Personal perspective from an 11-time Davos attendee

By Alec Hogg*

My first visit to Davos was the year after Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk and Mangosuthu Buthelezi were the star attractions at the World Economic Forum's 1992 annual meeting. South Africa had made it onto the WEF's radar screen. As a follow up, an invitation to attend the 1993 event arrived for the SABC's Economics Editor, a post I held back then.

That 1993 meeting was a blur, as it tends to be for any first timer in Davos. Discourse is at a level which presumes a high degree of knowledge. You quickly understand why the Good Lord gave us two ears and one mouth – to listen at least twice as much as talk. Those five sleep-deprived days are over too quickly. It's only on the flight home one starts to feel the slow-release from that injection of concentrated information.

A year after my introduction to Davos my career took a brief but very educational turn into Big Business. A couple of years later and in the media world, getting to another WEF meeting ranked high on the list of priorities. But wanting to go to Davos in January, and actually cracking the nod can be worlds apart. It was only after a string of co-incidences that the next invitation arrived in late 2004 and, thankfully, has kept arriving every year since then.

First-timers in Davos are sometimes critical. Especially those in the reporting media who struggle to stomach their status alongside tradesmen and support staff, and clearly below the participants. Their access is restricted to certain part of the Congress Centre areas and, mostly, just the Plenary sessions and Press Conferences. Many of the 200-plus breakaway sessions are strictly off the record affairs; encouraging participants to speak freely, but having an obvious impact on the news-seeking reporter. 

But for those with different agendas, there's much which makes the WEF special. The relaxed format means almost anything can and does happen. A long-time attendee once explained this is the place where the world's economic agenda is set for the coming year. Listen closely, he advised, and instead of confusion, you'll instinctively understand events as they unfold later in the year.

That makes sense. During the last week in January, the Swiss ski resort becomes a global nexus of power, a place where the Presidents and Business Leaders meet formally and informally; publicly and privately. By the time those limos and helicopters leave, many pieces will have dropped into place, helping make their jigsaw puzzle of the future a little clearer.

The 2009 meeting provides a great example. Then President Kgalema Mothlante arrived in Davos cautiously optimistic about the country's economic prospects, suggesting a 2009 growth rate of 4% was possible. After exposure to his counterparts, within a couple days he had radically downgraded that forecast to between a small negative and zero. He wasn't the only one to initially under-estimate the impact of the Global Financial Crisis.

Many of the 2 500 attendees – half of them business executives whose sponsorship and membership fees pay for the exercise – are attracted by the opportunity to network. Nothing on earth compares. Virtually all the world's Top 100 companies are represented, usually by their chairman or chief executive, sometimes both. The lives of many a social entrepreneur or member of the WEF's young global leader programme have been changed through a chance meeting with one of these worthies.

For others, the attraction is an opportunity to market their ideas to the most exclusive audience on earth. Economist Nouriel Roubini gain his guru status because of raising uncomfortable questions during Davos in 2006 and 2007. Ditto billionaire George Soros, whose sometimes off-the-wall ideas enjoy serious consideration in Davos.

Being exposed to great minds, to the latest trends in anything from science and technology to economics and social behaviour, is what gets me to brave the sub zero temperatures every year. It's also confirmation of what a US Professor once opined while we were having a private chat in Davos two years ago – that in today's speeded-up world only academics and journalists have the time to think. And in providing stuff to think about, the WEF is in a class of its own.

In conjunction with BrightRock, we have taken to sharing the stories from our recently published World Economic Forum starter pack, 'A Veterans Guide to Surviving Davos' PDF with you – To download the full document, follow this link.