What part of what you’ve heard at Davos this year will you be taking away with you? I think there has been a very practical, pragmatic can-do spirit here. There was less focus on times past. I think people felt that, one, the world situation is far better than most people give credit for and, two, that among many here there is a feeling that the task at hand can be dealt with. A topic that has dominated discussions has been executive pay in America. Do you think American executives are paying themselves too much? I think you can see the hunger for talent in these so-called equity funds that buy companies, hold them for 3-7 years and then sell them. They are paying compensation that is even higher than that paid by public companies for executives to run these companies in the sense that they are giving them a huge equity participation. So things work out for executives extremely well. So the hunger for talent is there and the scandal is not so much in general pay packages as it is paying for poor performance. If you delivered well, you get what was promised to you. But if you are a flop, and you still get paid well, then that is why there is anger. This might sound like an ignorant question but I can’t get my head around why there is such a shortage of talent even though pay packets are so inflated. Are the business schools not producing enough good people? There is plenty of talent out there but there are also many opportunities. When you are putting a lot of money, borrowing a lot of money as these equity funds are, you want somebody who has a good probability of delivering because failure is going to cost far more than what you paid those executives. It’s like athletes. Is there a shortage of athletes? No. But in today’s market, given the endorsements, given the wide audiences, you are paying infinitely more than what you would have paid 20-30 years ago. Also emphasized at Davos this year has been climate change. We even heard today that Senator John McCain is going to be tabling a bill to Congress, a very tough bill, which he says the president will sign. Are American businesses prepared to pick up the tab for averting climate change? I think the key is in the details. One of the things that [British] Prime Minister Blair emphasized is the need for nuclear power plants. They work. They work in France; they work in Japan. And as he pointed out, the technology has advanced enormously. If the United States had built all the nuclear power plants that were being planned in 1979 before Three Mile Island, we would today be in compliance with Kyoto. So it’s not just new technology. It’s not just trying to deal with emissions, current emissions, but let’s get realistic about the technologies we know work. A lot of coal plants are now being built. Well, why don’t we make it easier to build new plants or speed the process of getting regulatory clearance for nuclear power plants so that we don’t have to bring the coal plants? Another concern that came up, on the periphery of the WEF, was the change from print to Internet. What are you as a publisher doing to adapt to it? We made a huge commitment to the Internet years ago. And after the bubble of 2000 and 2001 burst, we made a commitment to continue to grow, even though we were losing a lot of money and others were putting their websites in the deep freeze. So today we have a very vigorous website. It’s making money. We just launched, a few months ago, with our partner a Polish edition of our website and we hope to do that in other languages. So rather than fear the thing, we have embraced it and we have felt that the brand of the magazine helps the website and that the website has helped market the magazine, especially in advertising. So, rather than fear change, embrace it even though it means dislocation. The dislocations are going to come anyway. The adjustments you have to make are going to come anyway. Either you do it in an environment where you know something is growing or you do it in an environment where everything is just shrinking. So it’s a growing market. What percentage of revenue do you hope to derive from the Internet as opposed to mainstream publishing? Are you expecting a noticeable shift from the public? In a year and a half, the Forbes website will be bigger than the magazine in terms of revenue.

   Email This Post      Print This Post