Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, proclaimed the Four Seasons restaurant a "high schmooze zone." He was chatting with actor Ron Silver and Tim and Nina Zagat, founders of Zagat Survey LLC's restaurant guides, at a private party hosted by Coca-Cola Co chief executive Douglas Daft Thursday night following the opening of the World Economic Forum.
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr, and Stuart Eizenstat, a former Treasury Department deputy secretary who heads the international law practice for Washington's Covington & Burling, were among 400 guests sampling raw oysters wrapped in prosciutto, chocolate truffles and delicate slivers of roast duck.
While there are some 160 formal meetings, plenary sessions and social events organized at the forum, some participants say the real work takes place behind the scenes at dozens of private parties and at informal social gatherings during off hours.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The opportunities to schmooze, or make new contacts and build social relationships with business leaders, are the primary draw of the conference at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, some forum-goers said.
"I would say they don't make up more than 90 percent of the value," joked Benjamin Barber, author of Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, and a forum participant. "The real work, which is the work of networking, is done at parties and in bars and in the elevators between sessions."
Barber was leaving a private dinner at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center Friday night sponsored by Sun Microsystems, where he said he met Klaus Schwab, founder of the forum, and had a long conversation about technology and humanism with Jaron Lanier, the dreadlocked computer scientist who coined the term virtual reality.
Business leaders may not want to talk about their corporate goals during the public panel discussions at the conference, Barber said.
"The great value of the private interactions is that they are private," he said. "I've certainly seen politicians talking to corporate types that they might not want to be publicly seen with for fear that they would seem to be in bed with them."
On Friday evening, at a Yale Club party hosted by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Andrew Tisch of Loews Corp and his wife Ann, a Chicago educational philanthropist, talked with philosophy professor Lou Marinoff, author of Plato, Not Prozac!: Applying Philosophy to Everyday Problems. Marinoff philosophized on the importance of the extra-curricular events.
"You know that the furthest you are from something, the closer you are, so the fringe events actually complete the circle" at the forum, he said.
Lance Knobel, an adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said, "schmoozing can be very, very valuable in the business sense, and in terms of working through issues. Here you have ministers, CEOs, Nobel Prize winners, scientists, and you can just pull them over in a corridor and ask them to clarify something for you."
Much of the "cross-fertilizing," as Goldman Sachs' Hormats described it, takes place at the parties each night and in bars at the Waldorf and other hotels in the "frozen zone," which is restricted to forum badge-holders.
At the Coca-Cola party, Tim Zagat said he had witnessed some rare pairings of guests.
"Earlier tonight, Elie Wiesel" -- the Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate -- "was sitting next to the King of Jordan, and you've got Israeli and Arab leaders here," Zagat said. "No one is going at each other, but they have a chance to drink and talk."
On Saturday night, the New York Stock Exchange hosted a black tie gala with different areas of the trading floor decorated like regions of the world.
US Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, noshed on Middle Eastern food with filmmaker Michael Mann, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, chatted with business leaders as a salsa band played in the background. Gene Simmons, lead singer of the 1970s rock band KISS, mingled with the guests.
Corporations pay about US$26,000 to become members of the forum, which gains admittance to the conference. Invited celebrities, religious leaders, academic experts, and other non-corporate guests get in free.
Marinoff, a philosopher who works as an independent consultant to companies, comes to hobnob with potential clients.
Entertainment figures such as Bono, lead singer of U2, and Quincy Jones, a music producer, come to lobby for political causes.
Bruce Raynor, president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, was both a participant and a protester. He said that while substantive work takes place at conference events, the high-level networking feeds the concerns of the anti-globalization movement.
Raynor said he noticed that "the first thing that people do is start handing out business cards, to see who they can do business with later."
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