It can be difficult to get hold of the CEOs of your big global customers at the end of January. Why? Because many of them are in the Swiss town of Davos for the World Economic Forum.

If they are lucky they will get the CFO to sign off their expenses for the trip. But does Davos actually send out any useful messages on how to run a business?

Cynics will snigger that the invitees – and you have to be invited – have been lured by the chance of a spot of skiing on the nearby slopes and that it should be possible to grab five minutes with a UK CEO at the CBI conference – but then Islington is not Klosters.

Of course, any verdict on the value of the meetings depends on whether the judge has been invited. The CBI, which is going, says while it was no more than a “talking shop” five years ago, it now brings together an international business peer group.

The Federation of Small Businesses, which isn’t invited, says the whole thing goes over the heads of their 200,000 members. “For people running a pub or a small shop, this is not at the top of their list,” it says.

A poll of FDs before last year’s event found that three out of four saw it as a waste of time.

But Sir Digby Jones, former director general of the CBI and now an adviser to business and government, insists that anyone who claims to be going for the debates is being politically correct.

“The greatest benefit of being in Davos is the people you meet, the networking you can do and the chance of button-holing a CEO whose diary you couldn’t get into,” he says.

The Alpine seclusion is a benefit as it prevents people dipping in for an hour and then heading back to the office – perhaps the organisers have taken a leaf out of the FDs’ Forum playbook. As a result, something concrete usually emerges from the social whirl.

The first is a straightforward sense of what this year is going to look like. A year ago, the message from economists at the forum meetings was that the myriad risks – a collapse in the overpriced dollar and the booming US housing market, a surge in oil prices or a sudden unwinding of the twin US budget and trade deficits – would crystallise in 2006.

Business leaders instead hailed the boom on world stock markets, rising corporate profitability and the growth opportunities of China and India. As it turned out, global economic growth topped five per cent and the US economy is still motoring, albeit at a slightly slower pace.

Second, if you get the world’s most successful entrepreneurs together, you should be able to divine some insights into the challenges for business.

This year’s event has the theme “Shaping the Global Agenda: The Shifting Power Equation” and four sub-themes – the risk to financial markets from hedge funds and the like; the need for a fresh mandate to tackle climate change and terrorism; the growing importance of technology for business; and the challenge posed by the new powers of China and India.

But beneath these familiar themes around 160 issues will be debated over five intensive days and evenings. These include predicting when emerging market multinationals will start buying abroad and surviving an attack on your corporate reputation.

Davos’s supporters would argue that all these issues are the concern of the FD, no matter what the size of their business. It may seem like a jolly, but what the key decision-makers of global economic policy think will affect FDs of all stripes.

The final verdict rests on whether they can deliver new ideas and products that will boost the economy. If not, then Davos is in danger of being seen as little more than a source of hot air and aviation emissions.

Tags: fds, ceo, global economic policy, cbi, davos, world economic forum, federation of small businesses,

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