The Great Debate UK

from Davos Notebook:

Women on top — more quotas, please

I was in the lobby of the Steigenberg Belvedere waiting for my husband yesterday but there was nowhere to sit. Looking around I saw a Davos Wife  resting on a crowded stairway. I joined her and, of course, we struck up a conversation about Women at Davos. I could tell by her comfy snow boots she had been coming for years.

She explained to me that I had it all wrong. Women are at not the bottom of the ladder at Davos but in fact are the ones who make it work. Here is why: speakers are invited so that they can be on panels but the businessmen come so they can take meetings and do deals.

“The World Economic Forum produces all this content but needs to create an audience for the invited speakers,” she said. “The women who come are equal to their husbands and equal in drive and so they self select.” Since they aren’t given a role in the conference they have nothing to do but go to the panels. That’s why the audiences for the sessions on health, arts, science and, to some extent philanthropy, are largely made up of Davos Wives.  Davos would not function without these women.

I am all for  being allowed to attend panels on “Personalized Medicine”, “Design for the New Reality” “Ensuring Elusive Growth” and “What If Another Bank Fails?”.  But things have come to a pretty pass when a paid up Davos Wife (who is a business executive to boot) actually believes our role is simply to fill the seats. Nor do I do believe for a minute that this is what founder Klaus Schwab and his board have in mind for us.

The people that run the Davos meeting are trying hard to make it more woman friendly and they have many initiatives to prove it. But sometimes they just get it wrong: at the Thursday panel on “Women and Society” chaired by Laura Tyson, the male panelists outnumbered the females by two to one. When she saw it on the agenda, “I thought it was a f----ing joke! “said one female Davos participant.

I’ve had a lot of responses since to my writings this week and Jessica Mack at the Ms. Magazine blog yesterday called on me to stop writing about hokey subjects like mistresses and to tackle more serious matters.

My good friend Rana Foroohar from Time magazine has written that quotas by themselves don’t work. Businesses should hire women because it is the smart thing to do. Megan Casserly at Forbes.com cautions that marginalizing women by putting them on earnest panels about women’s issues may not help much either.

from Davos Notebook:

Shared norms, soccer pundits and dealing with the ‘New Reality’

-- Mark Kobayashi-Hillary is the author of several books, including ‘Who Moved my Job?’ and ‘Global Services: Moving to a Level Playing Field’. The opinions expressed are his own. --

And so the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos is underway once again. The theme this year is Shared Norms for the New Reality, which according to the WEF is: “…reflecting the fact that we live in a world that is becoming increasingly complex and interconnected but also experiencing an erosion of common values and principles.”

I think that means life is moving faster so we need to step back and review some basic principles, because some are struggling to keep up. At least that’s what I understand it to mean.

But, disregarding the headline purpose of the conference, the really interesting story I am noticing as the WEF gets underway is that partners – or sponsors in more direct language – have been asked to bring at least one woman in their delegation. In 2010, just 16% of attendees in Davos were women and the WEF wants to see that figure going up.

But this is a club for presidents and company executives and fewer than 3 percent of the Fortune Global 500 chief executives are women and less than 20 of the world's presidents or prime ministers are female. It’s no wonder that Davos is overrun with men in unimaginative dark suits sheltering from the cold.

The WEF has been around for forty years now and this is the first time any serious effort has gone into forcing the companies who attend to favour their female employees for a place in the conference delegation. Some might argue that creating female-only quotas for a business conference is the tail wagging the dog, but organisations often need some incentive to change and break free of the sexism all around us in daily life.

This week, Britain has been gripped by the controversial recording of sexist remarks by two football pundits, Richard Keys and Andy Gray. Keys and Gray made disparaging off-air comments on Sky TV about a female match official, questioning her ability to understand the game based solely on her gender and scoffed at remarks by former Birmingham City FC Managing Director, Karren Brady, that the game is sexist.

from Davos Notebook:

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.

from Davos Notebook:

What Davos can learn from BP

By Christine Bader, who worked for BP from 1999-2008. The opinions expressed are her own.

Next week world leaders will gather in Davos for the annual World Economic Forum to discuss topics ranging from climate change to global risks and economic growth. Looming in the background will be last year’s massive Gulf oil spill, which has serious implications for all of those issues.

In the postmortem analyses of the spill, my former employer, BP, looks like the opposite of a model corporate citizen, having apparently contributed to 11 deaths, numerous other injuries, and the release of over four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

I struggle to reconcile the BP on view today, in which reckless cost-cutting and risk-taking seem to run rampant, with the BP I worked for, which went above and beyond what was required to take care of its employees and neighbors. The latter in no way exonerates the former, but examining the two different faces of the company shows how we can improve corporate behavior -- not just of BP, but of business more broadly.

When I moved to Indonesia for BP in 2000, my assignment was to make sure that a planned liquefied natural gas plant would benefit the people of West Papua, the country’s easternmost province on the island of New Guinea.

History showed that communities from Azerbaijan to Zambia have had their hopes raised by the discovery of oil, gas, or minerals in their area, but ultimately reaped little more than corruption and pollution. And West Papua isn’t just any community -- it’s home to flora and fauna that don’t exist anywhere else, and indigenous tribes that have had little contact with the West.

from Davos Notebook:

Is Davos really a zoo?

Watch Reuters Global Editor at Large Chrystia Freeland and Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon debate the utility of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting at Davos and trade memories about their experiences at Davos over the years.

While Chrystia thinks Davos is a good hunting ground for journalism, Felix thinks it's "mostly zoological." Felix may have zero hope for the conference, but there are two topics Chrystia wants to know more about:

• global financial imbalances -- and what the Chinese are going to be saying to the Americans about that?
• global income inequality, Chrystia's "obsession," and is that going to be a theme, too?

One question remains, will Felix maintain his solidarity and allegiance to the underdog? Or will he have a "frisson"?

Felix and Chrystia will be reporting from Davos and bringing you the highlights from there, so please follow our coverage of it. Even if Felix thinks nothing might come from the conference, at least, he says, it will be fun and you always meet fascinating people.

from Davos Notebook:

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.