Ever since coming up with the solution of abandoning countries in favour of global and very local governance, my head has been spinning about how it might work. But what has become clearer in my mind is the basic belief that it would work, or at least be a major improvement on what we have today.
I have started reading political statements and news articles in a different way. Never before has I realised that nations and their apologists did so much damage. Look out for policies defined in a national interest that are plainly against a global interest and arguably against the interest of the citizens of the subject country too. There are everywhere. Some are blatant – just read the obituaries for Kim Jong Il. Others are more subtle – look at the statements of European leaders around their recent summit. The worse an argument is, the more likely it is to be sold using a justification of national interest, and we fall for it!
So am I advocating a sort of big brother super-state? Well, I hope not. Though I have started to look again at one of the countries I had the privilege of living in during the 1990’s, namely Sweden. The place had a collectivist feel which I found strange at the time. Districts of cities had a lot of power, and people clubbed together readily on basic things. As an example, a typical apartment block had a common room in the basement for laundry, thereby saving electricity, freeing space in kitchens and creating social contact all at the same time, at the cost of a bit of time and planning.
Then the Swedish state was more intrusive than I was used to. We all had personal numbers and identity cards, and information about each other was readily available to all, for example income and tax records. Taxes were high, and very progressive, but then services were excellent too. My favourite example concerned affordable childcare facilities, whereby parents could both work while raising children. Also, people worked hard, but their hours showed a good balance between work and family.
Of course Sweden is also famous for its environmental leadership – with a clear understanding of common goods - and its generous overseas aid. Ten years ago, capitalists scoffed at the Swedish model, but they seem to have fine-tuned it a little now to promote growth and innovation a bit more. They tried a Tobin tax, but found that alone it was too costly. Even while I was there, the arguments against innovation seemed thin – as an example Swedish IT was always leading edge – but now the economy has become a leader again overall.
So Sweden may be a good model for future global governance. Lots of local democracy, within an accepted system of benign global rules. It is feasible. It even works to an extent in isolation, so imagine its power if everyone played by those rules.
What might those rules look like?
Start with the universal declaration of human rights, maybe strengthened a little with statements about gender equality and rights of children. After abolishing countries, we can also add in a right for full freedom of movement and residence. We just have to accept transparency in our affairs.
Next, create an economic policy for the world. Common goods, such as forests and natural resources, are owned commonly. One central bank runs a global monetary and fiscal policy with a single currency. Goals are full employment, global balance sheet (common resource) growth, stable prices including asset prices, a declining GINI coefficient, and fair outcomes for each generation. Taxes would focus on production and on redistribution.
Much tax would be collected or be immediately reallocated locally, to communities of say 100,000-500,000 people. Health, education, housing, policing and social care would be managed locally, and communities could also raise tax on property and consumption. Where I am struggling in the extent to which communities should be regulated. I want competition at this level, but not at the expense of human rights and wider goals. Ideally, there are a set of big rules about freedom of movement and human rights, but everything else would be the subject of local democracy. But a part of me would intervene too much. Why not outlaw smoking? Or gambling? This part gets tricky.
Companies would be registered and regulated globally, with no need for subsidiaries. Shareholders and workers would have lots of rights to prevent greed, and communities would encourage companies to locate in their areas. Careers are managed by individuals, with much freedom of movement, personal education and personal pension plans, and the right to variable working hours and styles.
There would need to be a lot of transition arrangements, but the EU experience shows that these can be managed.
There is a second type of community. We all have a residence community, but we are also free to join communities of interest as well, for example religions or languages. And families of course. This way traditions can be maintained and sensitivities can be managed, at least in theory.
Am I mad? Does this sound like communism, or at least collectivism? We all know what happened to communism, its inherent flaws. Would this system reduce corruption, ore make it worse? Would it stifle development? I don’t really know. But I do know we could eliminate armies and secret police. We could solve the current crisis in an instant. Climate change would be resolved. The millennium development goals would be achieved, indeed exceeded.
What about the people? Could we survive without our nations? For this one, look at football. When there are clubs, we don’t really care too much about countries. My guess it would be the same with governance, that given the chance to support a local team of people we identified with, together with other communities of global interest, we could easily dispense with the nation.
The sad thing is, I don’t think we are ready to try. We have all been brainwashed, and our elites have too much to lose. Even the most noble live experiment of pooling resources, the EU, is collapsing rather than thriving.
But I’ll continue reading articles and statements with my new lens. Try doing the same, you may reach the same conclusion.
Now I’ll retire to read my Christmas treat, the Economist. I’ve only read two special articles so far and already I’m captivated, the comparison between Martin Luther and Facebook was simply brilliant.
Happy Christmas and a healthy and peaceful 2012.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
After Democracy - The World of John Lennon
Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.
How did countries come about? Originally we were individuals, then loose groupings, then tribes. The people who grouped us into countries were Kings, or Priests, or Landowners, all looking for ways to legitimise their established advantages. It enabled laws (initially on things like slavery and surfdom), taxes and tithes, trade, and borders – to keep people in, and to keep people out.
Now we need laws, and taxes. And we benefit from trade. But most of the rest of that list only do harm to development. And what if the good bits – laws, taxes and trade – could be managed within a single global country? Why not?
The start of this line of thinking was to look at the mess democracy is currently making. Democracy itself is not the problem – indeed it seems better than other systems – but we have allowed it to become misused.
A lot of this is about language, and the use of language to pursue tribal goals (for the modern day Kings of course). Democracy becomes associated with freedom. What sort of freedom? In some countries freedom becomes associated with God, a God who somehow is on our side.
I’m sorry to be blunt, but this is almost akin to fascism. Freedom is a relative concept, applicable only to insiders and within defined boundaries. How can we espouse freedom when we invade others, build fences, lock up so many citizens, allow an explosion of inequality, and allow our establishment to peddle lies?
Good concepts have been taken over for tribal ends here. It was interesting this week to read that Egyptians are not hankering for democracy and freedom, but for dignity and justice. These are better goals, and the system should be shaped to deliver those goals, rather than be the goal itself.
So what system best delivers dignity and justice? I think I would add a third goal, something about development - a sustainable positive evolution of living standards. That is a bit wordy, but it covers things like health (eg. infant mortality) and other such progress.
Let us learn from other systems that have lasted to course. Families can be functional or dysfunctional, but their strength is their compact self-support mechanism. A lot of our dignity comes from our family, at least when it works well. Families distribute blessings with some justice, and protect the weak.
Churches have perpetrated some of the worst evils on the world over the centuries. But, at their heart and when well-run, they promote values supporting dignity and justice. They help our sense of belonging, distribute blessings, and make us humble.
Companies allow development through innovation. They rape the world’s natural resources and have little sense of sustainability, and, unchecked, can lead to terrible inequality. Yet I would argue the best run companies do more good than harm. And we know that families, Churches and governments would have struggled to give us the internet or modern medicines. So let us embrace them.
So what about countries? Unlike companies, they rarely evolve. Few people change country, few countries perish or merge. Unlike families, their system of redistribution is inefficient, and, unlike Churches, their values are almost always tribal. If you doubt that, just look at David Cameron this week, defending a national interest over a greater good, and a national interest based on a parasitic sector of the economy driving shameful inequality, no less.
Elsewhere, we have Belgium that took 500 days to form a government, Greece and Italy where bankers have taken over, a USA where Gingrich might become president. And let us not just knock the West. Russia, DRC, or Venezuela or hardly role models. China has at least managed the macro-economics a bit better, but at the expense of dignity and justice.
No, countries, you are the weakest link, goodbye. Imagine what might have happened in Durban if everyone had not been constrained by tribal economic or political interests. Europe has got itself in trouble over the Euro, but let us celebrate the single market and Schengen as the wonderful drivers of dignity, justice and development that they have been.
Most of the economic mess comes from imbalances between countries. Each country tries to optimise its own affairs, and it is the structural imbalances that have resulted that led to the system clogging up. A single currency and central bank, like the Euro but backed up by a fiscal framework, could respond as required. Global austerity would never be needed. Globally, we could also have a balance sheet as well as a current account, with scarce assets valued, and, for example, a carbon price.
What I would propose is a global governance for global issues, run by technocrats using universal principles. We need one currency, one central bank, one monetary and fiscal framework, one energy framework, one supreme court and so on. There would be free movement for all, a single competition framework for business, and no trade restrictions. Then, within that framework only, allow communities to form and run their affairs using democracy, with powers to raise taxes. Using modern technology, we could change our chosen teams easily, thereby facilitating good competition. Things like health and education implementation, rubbish collection, police and fire and so on could all be managed very locally.
Great changes like this have traditionally only followed wars. This morning I looked up the visionary fourteen points of US president Woodrow Wilson in 1918, which sadly became watered down by inter-country rivalry. In the late 1940’s, we did a bit better, with some sort of UN, a global declaration of human rights and the Marshall plan. Sadly, as always happens, the existence of countries has meant we have backtracked from there ever since.
So there is little chance of a such a change without another war. The Economist this week had a chilling comparison of the current global economy and policies to the 1930’s. Hopefully, this one won’t need a war to sort out. But we can dream, like Lennon. Next exercise will be to dream up fourteen points for today, as a sort of global charter
How did countries come about? Originally we were individuals, then loose groupings, then tribes. The people who grouped us into countries were Kings, or Priests, or Landowners, all looking for ways to legitimise their established advantages. It enabled laws (initially on things like slavery and surfdom), taxes and tithes, trade, and borders – to keep people in, and to keep people out.
Now we need laws, and taxes. And we benefit from trade. But most of the rest of that list only do harm to development. And what if the good bits – laws, taxes and trade – could be managed within a single global country? Why not?
The start of this line of thinking was to look at the mess democracy is currently making. Democracy itself is not the problem – indeed it seems better than other systems – but we have allowed it to become misused.
A lot of this is about language, and the use of language to pursue tribal goals (for the modern day Kings of course). Democracy becomes associated with freedom. What sort of freedom? In some countries freedom becomes associated with God, a God who somehow is on our side.
I’m sorry to be blunt, but this is almost akin to fascism. Freedom is a relative concept, applicable only to insiders and within defined boundaries. How can we espouse freedom when we invade others, build fences, lock up so many citizens, allow an explosion of inequality, and allow our establishment to peddle lies?
Good concepts have been taken over for tribal ends here. It was interesting this week to read that Egyptians are not hankering for democracy and freedom, but for dignity and justice. These are better goals, and the system should be shaped to deliver those goals, rather than be the goal itself.
So what system best delivers dignity and justice? I think I would add a third goal, something about development - a sustainable positive evolution of living standards. That is a bit wordy, but it covers things like health (eg. infant mortality) and other such progress.
Let us learn from other systems that have lasted to course. Families can be functional or dysfunctional, but their strength is their compact self-support mechanism. A lot of our dignity comes from our family, at least when it works well. Families distribute blessings with some justice, and protect the weak.
Churches have perpetrated some of the worst evils on the world over the centuries. But, at their heart and when well-run, they promote values supporting dignity and justice. They help our sense of belonging, distribute blessings, and make us humble.
Companies allow development through innovation. They rape the world’s natural resources and have little sense of sustainability, and, unchecked, can lead to terrible inequality. Yet I would argue the best run companies do more good than harm. And we know that families, Churches and governments would have struggled to give us the internet or modern medicines. So let us embrace them.
So what about countries? Unlike companies, they rarely evolve. Few people change country, few countries perish or merge. Unlike families, their system of redistribution is inefficient, and, unlike Churches, their values are almost always tribal. If you doubt that, just look at David Cameron this week, defending a national interest over a greater good, and a national interest based on a parasitic sector of the economy driving shameful inequality, no less.
Elsewhere, we have Belgium that took 500 days to form a government, Greece and Italy where bankers have taken over, a USA where Gingrich might become president. And let us not just knock the West. Russia, DRC, or Venezuela or hardly role models. China has at least managed the macro-economics a bit better, but at the expense of dignity and justice.
No, countries, you are the weakest link, goodbye. Imagine what might have happened in Durban if everyone had not been constrained by tribal economic or political interests. Europe has got itself in trouble over the Euro, but let us celebrate the single market and Schengen as the wonderful drivers of dignity, justice and development that they have been.
Most of the economic mess comes from imbalances between countries. Each country tries to optimise its own affairs, and it is the structural imbalances that have resulted that led to the system clogging up. A single currency and central bank, like the Euro but backed up by a fiscal framework, could respond as required. Global austerity would never be needed. Globally, we could also have a balance sheet as well as a current account, with scarce assets valued, and, for example, a carbon price.
What I would propose is a global governance for global issues, run by technocrats using universal principles. We need one currency, one central bank, one monetary and fiscal framework, one energy framework, one supreme court and so on. There would be free movement for all, a single competition framework for business, and no trade restrictions. Then, within that framework only, allow communities to form and run their affairs using democracy, with powers to raise taxes. Using modern technology, we could change our chosen teams easily, thereby facilitating good competition. Things like health and education implementation, rubbish collection, police and fire and so on could all be managed very locally.
Great changes like this have traditionally only followed wars. This morning I looked up the visionary fourteen points of US president Woodrow Wilson in 1918, which sadly became watered down by inter-country rivalry. In the late 1940’s, we did a bit better, with some sort of UN, a global declaration of human rights and the Marshall plan. Sadly, as always happens, the existence of countries has meant we have backtracked from there ever since.
So there is little chance of a such a change without another war. The Economist this week had a chilling comparison of the current global economy and policies to the 1930’s. Hopefully, this one won’t need a war to sort out. But we can dream, like Lennon. Next exercise will be to dream up fourteen points for today, as a sort of global charter
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
My Favourite Course
I’m still thinking about what to do with democracy. Somehow, the main problem is that the concept of a country has become outdated. It is far too small an entity for some modern challenges, yet far too big for others. We have a vote, but only within this out-of-date bounadry. Keep the votes, but change the structure. More to follow.
In the meantime, I was gratified to read an article in this week’s Economist about Harvard’s MBA. They want to change the basis of syllabus and teaching away from one based on case studies towards more direct field experience. Hooray, I say.
The article brought back happy memories of a course I did at Shell in the mid 1990’s. That course has stayed with me, as the most fun and the most beneficial I ever did. I still use the lessons today.
The whole basis of the course was that we were split into teams of about four, and sent out as consultants to a small business for two weeks. The time spent with the small business was interspersed with some classroom content. At the climax of the course we had to present our ideas for our small business – to our teachers and the managers of the small business itself.
This was a neat idea. Once a year Shell took out an advert in a trade magazine looking for volunteer small businesses to accept raw consultants. It was potentially a good deal for them, as they got some fresh insights and at least some cheap labour for a couple of weeks, for free.
I was blessed in the business I was assigned to. My team worked with a Jewish butcher from the east end of London. They had a processing factory near Smithfield incorporating a tiny office, and a shop in Golders Green. The employed maybe twenty staff, and, like most small businesses, most of the leaders came from the same family.
We had such a laugh. The family really welcomed us. Their own relationships and business practices were bizarre and funny. The boss was constantly doing deals on his mobile phone (a new gadget at the time) and played a passing impression of Topol from Fiddler on the Roof. It was an insight into a totally unfamiliar world for us, and a privilege to be included. I will always remember doing a price survey and market research among the Jewish housewives of the Golders Green road.
I recall that one challenge the business faced was about the weekly cycle. Smithfield only had its best value meat on Friday, in time for weekend shoppers. During the winter, the firm had to buy meat, get it blessed by a Rabbi, process it and distribute it to stores, all before sundown, when Jews have to stop working. You don’t get that sort of challenge in MBA text books – yet it mirrors something very realistic for many businesses.
In the end, I think we gave the family something of value, though I have doubts whether they implemented any of it, such was the impulsive nature of the boss. But the gain for our team was immense. And the reason we gained so much was because the course directors sent us into the field and did not get in the way.
A case study is almost always from the point of view of the CEO, with defined parameters. Field studies expose a broad canvas of human actors with human issues. Just like real business.
A case study can be solved at leisure, in the time of the students. A field study has to respond to the tempo and distractions of the client. Just like real business.
A case study is constrained by a classroom. Field studies show the squalor and primitive conditions most real businesses operate in. For a load of pampered Shell kids, that was perhaps the biggest realisation of all. Real business is not usually like Shell business.
A case study has a financial and a strategic element. Only a field study can show up conditions where the cash needed to pay the wages the next week is the dominant consideration, yet somehow the business has to drive forward in that environment. Just like real business.
In a case study students have to convince learned professors of their ideas. In a field study, students have to gain credibility and influence among real decision makers, often with very different world views. Just like in real business.
Altogether, a field study offers potential a case study can only scratch at. So why has it taken so long to move from case studies? Well, the professors mainly. The former approach allowed them to show off their brilliance in the classroom. It allowed them to re-use material time after time. There was little risk of students coming up with angles and challenges that other students had not brought up before.
In a field approach, the professor cedes control. In a way, the professor becomes like another student, trying to understand the subject company and fit its challenges to familiar models. Hard work, that. And perhaps beyond the skills of most of the cosseted professors out there.
So well done Harvard, I applaud you, and I look forward to the day when a field based approach is standard practice and MBA students can emerge so much better qualified as a consequence. It doesn’t surprise me that Harvard professors required convincing before accepting this new experimental approach, and no doubt they will find other reasons to slow it down. But my guess is that this is the start of a whole new way of teaching MBA’s. And not before time. After all, some trainer at Shell thought of it twenty years ago.
In the meantime, I was gratified to read an article in this week’s Economist about Harvard’s MBA. They want to change the basis of syllabus and teaching away from one based on case studies towards more direct field experience. Hooray, I say.
The article brought back happy memories of a course I did at Shell in the mid 1990’s. That course has stayed with me, as the most fun and the most beneficial I ever did. I still use the lessons today.
The whole basis of the course was that we were split into teams of about four, and sent out as consultants to a small business for two weeks. The time spent with the small business was interspersed with some classroom content. At the climax of the course we had to present our ideas for our small business – to our teachers and the managers of the small business itself.
This was a neat idea. Once a year Shell took out an advert in a trade magazine looking for volunteer small businesses to accept raw consultants. It was potentially a good deal for them, as they got some fresh insights and at least some cheap labour for a couple of weeks, for free.
I was blessed in the business I was assigned to. My team worked with a Jewish butcher from the east end of London. They had a processing factory near Smithfield incorporating a tiny office, and a shop in Golders Green. The employed maybe twenty staff, and, like most small businesses, most of the leaders came from the same family.
We had such a laugh. The family really welcomed us. Their own relationships and business practices were bizarre and funny. The boss was constantly doing deals on his mobile phone (a new gadget at the time) and played a passing impression of Topol from Fiddler on the Roof. It was an insight into a totally unfamiliar world for us, and a privilege to be included. I will always remember doing a price survey and market research among the Jewish housewives of the Golders Green road.
I recall that one challenge the business faced was about the weekly cycle. Smithfield only had its best value meat on Friday, in time for weekend shoppers. During the winter, the firm had to buy meat, get it blessed by a Rabbi, process it and distribute it to stores, all before sundown, when Jews have to stop working. You don’t get that sort of challenge in MBA text books – yet it mirrors something very realistic for many businesses.
In the end, I think we gave the family something of value, though I have doubts whether they implemented any of it, such was the impulsive nature of the boss. But the gain for our team was immense. And the reason we gained so much was because the course directors sent us into the field and did not get in the way.
A case study is almost always from the point of view of the CEO, with defined parameters. Field studies expose a broad canvas of human actors with human issues. Just like real business.
A case study can be solved at leisure, in the time of the students. A field study has to respond to the tempo and distractions of the client. Just like real business.
A case study is constrained by a classroom. Field studies show the squalor and primitive conditions most real businesses operate in. For a load of pampered Shell kids, that was perhaps the biggest realisation of all. Real business is not usually like Shell business.
A case study has a financial and a strategic element. Only a field study can show up conditions where the cash needed to pay the wages the next week is the dominant consideration, yet somehow the business has to drive forward in that environment. Just like real business.
In a case study students have to convince learned professors of their ideas. In a field study, students have to gain credibility and influence among real decision makers, often with very different world views. Just like in real business.
Altogether, a field study offers potential a case study can only scratch at. So why has it taken so long to move from case studies? Well, the professors mainly. The former approach allowed them to show off their brilliance in the classroom. It allowed them to re-use material time after time. There was little risk of students coming up with angles and challenges that other students had not brought up before.
In a field approach, the professor cedes control. In a way, the professor becomes like another student, trying to understand the subject company and fit its challenges to familiar models. Hard work, that. And perhaps beyond the skills of most of the cosseted professors out there.
So well done Harvard, I applaud you, and I look forward to the day when a field based approach is standard practice and MBA students can emerge so much better qualified as a consequence. It doesn’t surprise me that Harvard professors required convincing before accepting this new experimental approach, and no doubt they will find other reasons to slow it down. But my guess is that this is the start of a whole new way of teaching MBA’s. And not before time. After all, some trainer at Shell thought of it twenty years ago.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Keep it Simple Stupid
On Saturday, I visited a Vodaphone shop to try to my a mobile phone and a contract. This was because of the sad demise of my previous mobile phone, a wonderful Siemens device I had bought for 15 Euros.
The mobile phone died in a very Dutch way. Last Wednesday evening, I had a concert and a party to go to, on either side of a small forest in The Hague. I had often walked in this area, so I decided to get from one engagement to the other on foot, even though it was dark.
Then I took a wrong turning. I could go back to get on the right route, but, hey, I knew this forest, so I ploughed on. Up ahead was a path I knew well. My mum phoned so I was a bit distracted, as I jumped down onto the path.
Only the path wasn’t a path at all, it was a canal. The call to mum was the phone’s swansong. Mum says she heard some strange noises, probably me screaming. I wish someone had been nearby, it would have made a great video, grown man in concert clothes walking straight into a canal.
Walking into a canal is not something I recommend. There is a lot of gunk in Dutch canals. They are quite deep, very cold, muddy and slimy. It was very easy to walk in, but quite hard to climb out. Lesson learned – walking in forests after dark is a silly thing to do.
So that is how I ended up in the Vodaphone shop. And what a beautiful shop it was too, with sexy lighting, fancy equipment and tasteful marketing everywhere. I got the feeling that the store in The Hague was replicated in cities around Europe, or even the world. That company has a powerful brand department and plenty of money to invest.
But the senior managers and brand managers have plainly never been in any of these shops. For the customer, it was horrible. They could afford lots of equipment, but not enough staff. Of the staff that were there, half of them were wearing blue shirts, which seemingly disqualified them from actually dealing with customers. A blue shirt met us, listened to our needs, and told us that we would have to wait for a red shirt to be free, although he could offer us coffee while we waited. So half the staff were actually waiters, while the other half were overloaded.
When we finally reached the front of the red queue, we came to realise why we had to wait so long. It seemed to be impossible to conclude a transaction in less than twenty minutes. By the time we had explained our needs, listened to the array of contracts on offer, and linked these to physical phones, we were more confused than enlightened. Even when we were able to make a decision, there was still the long process of contracts and validations, and the simple expedient of keeping the same phone number added further complication.
The red team guy was excellent – perhaps surprisingly so, since he is probably paid a meagre wage and had to deal with many interruptions. Even the blue team guys seemed very willing and motivated, even if their only roles were greeter and waiter. Yet, as a customer, I came very close to just walking out and abandoning the whole process more than once. I felt frustrated, intimidated, and un-served. Are these the emotions that the Vodaphone brand managers aim for in their customers? Probably not.
The nearest equivalent retail experience I could link this to was the old fashioned way we all used to book holidays. The tour operator shop still exists, though most of us rarely set foot in them these days. It used to be the same, with long, long, transaction times and waiting times, staff of mixed motivation, and more often than not frustrating outcomes.
I find it ironic that the travel industry has reinvented itself through the internet. Most of us now do everything online and have better service and outcome as a result. The industry itself has not always reaped the benefits, as poor old Thomas Cook demonstrate. Yet the customer has won, and well-managed providers are still in business. But here we have a modern industry, mobile communications, invented around the same time as the internet, which has the most old-fashioned customer interface.
Surely someone should do an Easyjet or an Ikea on mobile telecommunications? There must be a way to reinvent things around the customer. Please let me know when it happens. I hope at least that occurs before the next time I walk into a canal.
Other modern industries have similar problems. Computer interfaces are still created by geeks. Surely those older people who only want to use google and e-mail could be served by now by a simple device with one large button advertising each, together with a keyboard of large letters, big buttons and no symbols? It would sell so well, even my dear mum could be a customer.
And what about other electronic devices? Philips, a fine Dutch company, is onto a winner with its slogan emphasising simplicity. Spot on. Yet my alarm clock cum CD still resembles the potted face of a teenager. No-one else can use mine, and I can’t use anyone else’s. That is not simplicity, my friends from Eindhoven, that is the result of too many application-loving geeks. No doubt some customers love the applications, but many customers would value something simpler.
Then there are banks. Ah yes, banks. But I want to be happy today, so I won’t dwell on banks.
I think part of the problem is often the distance between departments in large companies. The designers and the marketers live in different worlds from the shopkeepers. This is especially true for business models relying on in-store experience, like mobile phones. McDonalds and Starbucks and others have shown it can be solved. None of the petrol companies have. Nor has Vodaphone. Or banks. Sorry, I wasn’t going to dwell on banks.
When it goes wrong, the marketers emphasise standardisation, often internationally. That usually leads to stores where the staff have little discretion, and customer experiences with little regard to local needs. The most important management choice is often where in the chain to place the power and discretion. McDonalds has it right, each store feels like a motivated and tailored business. Same for Ikea. But many brands have forgotten the importance of the local interface.
Perhaps this is also the answer to the conundrum I asked myself last time, about democracy. WE should think first about the best level to make each decision. Currently, individuals have too much say about climate policy and fiscal policy, but not enough about their local schools. Democracy is mainly conducted at national level, with a few morsels left to a local level. This suits national politicians, but leads to weak outcomes.
So now we have a partial answer to the question: how is the euro crisis like Vodaphone? I’ll explore this further, so long as I can also answer the question about how to stay out of canals.
The mobile phone died in a very Dutch way. Last Wednesday evening, I had a concert and a party to go to, on either side of a small forest in The Hague. I had often walked in this area, so I decided to get from one engagement to the other on foot, even though it was dark.
Then I took a wrong turning. I could go back to get on the right route, but, hey, I knew this forest, so I ploughed on. Up ahead was a path I knew well. My mum phoned so I was a bit distracted, as I jumped down onto the path.
Only the path wasn’t a path at all, it was a canal. The call to mum was the phone’s swansong. Mum says she heard some strange noises, probably me screaming. I wish someone had been nearby, it would have made a great video, grown man in concert clothes walking straight into a canal.
Walking into a canal is not something I recommend. There is a lot of gunk in Dutch canals. They are quite deep, very cold, muddy and slimy. It was very easy to walk in, but quite hard to climb out. Lesson learned – walking in forests after dark is a silly thing to do.
So that is how I ended up in the Vodaphone shop. And what a beautiful shop it was too, with sexy lighting, fancy equipment and tasteful marketing everywhere. I got the feeling that the store in The Hague was replicated in cities around Europe, or even the world. That company has a powerful brand department and plenty of money to invest.
But the senior managers and brand managers have plainly never been in any of these shops. For the customer, it was horrible. They could afford lots of equipment, but not enough staff. Of the staff that were there, half of them were wearing blue shirts, which seemingly disqualified them from actually dealing with customers. A blue shirt met us, listened to our needs, and told us that we would have to wait for a red shirt to be free, although he could offer us coffee while we waited. So half the staff were actually waiters, while the other half were overloaded.
When we finally reached the front of the red queue, we came to realise why we had to wait so long. It seemed to be impossible to conclude a transaction in less than twenty minutes. By the time we had explained our needs, listened to the array of contracts on offer, and linked these to physical phones, we were more confused than enlightened. Even when we were able to make a decision, there was still the long process of contracts and validations, and the simple expedient of keeping the same phone number added further complication.
The red team guy was excellent – perhaps surprisingly so, since he is probably paid a meagre wage and had to deal with many interruptions. Even the blue team guys seemed very willing and motivated, even if their only roles were greeter and waiter. Yet, as a customer, I came very close to just walking out and abandoning the whole process more than once. I felt frustrated, intimidated, and un-served. Are these the emotions that the Vodaphone brand managers aim for in their customers? Probably not.
The nearest equivalent retail experience I could link this to was the old fashioned way we all used to book holidays. The tour operator shop still exists, though most of us rarely set foot in them these days. It used to be the same, with long, long, transaction times and waiting times, staff of mixed motivation, and more often than not frustrating outcomes.
I find it ironic that the travel industry has reinvented itself through the internet. Most of us now do everything online and have better service and outcome as a result. The industry itself has not always reaped the benefits, as poor old Thomas Cook demonstrate. Yet the customer has won, and well-managed providers are still in business. But here we have a modern industry, mobile communications, invented around the same time as the internet, which has the most old-fashioned customer interface.
Surely someone should do an Easyjet or an Ikea on mobile telecommunications? There must be a way to reinvent things around the customer. Please let me know when it happens. I hope at least that occurs before the next time I walk into a canal.
Other modern industries have similar problems. Computer interfaces are still created by geeks. Surely those older people who only want to use google and e-mail could be served by now by a simple device with one large button advertising each, together with a keyboard of large letters, big buttons and no symbols? It would sell so well, even my dear mum could be a customer.
And what about other electronic devices? Philips, a fine Dutch company, is onto a winner with its slogan emphasising simplicity. Spot on. Yet my alarm clock cum CD still resembles the potted face of a teenager. No-one else can use mine, and I can’t use anyone else’s. That is not simplicity, my friends from Eindhoven, that is the result of too many application-loving geeks. No doubt some customers love the applications, but many customers would value something simpler.
Then there are banks. Ah yes, banks. But I want to be happy today, so I won’t dwell on banks.
I think part of the problem is often the distance between departments in large companies. The designers and the marketers live in different worlds from the shopkeepers. This is especially true for business models relying on in-store experience, like mobile phones. McDonalds and Starbucks and others have shown it can be solved. None of the petrol companies have. Nor has Vodaphone. Or banks. Sorry, I wasn’t going to dwell on banks.
When it goes wrong, the marketers emphasise standardisation, often internationally. That usually leads to stores where the staff have little discretion, and customer experiences with little regard to local needs. The most important management choice is often where in the chain to place the power and discretion. McDonalds has it right, each store feels like a motivated and tailored business. Same for Ikea. But many brands have forgotten the importance of the local interface.
Perhaps this is also the answer to the conundrum I asked myself last time, about democracy. WE should think first about the best level to make each decision. Currently, individuals have too much say about climate policy and fiscal policy, but not enough about their local schools. Democracy is mainly conducted at national level, with a few morsels left to a local level. This suits national politicians, but leads to weak outcomes.
So now we have a partial answer to the question: how is the euro crisis like Vodaphone? I’ll explore this further, so long as I can also answer the question about how to stay out of canals.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The End Game for Democracy?
What a mess Europe is in politically. Last week two governments fell, as a direct consequence of the Euro crisis. This sort of thing usually only happens during wars or in the run up to wars. And the impotence of the political leaders is stunning. They can all see where they are heading. Most of them can see how to escape. But collectively they are unable to stem the tide.
How did we get here? One thing that caught my attention was the Greek prime minister’s call for a referendum. The poor chap had his career finished over this call, and, to be fair, his timing could be questioned. But wasn’t this one of the few honest acts in the whole charade? He had a democratic mandate from two years ago. He had used it to its limit, trying to find ways out of an inherited mess and to do deals with creditors and partners. It was clear to him that his mandate was expiring, since the packages he came up with were not accepted on the streets and were leading to slow paralysis of the state.
So he called a referendum, in an attempt to shore up his mandate. He had a good question to ask, since he had just negotiated a landmark deal. He had something to gain, since a yes vote would have enabled him to face down the protesters and start reform properly. And the people should have been able to see the consequence of their choice.
So he took a brave step. And was immediately vilified by his so called democratic partners, with a stunning hypocrisy. The British press call for European referenda all the time, about the most ill- defined issues, yet someone else calling a referendum was not acceptable. In the end the elites completed a coup, and followed it up with a second coup in Italy later in the week. In both cases, the new leaders are bankers. Ah, bankers. The very people who got us in the mess in the first place.
In the short term we will all probably muddle through. Pundits and politicians lazily refer to the abyss, or meltdown, or some other term for a disastrous endpoint from which there is no return. Yet no one really tries to describe what such an abyss would feel like. Argentina had such an abyss ten years ago. Anyone with savings got badly burned, and for a while it was hard to find a job. Then the country started to recover, and now is arguably better off than it would have been if it had muddled through. I am not sure that such a thing as an abyss exists, and one of the reasons the Greeks were not allowed to have their referendum was that they knew it.
In the longer term, the casualty may well be democracy. It was also struck by an Economist quote this week, where it was made clear that there was never any democratic intent behind the EU, even when it started as a small trading block. “Ordinary Europeans see Brussels as remote and elitist. As it happens, the European project was like that from the very beginning”. What a statement that is. The article defends the project as inspired statehood, a way to defend the people from themselves and to avoid a third spiral into war. Fair enough, but let’s not call it democracy, then.
And the long term consequence may be the very spiral it was trying to avoid. Look at the anti-elite parties all over Europe now. Surely these will all grow as a direct result of the crisis. Look at the protesters on our streets. They will surely find a voice in anti-elite parties eventually. This is not a movement of some thugs any more, it is people like us, the 99%.
Yet the politicians continue to lie, and to make no attempt to win over their citizens with any logic. Virtually every elite party in Europe queues up to blame Brussels, at the same time as knowingly ceding power. They have their cake, and they eat it. But in the end there will be no cake left for anyone. They consistently champion democracy, while eschewing it.
Is the US any better? Arguably, it is worse. Their economic fundamentals are even worse than ours, only hidden away by the elites because an abyss for them (at least the elite them) would even be more unthinkable than an abyss for us. Their social fundamentals are clearly worse than ours. And their politics is even more cynical and even more dysfunctional, dominated only by money and media access. And the cheerleaders for freedom invade others at will, and have intelligence agents undermining societies globally. At least they have to answer for their wars in their sham elections every so often, the clandestine stuff is wholly unanswerable. Should we be pleased or scared by the Americans managing to stymie the Iranian computer systems? I am not sure.
So our system is dead, while our leaders still champion it. I am not promoting other systems of national governance, since they all seem to fail too. There is still wisdom in Churchill’s quote that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. But let us at least start being honest about it. There are alternatives, and soon we will need them.
We don’t run companies by democracy. We don’t run Churches by democracy. We don’t run families by democracy. Those institutions have lasted as long as most countries. We now have such powerful technology available, and education is so widespread, that models that were previously infeasible become interesting. We could probably take the best from the models used by each of those institutions and create something strong.
Perhaps this is what the 99% are saying, much derided by the elite for being directionless and without coherent solutions. They (we?) might simply be declaring the imminent end of the current Western system, called democracy, but in practice rule by an elite and high finance. I get annoyed when multinational corporations get blamed for everything, for they are usually quite honest in their methods and their goals. But finance as an industry is another thing. Banks and bankers have not come through this era well. Nor have politicians.
A friend last week told me to stop observing and stop moaning about this crisis, but to come up with some ideas. Now that is a tough ask. But I’ll have a go, next blog. As long as there is time, before we all fall into the abyss. All ideas are welcome.
How did we get here? One thing that caught my attention was the Greek prime minister’s call for a referendum. The poor chap had his career finished over this call, and, to be fair, his timing could be questioned. But wasn’t this one of the few honest acts in the whole charade? He had a democratic mandate from two years ago. He had used it to its limit, trying to find ways out of an inherited mess and to do deals with creditors and partners. It was clear to him that his mandate was expiring, since the packages he came up with were not accepted on the streets and were leading to slow paralysis of the state.
So he called a referendum, in an attempt to shore up his mandate. He had a good question to ask, since he had just negotiated a landmark deal. He had something to gain, since a yes vote would have enabled him to face down the protesters and start reform properly. And the people should have been able to see the consequence of their choice.
So he took a brave step. And was immediately vilified by his so called democratic partners, with a stunning hypocrisy. The British press call for European referenda all the time, about the most ill- defined issues, yet someone else calling a referendum was not acceptable. In the end the elites completed a coup, and followed it up with a second coup in Italy later in the week. In both cases, the new leaders are bankers. Ah, bankers. The very people who got us in the mess in the first place.
In the short term we will all probably muddle through. Pundits and politicians lazily refer to the abyss, or meltdown, or some other term for a disastrous endpoint from which there is no return. Yet no one really tries to describe what such an abyss would feel like. Argentina had such an abyss ten years ago. Anyone with savings got badly burned, and for a while it was hard to find a job. Then the country started to recover, and now is arguably better off than it would have been if it had muddled through. I am not sure that such a thing as an abyss exists, and one of the reasons the Greeks were not allowed to have their referendum was that they knew it.
In the longer term, the casualty may well be democracy. It was also struck by an Economist quote this week, where it was made clear that there was never any democratic intent behind the EU, even when it started as a small trading block. “Ordinary Europeans see Brussels as remote and elitist. As it happens, the European project was like that from the very beginning”. What a statement that is. The article defends the project as inspired statehood, a way to defend the people from themselves and to avoid a third spiral into war. Fair enough, but let’s not call it democracy, then.
And the long term consequence may be the very spiral it was trying to avoid. Look at the anti-elite parties all over Europe now. Surely these will all grow as a direct result of the crisis. Look at the protesters on our streets. They will surely find a voice in anti-elite parties eventually. This is not a movement of some thugs any more, it is people like us, the 99%.
Yet the politicians continue to lie, and to make no attempt to win over their citizens with any logic. Virtually every elite party in Europe queues up to blame Brussels, at the same time as knowingly ceding power. They have their cake, and they eat it. But in the end there will be no cake left for anyone. They consistently champion democracy, while eschewing it.
Is the US any better? Arguably, it is worse. Their economic fundamentals are even worse than ours, only hidden away by the elites because an abyss for them (at least the elite them) would even be more unthinkable than an abyss for us. Their social fundamentals are clearly worse than ours. And their politics is even more cynical and even more dysfunctional, dominated only by money and media access. And the cheerleaders for freedom invade others at will, and have intelligence agents undermining societies globally. At least they have to answer for their wars in their sham elections every so often, the clandestine stuff is wholly unanswerable. Should we be pleased or scared by the Americans managing to stymie the Iranian computer systems? I am not sure.
So our system is dead, while our leaders still champion it. I am not promoting other systems of national governance, since they all seem to fail too. There is still wisdom in Churchill’s quote that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. But let us at least start being honest about it. There are alternatives, and soon we will need them.
We don’t run companies by democracy. We don’t run Churches by democracy. We don’t run families by democracy. Those institutions have lasted as long as most countries. We now have such powerful technology available, and education is so widespread, that models that were previously infeasible become interesting. We could probably take the best from the models used by each of those institutions and create something strong.
Perhaps this is what the 99% are saying, much derided by the elite for being directionless and without coherent solutions. They (we?) might simply be declaring the imminent end of the current Western system, called democracy, but in practice rule by an elite and high finance. I get annoyed when multinational corporations get blamed for everything, for they are usually quite honest in their methods and their goals. But finance as an industry is another thing. Banks and bankers have not come through this era well. Nor have politicians.
A friend last week told me to stop observing and stop moaning about this crisis, but to come up with some ideas. Now that is a tough ask. But I’ll have a go, next blog. As long as there is time, before we all fall into the abyss. All ideas are welcome.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
I know what you are thinking
Technology continues to make breakthroughs to change our lives. I like the cover of the fiftieth anniversary of Private Eye. The shields at the top show what has changed between 1961 and 2011. Mainly it is communication. A typewriter and telephone have become a mobile and printer. Everything is much faster now, and many things are more reliable. This is generally good, though the blackberry 24/7 addicts choose to become slaves to progress.
A leader in this week’s Economist suggested what might be coming next. Seemingly, mind reading technology is getting closer. We might soon be able to look inside each other’s brains and be able to tell what we are thinking. No doubt the facility is many years away from being generally available, but fifty years ago we couldn’t really imagine the internet or wi-fi.
Just imagine the changes this technology would have on the way we lived. Start with relationships. The whole vocabulary would be thrown open. We could no longer quietly leer at someone we fancied without being exposed. Our professed loyalties would be called into question. Our small lies in the interest of harmony would no longer work. Many bums would suddenly look big in many outfits, and have nowhere to hide. A man is supposed to have a sexual thought every eight seconds or so. Imagine if such thoughts were transparent to all.
Things would change, but no doubt we would adapt. Adapting is what humans are very good at. And would it be worse? Initially, it would be very difficult for everyone, but, once things had settled down, perhaps things would be easier. How many women really believe the harmony lies anyway, or believe their man is the only one immune from the eight second urge? The worst thing in any relationship is a lack of trust, and the technology would have the potential to banish that completely. Most of us are more anxious about the fear or what someone is thinking about us than the sure knowledge of what those thoughts are – and most of us are thinking better thoughts of most of our acquaintances than they think we are anyway. We would adapt. The game would change. I sense things would be better.
Then look at illness. The earliest application of the technology would be to improve the lives of the disabled. People with the inability to communicate would suddenly be able to, and lives would be improved immeasurably. Maybe there are other creative brains like Stephen Hawking out there that could be liberated. I also suspect the technology would be decisive in breakthroughs against diseases primarily of the mind, such as addictions. All the junk in our minds could be freed. In most cases, I suspect that could be decisive in helping people to move onto better lives. True, counsellors would lose their capacity for professional dishonesty, but again the advantages would be enormous.
Now take politics. Again, things would change, and change a lot. But for the better or the worse? Many of the more intractable problems in the world start with casual misleading of people. The EU, a good thing, was set up by the elite without really explaining the truth to the public, who were deemed too dumb to understand. Ditto the euro. Such lies are coming apart right now. Cameron doesn’t really want a referendum, just votes. Such lazy lies are coming back to haunt him. The true reasons for the US invasion of Iraq are either justifiable – so we should hear them – or not – and the invasion might have been avoided. Discrimination would be out into the open, and perhaps eliminated by a rare dose of honesty, or at least cast to the outer reaches of society.
The same with firms. When the CEO makes his Christmas speech about his staff being his most important asset he might find himself the turkey, and quite right. Effort would be moved from the dark arts of misleading marketing and lobbying, and invested in innovation to create genuine customer benefits. No more fraud. No more tax avoidance. No more value-destroying confidentiality. I have no problem with any of this.
What surprised me was the tone of the Economist leader, which feared the change. Generally, this magazine embraces technology and innovation, and especially likes things which eliminate inefficiencies. Well, here is a chance to eliminate perhaps the greatest inefficiency of all, and how do they react? They worry about their eight second urges, predict problems with adaptation, and fear misuse by the governments. The internet had all these problems too. Should we have resisted it? I expect better from my favourite magazine.
Perhaps the leader writer, like me, has been spooked by his or her computer lately. I have seen a step change in the last six months at the ability of my computer to know everything about me, and find it scary. Do you feel the same? When I reflect on it though, I find this technology exciting. True, it can be misused, and I like to have a few secrets, even from my computer. But we will adapt, we will move on, and the benefits to society can be huge. Bring it on.
One last argument in favour of mind reading. I read a different article this week about Amanda Knox, in the Guardian weekly. Seemingly, most of us found her guilty because of her face. Her features make her look a bit foxy. We were a bit titillated by the stories of what may have gone on in Perugia, egged on by our tabloids, and jumped to conclusions about poor Amanda. According to the article, we do this sort of thing unconsciously all the time, making judgements about people based on how they look. I knew this before, and understood it as a reason for some discrimination and a need for caution against bias, for example in job interviews. But this article took it to a new level, for indeed a part of me had done exactly as the article suggested, and found Amanda guilty, despite any real evidence available to me.
Once we all have our personal mind readers as an app in our mobile phones, we won’t make such mistakes again. This will be scary. Probably it will be after my time, but at the rate things progress these days who can know that for sure? Personally, I hope the technology comes sooner rather than later. By then I’ll be so old that eight seconds will have become at least a minute anyway.
A leader in this week’s Economist suggested what might be coming next. Seemingly, mind reading technology is getting closer. We might soon be able to look inside each other’s brains and be able to tell what we are thinking. No doubt the facility is many years away from being generally available, but fifty years ago we couldn’t really imagine the internet or wi-fi.
Just imagine the changes this technology would have on the way we lived. Start with relationships. The whole vocabulary would be thrown open. We could no longer quietly leer at someone we fancied without being exposed. Our professed loyalties would be called into question. Our small lies in the interest of harmony would no longer work. Many bums would suddenly look big in many outfits, and have nowhere to hide. A man is supposed to have a sexual thought every eight seconds or so. Imagine if such thoughts were transparent to all.
Things would change, but no doubt we would adapt. Adapting is what humans are very good at. And would it be worse? Initially, it would be very difficult for everyone, but, once things had settled down, perhaps things would be easier. How many women really believe the harmony lies anyway, or believe their man is the only one immune from the eight second urge? The worst thing in any relationship is a lack of trust, and the technology would have the potential to banish that completely. Most of us are more anxious about the fear or what someone is thinking about us than the sure knowledge of what those thoughts are – and most of us are thinking better thoughts of most of our acquaintances than they think we are anyway. We would adapt. The game would change. I sense things would be better.
Then look at illness. The earliest application of the technology would be to improve the lives of the disabled. People with the inability to communicate would suddenly be able to, and lives would be improved immeasurably. Maybe there are other creative brains like Stephen Hawking out there that could be liberated. I also suspect the technology would be decisive in breakthroughs against diseases primarily of the mind, such as addictions. All the junk in our minds could be freed. In most cases, I suspect that could be decisive in helping people to move onto better lives. True, counsellors would lose their capacity for professional dishonesty, but again the advantages would be enormous.
Now take politics. Again, things would change, and change a lot. But for the better or the worse? Many of the more intractable problems in the world start with casual misleading of people. The EU, a good thing, was set up by the elite without really explaining the truth to the public, who were deemed too dumb to understand. Ditto the euro. Such lies are coming apart right now. Cameron doesn’t really want a referendum, just votes. Such lazy lies are coming back to haunt him. The true reasons for the US invasion of Iraq are either justifiable – so we should hear them – or not – and the invasion might have been avoided. Discrimination would be out into the open, and perhaps eliminated by a rare dose of honesty, or at least cast to the outer reaches of society.
The same with firms. When the CEO makes his Christmas speech about his staff being his most important asset he might find himself the turkey, and quite right. Effort would be moved from the dark arts of misleading marketing and lobbying, and invested in innovation to create genuine customer benefits. No more fraud. No more tax avoidance. No more value-destroying confidentiality. I have no problem with any of this.
What surprised me was the tone of the Economist leader, which feared the change. Generally, this magazine embraces technology and innovation, and especially likes things which eliminate inefficiencies. Well, here is a chance to eliminate perhaps the greatest inefficiency of all, and how do they react? They worry about their eight second urges, predict problems with adaptation, and fear misuse by the governments. The internet had all these problems too. Should we have resisted it? I expect better from my favourite magazine.
Perhaps the leader writer, like me, has been spooked by his or her computer lately. I have seen a step change in the last six months at the ability of my computer to know everything about me, and find it scary. Do you feel the same? When I reflect on it though, I find this technology exciting. True, it can be misused, and I like to have a few secrets, even from my computer. But we will adapt, we will move on, and the benefits to society can be huge. Bring it on.
One last argument in favour of mind reading. I read a different article this week about Amanda Knox, in the Guardian weekly. Seemingly, most of us found her guilty because of her face. Her features make her look a bit foxy. We were a bit titillated by the stories of what may have gone on in Perugia, egged on by our tabloids, and jumped to conclusions about poor Amanda. According to the article, we do this sort of thing unconsciously all the time, making judgements about people based on how they look. I knew this before, and understood it as a reason for some discrimination and a need for caution against bias, for example in job interviews. But this article took it to a new level, for indeed a part of me had done exactly as the article suggested, and found Amanda guilty, despite any real evidence available to me.
Once we all have our personal mind readers as an app in our mobile phones, we won’t make such mistakes again. This will be scary. Probably it will be after my time, but at the rate things progress these days who can know that for sure? Personally, I hope the technology comes sooner rather than later. By then I’ll be so old that eight seconds will have become at least a minute anyway.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
On reconciliation
Non-catholics may not realise that the sacrament of reconciliation is the modern name for what used to be called confession. It is not just the name that has changed. The emphasis on owning up and penance in a dark box in Church has largely been replaced by a quiet chat in a lounge with a priest who tries to help you come to terms with yourself.
In its new form, this is a powerful process. And it is no coincidence that reconciliation is emphasised in many other forms of self-help.
Take the AA 12 steps for example. Step one is about surrender - reconciling oneself to powerlessness. Steps five to seven are a sort of confession. And step nine, the last step before a recovery can enter a phase of stability, is about reconciling and making amends with all those we have wronged. Often the hardest thing to live with for an addict, or anyone else for that matter, is the guilt and shame. These steps face up to guilt and shame, and create the space to make it possible to move on.
A completely different example comes from business, and the Kotter model of change management. The first step in this model is about creating urgency, and it is the one where most change programmes fail. I would argue that this step is about helping those that need to change to feel reconciled with that fact. Before we accept this need we are stuck in the past, living a long-lost dream. Intellectually, we may see this, but it takes a human step of reconciliation to accept it and be ready to move on. The best implementations of Kotter do not emphasise leader speeches and compelling power points, but instead ask people to talk among each other. That way, nostalgia can be seen for what it is, individuals and teams can mourn their loss, and then face a different future. Leaders struggle with this because they do not usually have the need for reconciliation themselves, so are blind to it in others.
Mourning is another form or reconciliation. Nowadays, funerals attempt to be a celebration of life. Another catholic healing sacrament, anointing the sick (formerly last rites – how things have moved on!), seeks to reconcile people with their possible death and help others reconcile themselves to the loss they may face too. A wake tries to achieve the same. A strange ritual at first glance (especially to cold English people like me) it is powerful, and has parallels in most other religions and cultures. Just like in the two other examples above, the key element is encouraging people to talk openly to each other, to rid themselves of the baggage that would stop them moving forward.
So, reconciliation works. We should try it. Some of the happiest news stories of recent years involve reconciliation. Explicit in South Africa via the heroic truth and reconciliation commission, similar processes have been followed, arguably with less grace, in Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. Only this week, ETA in Spain came closer to disbandment, following a long reconciliation effort. It is not easy, especially when memories and discrimination are long-standing and where everyone has a reason to hate and for suspicion. But facing the past, accepting it, and even forgiving it, is the only route out of the cycle of misery. You cannot move forward successfully unless you are at peace with the past.
I sense different sorts of reconciliation are the key steps in other situations. Tony Blair removed clause four, and somehow reconciled most of his party from a past that was no longer relevant. This week’s Economist has a hopeful article about Detroit. It seems that a key step in creating a positive future there has been to accept that the city must be different and smaller than before. The Norwegians were remarkable this summer in reconciling themselves to the massacre of its youth. In its attitude to the EU, the British are not really reconciled to a less powerful role than in the days of empire. Reconciliation is hard – often close to impossible. But its lack is more damning than anything.
Many muses on this and other blogs have some well-reasoned diagnosis, but then are unable to offer practical solutions. The wonderful thing about reconciliation is how much we can do about it ourselves. And we don’t even need priests!
We all have reasons to complain about others. We say stupid things to each other, hurt each other. To some extent, we can’t help it. What we can help is what happens next. We tend to make assumptions about how people think about us, about what they meant when they said something hurtful. We sulk. We are stubborn. Wow, how we are stubborn.
We could instead try another tactic. We could attempt to reconcile. We could make the first move, and apologise, even when we aren’t so sure it was our fault. Apologise, with no buts and no bitterness. We could make it easy for the other party to apologise. We could try to understand things from their point of view. We can try to create conditions where we can move on together.
What would this cost us? A bit of pride. Some feeling that the other party got away with something. Not much really. Whereas the rewards are huge. There are few better feelings in life than after unloading with an apology, receiving forgiveness, and feeling a friend become a friend again after a period of strain. We feel lighter. We feel happier.
So, where to start. Most of us have an opportunity with work colleagues, notably with our boss. Bosses can be so stubborn, as they have their position to maintain. Try disarming them by recognising their side and giving some ground. They won’t know what to do, but they won’t be able to stop themselves giving ground in return.
Then there are parents. Parents still treat us as though we are small children, so usually like to keep a bit of power and struggle to make the first move in apology. How sad. We only have two parents. Imagine if one of them died and we hadn’t made peace with them. It would haunt us for ever. Painful though it is, make the first move. Accept them as they are. No matter how many times they misbehave, never break off good relations. Most of us are lucky, and our parents have time to reconcile their affairs before dying, to set their relationships in order and say what needs to be said. But sometimes that cannot happen, and we have to be ready for that contingency. Follow the timeless advice to live each day as though it were your last.
Then there are other acquaintances, friends, and especially our partners. We can make a start today.
Sometimes we have a strained relationship and we don’t even know what lies behind it. In my experience, the most common cause is that the other party has some baggage to reconcile with you. I had a recent experience of this, and the thing the other party was carrying guilt over came out quite by accident one day. That was a true turning point, as both of us could immediately sense a new lightness, and start to go forward again. We have to be patient of course, as the other party has to move in their own time, but we can always do things to signal our readiness, to make it a bit easier rather than a bit harder. Life is so much happier if we stop seeing it as a point scoring exercise.
When I learned to drive, my instructor taught me some famous last words. Something like “it was my right of way”. If we are killed in a car accident, it is little consolation to know we were in the right. We are dead anyway. This same philosophy applies to our relationships.
In the end, our own peace comes less from seeing the pleasure of others, and more from the feeling of being reconciled with ourselves. That is the point in AA and in the sacrament, and a happy consequence in the business context. We don’t have to leave it until we are on our death beds.
I am one of the worst role models for my own advice that I know. I have relationships to reconcile in all the categories listed, and can be as stubborn as anyone. Wow, how I love to score points. Yet I feel I am getting better, and benefiting a lot from it.
Who will you start out to reconcile with today?
In its new form, this is a powerful process. And it is no coincidence that reconciliation is emphasised in many other forms of self-help.
Take the AA 12 steps for example. Step one is about surrender - reconciling oneself to powerlessness. Steps five to seven are a sort of confession. And step nine, the last step before a recovery can enter a phase of stability, is about reconciling and making amends with all those we have wronged. Often the hardest thing to live with for an addict, or anyone else for that matter, is the guilt and shame. These steps face up to guilt and shame, and create the space to make it possible to move on.
A completely different example comes from business, and the Kotter model of change management. The first step in this model is about creating urgency, and it is the one where most change programmes fail. I would argue that this step is about helping those that need to change to feel reconciled with that fact. Before we accept this need we are stuck in the past, living a long-lost dream. Intellectually, we may see this, but it takes a human step of reconciliation to accept it and be ready to move on. The best implementations of Kotter do not emphasise leader speeches and compelling power points, but instead ask people to talk among each other. That way, nostalgia can be seen for what it is, individuals and teams can mourn their loss, and then face a different future. Leaders struggle with this because they do not usually have the need for reconciliation themselves, so are blind to it in others.
Mourning is another form or reconciliation. Nowadays, funerals attempt to be a celebration of life. Another catholic healing sacrament, anointing the sick (formerly last rites – how things have moved on!), seeks to reconcile people with their possible death and help others reconcile themselves to the loss they may face too. A wake tries to achieve the same. A strange ritual at first glance (especially to cold English people like me) it is powerful, and has parallels in most other religions and cultures. Just like in the two other examples above, the key element is encouraging people to talk openly to each other, to rid themselves of the baggage that would stop them moving forward.
So, reconciliation works. We should try it. Some of the happiest news stories of recent years involve reconciliation. Explicit in South Africa via the heroic truth and reconciliation commission, similar processes have been followed, arguably with less grace, in Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. Only this week, ETA in Spain came closer to disbandment, following a long reconciliation effort. It is not easy, especially when memories and discrimination are long-standing and where everyone has a reason to hate and for suspicion. But facing the past, accepting it, and even forgiving it, is the only route out of the cycle of misery. You cannot move forward successfully unless you are at peace with the past.
I sense different sorts of reconciliation are the key steps in other situations. Tony Blair removed clause four, and somehow reconciled most of his party from a past that was no longer relevant. This week’s Economist has a hopeful article about Detroit. It seems that a key step in creating a positive future there has been to accept that the city must be different and smaller than before. The Norwegians were remarkable this summer in reconciling themselves to the massacre of its youth. In its attitude to the EU, the British are not really reconciled to a less powerful role than in the days of empire. Reconciliation is hard – often close to impossible. But its lack is more damning than anything.
Many muses on this and other blogs have some well-reasoned diagnosis, but then are unable to offer practical solutions. The wonderful thing about reconciliation is how much we can do about it ourselves. And we don’t even need priests!
We all have reasons to complain about others. We say stupid things to each other, hurt each other. To some extent, we can’t help it. What we can help is what happens next. We tend to make assumptions about how people think about us, about what they meant when they said something hurtful. We sulk. We are stubborn. Wow, how we are stubborn.
We could instead try another tactic. We could attempt to reconcile. We could make the first move, and apologise, even when we aren’t so sure it was our fault. Apologise, with no buts and no bitterness. We could make it easy for the other party to apologise. We could try to understand things from their point of view. We can try to create conditions where we can move on together.
What would this cost us? A bit of pride. Some feeling that the other party got away with something. Not much really. Whereas the rewards are huge. There are few better feelings in life than after unloading with an apology, receiving forgiveness, and feeling a friend become a friend again after a period of strain. We feel lighter. We feel happier.
So, where to start. Most of us have an opportunity with work colleagues, notably with our boss. Bosses can be so stubborn, as they have their position to maintain. Try disarming them by recognising their side and giving some ground. They won’t know what to do, but they won’t be able to stop themselves giving ground in return.
Then there are parents. Parents still treat us as though we are small children, so usually like to keep a bit of power and struggle to make the first move in apology. How sad. We only have two parents. Imagine if one of them died and we hadn’t made peace with them. It would haunt us for ever. Painful though it is, make the first move. Accept them as they are. No matter how many times they misbehave, never break off good relations. Most of us are lucky, and our parents have time to reconcile their affairs before dying, to set their relationships in order and say what needs to be said. But sometimes that cannot happen, and we have to be ready for that contingency. Follow the timeless advice to live each day as though it were your last.
Then there are other acquaintances, friends, and especially our partners. We can make a start today.
Sometimes we have a strained relationship and we don’t even know what lies behind it. In my experience, the most common cause is that the other party has some baggage to reconcile with you. I had a recent experience of this, and the thing the other party was carrying guilt over came out quite by accident one day. That was a true turning point, as both of us could immediately sense a new lightness, and start to go forward again. We have to be patient of course, as the other party has to move in their own time, but we can always do things to signal our readiness, to make it a bit easier rather than a bit harder. Life is so much happier if we stop seeing it as a point scoring exercise.
When I learned to drive, my instructor taught me some famous last words. Something like “it was my right of way”. If we are killed in a car accident, it is little consolation to know we were in the right. We are dead anyway. This same philosophy applies to our relationships.
In the end, our own peace comes less from seeing the pleasure of others, and more from the feeling of being reconciled with ourselves. That is the point in AA and in the sacrament, and a happy consequence in the business context. We don’t have to leave it until we are on our death beds.
I am one of the worst role models for my own advice that I know. I have relationships to reconcile in all the categories listed, and can be as stubborn as anyone. Wow, how I love to score points. Yet I feel I am getting better, and benefiting a lot from it.
Who will you start out to reconcile with today?
Thursday, October 6, 2011
The 10,001 customer problem
The 10,001 customer problem is one of my favourite models of reality. There are two reasons I like it. One is that it seems to work and be instructive. The second is that, to the best of my knowledge, I invented it. A bit of vanity can’t be helped occasionally.
The idea is that most people or organisations are trying to manage a very large number of small relationships, and a very small number of big relationships. Imagine you are a petrol station manager. You have thousands of customers buying fuel, and you have to try to satisfy each of them, to make them buy a bit more or come back more often. And you have one fuel supplier, say Shell. Now where should you focus your energies? If you can persuade Shell to give you a bit of extra credit, or some support with discounting, or some improvement to the station, it can be worth thousands. The 10,000 can be worth thousands too, collectively. But to maximise bang for buck, the smart owner focuses on Shell.
There are examples everywhere. If you are a salesman, you can either try to sell to 10,000 customers, or alternatively you can try to convince your boss to reduce your target or give you a reward anyway because he likes you or thinks you are trying hard. As British Gas, you can either offer superior customer service, or secure some monopoly concession from the regulator. If you are Shell, you can either try to squeeze a bit more value out of 30,000 petrol stations, or alternatively secure one juicy exploration deal. As a Tesco store manager, you can display your milk beautifully, promote and advertise milk skilfully, price milk cleverly – or just squeeze another penny off milk from the buying department.
In each case, the smart people choose the few important relationships over the many smaller ones. But look more carefully. In most cases, the enterprise would be better served if the focus was on the many small relationships. The few, big relationships are often internal, are often a zero-sum game, and rarely create value for the system. We want people to innovate and create customer value outwards, but their incentives usually drive them inwards instead.
There it is, the 10,001 customer problem. As with many problems, recognising it is the first step towards solving it. To solve it, make sure rewards for the 10,000 are as big as possible, and for the one as small as possible. In the first example above, Shell can make its supply contracts fair, transparent and demonstrably non-negotiable. The sales manager can make KPI’s for his sales force as objective as possible, and the review system as unbiased as possible. The Gas regulator can be truly independent and pro-competition. Shell can create a retail division with a role only to grow sales in stations. And Tesco can remove buying price from the KPI’s of the store managers.
In the latter two cases, Shell will still make sure its best people are doing deals in Qatar, and Tesco will have their best people as buyers, but the organisational division will at least ensure that the 10,000 are not ignored completely. For what good is oil from Qatar without any outlets to sell it? And what is the only true basis for Tesco to get better supply prices than the power from scale emanating from its selling excellence? This demonstrates the second weakness with focusing on large relationships – even when it is productive at first, it tends to be unsustainable.
In this week’s Economist, I read of a study with one of the best demonstrations of the 10,001 customer problem I have ever seen, in the finance and economics section, entitled Money and Politics, link http://www.economist.com/node/21531014. Someone has found a link between the amount of lobbying a firm does, relative to its size, and its share price performance. Believe it or not, the big lobbyers do better.
Isn’t this priceless? Firms indeed do better (in the short term) focusing on the one big relationship, in this case a regulator, than getting on with the boring business of caring for real customers. British Gas, keep up the crap service, you know the regulator is the real game in town. And, true to form, lobbying is internal and non-productive to the wider economy.
This study was from the US. It is no surprise the growth and innovation have slowed – companies are rewarded not for that, but instead for buying lunch for a congressman. I wonder if the correlation is as strong in Europe? My guess would be that is very high in Greece or Italy but lower in Holland or Sweden or Germany. Nellie Kroes as competition commissioner probably did more to foster European growth than any other individual – more power to her.
Russia and communist countries are built on the power of lobbying and patronage. This is arguably what ultimately makes the system uncompetitive and ultimately unsustainable. What about China? Once the demographic dividend has worked its way through, will the propensity for patronage kill their growth too?
Just like in a firm, a country can address the 10,001 customer problem too. Transparent, independent regulation. Keeping politicians out of the way. Tough anti-monopoly laws. Support for small businesses and plurality. Training in customer facing skills over political ones. Banning or heavily restricting lobbying, or pricing it out of the market? Taking the money out of politics.
This could be a winning business and industry policy. And, sorry Ed Miliband, it is the diametric opposite of what you were proposing last week, which would be a dream world for lobbyists. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The idea is that most people or organisations are trying to manage a very large number of small relationships, and a very small number of big relationships. Imagine you are a petrol station manager. You have thousands of customers buying fuel, and you have to try to satisfy each of them, to make them buy a bit more or come back more often. And you have one fuel supplier, say Shell. Now where should you focus your energies? If you can persuade Shell to give you a bit of extra credit, or some support with discounting, or some improvement to the station, it can be worth thousands. The 10,000 can be worth thousands too, collectively. But to maximise bang for buck, the smart owner focuses on Shell.
There are examples everywhere. If you are a salesman, you can either try to sell to 10,000 customers, or alternatively you can try to convince your boss to reduce your target or give you a reward anyway because he likes you or thinks you are trying hard. As British Gas, you can either offer superior customer service, or secure some monopoly concession from the regulator. If you are Shell, you can either try to squeeze a bit more value out of 30,000 petrol stations, or alternatively secure one juicy exploration deal. As a Tesco store manager, you can display your milk beautifully, promote and advertise milk skilfully, price milk cleverly – or just squeeze another penny off milk from the buying department.
In each case, the smart people choose the few important relationships over the many smaller ones. But look more carefully. In most cases, the enterprise would be better served if the focus was on the many small relationships. The few, big relationships are often internal, are often a zero-sum game, and rarely create value for the system. We want people to innovate and create customer value outwards, but their incentives usually drive them inwards instead.
There it is, the 10,001 customer problem. As with many problems, recognising it is the first step towards solving it. To solve it, make sure rewards for the 10,000 are as big as possible, and for the one as small as possible. In the first example above, Shell can make its supply contracts fair, transparent and demonstrably non-negotiable. The sales manager can make KPI’s for his sales force as objective as possible, and the review system as unbiased as possible. The Gas regulator can be truly independent and pro-competition. Shell can create a retail division with a role only to grow sales in stations. And Tesco can remove buying price from the KPI’s of the store managers.
In the latter two cases, Shell will still make sure its best people are doing deals in Qatar, and Tesco will have their best people as buyers, but the organisational division will at least ensure that the 10,000 are not ignored completely. For what good is oil from Qatar without any outlets to sell it? And what is the only true basis for Tesco to get better supply prices than the power from scale emanating from its selling excellence? This demonstrates the second weakness with focusing on large relationships – even when it is productive at first, it tends to be unsustainable.
In this week’s Economist, I read of a study with one of the best demonstrations of the 10,001 customer problem I have ever seen, in the finance and economics section, entitled Money and Politics, link http://www.economist.com/node/21531014. Someone has found a link between the amount of lobbying a firm does, relative to its size, and its share price performance. Believe it or not, the big lobbyers do better.
Isn’t this priceless? Firms indeed do better (in the short term) focusing on the one big relationship, in this case a regulator, than getting on with the boring business of caring for real customers. British Gas, keep up the crap service, you know the regulator is the real game in town. And, true to form, lobbying is internal and non-productive to the wider economy.
This study was from the US. It is no surprise the growth and innovation have slowed – companies are rewarded not for that, but instead for buying lunch for a congressman. I wonder if the correlation is as strong in Europe? My guess would be that is very high in Greece or Italy but lower in Holland or Sweden or Germany. Nellie Kroes as competition commissioner probably did more to foster European growth than any other individual – more power to her.
Russia and communist countries are built on the power of lobbying and patronage. This is arguably what ultimately makes the system uncompetitive and ultimately unsustainable. What about China? Once the demographic dividend has worked its way through, will the propensity for patronage kill their growth too?
Just like in a firm, a country can address the 10,001 customer problem too. Transparent, independent regulation. Keeping politicians out of the way. Tough anti-monopoly laws. Support for small businesses and plurality. Training in customer facing skills over political ones. Banning or heavily restricting lobbying, or pricing it out of the market? Taking the money out of politics.
This could be a winning business and industry policy. And, sorry Ed Miliband, it is the diametric opposite of what you were proposing last week, which would be a dream world for lobbyists. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Kohr Blimey
The Guardian weekly had some excellent articles this week about the global crisis. My favourite one was by Paul Kingsnorth, extolling the philosophy of Leopold Kohr, who he called the most important economist we had never heard of. Well said Paul, I had indeed never heard of him.
Kohr was an Austrian Jew who formed most of his theories during the Spanish civil war and then the second world war, and then published “The Breakdown of Nations”. He later one a sort of secondary Nobel Prize and became the inspiration for “Small is Beautiful” and other seminal works. Not a bad CV.
His simple theory is that size destroys. As soon as things grow beyond human scale, they have a tendency to become inefficient and dangerous. In the end, the concentration of power creates destruction. Simple. And easy to see how a Jew living through the Hitler era might reach such a conclusion.
I find the theory attractive as well. I have long argued that in my work life I have seen far more examples of diseconomy of scale than of economy of scale. The bigger the enterprise, the less well motivated the employees, the more vanilla the direction, and the slower the response. There is also the problem of layers of bureaucracy in place to manage internal things rather than do anything of value to customers.
I saw one result of this when I visited Shell in Manila this summer (just as a tourist really) and read all the internal communications I could find. Nowadays, companies like Shell run most of their operations continent-wide or even globally. I was a victim of the early stages of this process in Europe, and always found it destructive of value. Well, now I saw the end game. For this business segment, there were clearly no leaders in a place as small as the Philippines (a mere 90 million people), merely supervisors relaying instructions from some remote centre. And since those instructions had to apply to every conceivable market circumstance, they were utterly devoid of content. If you have ever played Bullshit Bingo this was the ultimate example. The business was exhorted to be world-leading, customer-focused, best-in-class, innovative, to delight its customers, and much else besides, without any real description of what the people were actually supposed to do.
Another example was in a study in the Economist last week, with an American survey about how staff viewed their companies. Whereas most bosses thought their firms were inclusive and modern, staff overwhelmingly described them as command and control. Part of this must be a result of the distance created by scale. Dilbert is still a pretty fair reflection of business life.
The most compelling theoretical argument in favour of Kohr is the classical curve of the evolution of the firm. A firm starts bubbling along the bottom of the graph, as it creates its products and infrastructure. Then there is a growth spurt, with clear focus and strong management, and market impact of the firm’s distinctiveness. Then follows maturity, with little unit growth, as the internal processes of the larger firm clog up the works, and also when a single manager can no longer run the place effectively. In the end comes decline, as competitors overtake the slumbering giant.
There it is, in all the economics text books. And if it true for the firm, it is likely to be true for a country, an army, or even a Church, for the same basic factors are in play. When the bullshit bingo starts, you know the decline is on the way.
What the theory does not prescribe is how long each phase is or how big the firm is before it hits its plateau, as this will be decided by factors like context, skills and product of the firm. Some can fly very high before declining. Very occasionally, a new management team can engineer a rebirth, for example at IBM.
The pattern is obvious with empires through the ages, from the Greeks and Romans through the British. Another article in the same Guardian Weekly argued that when we look back on the current crisis we will see it as the decline of the age of American hegemony. Of course, most writers on the Guardian disparage the US, so this might be more wishful thinking then prescient analysis, but the may be some truth in the claim. Certainly, the poor education, dysfunctional politics, and even the rampant obesity do not auger well for a strong US future.
Then it will be China’s turn, and one lesson from Kohr is to recognise that even that era will have an end. We read about these wonderful Chinese companies – be careful not to invest too late, as what goes up must come down, in the end.
I suspect most of us would find that our personal experiences back up Kohr. When have you been most productive? In a corporate army, or within a small team with shared belief and autonomy?
There are social policy implications too. If the police is seen as a distant controlling body, we might try to outsmart it. If it is the guy in the village who drinks with Dad, we’ll find it a bit easier to understand and comply. If we feel part of a community, family or otherwise, we are more likely to have a mentality of service and support. An argument for the big society?
And while we are on British politics, Kohr would certainly find plenty of fault with Ed Miliband’s nascent industrial policy. What guff that was, somehow thinking the state could pick winners and punish those with the wrong motivation. Create conditions for innovation, then get out of the way, is surely a better plan.
We can take Kohr a bit further, and takes a global perspective. Is bigness not just destroying the US, but humanity? The EU responds to its crisis with more integration, creating more bigness and sowing the seeds of accelerated destruction? In the next era, might the successor to the UN even go the same way? Is climate change a classical Kohr symptom of diseconomy of scale? A fan of the EU, this certainly challenges some of my core assumptions. Then there is global finance. Is it possible that the real problem is that it has become too big, too integrated?
The theory is good, but perhaps we need a bit more to explain the world. Communications must help learning, yet communications needs scale to work. I for one am happy I have the internet. Is it possible to make good infrastructure advances while promoting smallness? I am not sure.
Of course, the big problem with Kohr is what to do about it. He was a sort of early hippie, advocating city sized states and autonomous communities within them. He was realistic enough to understand that there was no likelihood of this actually happening. Human nature looks for consolidation of power, for single repeatable solutions, for joining a winning team. Most firms in the decline phase respond my making acquisitions and managing ever more globally. You don’t see the Catholic Church devolving power from the Vatican. Not many US politicians or citizens advocate breaking the country up.
But what we can do is challenge our own assumptions, and consider giving more support to those who argue in a different way. The current UK coalition government started with an admirable intent to devolve decision making to local and regional bodies. It has lost its way, as so often is the case, swayed by the lazy “postcode lottery” brigade. In companies, some people do advocate genuine empowerment and even some internal competition, and I always tried to support them. I love the management concept of getting out of the way. The motive of the UK Eurosceptics may be unpalatable, but perhaps different logic could support some of their conclusions.
Thank you, Paul Kingsnorth, for bringing a valid alternative view to my attention.
Kohr was an Austrian Jew who formed most of his theories during the Spanish civil war and then the second world war, and then published “The Breakdown of Nations”. He later one a sort of secondary Nobel Prize and became the inspiration for “Small is Beautiful” and other seminal works. Not a bad CV.
His simple theory is that size destroys. As soon as things grow beyond human scale, they have a tendency to become inefficient and dangerous. In the end, the concentration of power creates destruction. Simple. And easy to see how a Jew living through the Hitler era might reach such a conclusion.
I find the theory attractive as well. I have long argued that in my work life I have seen far more examples of diseconomy of scale than of economy of scale. The bigger the enterprise, the less well motivated the employees, the more vanilla the direction, and the slower the response. There is also the problem of layers of bureaucracy in place to manage internal things rather than do anything of value to customers.
I saw one result of this when I visited Shell in Manila this summer (just as a tourist really) and read all the internal communications I could find. Nowadays, companies like Shell run most of their operations continent-wide or even globally. I was a victim of the early stages of this process in Europe, and always found it destructive of value. Well, now I saw the end game. For this business segment, there were clearly no leaders in a place as small as the Philippines (a mere 90 million people), merely supervisors relaying instructions from some remote centre. And since those instructions had to apply to every conceivable market circumstance, they were utterly devoid of content. If you have ever played Bullshit Bingo this was the ultimate example. The business was exhorted to be world-leading, customer-focused, best-in-class, innovative, to delight its customers, and much else besides, without any real description of what the people were actually supposed to do.
Another example was in a study in the Economist last week, with an American survey about how staff viewed their companies. Whereas most bosses thought their firms were inclusive and modern, staff overwhelmingly described them as command and control. Part of this must be a result of the distance created by scale. Dilbert is still a pretty fair reflection of business life.
The most compelling theoretical argument in favour of Kohr is the classical curve of the evolution of the firm. A firm starts bubbling along the bottom of the graph, as it creates its products and infrastructure. Then there is a growth spurt, with clear focus and strong management, and market impact of the firm’s distinctiveness. Then follows maturity, with little unit growth, as the internal processes of the larger firm clog up the works, and also when a single manager can no longer run the place effectively. In the end comes decline, as competitors overtake the slumbering giant.
There it is, in all the economics text books. And if it true for the firm, it is likely to be true for a country, an army, or even a Church, for the same basic factors are in play. When the bullshit bingo starts, you know the decline is on the way.
What the theory does not prescribe is how long each phase is or how big the firm is before it hits its plateau, as this will be decided by factors like context, skills and product of the firm. Some can fly very high before declining. Very occasionally, a new management team can engineer a rebirth, for example at IBM.
The pattern is obvious with empires through the ages, from the Greeks and Romans through the British. Another article in the same Guardian Weekly argued that when we look back on the current crisis we will see it as the decline of the age of American hegemony. Of course, most writers on the Guardian disparage the US, so this might be more wishful thinking then prescient analysis, but the may be some truth in the claim. Certainly, the poor education, dysfunctional politics, and even the rampant obesity do not auger well for a strong US future.
Then it will be China’s turn, and one lesson from Kohr is to recognise that even that era will have an end. We read about these wonderful Chinese companies – be careful not to invest too late, as what goes up must come down, in the end.
I suspect most of us would find that our personal experiences back up Kohr. When have you been most productive? In a corporate army, or within a small team with shared belief and autonomy?
There are social policy implications too. If the police is seen as a distant controlling body, we might try to outsmart it. If it is the guy in the village who drinks with Dad, we’ll find it a bit easier to understand and comply. If we feel part of a community, family or otherwise, we are more likely to have a mentality of service and support. An argument for the big society?
And while we are on British politics, Kohr would certainly find plenty of fault with Ed Miliband’s nascent industrial policy. What guff that was, somehow thinking the state could pick winners and punish those with the wrong motivation. Create conditions for innovation, then get out of the way, is surely a better plan.
We can take Kohr a bit further, and takes a global perspective. Is bigness not just destroying the US, but humanity? The EU responds to its crisis with more integration, creating more bigness and sowing the seeds of accelerated destruction? In the next era, might the successor to the UN even go the same way? Is climate change a classical Kohr symptom of diseconomy of scale? A fan of the EU, this certainly challenges some of my core assumptions. Then there is global finance. Is it possible that the real problem is that it has become too big, too integrated?
The theory is good, but perhaps we need a bit more to explain the world. Communications must help learning, yet communications needs scale to work. I for one am happy I have the internet. Is it possible to make good infrastructure advances while promoting smallness? I am not sure.
Of course, the big problem with Kohr is what to do about it. He was a sort of early hippie, advocating city sized states and autonomous communities within them. He was realistic enough to understand that there was no likelihood of this actually happening. Human nature looks for consolidation of power, for single repeatable solutions, for joining a winning team. Most firms in the decline phase respond my making acquisitions and managing ever more globally. You don’t see the Catholic Church devolving power from the Vatican. Not many US politicians or citizens advocate breaking the country up.
But what we can do is challenge our own assumptions, and consider giving more support to those who argue in a different way. The current UK coalition government started with an admirable intent to devolve decision making to local and regional bodies. It has lost its way, as so often is the case, swayed by the lazy “postcode lottery” brigade. In companies, some people do advocate genuine empowerment and even some internal competition, and I always tried to support them. I love the management concept of getting out of the way. The motive of the UK Eurosceptics may be unpalatable, but perhaps different logic could support some of their conclusions.
Thank you, Paul Kingsnorth, for bringing a valid alternative view to my attention.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Who needs God?
When do you feel good?
Studies are pretty consistent on this one, and my own feelings are in line with the studies. I feel good when somehow I can avoid worrying about things that are out of my control. I feel good when I make someone else feel good, maybe by forgiving them or complimenting them. I feel good when I am in the company of good friends that I respect. I feel good when I am achieving something for my fellow human being, albeit small. I feel good when I can find some peace and some love.
Now think about techniques to achieve these things.
To worry less, reminding oneself about how small we are is a good start. We control little. We understand little. Shit happens. Wonderful things happen too. If we can be nonchalant about the shit and really notice and celebrate the wonderful things then life is rosier. We could spend our lives hiding from possible shit, but we have been given the gift of a single life, and life is surely for living not for hiding. What we do with our lives is up to us. Counting our blessings is in our self-interest.
Making other people feel good is surprisingly easy, it just takes some courage and practice. Whenever we can put ourselves in the shoes of others, give them the benefit of the doubt, or start from a premise of wanting to understand them and help them, then we have more chance. Does this harm ourselves? Not usually. Of course, if we don’t defend our own interests at all, we might find ourselves without a job or a home or any money. But it surprising how rarely defending our own interests requires blocking someone else. And if we are good to others, amazingly, they start being good to us. The people who receive smiles and compliments and gifts are usually the ones who give them.
It also helps if we can learn to work against our prejudices. Everyone is different, but does that mean we can’t respect others unless they are like us? If we see life as some sort of zero sum game, where our tribe has to protect itself against the others or lose out, then we grow suspicious. But how often is that necessary?
Finding good friends can be hard. We have to develop our social skills. I read one study lately which claimed that 90% of education is about knowledge, getting a job, earning money and so on, while only 10% is about getting on with others. They argued it should be the other way around. Imagine that. The first class on Monday would be about lifetime partners and how to hold on to them. Then something about listening. Maths and history only on Friday afternoons. Not that silly a thought really. Of course, some of us are lucky enough to get our 90% social education from our parents. But not so many of us really.
One way to develop social skills and find friends is to throw ourselves into a club or community. It is even better if the others in the club or community are trying to follow the same ideas as us about being happy. Maybe the community can also be the vehicle for doing some good for fellow humans. Perhaps they can offer ways to serve, whether it is the disadvantaged or the lonely. We can use whatever energy we can find for this, recognising that sometimes we have to place our own friends and family and ourselves first.
Lastly there is peace. Become fatalistic about the ups and downs of life can help us get less stressed. There are also techniques available to us, like relaxation or meditation. We all know that when we can find time out of our busy lives to slow down our brains, then that helps us feel happier. So why don’t most of us do it?
Now look at the world’s religions. The basic core of most religions is very similar. If you examine what the holy books actually say rather than what the religious leaders actually preach, then it is even more so.
Most religions encourage us to be fatalistic. They express it a bit differently, by using a construct called God. God understands, so we shouldn’t worry ourselves. Usually there is more, stuff about us being more likely to get good results if we are good ourselves or believe this and that. But we don’t really need to believe any of that. Just recognising that we are small and usually ignorant and not in control is healthy and enough.
All religions encourage us to be good to our neighbours. Sometimes they limit this to other believers of the same religion, but again, they don’t usually stop us being good to others as well. And if we study the original teaching, we can usually find support for loving those of other faiths.
A religious community can be many things. But a good one will usually emphasise the techniques to make us happy, and also give us the forum to meet friends and to serve.
And all religions recommend meditation, usually called prayer. All religions emphasise time devoted to reflection, often supported by comforting rituals.
So, does religion make you happy? It seems like it has the potential too. And perhaps it is no coincidence that doctrines that have stood the test of time should help humanity.
But what about the other features of organised religion?
First, there is the credo, or belief system. That can be tricky if you don’t believe in afterlife, or reincarnation, or miraculous acts of prophets. But maybe you can treat these as symbols or metaphors. After all, over the years some former absolute beliefs have become rather watered down, the literal interpretation of Adam and Eve for one. It may seem wrong stating you believe something you don’t, but, if you join in but are private about what you really believe, you would not be alone in your Church. More, as you recite the prayers and creeds and take part in the rituals, you might ask yourself if you are really certain they are wrong. How can you be so sure?
Next, there is the politics of the Church itself. Sadly, the senior figures in most Churches appear to have been on the wrong side of history more often than not. Church leaders even encourage their members to go to war against other Churches. They are usually pretty cowardly in choosing what to condemn or ignore. And their attitudes, for example to women or contraception, may not be easy to swallow. But are you joining a community or a political party here? And even if it were a political party, maybe you would not agree with every policy. Perhaps you also work for a company whose ethical stances you find questionable? It is possible to be part of a group without agreeing with everything the group does.
Then, some religious communities place less emphasis on the values that make us happy than on other values. Conservative homilies about the good old days or the youth of today. Reference to sin and punishment rather than forgiveness and redemption. And many Church communities seem full of some of the least good role models for their own beliefs, with a lot of bitterness and rivalry. I would not want to join a community like that. But the good news is that local Church communities exist full of the joyful energy of happiness values. If you look, you might find one. I will go further – probably the organised community closest to you that best epitomises the values that can make you happy is a Church one.
So, this is a bit of a strange advert for joining a religious community. The content of this advert is unlikely to be the declared content of what your local Churches offer. But why not look a bit deeper below the surface? You might be surprised. And as a result you might end up happier.
Without any need for God.
Unless, of course, this is all what God intends for us after all. Who knows?
Studies are pretty consistent on this one, and my own feelings are in line with the studies. I feel good when somehow I can avoid worrying about things that are out of my control. I feel good when I make someone else feel good, maybe by forgiving them or complimenting them. I feel good when I am in the company of good friends that I respect. I feel good when I am achieving something for my fellow human being, albeit small. I feel good when I can find some peace and some love.
Now think about techniques to achieve these things.
To worry less, reminding oneself about how small we are is a good start. We control little. We understand little. Shit happens. Wonderful things happen too. If we can be nonchalant about the shit and really notice and celebrate the wonderful things then life is rosier. We could spend our lives hiding from possible shit, but we have been given the gift of a single life, and life is surely for living not for hiding. What we do with our lives is up to us. Counting our blessings is in our self-interest.
Making other people feel good is surprisingly easy, it just takes some courage and practice. Whenever we can put ourselves in the shoes of others, give them the benefit of the doubt, or start from a premise of wanting to understand them and help them, then we have more chance. Does this harm ourselves? Not usually. Of course, if we don’t defend our own interests at all, we might find ourselves without a job or a home or any money. But it surprising how rarely defending our own interests requires blocking someone else. And if we are good to others, amazingly, they start being good to us. The people who receive smiles and compliments and gifts are usually the ones who give them.
It also helps if we can learn to work against our prejudices. Everyone is different, but does that mean we can’t respect others unless they are like us? If we see life as some sort of zero sum game, where our tribe has to protect itself against the others or lose out, then we grow suspicious. But how often is that necessary?
Finding good friends can be hard. We have to develop our social skills. I read one study lately which claimed that 90% of education is about knowledge, getting a job, earning money and so on, while only 10% is about getting on with others. They argued it should be the other way around. Imagine that. The first class on Monday would be about lifetime partners and how to hold on to them. Then something about listening. Maths and history only on Friday afternoons. Not that silly a thought really. Of course, some of us are lucky enough to get our 90% social education from our parents. But not so many of us really.
One way to develop social skills and find friends is to throw ourselves into a club or community. It is even better if the others in the club or community are trying to follow the same ideas as us about being happy. Maybe the community can also be the vehicle for doing some good for fellow humans. Perhaps they can offer ways to serve, whether it is the disadvantaged or the lonely. We can use whatever energy we can find for this, recognising that sometimes we have to place our own friends and family and ourselves first.
Lastly there is peace. Become fatalistic about the ups and downs of life can help us get less stressed. There are also techniques available to us, like relaxation or meditation. We all know that when we can find time out of our busy lives to slow down our brains, then that helps us feel happier. So why don’t most of us do it?
Now look at the world’s religions. The basic core of most religions is very similar. If you examine what the holy books actually say rather than what the religious leaders actually preach, then it is even more so.
Most religions encourage us to be fatalistic. They express it a bit differently, by using a construct called God. God understands, so we shouldn’t worry ourselves. Usually there is more, stuff about us being more likely to get good results if we are good ourselves or believe this and that. But we don’t really need to believe any of that. Just recognising that we are small and usually ignorant and not in control is healthy and enough.
All religions encourage us to be good to our neighbours. Sometimes they limit this to other believers of the same religion, but again, they don’t usually stop us being good to others as well. And if we study the original teaching, we can usually find support for loving those of other faiths.
A religious community can be many things. But a good one will usually emphasise the techniques to make us happy, and also give us the forum to meet friends and to serve.
And all religions recommend meditation, usually called prayer. All religions emphasise time devoted to reflection, often supported by comforting rituals.
So, does religion make you happy? It seems like it has the potential too. And perhaps it is no coincidence that doctrines that have stood the test of time should help humanity.
But what about the other features of organised religion?
First, there is the credo, or belief system. That can be tricky if you don’t believe in afterlife, or reincarnation, or miraculous acts of prophets. But maybe you can treat these as symbols or metaphors. After all, over the years some former absolute beliefs have become rather watered down, the literal interpretation of Adam and Eve for one. It may seem wrong stating you believe something you don’t, but, if you join in but are private about what you really believe, you would not be alone in your Church. More, as you recite the prayers and creeds and take part in the rituals, you might ask yourself if you are really certain they are wrong. How can you be so sure?
Next, there is the politics of the Church itself. Sadly, the senior figures in most Churches appear to have been on the wrong side of history more often than not. Church leaders even encourage their members to go to war against other Churches. They are usually pretty cowardly in choosing what to condemn or ignore. And their attitudes, for example to women or contraception, may not be easy to swallow. But are you joining a community or a political party here? And even if it were a political party, maybe you would not agree with every policy. Perhaps you also work for a company whose ethical stances you find questionable? It is possible to be part of a group without agreeing with everything the group does.
Then, some religious communities place less emphasis on the values that make us happy than on other values. Conservative homilies about the good old days or the youth of today. Reference to sin and punishment rather than forgiveness and redemption. And many Church communities seem full of some of the least good role models for their own beliefs, with a lot of bitterness and rivalry. I would not want to join a community like that. But the good news is that local Church communities exist full of the joyful energy of happiness values. If you look, you might find one. I will go further – probably the organised community closest to you that best epitomises the values that can make you happy is a Church one.
So, this is a bit of a strange advert for joining a religious community. The content of this advert is unlikely to be the declared content of what your local Churches offer. But why not look a bit deeper below the surface? You might be surprised. And as a result you might end up happier.
Without any need for God.
Unless, of course, this is all what God intends for us after all. Who knows?
Monday, September 12, 2011
Riots and Housing
I was away from Europe during the English riots this summer, and didn’t really have much chance to follow their progress while they were going on.
One small advantage this affords is to be able to look at the media coverage after the event almost as a historian rather than as current affairs.
The main conclusion from this is that the media seemed to overreact. Even the blessed Economist included a number of articles claiming cathartic status for the riots. They were smart enough not to rush into trite analysis of causes, but they did seem to get swept away by the tide of excessive significance.
For, three weeks later, apart from the poor people directly affected who will have to painstakingly rebuild their lives, these riots don’t seem such a big story after all. Many places have frequent riots. A death tool of six would be a good week in Mexico City, or Rio, or Jo’burg, or Washington DC, and probably in Shanghai too if we knew the full truth. There have been riots in England before. It will do us English good next time there are riots in the Paris banlieux, perhaps we won’t be so smug about it.
Some things I have read have stuck in the memory. Private Eye dragged out some quotations from the 1981 riots. They were almost word for word what politicians and commentators are saying now. Lots of guff about loss of parental discipline, breakdown of family values, disadvantaged underclasses, and predictions of imminent doomsday.
There was a letter, also in Private Eye, from Northern Ireland, bemoaning that they suffer this stuff all the time yet the British press don’t care. It is a good point, but I guess that is what devolved government is for, to find local solutions for what are clearly local problems. A Scot also wrote in pointing out that descriptions of British riots were not accurate, since in truth they were all in England.
Then there are the politicians. Here, the Labour ones are on very thin ice bemoaning the way cutbacks have created an angry underclass. Surely these things take much more than a single year to simmer? And who has been in power for the thirteen years that these kids have been growing up?
But Tory are little better. As usual they mourn the loss of supposedly better times past, conveniently glossing over every statistic proving that beforehand there was even more poverty and family abuse. And the solution of punishment and more punishment is pretty thick. Bagehot wrote nicely to redeem the Economist a little when he/she argued that this was an English perennial solution dating back to colonial times – wish the troublemakers away. Where to, exactly? Penal colonies in Australia? Sorry, guys, these are our people, we can’t just make them vanish. I hope Ken Clarke sticks to his laudable justice principles during the coming weeks. Hooray for LibDems in government.
Myself, I think it is far more banal. Young men always have some urge to rebel, to make their mark in the world and show off to their peers. How they rebel is controlled by simple risk and reward. In the old days, eternal damnation was a deterrent from the Church, and tighter families also created deterrence, in good ways and bad ones. On the reward side, social media have made things easier – if you learn that a shop is ready to loot and all you have to do is join the crowd, then it is more tempting. Risk of sanction by the state is always limited, especially for kids with limited assets and prospects.
If we accept the banal explanation, responses can be more piecemeal.
The police can try to get smarter in developing intelligence from social media, and finding ways to amass more force more quickly in a locality.
Deterrents can be stepped up a little, though recognising that many perpetrators have little to lose.
Patient efforts at community building should continue. The same for vocational work and apprenticeship initiatives. Building tolerance between races and those of difference generally is always a good thing.
But one potential priority is not often mentioned in the UK, and that is the link to the quality of housing. I suspect that the quality of accommodation is a big driver towards law-abiding participation in society. If you live decently, you feel better and less excluded, and you are less likely to partake excessive rebellion.
I am always impressed by the housing development activity in the Netherlands. The root cause may be the lack of free land and the challenges of abundant water, but the outcome is fantastic. Everywhere is zoned, and each year, I see many projects of new housing developments and many more upgrading the worst existing housing. Unlike in the UK, you rarely see top-end housing going up, the mass of development is aimed at first-time buyers and at less affluent households. In the space of ten years, more than half of the low quality housing around the Hague seems to have been upgraded into very respectable dwellings. Holland has its social problems, but my guess is that the drive to decent housing for all is one policy which keeps them in check.
By contrast, most activity (and headlines) in the UK seem to be focused on the top-end and the green belt discussion. The result may be greater division, greater resentment, and greater squalor for many.
I applaud the coalition for its housing policies generally, and find it one of the biggest indictments of recent left-wing governments that they largely ignored housing. It was Maggie Thatcher who came up with the brilliant idea of selling council houses, and idea for shorter contracts rather than lifetime tenancies makes a lot of sense. It also has to be possible to evict trouble-makers and send them somewhere less desirable. But all of this requires a decent stock of housing to begin with.
Public-private partnership has worked (arguably) for schools and hospitals. Why not for house-building as well? Such a policy would not require much government investment, and it would create growth and jobs just when and where they are needed. But it might also be the most effective way to reduce the chance of future riots.
One small advantage this affords is to be able to look at the media coverage after the event almost as a historian rather than as current affairs.
The main conclusion from this is that the media seemed to overreact. Even the blessed Economist included a number of articles claiming cathartic status for the riots. They were smart enough not to rush into trite analysis of causes, but they did seem to get swept away by the tide of excessive significance.
For, three weeks later, apart from the poor people directly affected who will have to painstakingly rebuild their lives, these riots don’t seem such a big story after all. Many places have frequent riots. A death tool of six would be a good week in Mexico City, or Rio, or Jo’burg, or Washington DC, and probably in Shanghai too if we knew the full truth. There have been riots in England before. It will do us English good next time there are riots in the Paris banlieux, perhaps we won’t be so smug about it.
Some things I have read have stuck in the memory. Private Eye dragged out some quotations from the 1981 riots. They were almost word for word what politicians and commentators are saying now. Lots of guff about loss of parental discipline, breakdown of family values, disadvantaged underclasses, and predictions of imminent doomsday.
There was a letter, also in Private Eye, from Northern Ireland, bemoaning that they suffer this stuff all the time yet the British press don’t care. It is a good point, but I guess that is what devolved government is for, to find local solutions for what are clearly local problems. A Scot also wrote in pointing out that descriptions of British riots were not accurate, since in truth they were all in England.
Then there are the politicians. Here, the Labour ones are on very thin ice bemoaning the way cutbacks have created an angry underclass. Surely these things take much more than a single year to simmer? And who has been in power for the thirteen years that these kids have been growing up?
But Tory are little better. As usual they mourn the loss of supposedly better times past, conveniently glossing over every statistic proving that beforehand there was even more poverty and family abuse. And the solution of punishment and more punishment is pretty thick. Bagehot wrote nicely to redeem the Economist a little when he/she argued that this was an English perennial solution dating back to colonial times – wish the troublemakers away. Where to, exactly? Penal colonies in Australia? Sorry, guys, these are our people, we can’t just make them vanish. I hope Ken Clarke sticks to his laudable justice principles during the coming weeks. Hooray for LibDems in government.
Myself, I think it is far more banal. Young men always have some urge to rebel, to make their mark in the world and show off to their peers. How they rebel is controlled by simple risk and reward. In the old days, eternal damnation was a deterrent from the Church, and tighter families also created deterrence, in good ways and bad ones. On the reward side, social media have made things easier – if you learn that a shop is ready to loot and all you have to do is join the crowd, then it is more tempting. Risk of sanction by the state is always limited, especially for kids with limited assets and prospects.
If we accept the banal explanation, responses can be more piecemeal.
The police can try to get smarter in developing intelligence from social media, and finding ways to amass more force more quickly in a locality.
Deterrents can be stepped up a little, though recognising that many perpetrators have little to lose.
Patient efforts at community building should continue. The same for vocational work and apprenticeship initiatives. Building tolerance between races and those of difference generally is always a good thing.
But one potential priority is not often mentioned in the UK, and that is the link to the quality of housing. I suspect that the quality of accommodation is a big driver towards law-abiding participation in society. If you live decently, you feel better and less excluded, and you are less likely to partake excessive rebellion.
I am always impressed by the housing development activity in the Netherlands. The root cause may be the lack of free land and the challenges of abundant water, but the outcome is fantastic. Everywhere is zoned, and each year, I see many projects of new housing developments and many more upgrading the worst existing housing. Unlike in the UK, you rarely see top-end housing going up, the mass of development is aimed at first-time buyers and at less affluent households. In the space of ten years, more than half of the low quality housing around the Hague seems to have been upgraded into very respectable dwellings. Holland has its social problems, but my guess is that the drive to decent housing for all is one policy which keeps them in check.
By contrast, most activity (and headlines) in the UK seem to be focused on the top-end and the green belt discussion. The result may be greater division, greater resentment, and greater squalor for many.
I applaud the coalition for its housing policies generally, and find it one of the biggest indictments of recent left-wing governments that they largely ignored housing. It was Maggie Thatcher who came up with the brilliant idea of selling council houses, and idea for shorter contracts rather than lifetime tenancies makes a lot of sense. It also has to be possible to evict trouble-makers and send them somewhere less desirable. But all of this requires a decent stock of housing to begin with.
Public-private partnership has worked (arguably) for schools and hospitals. Why not for house-building as well? Such a policy would not require much government investment, and it would create growth and jobs just when and where they are needed. But it might also be the most effective way to reduce the chance of future riots.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Time for Tobin
The Tobin tax is an idea named after a Nobel prize winner for economics. It was first mooted around the time that exchange rates moved from predominantly fixed to generally variable, around 1970. Its purpose then was to discourage wild flows of speculative money between currencies, and so generate stability.
Since then, the tax idea has received an airing every few years, but never come to pass. Most recently, Sarkozy and Merkel speculated about a Tobin tax as part of a solution for the current financial woes in Europe. Gordon Brown was also once a cautious advocate.
I love the idea. One reason is that increasingly financial services have become just like any other services, and a big part of the world economy, yet somehow free from transaction taxes. If I go to the barber, I receive a service and pay VAT. If I go to the bank, I pay VAT on the banker fees, but no tax on the transactions involved, which are the main outcome of the service. Firms whose business is buying and selling oil or cars pay tax on every transaction. Why shouldn’t firms whose business is buying and selling money? This is one massive global tax loophole – should we be surprised that so much global wealth ends up in this sector (which, incidentally, actually produces nothing)?
But the main reason I like it is very similar to the original proposal. One culprit for financial instability is the velocity of markets, driven mainly by technology and communications advances. It is simply too easy these days to transact. As a result, the whole herd moves at the slightest market signal, often via computer generated actions. I would extend the tax to all financial transactions, including buying and selling of equities and all derivatives. At a small rate of say 0,2%, this would not deter transactions, except for the most damaging, short-term kind, yet the tax would still generate massive revenue.
Of course, the tax has to be global, and this is one reason often quoted against it – by the way the same reason that we don’t pay tax on airplane fuel, another gross distortion. This is so manageable. Each of the G20 has a good reason to support the tax and a forum to instigate it. That covers 99% of all transactions, and rogue states outside would have to play ball or be limited to dealing among themselves. Tax havens still need financial trading partners.
On what to do with the revenue, there are some clear global goods such as the millennium goals or climate change research, but nowadays the financial world itself could do with some of it. Much as Norway has invested much of its oil wealth into a rainy day fund, the Euro could currently do with such a fund, and every other economy would benefit from the creation of that fund.
What really annoys me about Tobin is how the wealthy establishment and the financial community collude to make the subject undiscussable. Merkel and Sarkozy were duly ridiculed, though admittedly Tobin on its own would not solve the problems they should be solving and their ideas don’t do enough. As soon as the subject is raised, the finance lobby brings out its old arguments, including, sadly, my beloved Economist. And such is the power of finance over politics, and the overwhelming resources they control, that the tax never makes it to the policy table.
The two main arguments against strike me as tosh. One is that it would be hard to collect. Well, so is VAT, yet that works. There are far fewer institutions involved in financial transactions, monetary value is always clear, and most transactions go through regulated bodies, so the tax would be among most collectable of all. True, the scope of the tax would have to keep up with the ingenuity of traders to create new vehicles, but that should be achievable with goodwill.
The second argument is the one about tax havens, and that is just as much tosh. Sweden apparently imposed Tobin on its own in the 1960’s and, unsurprisingly, it backfired. The G20 is not Sweden.
Lots of other spurious stuff comes up, much of it thinly disguised populist gunk (the real goal of Merkel and Sarkozy is claimed by the Sun as getting Britain to pay to bail out the Euro). Read this executive summary: http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/tax-and-economy/executive-summary:-the-tobin-tax-%E2%80%93-reason-or-treason%3F/ , and especially the part where it claims to be a summary of arguments both for and against Tobin.
All in all, global politicians are as cowed on the topic of Tobin as British ones were on the subject of Rupert Murdoch. Well, last month that changed. What might tip the balance for Tobin?
Since then, the tax idea has received an airing every few years, but never come to pass. Most recently, Sarkozy and Merkel speculated about a Tobin tax as part of a solution for the current financial woes in Europe. Gordon Brown was also once a cautious advocate.
I love the idea. One reason is that increasingly financial services have become just like any other services, and a big part of the world economy, yet somehow free from transaction taxes. If I go to the barber, I receive a service and pay VAT. If I go to the bank, I pay VAT on the banker fees, but no tax on the transactions involved, which are the main outcome of the service. Firms whose business is buying and selling oil or cars pay tax on every transaction. Why shouldn’t firms whose business is buying and selling money? This is one massive global tax loophole – should we be surprised that so much global wealth ends up in this sector (which, incidentally, actually produces nothing)?
But the main reason I like it is very similar to the original proposal. One culprit for financial instability is the velocity of markets, driven mainly by technology and communications advances. It is simply too easy these days to transact. As a result, the whole herd moves at the slightest market signal, often via computer generated actions. I would extend the tax to all financial transactions, including buying and selling of equities and all derivatives. At a small rate of say 0,2%, this would not deter transactions, except for the most damaging, short-term kind, yet the tax would still generate massive revenue.
Of course, the tax has to be global, and this is one reason often quoted against it – by the way the same reason that we don’t pay tax on airplane fuel, another gross distortion. This is so manageable. Each of the G20 has a good reason to support the tax and a forum to instigate it. That covers 99% of all transactions, and rogue states outside would have to play ball or be limited to dealing among themselves. Tax havens still need financial trading partners.
On what to do with the revenue, there are some clear global goods such as the millennium goals or climate change research, but nowadays the financial world itself could do with some of it. Much as Norway has invested much of its oil wealth into a rainy day fund, the Euro could currently do with such a fund, and every other economy would benefit from the creation of that fund.
What really annoys me about Tobin is how the wealthy establishment and the financial community collude to make the subject undiscussable. Merkel and Sarkozy were duly ridiculed, though admittedly Tobin on its own would not solve the problems they should be solving and their ideas don’t do enough. As soon as the subject is raised, the finance lobby brings out its old arguments, including, sadly, my beloved Economist. And such is the power of finance over politics, and the overwhelming resources they control, that the tax never makes it to the policy table.
The two main arguments against strike me as tosh. One is that it would be hard to collect. Well, so is VAT, yet that works. There are far fewer institutions involved in financial transactions, monetary value is always clear, and most transactions go through regulated bodies, so the tax would be among most collectable of all. True, the scope of the tax would have to keep up with the ingenuity of traders to create new vehicles, but that should be achievable with goodwill.
The second argument is the one about tax havens, and that is just as much tosh. Sweden apparently imposed Tobin on its own in the 1960’s and, unsurprisingly, it backfired. The G20 is not Sweden.
Lots of other spurious stuff comes up, much of it thinly disguised populist gunk (the real goal of Merkel and Sarkozy is claimed by the Sun as getting Britain to pay to bail out the Euro). Read this executive summary: http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/tax-and-economy/executive-summary:-the-tobin-tax-%E2%80%93-reason-or-treason%3F/ , and especially the part where it claims to be a summary of arguments both for and against Tobin.
All in all, global politicians are as cowed on the topic of Tobin as British ones were on the subject of Rupert Murdoch. Well, last month that changed. What might tip the balance for Tobin?
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Manifesto for Manila
Safely home from a wonderful trip East, I’ve had time to think a bit about what my priorities would be to try to develop the place further. It is a wholly theoretical exercise, since winning power anywhere is a messy compromise between promoting a vision and getting elected, and then retaining a mandate. In Manila, that is truer than in most places with its crony politics. I’m also well aware that Europeans have spent much of history forcing their visions onto other cultures, with pretty dreadful results. Furthermore our European model looks pretty broken just now. Still, it passes the time.
Philippine politics is currently consumed by the reproductive health bill, bravely promoted by the president against strident opposition by the catholic church and other conservatives. While divorce and abortion are important, it does seem perverse to me that so much energy goes on a single issue, while the problems of poverty, overcrowding, economic weakness and corruption are so evident. Still, at least those issues matter more than the news story dominating the radio stations on Monday – that Paris Hilton had lost her mobile phone. The poor thing.
My campaign would focus on three issues – education, infrastructure and security.
Education is the biggest opportunity facing many developing countries. While health and other things clearly matter, education seems to me to give the best future return on investment. Currently, many of the best schools are run by the Church. They provide a decent education, but to a pitifully small share of the country’s young. The rest have to settle for woeful state-run schools, or for nothing at all. Of course, the Church schools charge fees, and apply other entry criteria to favour families who have existing status in society. These then feed similar universities.
This is similar to the problem of public schools in Britain, only on a much larger scale. There too, an infeasible share of Oxbridge undergraduates come from few, fee paying schools. Labour for years campaigned to close these schools down, on the grounds of fairness, and also with a belief that the elite would care more about state sponsored education if their own kids were not exempt from it. This has great merit, but it would be such a destructive waste.
The Philippines could afford this waste even less, so let us build on it. The Church could be encouraged to triple the number of such schools, while only marginally reducing resources allocated to existing ones. Then also greatly increase the number of available bursaries for poor kids, while also making life a bit tougher for the richer ones by raising entry standards – based on raw ability only. Finally, force universities to look to the state sector for most undergraduates, with a quota system for a time.
Even more important is to improve the quality of state schools. For sure, that would mean investment in infrastructure and teachers, but perhaps the private sector could help. The last link is to encourage parents to make their kids’ education a priority, and here, the existing government is laudably following the brilliant example of Brazil, where welfare hand outs for the poor have greatly increased, but with a string attached that children must attend school.
On infrastructure, I would be a bit of a communist planner. Plainly, what is missing is any long-term or joined-up thinking. Here is an example. We visited a friend in a recently opened condo unit. The unit was less 500 metres from a metro station, and the same from shops. We actually did walk from the metro, and what a walk! In the heat, we had to climb many staircases, cross busy roads, and finally walk right around the condo unit to reach its only entrance – placed round the back for reasons of security and parking. It is no surprise then that our friends have three cars, and use them to travel around the corner, thereby clogging the roads even more.
While money and personal convenience dictate everything, this will only get worse. Hence the only answer is some sort of grand Manila 2025 type scheme, with the future zoning and use of every square metre defined now and implemented gradually. Investment in public transport is critical, as are things like covered and air-conditioned walkways and proper bus stops. The scheme would have to address flood control, sewerage upgrades and of course road improvements too.
Massive investment in public-type housing would also be needed, as currently almost nothing exists between the luxury condo and the slum. Again, the private sector, Church, and imaginative finance can help. In Kuala Lumpur, I was always impressed by the lower-middle class housing being developed, in Manila I saw none. Then, many slums would need to be cleared up. Where to put these displaced people? Well, the new housing can help and so can an expansion of the city boundaries, as well as incentives to stop families moving from the countryside to Manila. But this would not be enough. Perhaps the Mexico solution would be required. There, a dense ring of shanty towns has developed around the city perimeter. They are hardly ideal, but at least it frees up the city itself, and the state has succeeded in making shanty living conditions almost bearable, and even created some property rights.
This will all take time and be expensive. One source of funds has to be taxing cars more, like in Singapore. It would not win me votes, but I would tax cars heavily for registration and use (fuel and tolls) and hit the SUV’s hardest. My friends and the next condo developers may otherwise need more than a covered walkway to change their habits.
The security policy would be all about professionalising the police and giving them legitimacy, and trying to get private security and guns off the streets. Mexico has tried this as well, which has involved taking on the drug barons. It would be ugly in Manila too. But a well-staffed, non-corrupt, police and judiciary is the only way to restore any control and get rid of guns, fences, and impunity for criminals. This will start with some investment, linked with some zero tolerance policies, including for police bribe-seeking. To his credit, the president has focused here, with some early successes, but it will require great backbone to stay the course. Part of this policy would be paid for by reducing spending on the armed forces. Sorry, the country has more important things to deal with than invading/defending the Spratleys.
So then, education, infrastructure and security. Dose this with promoting competition in business and honesty in tax paying, and you have a manifesto that might make a difference. Of course, there is no chance at all of this coming to pass. So, if you live in Manila, prepare for more guns and gridlock while the debate on birth controls continues. But you can console yourself that you have some of the best food and the best hospitality in the world, so you’ll probably still be smiling.
Philippine politics is currently consumed by the reproductive health bill, bravely promoted by the president against strident opposition by the catholic church and other conservatives. While divorce and abortion are important, it does seem perverse to me that so much energy goes on a single issue, while the problems of poverty, overcrowding, economic weakness and corruption are so evident. Still, at least those issues matter more than the news story dominating the radio stations on Monday – that Paris Hilton had lost her mobile phone. The poor thing.
My campaign would focus on three issues – education, infrastructure and security.
Education is the biggest opportunity facing many developing countries. While health and other things clearly matter, education seems to me to give the best future return on investment. Currently, many of the best schools are run by the Church. They provide a decent education, but to a pitifully small share of the country’s young. The rest have to settle for woeful state-run schools, or for nothing at all. Of course, the Church schools charge fees, and apply other entry criteria to favour families who have existing status in society. These then feed similar universities.
This is similar to the problem of public schools in Britain, only on a much larger scale. There too, an infeasible share of Oxbridge undergraduates come from few, fee paying schools. Labour for years campaigned to close these schools down, on the grounds of fairness, and also with a belief that the elite would care more about state sponsored education if their own kids were not exempt from it. This has great merit, but it would be such a destructive waste.
The Philippines could afford this waste even less, so let us build on it. The Church could be encouraged to triple the number of such schools, while only marginally reducing resources allocated to existing ones. Then also greatly increase the number of available bursaries for poor kids, while also making life a bit tougher for the richer ones by raising entry standards – based on raw ability only. Finally, force universities to look to the state sector for most undergraduates, with a quota system for a time.
Even more important is to improve the quality of state schools. For sure, that would mean investment in infrastructure and teachers, but perhaps the private sector could help. The last link is to encourage parents to make their kids’ education a priority, and here, the existing government is laudably following the brilliant example of Brazil, where welfare hand outs for the poor have greatly increased, but with a string attached that children must attend school.
On infrastructure, I would be a bit of a communist planner. Plainly, what is missing is any long-term or joined-up thinking. Here is an example. We visited a friend in a recently opened condo unit. The unit was less 500 metres from a metro station, and the same from shops. We actually did walk from the metro, and what a walk! In the heat, we had to climb many staircases, cross busy roads, and finally walk right around the condo unit to reach its only entrance – placed round the back for reasons of security and parking. It is no surprise then that our friends have three cars, and use them to travel around the corner, thereby clogging the roads even more.
While money and personal convenience dictate everything, this will only get worse. Hence the only answer is some sort of grand Manila 2025 type scheme, with the future zoning and use of every square metre defined now and implemented gradually. Investment in public transport is critical, as are things like covered and air-conditioned walkways and proper bus stops. The scheme would have to address flood control, sewerage upgrades and of course road improvements too.
Massive investment in public-type housing would also be needed, as currently almost nothing exists between the luxury condo and the slum. Again, the private sector, Church, and imaginative finance can help. In Kuala Lumpur, I was always impressed by the lower-middle class housing being developed, in Manila I saw none. Then, many slums would need to be cleared up. Where to put these displaced people? Well, the new housing can help and so can an expansion of the city boundaries, as well as incentives to stop families moving from the countryside to Manila. But this would not be enough. Perhaps the Mexico solution would be required. There, a dense ring of shanty towns has developed around the city perimeter. They are hardly ideal, but at least it frees up the city itself, and the state has succeeded in making shanty living conditions almost bearable, and even created some property rights.
This will all take time and be expensive. One source of funds has to be taxing cars more, like in Singapore. It would not win me votes, but I would tax cars heavily for registration and use (fuel and tolls) and hit the SUV’s hardest. My friends and the next condo developers may otherwise need more than a covered walkway to change their habits.
The security policy would be all about professionalising the police and giving them legitimacy, and trying to get private security and guns off the streets. Mexico has tried this as well, which has involved taking on the drug barons. It would be ugly in Manila too. But a well-staffed, non-corrupt, police and judiciary is the only way to restore any control and get rid of guns, fences, and impunity for criminals. This will start with some investment, linked with some zero tolerance policies, including for police bribe-seeking. To his credit, the president has focused here, with some early successes, but it will require great backbone to stay the course. Part of this policy would be paid for by reducing spending on the armed forces. Sorry, the country has more important things to deal with than invading/defending the Spratleys.
So then, education, infrastructure and security. Dose this with promoting competition in business and honesty in tax paying, and you have a manifesto that might make a difference. Of course, there is no chance at all of this coming to pass. So, if you live in Manila, prepare for more guns and gridlock while the debate on birth controls continues. But you can console yourself that you have some of the best food and the best hospitality in the world, so you’ll probably still be smiling.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Colonial Legacies
My two trips outside Europe this year have been to Mexico, in March, and to the Philippines, where I am now. Despite being on opposite sides of the world, the two countries have a similar feel about them. This has set me wondering whether the similar colonial legacies have had an enduring effect on this lands, since I have not felt the same impression from other South East Asian visits.
I should declare here that, even more than usual in this blog, I don’t really have much idea what I am blabbing on about. Though much travelled in Europe, I am pretty naïve outside of Europe. Most of my trips have been as a Shell visitor, pampered and shielded from reality. Even then, I have never been to Africa, except South Africa, and only once to Latin America, this year.
So what do I find here, and in Mexico, that might be from a colonial legacy? There are many factors, some of which might be symptoms, some deeper root causes.
First is the security. In Mexico, the police and army were everywhere, in the Philippines less so, yet in both places guns have been prevalent, and public places and private addresses are routinely guarded and fortified. Armed security guard must be one of the most readily available jobs in both places. It is intrusive, and a sad reflection on a society with great inequality and lack of trust in the official institution.
Next is the consumerism and its nature. Here, malls are everywhere, and local shops everywhere else. You are also bombarded with advertising. Top categories are food, health and beauty, mobile phones and car related. In Mexico it is the same. I find the emphasis on body enhancement rather sad. Most people have very little money, and that feels a rather wasteful way to spend it. Yet spend it they do, judging by the number of outlets and people buying. Sadly, I also see many pawnshops and debt management adverts.
The cars and transport is truly amazing. Here is a city of 12-24 million people, depending on how you count, with one highway quality road, just one or two over ground metro lines, and no trams or trains. No one seems to walk, maybe due to the heat and pollution as well as the dangerous walkways. There are a plethora of public buses, and cheap local transport in the form of little vans converted as a form of bus and tricycles. Yet many people still drive, and what cars they have! SUV’s abound, and the average age of cars seems low. The result is almost total gridlock. A few years ago, the government tried to ease congestion by banning each car one day per week based on its number plate. Most of the people I have met here got around that restriction by buying an extra car! Manila is worse than Mexico City, where at least the metro system appeared good, but the nightmare of transport is the same.
Inequality is staggering in both cities. Both have shanty areas and street life at the bottom, and every strata on the way up towards condo or hacienda life with multiple cars and servants. The plentiful malls in Manila seem designed to serve the separate classes, some full of exclusive brands and others feeling like bustling street markets.
Then we come to the politics. Both places boast democracy, but ones driven primarily by money. We look with distaste at Berlusconi’s Italy, but here the hostess of a popular chat show just happens to be the president’s niece. Money buys patronage and votes, and retention of privileges. True, individuals in both countries are incredibly generous, especially to their extended families and via Church charity, but the reality is that a car or a city flat are totally unaffordable from the salary from a decent starter job. Worse, education is the most stratified thing of all. Many kids get no schooling, free schools are woeful, and getting to college from anything but a fee paying school is next to impossible. Then jobs are advertised for graduates from the better colleges only (unless someone in the family can get you in).
I ask many people here the question why the Philippines has fallen so far behind its neighbours. I usually receive incomplete answers. Too many people, corrupt politicians, lack of infrastructure. Yet Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have or had all these things too. It is not enough.
Which brings me to my theory about colonial legacy. Colonialism is always bad, but if you had it, perhaps some is worse than others. What priorities did British colonists have? Raping the raw materials of their colonies was one, hardly a laudable goal. But the result may have been a few well-run companies, and some institutions and infrastructure to back them up, including some public schooling. Over generations, that may have equipped the societies to thrive once the Brits had gone.
I expect the Dutch, and even the French, colonies received similar legacies. Apart from a greater focus on a more authentic religion, I’m not even sure the Spanish were that different. My theory is that the bigger driver in Latin America and the Philippines has been the de facto US colonisation since 1900.
Much of what I find distasteful in Mexico City and Manila is reminiscent of the least functional aspects of the US. No public transport. Intrusive security. Inequality. Money based politics. Broken institutions. Poor public education. For many generations, the US has got away with it, perhaps because the prescription suited their nation in their state of development. But exporting that system to developing pseudo colonies appears to have been an unmitigated disaster.
If you are a bit jaded with the European model and what used to be called social democracy I advise you to spend some time in Manila. As the many priests here advise, it will help you to count your blessings.
Next week, if I find a bit more free time on holiday, I’ll think about what a one-term manifesto for improving the Philippines might look like. As with many problems, this one is much easier to diagnose than to solve.
I should declare here that, even more than usual in this blog, I don’t really have much idea what I am blabbing on about. Though much travelled in Europe, I am pretty naïve outside of Europe. Most of my trips have been as a Shell visitor, pampered and shielded from reality. Even then, I have never been to Africa, except South Africa, and only once to Latin America, this year.
So what do I find here, and in Mexico, that might be from a colonial legacy? There are many factors, some of which might be symptoms, some deeper root causes.
First is the security. In Mexico, the police and army were everywhere, in the Philippines less so, yet in both places guns have been prevalent, and public places and private addresses are routinely guarded and fortified. Armed security guard must be one of the most readily available jobs in both places. It is intrusive, and a sad reflection on a society with great inequality and lack of trust in the official institution.
Next is the consumerism and its nature. Here, malls are everywhere, and local shops everywhere else. You are also bombarded with advertising. Top categories are food, health and beauty, mobile phones and car related. In Mexico it is the same. I find the emphasis on body enhancement rather sad. Most people have very little money, and that feels a rather wasteful way to spend it. Yet spend it they do, judging by the number of outlets and people buying. Sadly, I also see many pawnshops and debt management adverts.
The cars and transport is truly amazing. Here is a city of 12-24 million people, depending on how you count, with one highway quality road, just one or two over ground metro lines, and no trams or trains. No one seems to walk, maybe due to the heat and pollution as well as the dangerous walkways. There are a plethora of public buses, and cheap local transport in the form of little vans converted as a form of bus and tricycles. Yet many people still drive, and what cars they have! SUV’s abound, and the average age of cars seems low. The result is almost total gridlock. A few years ago, the government tried to ease congestion by banning each car one day per week based on its number plate. Most of the people I have met here got around that restriction by buying an extra car! Manila is worse than Mexico City, where at least the metro system appeared good, but the nightmare of transport is the same.
Inequality is staggering in both cities. Both have shanty areas and street life at the bottom, and every strata on the way up towards condo or hacienda life with multiple cars and servants. The plentiful malls in Manila seem designed to serve the separate classes, some full of exclusive brands and others feeling like bustling street markets.
Then we come to the politics. Both places boast democracy, but ones driven primarily by money. We look with distaste at Berlusconi’s Italy, but here the hostess of a popular chat show just happens to be the president’s niece. Money buys patronage and votes, and retention of privileges. True, individuals in both countries are incredibly generous, especially to their extended families and via Church charity, but the reality is that a car or a city flat are totally unaffordable from the salary from a decent starter job. Worse, education is the most stratified thing of all. Many kids get no schooling, free schools are woeful, and getting to college from anything but a fee paying school is next to impossible. Then jobs are advertised for graduates from the better colleges only (unless someone in the family can get you in).
I ask many people here the question why the Philippines has fallen so far behind its neighbours. I usually receive incomplete answers. Too many people, corrupt politicians, lack of infrastructure. Yet Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have or had all these things too. It is not enough.
Which brings me to my theory about colonial legacy. Colonialism is always bad, but if you had it, perhaps some is worse than others. What priorities did British colonists have? Raping the raw materials of their colonies was one, hardly a laudable goal. But the result may have been a few well-run companies, and some institutions and infrastructure to back them up, including some public schooling. Over generations, that may have equipped the societies to thrive once the Brits had gone.
I expect the Dutch, and even the French, colonies received similar legacies. Apart from a greater focus on a more authentic religion, I’m not even sure the Spanish were that different. My theory is that the bigger driver in Latin America and the Philippines has been the de facto US colonisation since 1900.
Much of what I find distasteful in Mexico City and Manila is reminiscent of the least functional aspects of the US. No public transport. Intrusive security. Inequality. Money based politics. Broken institutions. Poor public education. For many generations, the US has got away with it, perhaps because the prescription suited their nation in their state of development. But exporting that system to developing pseudo colonies appears to have been an unmitigated disaster.
If you are a bit jaded with the European model and what used to be called social democracy I advise you to spend some time in Manila. As the many priests here advise, it will help you to count your blessings.
Next week, if I find a bit more free time on holiday, I’ll think about what a one-term manifesto for improving the Philippines might look like. As with many problems, this one is much easier to diagnose than to solve.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
The End of Deference
Traditional societies rely a lot on deference. People are given respect based on their role or experience. A patient offers deference to a doctor. The young defer to the old. Everyone defers to a policeman, and even more to a priest or a monarch. Less educated people defer to those with qualifications.
The Economist this week referred to the end of the age of deference , at least in the UK. Whatever may have remained twenty years ago has been lost due to a series of scandals. The royals were damaged by Charles and Diana. MP’s had little automatic respect anyway, but what they did have was lost over expenses. Now the Murdoch scandal has reduced confidence in the police. Journalists, of course, never commanded much respect. The horrible revelations about the Catholic Church have changed the way we view priests. Bank managers, when you can actually find one, are tainted. Nowadays, it is even acceptable, sometimes, to challenge a boss.
Germans have less class history to hold them back, but historically have placed great store on qualifications and experience. There, wages follow age much more than they follow current merit, and people will always show off their doctor-ships or other titles. But even this was challenged last year when a senior government minister was discovered to have plagiarised part of his doctoral thesis.
The Netherlands may be the least deferential society on earth. There, everyone has to earn their respect. I believe this lies at the root of the terrible customer service prevalent there. Shop assistants are essentially reminding customers that they command equal respect, and find any hint of obsequiousness inconsistent with that. Elsewhere in society, politicians, generals, even royals may be respected, but they all have to earn it as humans first. One good by-product may be that the police are generally more courteous there.
The first reaction of my generation and younger people to the end of deference is to cheer. Why should anyone command automatic respect? We are all humans, and we all need to earn the right to be heard and followed. Lazy deference held together many an out-dated institution for far too long, whether caps were doffed to landed gentry, or even colonial rulers. I find sad and frustrating the unthinking deference offered by my Mum to her GP, anyone in a bank, and sometimes even any white male above 30 wearing a suit.
Like so many trends, the one reducing deference is mainly a result of globalisation and technology. When everyone you ever met came from your village, it was much more natural to respect an established hierarchy – even if you did not have personal experience to cause you to defer, you certainly had friends and family to offer you secondary evidence. Nowadays, qualifications can come from anywhere, our Facebook friends span the globe, and Wikipedia allows us to check credentials, and even to quickly match knowledge.
But is the end of deference wholly a good thing? What about schooling? Even twenty years ago, a parent approaching a teacher would most likely be looking up to the teacher for information and feedback about their child. Now it is most often to complain or to judge the teacher. I can feel the same things happening now with medical professionals. The natural outcome is caution – both sets of professionals become more likely to cover themselves against future complaint rather than seek the best outcome for the student/patient, at least compared with before. In schools, discipline gets worse and less teaching takes place, while health services and police forces spend precious resources on documentation and litigation.
The deference-free Netherlands is also rather a noisy place. Everyone feels empowered to give their opinion on everything, decisions are slow, and often there is more talking than listening. When I reach the departure lounge in Faro airport en route for Amsterdam I always notice an unwelcome increase in volume.
Deference is one of the first things we are taught, by our parents, when we know no better. Do as you are told, speak when you are spoken to. It is natural and healthy to rebel against this model as we enter adolescence. If we are blessed with smart parents and other good role models, they start to use subtler techniques to coach us and to earn our continued respect. But many of us swing from unthinking deference all the way to unthinking disrespectfulness. Perhaps societies need to go through the same process.
Asians, Africans and others criticise our more challenging societies. True, life can be simpler with clear values and a hierarchy of deference. Families may well stay closer as a result. But the downside is apparent too, when you observe attitudes to women and political abuse of power for example. I believe we can lose the deference but keep most of its advantages.
So, on balance, good riddance to deference. All these UK scandals might finally rid us of our out-dated class-ridden model. Parenting might improve too. I defer to no one, yet I try to be open to anyone, with a bias towards respect. I make positive assumptions, but am always ready to challenge them before they become fixed views. I also expect deference from no one over the age of five. Increasingly, most of us follow this sort of philosophy, even the royal family, and society is better for it. If the volume goes up too much, we can always tune out every so often, at Faro airport or anywhere else.
The Economist this week referred to the end of the age of deference , at least in the UK. Whatever may have remained twenty years ago has been lost due to a series of scandals. The royals were damaged by Charles and Diana. MP’s had little automatic respect anyway, but what they did have was lost over expenses. Now the Murdoch scandal has reduced confidence in the police. Journalists, of course, never commanded much respect. The horrible revelations about the Catholic Church have changed the way we view priests. Bank managers, when you can actually find one, are tainted. Nowadays, it is even acceptable, sometimes, to challenge a boss.
Germans have less class history to hold them back, but historically have placed great store on qualifications and experience. There, wages follow age much more than they follow current merit, and people will always show off their doctor-ships or other titles. But even this was challenged last year when a senior government minister was discovered to have plagiarised part of his doctoral thesis.
The Netherlands may be the least deferential society on earth. There, everyone has to earn their respect. I believe this lies at the root of the terrible customer service prevalent there. Shop assistants are essentially reminding customers that they command equal respect, and find any hint of obsequiousness inconsistent with that. Elsewhere in society, politicians, generals, even royals may be respected, but they all have to earn it as humans first. One good by-product may be that the police are generally more courteous there.
The first reaction of my generation and younger people to the end of deference is to cheer. Why should anyone command automatic respect? We are all humans, and we all need to earn the right to be heard and followed. Lazy deference held together many an out-dated institution for far too long, whether caps were doffed to landed gentry, or even colonial rulers. I find sad and frustrating the unthinking deference offered by my Mum to her GP, anyone in a bank, and sometimes even any white male above 30 wearing a suit.
Like so many trends, the one reducing deference is mainly a result of globalisation and technology. When everyone you ever met came from your village, it was much more natural to respect an established hierarchy – even if you did not have personal experience to cause you to defer, you certainly had friends and family to offer you secondary evidence. Nowadays, qualifications can come from anywhere, our Facebook friends span the globe, and Wikipedia allows us to check credentials, and even to quickly match knowledge.
But is the end of deference wholly a good thing? What about schooling? Even twenty years ago, a parent approaching a teacher would most likely be looking up to the teacher for information and feedback about their child. Now it is most often to complain or to judge the teacher. I can feel the same things happening now with medical professionals. The natural outcome is caution – both sets of professionals become more likely to cover themselves against future complaint rather than seek the best outcome for the student/patient, at least compared with before. In schools, discipline gets worse and less teaching takes place, while health services and police forces spend precious resources on documentation and litigation.
The deference-free Netherlands is also rather a noisy place. Everyone feels empowered to give their opinion on everything, decisions are slow, and often there is more talking than listening. When I reach the departure lounge in Faro airport en route for Amsterdam I always notice an unwelcome increase in volume.
Deference is one of the first things we are taught, by our parents, when we know no better. Do as you are told, speak when you are spoken to. It is natural and healthy to rebel against this model as we enter adolescence. If we are blessed with smart parents and other good role models, they start to use subtler techniques to coach us and to earn our continued respect. But many of us swing from unthinking deference all the way to unthinking disrespectfulness. Perhaps societies need to go through the same process.
Asians, Africans and others criticise our more challenging societies. True, life can be simpler with clear values and a hierarchy of deference. Families may well stay closer as a result. But the downside is apparent too, when you observe attitudes to women and political abuse of power for example. I believe we can lose the deference but keep most of its advantages.
So, on balance, good riddance to deference. All these UK scandals might finally rid us of our out-dated class-ridden model. Parenting might improve too. I defer to no one, yet I try to be open to anyone, with a bias towards respect. I make positive assumptions, but am always ready to challenge them before they become fixed views. I also expect deference from no one over the age of five. Increasingly, most of us follow this sort of philosophy, even the royal family, and society is better for it. If the volume goes up too much, we can always tune out every so often, at Faro airport or anywhere else.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Some predictions
Every so often I like to set myself up for future ridicule by trying to predict how things might change. It is nearly thirty years now since I joined the workforce. There were no computers, no mobile phones. No one ever mentioned climate change (but everyone still talked all the time about the strange weather). My Dad died aged sixty six and people thought it was an average sort of score. Until I went to London I had hardly ever met any dark skinned people.
So, the last thirty years have seen dramatic change, more than any in human history. The Economist and others now herald the start of what they call the Anthropocene, or era where humans themselves are the prime determinants of planetary evolution. How might things look thirty years from now?
Some things are well documented. The human race will continue to grow. The climate will have changed a lot, or at least most people think so. Asia will dominate economically, and Africa will be the rising star. We will live longer, and work longer.
But that is too easy – it just takes a current trend and extrapolates. Here are some other predictions, many of them also building on current trends, but maybe more daring in sketching outcomes. Generally, I look to sciences or disciplines which are newer or seem less fully determined. IT and communications, and climate geography are obvious examples, but I think this description also applies to economics and medicine. Finally, there are the results likely socially from other trends.
In medicine, I still contend that we know almost nothing. Just consider your last trip to your GP, or the last sad story you listened to of a friend with symptoms who was shuffled from expert to expert but without any diagnosis, let alone effective treatment, forthcoming. My guess is that in thirty years we will be able to self-diagnose and self-treat things that seem incurable today. Most folk will still have good quality life aged a hundred, and some might make 130.
Where will we see most effects? Some will be in classical medicine for sure, with everything from cancer to common colds losing their sting. But I fancy even bigger changes in three other areas.
First, there will be a step change in our understanding of the mind. This could radically alter our ability to conquer things like depression or addiction, and also make a difference to our social skills and empathy. Imagine the value in that. It is not so unlikely, already scientists are making amazing progress in understanding these things, and remedies will not be far behind. Here also I believe globalisation will help, as the mysterious, mainly mental, benefits of Asian and homeopathic remedies will start to be understood more widely.
Second, there is cosmetics. Laser eye surgery is already fool-proof, though so far only for short sight. It may well be possible to routinely operate on new-borns (or maybe adolescents) to give them cost-free perfect eye-sight for life. Why not? And perfect hearing too – I would love that one. We will be able to change our looks, and probably be able to take pills to sort out obesity and other things we don’t like about ourselves.
The last medical area is pre-birth. Sex selection at conception may become possible. Radical reductions of disabilities certainly will. This last one is an ethical minefield, and have threatening side effects, but the march of progress will be relentless.
The next discipline which is ripe for progress is economics. I studied this in the seventies, and it was clear than that what it said in the textbooks fell woefully short of describing reality. Since then, the textbooks have been re-written at least twice more, yet we still know nothing. My guess is that in thirty years they will look back at the 2009 banking crisis (and the 2012 one?) and cringe at the appalling policy mistakes born of crass ignorance. Economics feels somehow solvable, and I sense we are close to some powerful solutions. Of course, politics will still get in the way, but my feeling is that huge progress is possible, with enormous potential benefits for everyone.
Next, geography, specifically climate geography. I am an optimist on climate change, not because of any faith in humanity or politicians to change habits, but because of the potential of science. In thirty years we might be able to actually control a lot of the weather, and deal with (at least for now) annoying things like pollution. There may be solutions there way outside our current blinkers, and desperation may well guide us to them. Any wouldn’t it be nice if it was always sunny but not too hot on our European summer holidays?
IT and Communications will of course continue to evolve at a rapid pace. One future trend will be the use of voice and even mind to send signals. Maybe we’ll all be walking around with a I-pad cum I-pod cum I-phone somehow secreted about our person with no need for screen or keyboard. I have predicted before that live culture will become available personally, and I saw last week that the New York Opera has started to sell live computer feeds of their shows. Why not? Better to get 50 cents from 1 million people than 100 dollars from just 1000. They can have both. And I look forward to enjoying such things in the Algarve.
Lastly, what about social evolution? I think many of the established norms of how we live will break down. Already there is a blur between work and retirement, and in future the whole concept of work will become less well defined. We will work for many employers on spot type contracts doing things in our own time and place. I also wonder if the institution of marriage will not fray further, as it is a bit of an artificial construction linked to child-rearing, and child-rearing will become a smaller share of our lives.
Linked to the two trends above, the concept of residence will become more fluid, and more of us will divide our time between different places. The bureaucracy to support this cannot come soon enough for me: yesterday I tried to renew my Dutch driving licence, as a Brit living partly in Portugal. The lady behind the desk was very pleasant, but defeated. Finally, sexuality will probably become more fluid too. Who knows, life in the 1960’s might turn out to be a rehearsal for life in the 2040’s – with many of the same people alive to enjoy both!
All of this is wild speculation, and much of it pure nonsense. But I find it fun, and recommend this exercise. One technique I have used in called Clashing. In that you don’t just look at one trend and consider its evolution, but you consciously look at two trends together. That opens the mind to a wider set of possibilities.
So, the last thirty years have seen dramatic change, more than any in human history. The Economist and others now herald the start of what they call the Anthropocene, or era where humans themselves are the prime determinants of planetary evolution. How might things look thirty years from now?
Some things are well documented. The human race will continue to grow. The climate will have changed a lot, or at least most people think so. Asia will dominate economically, and Africa will be the rising star. We will live longer, and work longer.
But that is too easy – it just takes a current trend and extrapolates. Here are some other predictions, many of them also building on current trends, but maybe more daring in sketching outcomes. Generally, I look to sciences or disciplines which are newer or seem less fully determined. IT and communications, and climate geography are obvious examples, but I think this description also applies to economics and medicine. Finally, there are the results likely socially from other trends.
In medicine, I still contend that we know almost nothing. Just consider your last trip to your GP, or the last sad story you listened to of a friend with symptoms who was shuffled from expert to expert but without any diagnosis, let alone effective treatment, forthcoming. My guess is that in thirty years we will be able to self-diagnose and self-treat things that seem incurable today. Most folk will still have good quality life aged a hundred, and some might make 130.
Where will we see most effects? Some will be in classical medicine for sure, with everything from cancer to common colds losing their sting. But I fancy even bigger changes in three other areas.
First, there will be a step change in our understanding of the mind. This could radically alter our ability to conquer things like depression or addiction, and also make a difference to our social skills and empathy. Imagine the value in that. It is not so unlikely, already scientists are making amazing progress in understanding these things, and remedies will not be far behind. Here also I believe globalisation will help, as the mysterious, mainly mental, benefits of Asian and homeopathic remedies will start to be understood more widely.
Second, there is cosmetics. Laser eye surgery is already fool-proof, though so far only for short sight. It may well be possible to routinely operate on new-borns (or maybe adolescents) to give them cost-free perfect eye-sight for life. Why not? And perfect hearing too – I would love that one. We will be able to change our looks, and probably be able to take pills to sort out obesity and other things we don’t like about ourselves.
The last medical area is pre-birth. Sex selection at conception may become possible. Radical reductions of disabilities certainly will. This last one is an ethical minefield, and have threatening side effects, but the march of progress will be relentless.
The next discipline which is ripe for progress is economics. I studied this in the seventies, and it was clear than that what it said in the textbooks fell woefully short of describing reality. Since then, the textbooks have been re-written at least twice more, yet we still know nothing. My guess is that in thirty years they will look back at the 2009 banking crisis (and the 2012 one?) and cringe at the appalling policy mistakes born of crass ignorance. Economics feels somehow solvable, and I sense we are close to some powerful solutions. Of course, politics will still get in the way, but my feeling is that huge progress is possible, with enormous potential benefits for everyone.
Next, geography, specifically climate geography. I am an optimist on climate change, not because of any faith in humanity or politicians to change habits, but because of the potential of science. In thirty years we might be able to actually control a lot of the weather, and deal with (at least for now) annoying things like pollution. There may be solutions there way outside our current blinkers, and desperation may well guide us to them. Any wouldn’t it be nice if it was always sunny but not too hot on our European summer holidays?
IT and Communications will of course continue to evolve at a rapid pace. One future trend will be the use of voice and even mind to send signals. Maybe we’ll all be walking around with a I-pad cum I-pod cum I-phone somehow secreted about our person with no need for screen or keyboard. I have predicted before that live culture will become available personally, and I saw last week that the New York Opera has started to sell live computer feeds of their shows. Why not? Better to get 50 cents from 1 million people than 100 dollars from just 1000. They can have both. And I look forward to enjoying such things in the Algarve.
Lastly, what about social evolution? I think many of the established norms of how we live will break down. Already there is a blur between work and retirement, and in future the whole concept of work will become less well defined. We will work for many employers on spot type contracts doing things in our own time and place. I also wonder if the institution of marriage will not fray further, as it is a bit of an artificial construction linked to child-rearing, and child-rearing will become a smaller share of our lives.
Linked to the two trends above, the concept of residence will become more fluid, and more of us will divide our time between different places. The bureaucracy to support this cannot come soon enough for me: yesterday I tried to renew my Dutch driving licence, as a Brit living partly in Portugal. The lady behind the desk was very pleasant, but defeated. Finally, sexuality will probably become more fluid too. Who knows, life in the 1960’s might turn out to be a rehearsal for life in the 2040’s – with many of the same people alive to enjoy both!
All of this is wild speculation, and much of it pure nonsense. But I find it fun, and recommend this exercise. One technique I have used in called Clashing. In that you don’t just look at one trend and consider its evolution, but you consciously look at two trends together. That opens the mind to a wider set of possibilities.
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