Davos: Can social media make a difference?
The Davos meeting organisers have made a huge push into social media this year. From interviews on Facebook to geo-location services using Foursquare, it’s an impressive use of social media tools to bring the closed-shop that is the WEF to the masses.
In the video clip below, Reuters correspondent and Davos veteran Ben Hirschler shares his thoughts on the impact this will have on this year’s WEF.
“They’ve made a big effort to show their involvement with the outside world,” he says. “The question is… to what extent is this just PR eye-wash and to what extent is it something serious?”
Davos fails to grab the attention of angry protesters
The days when anti-capitalist protesters could rampage through Switzerland’s financial capital Zurich in rage at the Davos talkfest 100 miles (150 km) to the east are long gone.
A couple of hundred anti-globalisation activists managed to rally in the nearby town of St. Gallen on Saturday against the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum opening this week. Braving a vicious north-east wind, they assembled near the station then marched peacefully through the centre of town, barely disrupting the good burghers as they went about their weekend shopping. At the front of the demo a large red banner proclaimed: “Take the future from the capitalists – Smash the WEF”.
The mostly young demonstrators pulled a cart festooned with anti-capitalist slogans, and beat drums and lit crackers to keep time. The march went off peacefully.
Is it a sign of the fading relevance of the world’s greatest networking event? Just as the forum has failed to attract the political leaders of the emerging economies, so it no longer appears to grab the attention of the anarchist and alternative movements.
Why “generation next” matters at Davos
– Trevor Dougherty is a student and activist and will attend the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos as a representative of the Global Changemakers. He’s also the youngest American ever to attend the Davos meeting. —
Most of the sessions at the WEF’s annual conference in Davos will focus on the future, and how it can be bettered, so, naturally, a topic of discussion is the “next generation.” How will their consumption patterns change? How will they contribute to society? How will they use technology? How will they lead?
Among the Davos crowd, better known for its executives and politicians, is a group of people who can offer real insight to these questions. They possess a profound knowledge of “kids these days,” because, drum roll please, that is exactly what they are. Meet the British Council’s Global Changemakers, five teenagers selected from five different countries to represent young people at the World Economic Forum. My name is Trevor, and I am one of them.
At Davos, we will have speaking roles in many of the Forum’s official sessions. As the only people under twenty at the event, the five of us feel a heavy weight on our shoulders to accurately express “youth concerns.” But I think that the established leaders converging at Davos should also have a considerable weight on them to listen to us. Our voices may not be as impactful as those of CEOs and heads of state, but I hope that they may help inform, at least in part, important decisions made by these individuals.
What will I tell them? Well, I worry that, because of our self-indulgent use of modern communication technologies, we may be seen as an apathetic generation. My focus at this year’s meeting will be to discuss how we can alter the behavioral patterns that create this perception. I am passionate about improving how the world uses new media, and my greatest hope is to discuss how this could be implemented with those in charge of leading social networks. I am a panelist for The Social Network Addiction and Young People versus Old Models sessions, and will be talking about social media during my presentation at the Global Changemakers IdeasLab.
We have all just arrived in Zurich, where a team from the British Council’s Bern office will be training us and preparing us for the bright lights before we head to Davos next week. The WEF, in inviting us to their Annual Meeting, has recognized that representatives of “generation next” should be included in the discussion of global issues for more meaningful progress to be made. Hopefully, through our involvement, they will recognize that we are no longer “next” but “now.”
You can follow Trevor’s progress at Davos here, on Twitter.
Jargon hunting at Davos 2011
The annual shindig of the great and good from the corporate, banking and political worlds in Davos is always a rich hunting ground for connoisseurs of business jargon.
This year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum is no exception.
The theme of the meeting is “Shared norms for the new reality” — which translated means the world has got a lot nastier, or at least different, and how do we deal with all the new threats?
Speaking from the WEF’s Dr. Evil-style headquarters overlooking Lake Geneva, forum founder and chairman Klaus Schwab said the world was now facing “global burn-out syndrome”, whose symptoms, he told a news conference, include lethargy, withdrawal, and a tendency to be reactive and rely on firefighting rather than being proactive and thinking strategically.
The WEF’s answer to the web of 37 risks it has identified threatening the world is to launch the “global risk response network”, which will allow corporate chief risk officers to work together with government risk experts on solving the problem.
In any case, the answers will be found in the dialogue between business, governments and civil society, for which the forum can provide a conducive setting.
Or in Professor Schwab’s words: “What we need is a multi-stakeholder platform.”
“Shared norms for the new reality” is a very good title and the firt of theme is to share the nom of tax carbon stating from China!
Cherchez La Femme at Davos
– Elisabeth Kelan is lecturer in the Department of Management at King’s College London. The opinions expressed are her own. –
The World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes insightful research on gender in business, the economy and politics. Every year, for instance, the WEF releases a Gender Gap Report that measures how countries are doing in regards to gender equality.
This always stood in sharp contrast to the annual meeting in Davos itself, where spotting a female face in the crowd was easier said than done. It might come as a surprise (then again, it might not), but one of the most influential meetings around the globe has so far taken place with minimal female involvement.
This might be set to change with the announcement that this year’s WEF will impose a gender quota. More specifically, one in five delegates needs to be female.
However, close inspection reveals that this only applies to the 100 so-called ‘strategic partner organisations’ — groups which pay for the right to send five delegates to attend the WEF.
Applying a gender quota is a laudable effort, and there is evidence that it works. The success of quotas on company boards in Norway has led other nations, including Spain and France, to introduce or promise to introduce a similar framework in the future.
In most cases the quota is set at a level higher than one in five (usually around 40 percent), but in the WEF’s defence, the 20 percent mark is in line with targets for female executives that some companies such as Deutsche Telekom have set themselves.
Well, I will be speaking at Davos, on 3 different occasions:
http://site.layar.com/company/blog/layar s-claire-boonstra-to-speak-with-world-le aders-at-world-economic-forum-in-davos
And: I fear that this whole gender issue is more of a press/ media thing than a real issue…
Celebrities and handshakes – is the WEF really working?
-Mark Kobayashi-Hillary is a British author, blogger, and advisor on technology, globalisation and corporate change, based in São Paulo, Brazil. The opinions expressed are his own.-
The World Economic Forum returns to Davos next week for the annual round of handshakes and backslapping between world leaders and A-list celebrities that aim to solve the major problems of the world. But when this blog (http://blogs.reuters.com/davos/2011/01/13/is-davos-still-relevant/) asked readers if the annual WEF meeting in Davos is still relevant, more than two-thirds of you said that times have changed and little will be achieved.
That seems a harsh judgement from the blog readers, so I asked my own network of online friends on Twitter (www.twitter.com/markhillary) and Facebook what they think.
Of course, mine is an unscientific survey that no academic could ever support – negative feelings tend to run higher and attract more comment than positive – but my own network agreed that little will be achieved in Davos – a full 100% of people who sent me a comment supported that view.
Some typical responses were: “Davos still counts because no one expects it to do anything”, “Stop the drama… take the hundreds of millions of expenses and develop a hundred target villages [in India]”, “I never noticed it was Davos time because I have yet to read the poor Doctor Who puns in the media”, “annual lame duck sessions that only project and boost their narcissistic, bloated egos….”
The World Economic Forum believes that the only way to create real social and economic change is to get the major decision-makers together so they can plan a future political, economic, social, and technological agenda. In a way, they have a point. Have you ever tried working virtually with people you don’t know? The team in another country that your boss insists you work with. Once you go and meet those same people, share a dinner or meet their family, what happens to your working relationship?
It improves dramatically, just because you met the people and experienced a real interaction with them as fellow humans. That makes for a more efficient workplace where decisions can be taken together. It is natural for all of us to work better and be more agreeable with people we know, rather than the unknown voice at the end of a telephone line or email address.
Davos 2011: More people, fewer resources, big risk
Among the major issues global leaders will discuss at the upcoming annual World Economic Forum in Davos are the risks associated with the tightening of water, food and energy resources to meet the demands of an increasing global population.
The three interrelated resources impact both global economic growth and geopolitical stability and the Forum’s Global Risks 2011 report warns that “any strategy that focuses on one part of the water-food-energy nexus without considering its interconnections risks serious unintended consequences.”
Three recent news stories illustrate the risks associated with these precious resources.
Water
The situation in Yemen provides a perfect illustration of the growing problem countries face when it comes to fresh water supplies. Yemen’s population is increasing – exploding really. Currently at 23 million, it’s forecast to double in the next 20 years. Thanks to drought and overconsumption, the water is running out and farmers are abandoning their land for the cities.
A nonprofit network and affiliate of the policy think tank Pacific Institute called Circle of Blue offers 19 solutions to the global freshwater crisis here.
Food
Groundhog Day in Davos
The programme may strike a different note — this year’s Davos is apparently all about Shared Norms for the New Reality — but much of the discussion at the 41st World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos this month will have a distinctly familiar ring to it.
Last January, the five-day talkfest in the Swiss Alps was dominated by Greece’s near-death experience at the hands of the bond market and recriminations over the role of bankers in the financial crisis, as well as worries about China’s rapid economic ascent and a lot of calls for a new trade deal.
Fast forward 12 months and not much has changed.
Ireland has joined Greece in the euro zone’s intensive care unit and Portugal and Spain are getting round-the-clock monitoring. The annual round of bankers’ bonuses is once again stirring up trouble. China looms larger than ever on the global stage, after overtaking Japan in 2010 to become the world’s second-biggest economy. And trade ministers who signally failed to make headway last year say they really must get down to business when they meet on the sidelines of Davos this time round.
For a sense of the deja vu, take a look at the WEF’s latest hot-off-the-press report on Global Risks — a 50-page tome on the spider’s web of interconnected threats now facing the world. Not much progress in addressing them has been made, it seems. Government debt and the danger of sovereign default remains top of the risk hit-list, alongside macroeconomic imbalances, the fragility of the economic recovery and resource limits. It is a very similar litany as a year ago.
Worryingly, while the threats remain all too visible, the report’s authors conclude that the world is now uniquely vulnerable to any further shocks in the wake of the financial crisis.
Watch Felix Salmon interview Nouriel Roubini
Yesterday evening Reuters.com streamed an interview with renowned economist Nouriel Roubini live from our studio at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Reuters columinst Felix Salmon presented the interview and all the questions he put to Roubini were sent in by visitors to our Davos 2010 live blog.
Greece’s economic woes, U.S. GDP and the trustworthiness of statistics coming out of China were just some of the issues being discussed. If you missed it, or if you want to see it again, watch the interview in the player below.
Italian CEO says retail banks need time to adapt
Yesterday I spoke to Antonio Vigni, CEO of Siena-based Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank. Below are two video clips of Vigni answering questions on lending in Italy and the hot topic of regulation.
In this first clip, Vigni says bank lending is holding up in Italy and he sees improvement.
In the next clip, Vigni says that retail banks may need more time to adapt to the brave new regulatory world.
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Resident Davos Expert
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