But how do you create an intimate dinner at a networking event? How do you get people to be vulnerable when they show up invulnerable? How do you create a work dinner that feels more like a rehearsal dinner? How do you take people who have come to hawk one idea or organization and restore them, for a night, into the complex, multifaceted human bein

Perhaps because of this focus, many of us on the council were struck by how the WEF’s culture made it hard for leaders to develop along these dimensions.

According to a past report by that council, its focus was to understand and create an in-depth dialogue about the “profound shift in the context in which leadership takes place and in what it takes to flourish as a leader.” Specifically, the council felt that changes in the world were “opening up a new leadership space.” It said that space was defi

The people chosen to join these councils are invited because of their accomplishments and their strengths, not because of their vulnerability.

The purpose of this earlier conference is, in part, to surface ideas and agendas for Davos. The WEF organizes dozens of “global agenda councils” on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to the future of the oceans. Each council is instructed to “provide innovative thinking on critical global issues and incubate projects, events, and campaigns

see if we could hack the WEF. Could we create an anti-WEF on the sidelines of a WEF event? Could we induce people trained to present themselves as perfectly baked loaves to bring dough worth sharing instead?

Nowhere else is the chance to have conversations across borders, identities, and professions so often wasted. Nowhere else are so many people with the influence to change things so frequently brought together, only for the resulting conversations to remain on the surface. They lurk there because everyone is presenting the best self they think other

You have absorbed my pleas to own your power as a host, but to rule generously. You have encountered examples of people spicing up their gatherings with rules and fleeting formats. You’ve been instructed what not to do in your opening, and what to

Daniel Barrett is an elementary-school teacher at Brooklyn Heights Montessori School. He told me that he and his fellow teachers purposefully launch the first day of school with students knitting. “We call it ‘hand work,’ and it’s a way for the students to be quiet together and have something to focus on,” Barrett said. “It’s also meant to help wit