I did Davos once. I schmoozed with billionaire bankers and businessmen. I spent hours in queues below sniper-strewn roofs waiting for now-King Charles and then-President Donald Trump to pass. I got an incredibly tight squeeze from Cherie Blair after moderating a panel convened about 15 minutes before it started when the Ghanaian president couldn't make it for our "fireside chat". I listened to many men wax lyrical on the limitless potential of blockchain technology (before telling them, as politely as I could, why they were wrong).

That was four years ago, just before Covid-19 shut much of the world down, when the official theme for the conference was "stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world" — a theme so perfectly generic and management-speak-ish that it sounds as if it were produced by some early version of ChatGPT. With this year's "rebuilding trust" as the World Economic Forum's theme, generic management-speak could indeed be thought of as the lingua franca at Davos. Last year, one of the "key takeaways" from the conference was apparently the importance of "cultivating mattering" which, according to a WEF report, is "truly a meta-skill for modern management in a fragmented world".

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