The Zurich airport is a great mingler where people from the various levels of the Emirates flight from Dubai meet on the shuttle train and at the baggage carousel.
That is where I met Sultan Bin Sulayem, Chairman of DP World, as well as Gerald Lawless who has just moved to be in charge of Dubai Holding’s tourism and hospitality after 16 years at the head of the Jumeirah Group, and Badr Jafar of Crescent Enterprises and Crescent Petroleum who is due to talk in Davos about his Pearl Initiative that promotes better business practices.
Of course, very few people do not have to bother with their ancillary luggage.
A series of document boxes on the carousel marked prominently with the name of the office of Ranil Wickremesinghe showed that the large VIP cars at the base of the stationary plane were for the three-time prime minister of Sri Lanka, who won an important general election in January 2015 and is scheduled to play an active part in this year’s Davos sessions.
Weather
The journey in the trains from Zurich was bleak as we got higher into the Alps. The grey clouds had come down low, and the minus 6 Centigrade made it hard to think logically.
Huge snowfalls linger on roofs and would deluge passers - by when they fall, so the Municipality sends out men to clear the roofs like at this bus stop.
The TV stations village on top of the Congress Centre in Davos. GN Photos / Francis Matthew
Not a trace of sunlight all through the midday journey dampened the mood, and the falling snow and freezing ice on the pavements make it essential to walk carefully as we stumble around the essential preliminaries of registration with the target of getting the all-important badge without which there is no access to anything.
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The principle that makes Davos work is the free mingling of participants that happens once you are inside the ring of steel around the conference centre where no one has much security and everyone shares the same space, if they have the vital badge.
Potent mix
The value of the Annual Meeting is the variety of people who come from government, business, academia, and social groups. This potent mix allows ideas to move between these very different interest groups, and for each to understand the other better. Or at least that is the idea, and it does seem to work most of the time.
This year’s programme is focused on what the World Economic Forum sees as the next Big Thing.
It is looking at how the rapid advance of technology in all sorts of fields is profoundly changing the way companies will do business, people will live their lives and governments run their services, and even how armies fight their wars.
This means that this Annual Meeting has much less of a political focus as the key trouble spots already have UN or regional processes underway, and less on the global governance of business or trade that has dominated the past few years.
