IN NORMAL TIMES, Davos, Switzerland, is a snow-covered ski village whose main street—the Promenade—is lined with quaint shops offering chocolate, watches, and ski boots.
But this January the Promenade was transformed. The stores were emptied, their signage scraped off windows, and they were turned into high-tech "networking hubs," plastered with ads for companies like Salesforce, Flex, Infosys, Accenture, and more. Palantir and Facebook built entirely new buildings for the occasion.
The reason? More than ever before, the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum has become a place to do business. The forum's goal is to "improve the state of the world." But the CEOs who arrive here en masse do so in large part because it's an efficient way to meet with colleagues. The pop-up stores along the Promenade…