Crashing parties to making friends: What Davos elites know

For a master class in power networking, it's tough to beat the one taking place in the Swiss Alps this week.

- Chip Cutter

The annual World Economic Forum brings the planet's power brokers together for morning-to-past-midnight meetings over coffee, cocktails and fondue. For the thousands of CEOs, billionaires, intellectuals and world leaders descending on Davos, the setting is unrivaled in its potential to spark relationships, dealmaking and big ideas for the year ahead. After all, there are few other places where you can run into AI Gore at the hotel bar and wait next to Bill Gates to pass through the metal detectors.

Maximizing all that powerful proximity and turning it into actual connections takes skill, chutzpah and the ability to think on your feet. What to do if you Spot Sting in the elevator? How to know whether a tête-à-tête merits more than a minute of your time? And how do you divine someone's importance without peering at the badge dangling at their midsection?

The tricks of Davos movers and shakers can apply to any business gathering or cocktail party, regardless of your VIP status. Here's how they do it.

Names and spaces

For Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, getting the most out of the high-powered gathering often comes down to location in this case, the top of a staircase in the Davos Congress Center, the main hub of the event.

The Davos regular says he plans to spend an hour each day of the forum perched there or in an adjacent hallway. Why? In a single hour amid a packed calendar of meetings, lunches, dinners and other engagements-he might see 100 people he'd otherwise not encounter all year.

"The amount of serendipity that happens is unlike anything I've ever experienced," said Benioff, who has attended the forum for two decades and hosts parties and gatherings that people vie all week to get into. "It's an incredible thing."