The warm wind of optimism blew into Davos even before Bill Clinton did. Hotel tables groaned with surveys telling the CEOs how increasingly sure executives of their rank are that e-commerce brightens the global outlook. With the United States booming, Asia recovering and Latin America opening to market forces, A.T. Kearney’s global survey of 1,000 company executives found 60 percent more confident than six months ago. Joel A. Kurtzman caught the mood in a PricewaterhouseCooper’s report, writing that top executives believe technology is transforming and shortening the business cycle “into something more like an upward spiral.”
Parsing the boom, various studies found that the United States is leading the way with 75 percent of the world’s top 100 e-stores. In Europe the Nordic countries have the most developed e-commerce markets, but the Belgians, British and Irish are all racing to catch up. Since 1998 the number of British businesses pursuing e-commerce strategies has risen from 44 percent to 69 percent. Big corporations now fear e-competition from big rivals more than from garage start-ups and wonder whether they can compete. Most Euroexecs doubt they have the dynamic personnel or corporate culture to make it online–but they mean to try. In the chauffeured limos clogging the Davos Promenade, the mood is “join the party or perish.” In the long run, says PWC CEO James Schiro, “Entrepreneurship always overcomes fear.”
The world is changing fast, but some parts are changing faster than others. Take the conference hall in Davos. In the past two days this space has seen everything from Shanghai performance art to a Tony Blair policy speech and a Confederation of Indian Industry display of “a resurgent India… where vision and enterprise come together to create wealth and a welfare society.” This last featured Indian supermodels, whose ties to the welfare society weren’t immediately visible–except perhaps for the fact that the pakoras and the Kingfisher beer were free for the guests. No matter. The 10 models strutted the runway in costumes of silver and gold and gauze to the beat of a remixed version of the Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and by the end no one in the besuited crowd had missed the point. One smitten CEO panted to an organizer of the show: “If you want people to invest in India, do more fashion shows.”
Ben Zander paces, cajoles. He thumps out Beethoven’s Fifth on a baby grand and coaxes 180 world leaders to sing “Happy Birthday” to a fellow audience member. “Oh, come on, you’re world leaders,” the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic says after a prim attempt. “Can’t you do better than that?” The next try is rather too assertive. “Don’t attack her,” pleads Zander. “Do it with tenderness, with warmth, with love.” Afterward, men in suits stream forward: two chisel-jawed types ask Zander if he can give his motivational speech in German. A Japanese banker wants to take home a flash card on which Zander has scrawled “Vision.” The chair of Andersen Consulting says he must come for dinner. Sun Microsystems chief researcher John Gage throws his arms skyward and beams: “Ben! That was gr-reat!” Zander smiles, exhausted by his virtuoso performance. Zander’s two-hour talk on leadership is a carefully choreographed cheerleading session that includes discussions of love, Chopin, corporate motivation and Life Lessons: about thinking out of the box, living in hope rather than fear, and so on. He says his “one buttock playing” style–letting passion lift one haunch off the piano seat–once inspired an Ohio business owner to declare that he would rebuild his company as “a one-buttock business.” And it’s catching on in the Davos set.
