- In today’s CEO Daily: Fortune’s Executive Editorial Director for the U.K. and Europe Kamal Ahmed reports on an eventful day at Davos.
- The big story: Fortune assesses Trump’s record as CEO-in-chief
- The markets: Buoyed by Trump’s promise of a Greenland deal
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Bumping into a leading European chief executive as he left the Congress Centre in Davos last night, I asked for a take on President Donald Trump’s speech.
“I think we are just tuning out of all that noise a little. Did he say anything we didn’t expect? Was there anything new?” He continued: “We are focusing on our investments, on the AI transition, on security, on our three-to-five-year plans.” He had been at a dinner the night before and that was also “the mood of the table,” American and European.
There is only so long you can maintain your risk antenna at 11 on the dial—even as a chief executive. I sense the mood here at Davos was respectful of Trump but resolute in its sense that there are other pressing issues to consider.
Fortune hosted a series of panels at USA House, America’s “home base” for the duration of the World Economic Forum. We heard from Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan; Robin Vince, chief executive of BNY; Kellyanne Conway, former counsellor to the president; Mark Penn, CEO of Stagwell; and Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates.
Dalio, leaning on his decades of investment experience, urged business leaders to step back from the day-to-day and focus on the trends—conflict, indebted western governments, and major technology shifts. Trump may be playing in some of those lanes, but not in all of them.
“But when you have the president of France saying that we are flirting with a world without rules, surely that will strike fear into leadership teams?” I asked him. Businesses need to sharpen up, he responded, and realize that change is with us for good.
On the global stage, Europe can often appear to speak with one voice. But it is more nuanced than that. At our event at USA House, Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform party in the U.K., spoke about the reaction against globalization—a reaction he supports—and said that Trump was a success. Farage’s party is ahead in the polls.
Yes, Farage did urge the president to remember the sacrifices of NATO members such as Denmark in U.S.-led conflicts in, for example, Afghanistan. And that self-determination for Greenland was the same as the American desire for freedom from Britain 250 years ago.
Davos is about the nuances. It can be easy to ridicule. But for that CEO I bumped into, off to yet another dinner to discuss the transformational nature of AI, the hunt for the signal over the noise continues. Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
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