Posted by: Tom Stewart in On the Other Hand - Tom Stewart on Feb 3, 2009
As this goes up on the web, I go down from the magic mountain, leaving Davos, Switzerland, from the World Economic Forum meeting there. I was domiciled next door to a minor potentate. Minor, because my hotel was emphatically not one of those reserved for major heads of state; potentate, because there was a bodyguard posted at each end of the hall.
That may be an emblem for this, a Davos where the lords of finance are notable for their absence. Davos without Wall Street was a refreshing change: In the years previous, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and their ilk were over-present, reminding me of the old saying that it's wonderful if a woman's perfume lingers after she leaves a room, but not if it precedes her into a room. (A similar thing happened with the bursting of the dot-com bubble: Californians were overrepresented in Davos 2000, and fewer, less narcissistic, and more welcome in 2002.) Still, talking about financial and economic crisis without the villains in the room was rather like watching a production of the Scottish Play with no Macbeth. Instead, we poor players and pols were able to strut the stage ourselves.
To listen to the economists who dominated the first day here, one would imagine that the rest of the event would feature hourly suicides from despairing tycoons. But it's economics that's the dismal science; business, by contrast, is inherently and always about hope. By its end, the Forum was rather like the end of "Wall-E," with a few green sheets of new life evident, if you knew where to look, and if you were willing to put up with mixed, nay contradictory signals.
Notes from my notes:
An important California venture capitalist told me "our business is closed. There's nothing going on. We're sitting on our cash."
The same VC said: "There's never been a better time to start a business, if you can get the investment." With the economy in tatters, young businesses can "variable-ize"all kinds of costs that would otherwise be fixed, or semi-fixed, by writing short-term deals with service-providers who normally want long contracts, for example.
That sword cuts two ways, a hot entrepreneur told me: All her customers are stretching out their accounts payables - to as long as 90 days, trying to use her small company to make up for their bankers' absence from the scene.
Everybody agrees that more regulation is needed in financial services. (If they don't agree - and shame on them - they're resigned to its inevitability.)
Yet everybody agrees that new-business formation is critical to reigniting developed economies, producing low-carbon transportation solutions, and creating the jobs that poor and populous nations need. One Latin American entrepreneur told me that he'd opened an account for his business at a Citibank branch in California in 15 minutes, but had to wait several weeks to open the same simple checking account at a Citibank branch in his homeland.
The world of big corporations seems poised, or perhaps paralyzed, between similarly divergent impulses. A survey by my colleagues at Booz & Company shows that 56% of managers think their companies will emerge from the recession relatively stronger-i.e., they'll be winners. But 40% of the same managers doubt the efficacy of their own companies' plans, and 46% doubt their ability to carry them out. That's because the recession is forcing them to do two things at once: use a microscope to take out every bit of unnecessary cost, while peering through a telescope to envision the strategic restructuring of the industries of which they are a part. "It's a major problem differentiating cyclical from structural changes," Richard Evans, the impressive CEO of Rio Tinto Alcan, told a panel. And even if you can see the difference, it's hard to know how to act. So we wait. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to invest," said a private equity CEO. "Just don't ask me when to seize it."
Thomas A. Stewart is the Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of Booz & Company. Formerly the Editor and Managing Director of Harvard Business Review, he is the author of Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations and The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st-Century Organization.