Author Archives: Adrian Monck

Davos 2012

Posted on by
Reply

I atten­ded a Civil Soci­ety event where I spoke with rep­res­ent­at­ives from human rights organ­iz­a­tions, the union/labor move­ment, and NGOs work­ing to address some of the hard­est prob­lems in soci­ety. I had a lunch with a uni­ver­sity pres­id­ent talk­ing about the role of tech­no­logy in higher ed. I had din­ner with an esteemed phys­i­cist, an author I admire, and a net­work sci­ent­ist where we talked about how to engender and sup­port cre­ativ­ity. I gave advice to a group of women try­ing to com­bat the soci­etal valu­ation of con­sump­tion. I brain­stormed with a group of young attendees who had done amaz­ing work in the edu­ca­tion sec­tor around the globe. I atten­ded a din­ner with com­plex­ity ana­lysts, news­pa­per exec­ut­ives, and brain sci­ent­ists where we talked about how fear func­tions in society.

I share these things not to brag, but because my con­ver­sa­tions in Davos were inspir­ing, cre­at­ive, and stim­u­lat­ing. I came out of the event feel­ing as though I was able to con­trib­ute to dis­cus­sions among people who were truly work­ing to make the world a bet­ter place.

Dana Boyd, Apophenia

Some par­ti­cipants went to Davos simply intent on defend­ing and for­ward­ing their own, pre­de­ter­mined pos­i­tions. Yet I was sur­prised at times at how free­wheel­ing the con­ver­sa­tions actu­ally were.

Michael Schu­man, TIME

It is pleas­ant to spend a few days in snowy Davos eat­ing fon­due, ski­ing and talk­ing up cre­at­ive examples of social entre­pren­eur­ship. It can even be fun to muse on one of the big ques­tions the World Eco­nomic Forum has des­ig­nated for col­lect­ive cogit­a­tion: how to ‘‘redesign’’ capitalism.

But the hard part is embra­cing higher taxes or a lower salary.

Chrys­tia Free­land, Reu­ters

Here’s the truth about Davos: not a single per­son I’ve met who’s been to the event say that it’s worth­while in the way the Forum has inten­ded it.

Do people learn about global warm­ing, fam­ine in Africa, job­less­ness in Europe? Yes.

Does the WEF help the world in sub­stan­tial ways? It does.

The not-for-profit group hosts more than 200 work­ing ses­sions in Davos, and nine regional meet­ings around the globe that are less pub­li­cized and more focused.

But if attendees really cared about any of that, they’d have done some­thing about it.

No, Davos is a place to be seen, to feel spe­cial, to cut a deal. It’s the global system’s way of telling the cit­izens of the globe that everything’s working.

David Weidner, Mar­ket­watch

[A]midst the deal­mak­ing, party­ing, net­work­ing, and status-mongering, there lurks a fair amount of empathy and striv­ing for action to help the world’s needy. I spent time listen­ing to and strategiz­ing with Karen Tse, a friend I have made over years at Davos. Tse’s organ­iz­a­tion, Inter­na­tional Bridges to Justice, works to expose and stop routine non-political invest­ig­at­ive tor­ture in coun­tries all over the world. Until I met her here I didn’t even know such tor­ture is routine. Whatever its faults, Davos is a place where such con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen, where the dia­logue for pro­gress con­tin­ues, slowly, inexorably.

David Kirk­patrick, For­bes

[F]or all the talk of inequal­ity and the need to demon­strate the bene­fits of glob­al­isa­tion, I heard little to sug­gest that “Davos man” is equipped to fend off a pop­u­list assault. The idea that “struc­tural reform”, plus aus­ter­ity, plus bet­ter job train­ing will do the trick is – well – pious baloney.

Gideon Rach­man, Fin­an­cial Times

There’s been a strik­ing effort on the part of the world’s largest for-profit enter­prises to seek out and define the “shared value” play­ing field, with non-profits and the pub­lic sec­tor. The “for-benefit enter­prise” … seems to be on the minds of many par­ti­cipants here at Davos.

Frankly, neither my non-profit side of this con­ver­sa­tion, nor the for-profit side, really knows exactly how this will look and work in prac­tice. We should not fool ourselves that this is an easy area of col­lab­or­a­tion and mutual bene­fit in which to oper­ate. Sat­is­fy­ing share­hold­ers while also achiev­ing meas­ur­able social out­comes at scale is a prom­ising field that’s been stud­ied and exper­i­mented with by many great thinkers, and doers. But I doubt it’s ever been as front-and-center in the con­ver­sa­tions of global lead­ers who gather here in the Swiss Alps as it is this year.

Karl Roberts, Wash­ing­ton Post

Davos con­tin­ues to have its mer­its. As the event was draw­ing to a close, a Nobel laur­eate told me that at “first I thought this is a party for the ultra-rich and the glor­i­fic­a­tion of [WEF founder Prof Klaus] Schwab, but now I believe they really listen, and actu­ally do things.”

Tim Weber, BBC News

There was a lot of talk about jobs in Davos, in a way which was dir­ectly related to the talk of inequal­ity. The assembled plu­to­crats had their party line on the lat­ter — that the best way to address inequal­ity is to make poor people richer rather than rich people poorer … And clearly, the best way to make poor people richer is to give the unem­ployed jobs.

But bey­ond that, things got very fuzzy very quickly, and more than a little depress­ing. LSE eco­nom­ist Chris­topher Piss­ar­ides, for instance, basic­ally said that it was delu­sional to hope for sig­ni­fic­ant job growth from the tech­no­logy sec­tor or from man­u­fac­tur­ing, and that if employ­ment is going to go up, it’s going to be from people basic­ally act­ing as ser­vants to the rich — whether it’s look­ing after their chil­dren, giv­ing them personal-fitness ses­sions, or mak­ing them coffee.

The sad thing is that I think he’s prob­ably right.

Felix Sal­mon, Reu­ters

[A]s the mas­ters of fin­ance and heads of gov­ern­ment fil­ter out of this ski resort in the Swiss Alps, the anxi­ety gnaw­ing at the global eco­nomy con­tin­ues unchecked. The dam­age could run bey­ond an eco­nomic slow­down, fur­ther under­min­ing pub­lic faith in the insti­tu­tions that now gov­ern mod­ern life.

For dec­ades, as crises have assailed devel­op­ing coun­tries from Indone­sia to Argen­tina, the powers-that-be in the United States and Europe have counseled ortho­dox advice: Get your fiscal house in order; live within your means; act decis­ively and res­ol­utely. Yet now that crisis is hit­ting the wealthy world, lead­ers are avoid­ing the hard­est decisions and hop­ing to muddle through — all while export­ing their afflic­tions to mul­tiple shores.

Peter Good­man, Huff­ing­ton Post

One thing that’s becom­ing clear at Davos is that the core idea of the Enlight­en­ment — that cap­it­al­ism and demo­cracy go hand in hand to cre­ate the best soci­ety — is under fire. And the struggle to cre­ate a new model may well pit nation against nation, cor­por­a­tions against gov­ern­ment, poor against rich. The world, it turns out, isn’t flat – and it’s becom­ing bumpier all the time.

Rana Faroohar, TIME

Mr. Schmidt of Google said, “At Davos the con­ver­sa­tion is really about eco­nomic growth and the real­ity is that tech­no­lo­gical advance­ment bene­fits those who are edu­cated but endangers jobs that are routine and automatable.”

“This has been true for two hun­dred years with tech­no­lo­gies,” he added.

Nick Bilton, New York Times

The ran­dom encoun­ters can be just as telling as the formal arrange­ments. A couple of nights ago, I took a des­ig­nated WEF van back to my hotel. At the next stop, we picked up a Nobel-prize win­ning eco­nom­ist well-known for his pro­gress­ive out­look. In stepped another man with a South Asian accent. Ah, this time it’s a Nobel Peace Prize win­ner. He was in a great rush to talk to the cur­rent head of the G20 at one of the fancy hotels. He had a pro­posal to expand the G20 to make it into a G25, with rep­res­ent­a­tion from the five poorest coun­tries from five dif­fer­ent con­tin­ents. The aim, he explained, is to give greater voice to the poor in global fora and to sens­it­ize the lead­ers of the wealth­i­est coun­tries to the needs and interests of people in the poorest coun­tries. We wished him luck. I do not know if he will suc­ceed, but Davos can get the ball rolling.

Daniel Bell, Huff­ing­ton Post

Inequal­ity was also a sur­pris­ingly hot topic at last week’s World Eco­nomic Forum in Davos. You wouldn’t expect a gath­er­ing of plu­to­crats, olig­archs, and C-suite supremos to shed much light on the sub­ject, least of all between tast­ings of vin­tage Bor­deaux and excur­sions to the finest pistes in Switzer­land. And yet one night in Davos taught me more about the true mean­ing of inequal­ity than any­thing I’ve read or heard in the United States since the launch of Occupy Wall Street.

Niall Fer­guson, Daily Beast

Making sense of Davos

Posted on by
Reply

When the World Eco­nomic Forum pub­lishes a well-researched report on global gender gaps, sus­tain­able con­sump­tion, water secur­ity or com­pet­it­ive­ness, it fuels global debate. When it gath­ers its Mem­bers from the busi­ness world with oth­ers from a broad swathe of soci­ety (aca­dem­ics, artists, politi­cians, human rights cam­paign­ers, trade uni­on­ists, envir­on­ment­al­ists and more), it becomes either the sin­is­ter archi­tect of a global con­spir­acy or the con­vener of a point­less gab­fest: Weltver­schwörung or waffle.

So what is the Forum? I can’t pre­tend to give you the defin­it­ive answer, but I can tell you how I make sense of it, hav­ing spent my work­ing life in tele­vi­sion news and higher education. It might be help­ful to start by say­ing what it isn’t.

It is not a lob­by­ing or advocacy group. The world’s biggest com­pan­ies have little dif­fi­culty in secur­ing private meet­ings with whom­so­ever they choose. Politi­cians have good reas­ons to meet with com­pan­ies who might be employ­ers, and fin­an­ci­ers who might be investors. Trade asso­ci­ations, employ­ers’ groups and national cham­bers of com­merce all host such meet­ings and cam­paign on behalf of their mem­bers. This is not the role of the World Eco­nomic Forum.

It is not a net­work­ing asso­ci­ation. The Brit­ish prime minister’s coun­try res­id­ence at Chequers has long played host to eclectic gath­er­ings where journ­al­ists, bankers and celebrit­ies are encour­aged to rub shoulders. Doubt­less there are inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions over the marmalade, but that’s not the role of the World Eco­nomic Forum either.

So, what is the Forum’s reason for being? There is a Ger­man part to the explan­a­tion and a Swiss part. For the Ger­man part, you have to step back to the coun­try post-World War 2: des­troyed by extreme nation­al­ism; divided by com­mun­ism; its West­ern lead­ers seek­ing to rebuild their industry on a model that could also rebuild their society.

That pro­cess meant re-imagining indus­trial polit­ics. At its heart was the idea that busi­ness did not exist simply to serve share­hold­ers. Instead, an enter­prise should recog­nize its place within a con­stel­la­tion that includes employ­ees, sup­pli­ers, con­sumers, neigh­bours and bey­ond – its “stake­hold­ers”. For a firm to be account­able only to share­hold­ers was too nar­row. Cor­por­a­tions needed to embrace their broader respons­ib­il­it­ies as social, polit­ical, intel­lec­tual, cul­tural and even artistic or spir­itual act­ors. And under­stand­ing those respons­ib­il­it­ies required interaction.

The idea doesn’t have an easy Eng­lish label, and it is hardly in com­mon cur­rency. The Forum calls it the “multistake­holder” prin­ciple, and that prin­ciple extra­pol­ated to a global level is what gath­ers Mem­bers of the World Eco­nomic Forum with other global stakeholders.

The World Eco­nomic Forum has one simple motiv­a­tion in bring­ing people together – “con­ven­ing” in the jar­gon of inter­na­tional organ­iz­a­tions. It believes that its Mem­bers can only truly under­stand their interests by encoun­ter­ing the interests of others.

Then there is the Swiss part: par­ti­cip­a­tion. Per­haps it reflects the tra­di­tion of moun­tain com­munit­ies that respons­ib­il­ity be shared, that every view must be integ­rated, that one can­not simply abrog­ate one’s mem­ber­ship in a com­munity. It is an old idea. It was prob­ably old when it was artic­u­lated by one of Geneva’s most fam­ous sons, the polit­ical philo­sopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For the Swiss, it is a prin­ciple of their demo­cracy – the Konkord­anz­sys­tem.

That demo­cracy at fed­eral, can­tonal and town level is con­sul­ted in the pre­par­a­tions for the Forum’s Annual Meet­ing in Davos. Davos is an independently-minded moun­tain com­munity, steeped in Switzerland’s dir­ect demo­cratic tra­di­tion. Its alti­tude and an enter­pris­ing doc­tor, Alex­an­der Spen­gler, made it a des­tin­a­tion for well-heeled tuber­cu­losis suf­fer­ers. Thomas Mann set his com­edy of ennerv­a­tion, The Magic Moun­tain, in one of its san­at­oria. Albert Ein­stein helped kick-start its repu­ta­tion as an intel­lec­tual retreat (video).

Davos today is a work­ing alpine town. The town’s tour­ism is a func­tional con­trast to the chocol­ate box world of Vil­lars, Zer­matt and St Mor­itz. The Forum’s Annual Meet­ing boosts the local eco­nomy, but not its winter sports. Barely one-fifth of those par­ti­cip­at­ing can be accom­mod­ated in a five-star hotel. The local ski-lift com­pany has con­tem­plated shut­ting the lifts dur­ing the Meet­ing. When I’m there, as a mem­ber of the Forum, I sleep on a single bed and share a bath­room. Hard­ship? Not really, but it is work.

And that suits the Forum, because it deals with the world as it is, not as it would prefer it to be. It is not a decision-making body. Nor is it a con­spir­acy in which the horo­lo­gical com­pon­ents of global gov­ernance and industry are wound together to frus­trate the rest of the world.

For the busi­nesses and organ­iz­a­tions and indi­vidu­als who come together in Davos, the oppor­tun­ity simply to meet with one another, to think out­side their usual entour­age of attend­ant coun­sel and advisers, and to have no pre­de­ter­mined out­come assigned to every encounter is both a relief and an opportunity. It brings together com­pet­it­ors and col­leagues, prot­ag­on­ists and ant­ag­on­ists, the well respec­ted and the heart­ily reviled, without requir­ing all who enter to adhere to its pre­cepts or accept its principles.

It is an incre­ment­al­ist organ­iz­a­tion. It moves slowly, and a diverse fund­ing base means that it is not a host­age to any interest. Much nego­ti­ation and plan­ning is required simply to arrive at a con­sensus around which debate can take place. But when that con­sensus is achieved, move­ment can be profound.

Fabi­ans would recog­nize the bene­fits of a plat­form from which Nel­son Man­dela could announce his eco­nomic policy for the post-apartheid era in South Africa. It can inspire extraordin­ary acts of phil­an­thropy, like those of Bill and Melinda Gates. It can provide a global micro­phone to someone like Aung San Suu Kyi. Like any plat­form, its power comes from the people who stand upon it, and their power in turn derives from the strength of their organ­iz­a­tions, their office or their ideas.

At any gath­er­ing of the power­ful, most often power remains frus­trat­ingly unwiel­ded. Swords stay planted in stones. And so there is frus­tra­tion. Why doesn’t the Forum DO some­thing? Why does it take in coun­try X, leader Y? Why does it nudge gently rather than poke aggress­ively? How can it let things stay the same?

Every­one who works for a com­plex organ­iz­a­tion makes com­prom­ises. Some­times those com­prom­ises come off, and the reward is pro­gress. Some­times they don’t. Encour­aging power to accept respons­ib­il­ity can be a cover for expedi­ency, but it can also prompt change. Organ­iz­a­tional cul­tures are self-reinforcing. If enough people within an organ­iz­a­tion judge their own con­tri­bu­tion by its mis­sion “to improve the state of the world”, it puts a value to their work and gives them meaning.

The world remains a com­plex and dys­func­tional place. Yet it is a big­ger and bet­ter place than the world I grew up in, in the world’s first indus­trial eco­nomy. In the early 1970s, women like my grand­mother wore head­scarves to go to mar­ket; heat and water came from coal scraped from scuttles; and a job meant simply work for men – labour that was fuelled by tinned food and for­got­ten with weak beer, the wire­less and the foot­ball pools. And this life was the best on offer for the most-favoured mil­lions. This was the world in which the Forum was created.

I am con­vinced that eco­nomic pro­gress can drive social and polit­ical pro­gress. Later this month, the World Eco­nomic Forum, under the rub­ric of the theme of its Annual Meet­ing – The Great Trans­form­a­tion: Shap­ing New Mod­els – will ask par­ti­cipants in Davos to think again about how the world works. The Forum too recog­nizes that even its own model needs to be ques­tioned. Often and regularly.

Cross­pos­ted from Forum:Blog.

Losing control of a TV discussion: a masterclass

Posted on by
2

When Jeremy Pax­man engages, he is an excel­lent presenter. When he is bored…not so much. The clip below shows what hap­pens when News­night attempts to recre­ate the kind of boor­ish con­ver­sa­tion that would not have passed for debate in ye olde Eng­lish pub of thirty years ago.

By using con­tro­ver­sial­ists like Oborne, and an ex-journalist Lam­bert, as a proxy for opin­ion, the pro­gramme does no one a service.

Instead of being edgy and inform­at­ive, Oborne is allowed to simply hijack the stu­dio floor.

A prop­erly briefed Pax­man could have taken on a real offi­cial forensic­ally — and actu­ally “held someone to account”. Isn’t that what News­night was sup­posed to do?

Instead Pax­man is asked to ring­mas­ter a largely power­less array of opin­ion ped­dlers. Mean­while, if you’ve never seen a snake charmer bit­ten by a cobra…

 

Creative destruction

Posted on by
Reply

When we fol­low through the his­tory of par­tic­u­lar indus­tries and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is pos­sible to for­get that the old skill and the new almost always were the per­quis­ite of dif­fer­ent people… Even where an old skill was replaced by a new pro­cess requir­ing equal or greater skill, we rarely find the same work­ers trans­ferred from one to another… The rewards of the “march of pro­gress” always seemed to be gathered by someone else.

E.P. Thompson, The Mak­ing of the Eng­lish Work­ing Class

More than thirty years have passed since my father was vis­ited by the first of sev­eral stretches of unem­ploy­ment that were to haunt his life, and the lives of those who loved him.

He was a trav­el­ling tim­ber sales­man — the Willy Loman of a work­shop world that still ran on thick and tight-grained boards, fra­gile and exotic ven­eers, the seasoned planks and beams that were his stock in trade.

Self-educated, his book­shelf held the nov­els of Alistair McLean and Isaac Asimov along­side Vance Pack­ard’s The Hid­den Per­suaders, J.A.C. Brown’s Tech­niques of Per­sua­sion, Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influ­ence People.

His psy­cho­logy of selling would be shared with me on long drives between boat yards and build­ing sites, the work­shops of the cus­tom­ers for whom he was also listener and entertainer.

But changes in the psy­cho­logy of selling did not des­troy his live­li­hood. The makers of repro­duc­tion fur­niture fol­ded. Fibre­glass replaced well-varnished tim­bers in the boat­yards. The eco­nom­ics of busi­ness con­sol­id­a­tion elim­in­ated the need for com­pet­ing sales teams. Tech­no­logy, com­pet­i­tion, and demo­graphy made him redundant.

My father’s exper­i­ence of unem­ploy­ment in the early 1980s was hardly unique, but it was singular.

Laid off tim­ber reps were not heroic enough to myth­o­lo­gised as labour­ers, nor skilled enough to write their own legend and embalm their mis­for­tune with sen­ti­ment­al­ity and social significance.

But when we talk about the cre­at­ive destruc­tion of cre­at­ive indus­tries like journ­al­ism, there is a human cost, and — like my father — it’s lonely and eas­ily forgotten.