A complete shot in the arm - despite the flu which forced me home later in the day.

One of the more interesting rumours that made its giddy rounds at this year's World Economic Forum [Theme: 'The Shifting Power Equation'] was the one insisting that WEF Executive Chairman Professor Klaus Schwab's session with The Right Honourable Tony Blair [ATCA, 27 January] was in effect a 360-degree interview of Blair for the role of WEF Chairman once the he stands down -- or is dislodged. In the event, this turned out to be an expired rumour, squashed by Professor Schwab a few weeks ago, but having found new infectivity in a new and previously unexposed audience. An indication of just how easy it is to be distracted from what even such powerful speakers are saying in plenary session when so much is going on around you, and behind the scenes.

But, whatever the truth of the rumour, and however distracting the shifting power equation may be in Westminster, the Prime Minister's focus on global issues like poverty and climate chaos is unquestionably the new 'Spirit of Davos,' coupled with a deep sense of the developed world's growing vulnerability to a growing range of asymmetric threats, which have been at the heart of ATCA since its inception in 2001 post 9/11.

Luckily, my own WEF journey began with asymmetry. I count myself hugely lucky to have attended my first WEF summit in New York, the year the whole jamboree decamped to that wounded city as an act of solidarity in the wake of the 9/11 attacks -- prototypical examples of asymmetry in action. This was January 2002. Pretty much everyone was off balance and the wave of incoming NGOs and other would-be changemakers found it somewhat easier to penetrate the well-honed defences that had kept them at bay for so long.

But even though issues like those the Prime Minister would raise in Davos six years on were in the air even then, they were still seen as peripheral, speculative. That was also true last year. But 2007 was somehow different: Davos Man and Davos Woman could hardly stop talking about climate chaos. So much hot air, critics will say, but Sir Nicholas Stern was among the climate champions crunching through the snow, pushing the conclusions of his review of the economic implications of climate chaos in a number of Forum sessions -- and busily building the case for urgent action. There was also much talk of the impending report of the International Panel on Climate Change, just leaked by the Americans -- presumably to give climate sceptics enough time to prepare their defences.

But what struck a number of us was that, while NGO voices seemed somewhat muted this year, the real heroes of Davos 2007 were the people you might describe as providers of 'asymmetric solutions,' the social and environmental entrepreneurs who aim to develop scalable solutions to the world's great social and environmental challenges. They have been groomed by organisations like Ashoka, The Schwab Foundation and The Skoll Foundation to carry their agenda and their business case ever-deeper into the heart of the system. And it's working. Given the energy of these people, I even found myself wondering whether they shouldn't be setting the agenda for next year's Davos?

It's an unlikely prospect, clearly, but I am just finishing off a book for Harvard Business School Press under the title of 'The Power of Unreasonable People.' My co-author is Pamela Hartigan, who runs The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and many of the social entrepreneurs she and her colleagues support report that they have often been described as "crazy," by colleagues, friends and even family. But, as George Bernard Shaw sagely noted, real progress tends not to come from reasonable people, who attend to adapt themselves to the world as it is, but instead from 'unreasonable' people -- who imagine a different world and work against all odds to create it.

While top table discussions this year focused on the ways in which emergent superpowers like China and India are morphing power relationships worldwide, something else appears to be happening on and around the Magic Mountain. Something that gives me more hope than the economic indicators that most CEOs still focus upon. If the first societal pressure wave of the late 1960s pushed us to regulate business, the second (from the late 1980s) pushed us into new forms of ethical competition and corporate citizenship, and the third (from the late 1990s) drove new agendas around global and corporate governance, the emerging wave -- which feels more like a rising tide -- looks set to drive a raft of new entrepreneurial solutions to the political, economic, social and environmental threats to which so much air-time has been devoted in Davos.

As I mentioned in a previous posting to ATCA, I believe a new generation of entrepreneurs is modelling the way forward. In ongoing work for The Skoll Foundation -- founded by eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll -- we are contrasting the challenges facing entrepreneurs in the health and energy sectors, to get a sense of where the greatest market failures are to be found. The results will be reported at the Skoll World Forum at the Said Business School, Oxford, at the end of March, and I hope to be able to share at least headline results with the distinguished members of ATCA at that time. But I will be very surprised if they don't underscore the growing importance of entrepreneurial 'asymmetrical solutions' to sustainability challenges.

Best wishes

John Elkington