WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
Mid January · Davos, Graubünden · Five Days · Since 1971
The World Economic Forum meets for five days in the third week of January at Davos, a Swiss town of ten thousand people at five thousand feet, reached by a train that takes most of a day.
Some two and a half thousand people are accredited to it. Several times that number come anyway.
The Badges
Nothing at Davos is understood without the badges, and Davos understands itself entirely through them.
A white badge admits a participant to the sessions in the Congress Centre. A white badge with a hologram belongs to a head of state. Below those sit orange for press, blue for staff, and a further set of colours whose distinctions are known mainly to the people wearing them. There are at least ten, and the hierarchy is legible from across a room.
An individual cannot buy a white badge. A company must be invited into partnership by the Forum and then pays a great deal for the privilege of having been asked. Invitations are personal and not transferable, and have been since the first meeting.
Which makes the badge the most precise instrument of social sorting on this calendar. Ascot has four enclosures and publishes the rules for all of them. Davos has ten and publishes none.
The Promenade
The sessions run Tuesday to Friday inside the Congress Centre, and they are not where anything happens.
The main street of the town is taken over for the week. Shopfronts and restaurants become the pavilions of companies and countries, each with a programme and a guest list of its own. A person with no accreditation at all can spend the whole week on the Promenade and never once enter the official venue.
What matters most happens further off again: dinners in hotels, fireside sessions in private rooms, receptions nobody announces. That structure is why so many arrive without badges, and why some of them do better than the people who have them.
What to Know
Klaus Schwab, a professor at Geneva, convened the first meeting in 1971 for four hundred and fifty European executives. It was called the European Management Forum until 1987.
The town is small and the hotels are few. Rooms are taken a year ahead at prices that reflect it, and a good many people stay down the valley in Klosters and drive up.
It is January in the Alps. People arrive in city shoes and regret it by Tuesday.
The mistake is going for the sessions. They are recorded and published and can be watched from anywhere in the world. What cannot be had elsewhere is the Promenade and the rooms behind it.
The Court
The World Economic Forum is not the Court’s own, and it is the one engagement on this calendar that exists for business rather than for its own sake. The Court makes no pretence otherwise.
Accreditation is not something the Court can obtain. It is given by the Forum to organisations rather than to people. What the Court arranges is the week around it: the journey, rooms, and a table in a town where every table is taken. Members who go for the Promenade rather than the Congress Centre find that sufficient.
