Lance Knobel

(Originally published in World Link, January, 2000)

The programme of the Annual Meeting in 1900 reveals the inadequacies of predicting the future, but reminds us why we should attempt it anyway

The recent discovery of the programme for the 1900 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos was surprising for a number of reasons. First, although vague stories of an earlier incarnation of the Forum have long circulated, in the absence of solid evidence Davos participants had come to accept that it had only existed for 30 years. The second surprise was the circumstances of the discovery itself: who would have thought that the battered, waterlogged box uncovered by one of vice-president Al Gore’s sniffer dogs in Davos last January would hold such a treasure? Third, of course, was the content of the meeting.

Period charm abounds in the details of the meeting. Participants in 1900 were invited to a demonstration by Guglielmo Marconi of his wireless telegraph. In the mountain fastness, this must have been the first time speedy communication was available from Davos (today’s participants, lamenting the analogue switching that still prevails in the town, may wonder whether it has even yet arrived).

In the sessions, today’s reader is struck by both the similarities and differences from today’s concerns. From the organisation of the corporate plenaries, it was already evident that the US would be one of the great economic powers of the century: huge, integrated enterprises were redrafting the notion of the firm. Fresh-minted titans like Federal Steel’s Elbert Gary, Carnegie Steel’s Charles Schwab and George Westinghouse stalked the Congress Centre with assurance. Only Germany, of the European powers, could compete: the executives from Krupp, Thyssen and Siemens often shared the platform with the Americans. Like today, an extraordinary wave of consolidation was sweeping through industry: in the US, between 1897 and 1904, 4,277 industrial firms consolidated into 257. Technology was opening up new horizons, not least in healthcare. Bayer, founded in 1891, had introduced aspirin in 1899 and was discussing it in an interactive session; William Lever’s soap was bringing inexpensive hygiene to the masses ­ the subject of a Friday dinner.

But from our vantage point 100 years later, it seems remarkable how blind the earlier organisers of Davos were. Perhaps the technological blindspots are understandable: no mention of the car (there were only 8,000 in the US at the time and the bicycle makers of France were leading the nascent industry); science sessions focused on chemistry, rather than the physics that transformed both our worldview and warfare; references to manned flight were confined to a humorous dinner led by a sceptical clergyman.

More worrying are the geopolitical and societal gaps. The Colonial Office’s Joseph Chamberlain and prime minister Ernst von Koerber from Emperor Franz Josef’s court in Vienna seemed confident that empires would preserve a century of peace and prosperity (there is no record as to whether anyone challenged Chamberlain about the Boer War). No participants attended from outside Europe and North America. There were no women and no one under 40.

Were the men (and it was just men) responsible for the 1900 programme that bad at their job? For those of us orchestrating the 2000 programme, the answer is a sobering no. The prime lesson of Davos 1900 is a warning against forecasting hubris. Charting the century is an exercise verging on the random; even a decade is largely a matter of chance. With fairly little thought, it is evident that foretelling the truly important forces for the century was impossible. Why single out the contest between democracy and dictatorship, or free markets and state-controlled markets in a world before the word fascism existed and before the Russian revolution? Why focus on the changing role of women or the transformation of Asia or the end of empire? There were, to be sure, writers and thinkers who discussed these chimeras in the coffee-houses of Vienna or the cafes of Paris, but they were hardly the people who would be invited to Davos 1900.

What does that mean for the programme of this year’s Annual Meeting, where many of the sessions hazard an attempt at setting an agenda for the 21st century? Perhaps our network of information and analysis, our sources of knowledge and wisdom, have improved to such an extent that we can venture forth on the exercise with confidence. I fear not. As Alan Kay, the technologist who helped develop many of the ideas behind today’s personal computer at Xerox Parc in the ’60s, once remarked in Davos, “It’s easy to predict what technology we will have in 20 years time. It’s much more difficult to conceive how society will use it.” The Annual Meeting attempts something like this in the realms of technology, geopolitics, management, society and the arts. Does that mean the exercise is futile? Far from it. In fact, the very act of working to define a global agenda and hazarding some views on the shape of our century should act as a spur for all of the participants in Davos ­ and those who observe the meeting through the media. It is the thoughts and actions provoked by Davos that will truly have an impact on the new century.

QUESTIONS TO ANSWER

With those caveats, what are some of the key currents that will be in evidence in Davos? First, there will be the continuing examination of globalisation. After the fiasco of the WTO’s ministerial meeting in Seattle, some commentators have declared that the high water mark of globalisation has already passed. But the economic and technological drivers behind globalisation have not changed; in fact, they are of increasing power. What Seattle makes clear is that unmediated globalisation has profound problems. How can we avoid an exacerbation of the gap between the haves and have-nots? Are there ways to bring the fundamental right of health to people everywhere? And how can we ensure the development of a market economy, which is highly desirable particularly in the poorest countries, but not a market society, which most of the world abhors?

Critically related to these issues is a structural one: the changing relationship between business and government. As the world becomes increasingly connected, companies are well ahead of governments in becoming global. Does the world need new forms of regulation and new approaches to governance, and new organisations to carry them out? Or should companies be given free rein, subject to the constraints of national regulatory regimes? Do governments or regulatory organisations have the ultimate authority? Is the Internet a jurisdiction itself or a platform for regulatory agencies?

The non-governmental organisations (NGOs) need to fit into this picture somehow, and appropriately they will be represented in Davos to a far greater extent than in the past. The growth of NGOs and their impact is in part a reflection of confusion ­ and perhaps disenchantment as well ­ over government’s proper role. Just as Davos has always provided an informal venue for high-level dialogue between business and government, so it can now include this third sector.

Two technological revolutions will be a central focus: the e-revolution and the g-revolution. The e-revolution, as World Link ‘s cover story and countless other accounts have chronicled, is profoundly transforming the ways in which we do business, communicate with each other and form communities. One of the challenges for Davos (and World Link ) in light of the inundation of information on e-everything is to draw out new insights and, even more, make clear that we are still at the very early stages of this technology-led shift.

The g-revolution has unjustly received less attention. This year will mark the completion of the decoding of the human genome, a fitting tocsin for the new century. For all of the advances in medicine and healthcare of the last century, the prospects for the new century are even more dramatic: scientists are working towards personal pharmaceuticals, for example, that will be tailored to your genetic makeup. But as the fury over the introduction of genetically modified organisms into the food chain has demonstrated, biotechnology raises hard scientific, ethical and political questions ­ to a degree unthinkable with information technology ­ because it affects our very being. Consider the announcement last year that experiments showed it might be possible to make mice “more intelligent” through genetic modification. If (or perhaps when) it proves possible to do the same for humans, should it be allowed? How much would you pay to buy “intelligence” for your children?

The country that dominates the work in these technologies, the US, also takes centre stage in the geopolitical debate. In Davos 1900, astute observers may have seen the growing power across the Atlantic. But the great European empires still dominated the scene: the death knell of the Great War was still 14 years in the future. At the beginning of our new century, the US is, in the words of the Davos programme, “overpowerful” ­ supreme militarily, economically, technologically and culturally. But at the same time, the US is uncertain of its global role, just as the rest of the world is uncertain of what it expects of the one superpower.

A few years ago, it was commonplace to say that the 21st century would be Asia’s century, and particularly China’s. Despite the sharp rebound from the Asia crisis, such talk has not resurfaced. But one of the strong currents of the new century ­ and a focus in Davos ­ will be the changed position of China, and how the world responds to it. Most of the world, west and east, north and south, is still finding its way in this regard.

Perhaps one of the overriding themes might be termed the shock of the new. A characteristic of the truly new is that it causes dislocation and uncertainty. Leaders, whether in business, civil society or government, face the challenge of finding new paths. The Davos plenary entitled “Leading in an era of creative destruction” defines the challenge as balancing the need to create the new with the imperative to destroy the outmoded. It may be (in fact, it is a racing certainty) that the new century will bring as yet unimagined ideas, technologies and problems. Participants in Davos 2000, as they develop their agenda for personal and organisational action through the process of the Annual Meeting, will need to chart their own course through this uncertain terrain.