Imagine you're a multibillionaire or mega-chief executive officer. This time of year you're luxuriating in the Caribbean or the Seychelles, toes buried in the warm sand. Except, no: You're actually slip-sliding on the sidewalks of Davos, Switzerland, hurrying to an earnest discussion of climate change or youth obesity or secular stagnation. The ski slopes of Davos are bare because everyone in town is nerding out.
This year, the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos is expecting more than 40 heads of state and government, along with 2,500 or so additonal official participants, including philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates; Prince Andrew, Duke of York; United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-moon; Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web; JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon; and Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post.
To the rest of us, the annual stampede of the rich and famous to snowy Davos is as inexplicable as the great wildebeest migration of the Serengeti. But there's an easy explanation for it: People go to Davos because other people go to Davos. They want to be where the action is, even at the cost of an occasionally pratfall on the ice. "It is a very powerful convening capability," Laura Tyson, a former chief economic adviser to President Bill Clinton who is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley Haas School of Business, told me a couple of years ago.
Audio CEO Rupert Stadler says Davos is "one session at the beginning of the year when I have the best access with business leaders." Government leaders, too. "I can have a 15- or 20-minute exchange with the finance minister of Mexico. It's much better than writing a letter." In Davos, Stadler says, he's exposed to people he might not encounter in his day job. He says Davos brought his first exposure to the demographic challenge of the aging European workforce and, more recently, to the revolution in 3D printing. "I saw a small demonstration several years ago and said, 'Dear God!'"
The network effect pulls in a surprising number of scientists, not to mention nongovernmental organizations, cultural figures, and scads of journalists. "It helps a lot to network," says Rolf-Dieter Heuer, a particle physicist who is director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the lab in Switzerland that found the Higgs boson. "When you talk about science and decision-making, sustainable development goals, post-2015 agenda, etc., we should not forget this can only be done if you have educated people. Maybe I'm a bit naïve, but I think education can also help with moderating crises."
It's an historical accident that the World Economic Forum wound up in a remote Alpine valley in eastern Switzerland rather than, say, midtown Manhattan. (Austrian management professor Klaus Schwab founded it here in the 1970s as the European Management Forum.) But the very inconvenience of the village strengthens its hold. Once you get to Davos, there's nothing to do except be part of the buzz.
There are plenty of tough questions to ask about Davos. Does the World Economic Forum achieve its stated goal of "improving the state of the world"? Has the meeting become an opportunity for executives in various fields to conspire behind closed doors? Is the whole thing just too expensive? And is Switzerland really the best place to learn about, say, world hunger?
But there's one question that you don't really need to ask, which is why people keep coming year after year. Davos is popular because Davos is popular.
