Schwartz loses his way

Then went to a session on petropolitics moderated by Tom Friedman with Rex Tillerson the CEO of Exxon, Jeroen VanderVeer, CEO of Shell (and an old friend), Sam Bodman US Energy Secretary, and a few more. It was content free. They all avoided Tom’s questions and the audiences…not a great performance.

This evening it was to be the IT governors cocktail party and dinner, but…I screwed up…sort of. The World Economic Forum has a series of industry groups that also meet and help guide the program of the forum. Tonight was a joint cocktail party of the Media governors and the IT governors and then I thought a shared dinner. In fact Paul Saffo and I had discussed what we would say at the dinner as intellectual fare for the evening along with the other guests. As we were going down the stairs from the cocktail party to the dinner, Bob Wright the CEO of NBC/Universal grabbed me and invited me to join him for dinner which I did. We had great discussions on many things , including the work we are doing with SCI FI Channel one of his networks and The Long Tail which he had not heard of. We were entertained by a fascinating interview in which Sir Martin Sorrel another friend interviewed Rupert Murdoch and the founder of MySpace a recent acquisition of NewsCorp. Watching Murdoch make the poor young man dance was almost painful…but it was also clear that Murdoch has a very well focused and articulate vision of managing the digital transition. As I looked around the room I could not find Paul Saffo or my other fellow panelists. And no one ever called on me to speak. Only as we were leaving the dinner when I ran into Bill Gross and Joe Schoendorf who had spoken at the IT dinner that I found out that there were two dinners and I went to the wrong one. I had missed the IT governors dinner altogether. What an idiot!

After dinner it was off to another climate change event. This time it was the Young Global Leaders of Tomorrow (YGLs) who had decided to take on climate change as an issue last year and this year they were launching a campaign that they had worked on for the lpast year. The project looks hopeful. It is an effort to tie highly valued brands to climate action. But it was an all star event. At one point a photographer captured Claudia Schiffer, Hakken the studly young Crown Prince of Norway and me all in conversation. Shimone Peres also spoke on clean energy and he is always remarkable and inspiring. And it appears he will be named President of Israel in the next few days. By the way the Prince and I will be together most of next week at an energy meeting in Norway.
Well that’s it for tonight.