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We celebrated entrepreneurism for four days in Istanbul last week.  The media mostly covered the speeches by U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan  and the other dignitaries who spoke at the Global Summit on Entrepreneurship.  Those speeches were indeed important.  It is no small achievement that governments and political leaders from around the globe have accepted the core message of the AllWorld Network, i.e., that entrepreneurism is a core global strategy for promoting economic expansion and open societies.  Visibility economics and open markets trump top-down economic planning as engines for growth and are far more effective than toting Kalashnikovs or dispatching drone missiles for effecting substantive social change and mobility.  That the second-highest ranking official in the United States showed up halfway around the globe to deliver that message to a summit hosted by the Prime Minister of Turkey demonstrates how widespread the meme has become.

For those of us attending the conference as CEOs on the Arabia 500 list, however, the speeches and the political presence were not the most important part of the conference.  It was the opportunity to walk along the path with 499 other men and women I am proud to call “colleagues” – and we are colleagues of a sort, even though most of us had never met most of the others before.  By definition, this is a pretty competitive crowd – the jockeying for position on the stage during the award ceremony attests to that – but it is also an amazingly collaborative crowd.  Almost every CEO I spoke with had ideas for cross-company, cross-border or cross-industry collaborations with my company, and I learned far more from those networking opportunities than I did from the political speeches or expert panels.