There are actually two versions of Davos – here’s the one you won’t have heard about

There are two Davos meetings. There is the one that you read about in the papers or see on TV. It is the Davos of the presidents and prime ministers hobnobbing with the celebrities. It is the Davos of the earnest speeches by billionaires about the need for greater equality in the world, a pitch slightly tarnished by the record number this year of private aircraft bringing their important occupants to the meeting. And it is the Davos of the demos about the state of the world that challenge the “Davos man” globalist ethos.

But there is another Davos, which gets zero publicity, and which is just as important – actually, more so. This goes back to the origin of the meeting in 1971 when a professor at Geneva University, Klaus Schwab, created the European Management Forum, where the heads of European businesses could meet, talk, ski, and do business together in a relaxed place. Late January is low season for the Alps and Davos was delighted to be able to fill its rooms at discounted rates.

Those cheap rates have certainly changed as the conference has grown, and I’m afraid the informality has gone too. It has gone global, rather than just European, and the genius of Klaus Schwab was to steer it though this transformation. But what has not changed is the business case for this sort of informal gathering.

It costs a company upwards of £500k to send a small team there and that is without the cocktail party or the private jet. But if you can see the heads of, say 12 of your top 20 customers in two days rather than having to fly round the world to each of them, the cost becomes more worthwhile. So it is the tens of thousands of little meetings, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes more formal, that really matter.

They fall into three groups. There are the straightforward commercial meetings between businesses. You talk to your customers, suppliers, government representatives, regulators and so on. The meetings are all set up in advance and with a clear agenda.

The second group is the less structured meetings between business leaders and the non-business groups that the forum has invited to the meeting. The organisers add glamour by inviting Prince William to interview Sir David Attenborough, but below this level they ask a group of writers, artists, academics to give presentations.

It is nice for the professionals to have this platform to promote their ideas, but it is useful for someone engrossed in running a business to meet people at the top of their game in quite different fields.

Out of these meetings come continuing relationships. I know of one occasion where an oil giant hired an environmental consultant they met at Davos to look at the impact their drilling policies was having on recruitment. They found they could no longer attract top graduates and had to find out why.

But it is the third group of informal meetings that is the most interesting of all. It is hard for most of the rest of us to understand the scale of the decisions facing chief executives, and the lack of knowledge on which they take them. One duff call – perhaps a botched takeover – and your career is wrecked, and you have lost a lot of other people’s money.

What happens at Davos is the unplanned and unintended interchange. I know of one company that pulled out of Russia following a chance meeting in Davos, and was very glad to have done so.

And this year? Of course these chance meetings cannot be predicted or even documented, and I am not there this year anyway. But what I think one can see is the areas where you would look for changes of direction by the business community.

One huge topic is the future of globalisation, which is where I believe a retreat from the complex global supply chains that multinationals have lumbered themselves with will emerge. Yes, it may be cheaper, but does it make strategic sense?

Another obvious area is coping with populism. If you are by education, background and job, part of the elite, it is tough to accept that this anti-elitist tide may flow for another generation before it ebbs. So how do you turn this to a positive opportunity? Are there people in Davos who can help?

Another challenge is coping with the change in the balance of power in the world. This year President Bolsonaro of Brazil, just three weeks into the job, is advertising investment into his country: “This trip is a great opportunity for me to showcase to the world the unique point in time my country is going through,” he said.

Yeah, maybe. Brazil was one of Goldman Sachs’s famous BRICs, but has disappointed over the past 15 years. Will it continue to underplay its natural advantages? If it gives the new president the opportunity to showcase the country, it also gives potential investors the opportunity to sniff the air and judge whether he is for real.

I also think, and hope, that the initiative on mental health will lead somewhere. To be brutal, if a company chief executive realises that having a more active approach to its employees’ mental health can feed through to the bottom line, then that company will change its policies. If one does, others will follow. I would be surprised if there is not some action following the meetings on mental health there this week.

Davos works. It won’t forever, and I don’t think it will long outlive Klaus Schwab. But the world does need something like it precisely because of the business it does, not the headlines it makes.