A sneak peak into the G20!
Thomas Paris, 4th Year student at the American Business School of Paris had just gotten back from Cannes after the closing ceremony of the G20 Summit when he gave us his first impressions. As a member of the Marketing Team and Communications Board for MEDEF (The French Business Confederation) he worked together with the teams to organize the Business 20, or B20, which has been organized as an integral part of the G20 Summit. The B20 itself is meant to express the common views from the international business community, more specifically; its main purpose consists in developing recommendations and issuing relevant commitments from the business leaders and business organizations to deal with the current global issues firms are facing.
It’s within the framework of the G8 and G20 exclusively under French Presidency this year, that President Nicolas Sarkozy gave mandate to MEDEF, the French Business Confederation comprised of more than 800 000 companies, to organize the B20 Summit. This event took place in Cannes on November 2nd and 3rd concomitantly with the G20 Summit.
In short, the B20 is organized around twelve topics, which are crucial to the Business community and that are priorities for the G20. The Presidents of the business confederations of the G20 countries, as well as 120 CEOs and Chairmen from a many international companies have been working together for several months. They were gathered in 12 working-groups, each of them co-chaired by a company CEO and a President of a business organization to elaborate concrete recommendations. Those proposals were then presented to the Head of State and Government of France and used as key points in the G20 final conclusions.
As the youngest member of the Board, Thomas insisted on and prepared new conferences to be created during the Summit, notably regarding green energy, information technology, media regulations as well as innovation as a key growth factor. As the B20 was held exclusively in English, Thomas assisted with every media interface, communication as well as overall preparations very closely.
All decisions where made within the Board meetings that were held on different topics almost every day, especially near the end. Major decisions regarding the budget, security, and G20 integration had to be validated by Laurence Parisot, President of MEDEF, before being fully enacted. All databases had to be checked and rechecked by various members; updates on guest participations were on a minute-to-minute basis to provide a zero-error environment. Thomas also worked not only on the identification, selection and communication of the VIP’s but also the logistics of their visit to France and/or the flight to Cannes. Teamwork, he said, was "key to realizing a fully developed vision of what we all believed was necessary and highly ambitious". After only several months of organization, however, it was show time.