking ahead. Nassim took a mathematical approach, Niall, a historical approach, and Shiller an economic approach. They were all articulate brilliant and witty, the arguments strong, but at the end of the day I think that Niall was most convincing with his arguments that a deep understanding of history can lead one to the right analogy that clarifies the nature of the moment, what could happen, and what the consequences of action might be.
The most dramatic moment of the day came during a panel on Gaza when Erdogan, the PM of Turkey, stormed off stage after a confrontation with Shimon Peres and the moderator, my friend David Ignatius of the Washington Post. No one had seen anything quite like it at Davos.
President Obama sent his friend and advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to address a very full hall. She gave a terrific speech, telling us that we need to understand Chicago to understand Obama, that for him the key word was responsibility, that they were trying to forge a holistic strategy and rebuild trust in many venues, and that he intended for the US to lead on climate change. It was well received.
And all during the day, many interesting conversations. While I was discussing Putin's speech with Georgetown professor Angela Stent, Al Gore came up and gave me a big hug. He is looking almost svelte. There was another Dutch Prince, the Norwegian Crown Prince, Tim Garton Ash from Stanford and Oxford, and water expert Peter Gleick. We will be posting a great water video he did on the GBN website.
Toward the end of the day I caught up with Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson. Peter, a new daddy (boy Luc), is working on a new album of covers with people like Paul Simon and David Bowie playing each others songs. It's called something like Scratch My Back. Richard and I mostly discussed the work of The Elders and how to move it forward. The day finally wound down at the Oxford University night-cap. Another great conversation with Martin Wolf. His key point was that the nature and scale of the credit crisis is so novel that it is not clear that we know what we are doing when we try to stop it. He is deeply worried. And that worries me.
It's 1:30 time for bed.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
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.
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.
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