Asia's Chance

Sitting in New York or London, we can become sucked into a partial narrative for humanity. We see political dysfunction, growing inequality and a resumption of the cold war and we become depressed. But one continent has two thirds of humanity, and has altogether a better story to tell.

True, Asia has issues as well. The Middle East is part of Asia. The growing tensions between China and its neighbours are reminiscent for some of the drift of European powers into war a hundred years ago. And there is plenty of brutality and repression and abject poverty around in Asia too.

Banyan, the Economist’s Asia commentator, can be quite a negative writer. This week he or she bemoaned the state of Asean, the group of ten south east Asian nations seeking to forge common direction. Due to domestic issues, well known in Thailand and Burma but less reported in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and even Singapore, Asean is making slower progress than hoped for on issues such as free trade.

Well, I prefer to see a half full glass. Firstly, we should reflect on what has already been achieved within the last generation or two. Progress in Asia during that time has been unprecedented in human history. Almost all global economic growth from the last thirty years has come from Asia. That the UN has achieved such remarkable progress on its millennial goals is largely down to Asia. Child mortality, life expectancy, human rights and economic well-being have all moved in a positive direction at rapid pace, right across the continent. We might foresee war in the future, but we should also note the context of lack of war in the recent past – even supposedly civilized Europe cannot match the Asia record on that.

Further, contrary to the view of Banyan, recent events and trends seem to me to give Asia a unique chance to move even further ahead in the next twenty years or so. We can look at this country by country, in order of population, so starting with China.

The Chinese story is utterly remarkable and well documented. What is less appreciated is how the current leadership seems to be setting about fixing some of the things that made such progress hard to sustain. Quietly, the leaders are transforming the economy to be consumer led. Pensions are being introduced at sustainable dates and levels. Environmental flaws are being addressed. And the endemic corruption within the ruling system is being exposed as well. This is so impressive. Draconian measures such as a one child policy, treatment of minorities, forced relocation and frequent executions are plainly undesirable, but the regime, and even the system, has to take vast credit for a phenomenal set of achievements. I think China will go from strength to strength.

Next comes India, which has at last elected a leader with some mandate and clear agenda. The latent potential of India is like nowhere else on earth, and the social and health progress should be stunning in the next decade or two, built around such simple things as provision of proper toilets. Modi has his skeletons and his prejudices, but again the overall story is one of opportunity being grasped. He might even make progress with Pakistan.

Third in population comes Indonesia, where a charismatic and empathetic leader has recently been elected too. Finally, that country looks set to move away from the shadow of the military and oligarch families, and surely it will be the better for it, so long as there is no backlash. Jokowi’s priorities of health and education and of dragging the poor into society appear spot on, and might even work. That way lies another engine for human development and growth.

Next comes Pakistan, which is hardly a poster child. But even here signs are stronger than they were five years ago. At least the denial about military and security policy seems to be ebbing. This is another land with massive latent potential, and an upward trajectory at last seems more likely than a downward one. Then comes Bangladesh, which has improved on development goals but has broken politics, so that one might go backwards before it can resume success. Japan has its problems too, though a concerted effort to break the cycle of deflation and stagnation is having some successes. I also think that Japan being more forceful in the world has an upside too: engagement can lead to conflict, but also to Japan pulling more of its weight in supporting development elsewhere.

Number seven in population is the Philippines. Here again the president is notably less corrupt than predecessors and economic indicators at last start to point in a better direction. There is also the courage to deal with the Muslim minority issue, where some progress towards self-determination has been made. The Philippines is another work-in-progress of a good news story, in another land with huge upside.

Vietnam I know little about but does appear stable. Iran has a huge upside if only the West would have the humility to strike a deal with it – by the way the most likely legacy of the recent disgraceful Republican letter and the invite to Netanyahu is the loss of any global consensus on sanctions. People should be careful what they ask for. Turkey has had a great decade, and may even make progress with assimilating its Kurds, though Erdogan seems to be suffering from overreach lately.

Thailand is the only story of negative trends in the whole list of top Asians that I can see, and heaven only knows what chaos will ensue when the aged king dies. But next comes Burma, where challenges remain but we should remember that five years ago no-one gave any credence at all to what has emerged there. The last nation with population over 50m and number fifteen on the list is South Korea, which remains a poster child for democratic progress anywhere.

So here we have a continent that has achieved truly remarkable things in the last thirty years, yet where I see many trends seeming to make conditions even more favourable in the next period, with only one nation heading backwards and most heading forwards, some with incredible upsides. There are even good stories from lower down the list – Afghanistan has sound leadership for the first time in decades, and so does Sri Lanka.

There is evidence outside Asia of the coming Asian age. The top selective public school in New York has 70% Asian Americans – the future consequences of this sort of thing are immense.

What does this all mean? Well, overall it gives me cause to celebrate. There is good cause to believe in another burst of human development from Asia in the next generation, with benefits for all of us. With apologies for slipping into wild generalization, Asian values tend to be respectful, consensual, caring and peaceful. There is less dangerous religious baggage than in other parts of the world. On the other hand, transitions are always tough, and we cannot predict an era of blissful peace: far from it.

How should we respond, whether Asian or not? If I were younger, I’d certainly consider learning an Asian language, seeking out Asian friends and trying to understand come of the cultures better. All of us can read the news and observe current affairs aware that our lens may be out of focus or missing a dimension. We can certainly try to fight our own fears and prejudices, and avoid being party to policies or opinions that cling to outdated thoughts about white supremacy or xenophobia or “protecting national interests” – we should be especially careful what we wish for in those areas.

But mostly we can simply celebrate what could be a wonderful century for humanity, assuming we can avoid some of the transitional potholes.

On Ignorance

I have had a lot of polarised experiences lately from reading about people and from listening to them. It seems somehow that the smart are getting smarter and the dumb dumber.

I am amazed almost daily by the progress achieved by humanity. Each week the Economist obituary introduces me to a true hero or heroine. When I work with youngsters I am impressed time and again. The rate of progress in behavioural sciences is awe-inspiring. Just browsing on Wikipedia can give me such pleasure, for the increased range of fascinating knowledge so readily available and the brilliance of fellow humans. This is truly an enlightened age.

But then there is the other side. Each day I witness breath-taking ignorance, often openly expressed with pride. It is often the ignorance of ignorance that gives me pause.

Some examples are in order. Two weeks ago I was on a train from Philadelphia that broke down. As usual in these situations, people actually started talking to each other. It appears that the rolling stock on this line is prone to breakdown, since many seem to have witnessed it before. Poor Amtrak came in for a lot of criticism, not surprisingly in the circumstances. But out poured all sorts of other theories. Apparently, the main reason for poor infrastructure in the US is that the country invests most of its funds into propping up other economies! Someone claimed this, at typical New Yorker volume, and many seemed to agree, while no one demurred.

Yesterday, our daughter came home from school and asked if Italy and France were safe to travel to. Seemingly one of the kids at school had mentioned a plan to travel to those countries, and the principal, no less, had almost tried to bar her from the trip, on the grounds that the places were too unsafe.

Then we can add in all we read on discussion fora or as comments to articles. Many people are struck by how mean this material is, but I find the ignorance more astonishing. The contributors really believe what they write, and what they write is just so far away from anything that could remotely be true as to make me wonder how they ever exercise their brains at all.

So I’ve tried to draw some conclusions. First, I’m not so sure things are any more polarised than they ever were, it is only that now more beliefs are more visible.

When I heard about the unsafe France and Italy story, my first reaction was that the perpetrator had no right to his responsible position. I still think that. But then I thought about something that happened to me in 1985, when I was living in Northern Ireland, during what is known as the Troubles, when the place was close to civil war and many killings happened each year.

Northern Ireland was probably the least safe place to be in Europe at the time. By contrast, the rest of Ireland might have been the safest. Nothing ever happened. Few lived there, the place was just full of fields and pubs and villages and simple living in the rain. One Friday at lunchtime in the Shell canteen I happened to mention to some tanker drivers that I was going to the south for the weekend. They looked at me in horror. Quickly I wondered if I had made a political faux pas, but soon they revealed their true belief: they told me it was not safe there.

So probably things have not changed all that much, it is just that more of us has wider windows into the lives and opinions of others. Comment sections did not exist thirty years. Then again, nor did Wikipedia, and the Economist and other information sources worked with a much narrower range of sources. So we weren’t blessed with so much of the best of humanity, yet we were spared from some of the most ignorant.

Another factor may be that the ignorant have got louder. Before, we were less encouraged to be curious, and maybe with were a bit deferent and shy in expressing our opinions, more in awe of experts or even more senior family members. But now so much information, factual and otherwise, is available everywhere, so we all have a temptation to become part of the noise. Generally I celebrate that, and I love the way education has moved from facts to enquiry, but clearly there are downsides.

With the cacophony and with modern social media, are we talking more than listening? Are we being selective in what we pay attention to in order to keep the noise manageable, and not challenging our chosen sources enough? There is an idea going around that with all this complexity we tend to limit ourselves to voices that reinforce our existing prejudices.

A possible outcome is that we are all more open to be brainwashed. We used to trust the BBC, and know what to trust and what to ignore from Labour and Tories. Now we are confused and get lazy. Fox News can claim that Birmingham runs under Sharia Law and a lot of people choose to believe it.

This has uncomfortable consequences for democracy. We can see how politics in polarising and becoming nastier in democratic countries. We like to blame gerrymandering and the corrosive effect of money. But none of this would matter, indeed it would not even happen, without the ignorance and apathy of the general public.

Democracy should be stronger than ever, thanks to the wide availability of information, improvements in education and the breakdown of social deference. Even technology can help, for example via instant referenda. But the truth is much more sordid. Many are not fit or at least not interested, and the crowd can be swayed by populism or biased media, often driven by hidden money. The result is corruption, cynicism and cronyism, all the things that democracies like to accuse non-democracies of suffering from.

Some elites react by circumventing democracy. The EU commission, central banks, civil services and even armed forces are all guilty of this. In the short term, this can protect the public from their own incompetence, but in the longer term it only goes to feed the cynicism, with bodies such as the EU becoming targets for anger.

What can be done? Obviously the temptation to limit democratic rights has to be resisted – it is that sort of elitist logic that originally denied votes to women or black people. We also have to be careful not to overpraise a system like China’s, where a seemingly benign elite appears to have made a better job overall of running the country than most democracies.

No, somehow we have to find a way to muddle through. It will be healthy to be honest about the failings of democracy. In the longer term, further improvements in education and technology might help us pass a positive tipping point.

In the meantime, those of us that care owe it to democracy to make efforts to protect the system from its worst failings. Whatever our preferred policies, we have to find the energy to fight the influence of money, cynical gerrymandering or raising hurdles to be eligible to vote. We should withhold our votes from those seeking to undermine democracy in those ways. We should campaign to place decisions closer to where the impact will be felt, which generally means smaller national parliaments but larger local ones and more cross-border ones. This stuff is much more dull than taxation or immigration policy – but in the end it is this stuff which could prevent the whole democratic edifice from collapsing.

Another individual step could be to celebrate ignorance rather than to condemn it. We are taught that “I don’t know” is a weak answer. Far from it! Embracing ignorance is humble, and invites curiosity to learn. Similarly, let us all try to challenge our assumptions as often as we can, and encourage others to do the same. If such values could become even stronger in our education systems, then so much the better.

How to handle Russia

The Economist has a new editor. I learnt that she is a woman, a fact given away by John Micklethwait, in his excellent valedictory editorial. A bit of work on Google this morning reveals her name as Zanny Minton Beddoes.

I don’t know if it is a co-incidence, but this week saw by far the worst article I have ever read in the magazine, entitled “From Cold War to Hot War”, about Russia.

The piece could have been written by a retired colonel from the seventies. I remember at school that once a year some old guy in a faded uniform would come to speak to us. It was always the same, the purpose was to scare us with propaganda. I guess they thought public school kids might become opinion formers, or future recruits to military or intelligence. More likely, sensible schools wouldn’t have let these people near their kids. I remember misleading charts full of outsize Russian tanks seemingly on the point of invading Eastbourne – captain Mainwaring could not have done it better.

At college, I met my first Russian, a girl with many of the same quirks as the rest of us, a bit weird but in a normal, reassuring way. Before that, I seriously thought that all Russians were rabid communists. Once I had made the connection, I vowed never to be fooled by such nonsense again.

It was a good lesson, and one that has stood the test of time. I have developed a nose for censorship and a healthy scepticsm about the judgement of others. Such antennae have been especially active since moving to the US. Yesterday’s Russians have become today’s Muslims. But now it seems the Russians are back in the frame as well.

From the Economist, I have come to expect rigour, balance and some practical options. This article lacked all three.

I hated the regular twinning of EU and NATO. From the article, you could almost think they were the same organisation. In reality they are very different.

The EU promotes economic and human development among its member states. It does not threaten anyone, has admirable governance and attempts to be transparent. NATO is a military alliance. It aims to project military power and threat to promote the interests of its member states. It was formed specifically to contain Russia, and is dominated by the US. Its governance is far from transparent.

Viewed from Russia, the EU and NATO will appear completely different. One is a potential trading partner, a forum for development, and a threat only in terms of rule of business law and as a demonstration to Russian people that alternative economic models might be stronger than the Kremlin’s. The other is a direct, military threat, aimed at the throat of the bear at all times.

I hated the box “In the Kremlin’s pocket”. We were supposed to conclude that many political parties across Europe were somehow stooges for Russia. As far as I could tell, the only so-called evidence was that the FN in France had accepted a loan from Russia. The rest was innuendo, and pretty pathetic innuendo at that.

I hated the chart comparing Russia’s defence spending and NATO’s. It used the puerile device of starting from a year where Russia’s spending was lowest and then indexing – so that Russia’s spending now appeared more threatening.

But also striking, an ultimately more worrying, was the lack of ideas. The article noted how Putin was fighting on many fronts, and the tactics he uses, such as cycles taking military ground and then negotiating a pause. But I didn’t really see any thoughts about what to do about the situation. There was not even an opinion about the extent to arm the Ukrainian government – correctly pointing out that this would play into Putin’s hand by validating his story about the conflict being stoked from behind by the US.

I am no apologist for Putin. He was schooled in the KGB and shameless in tactics and disrespect for humanity. Actions in Chechnya, Abkhazia, Transdniester and Crimea are pretty indefensible, as was his cynical and inhumane reaction to the downing of the Malaysian airliner. The Litvinenko story is frightening and consistent.

But Putin and his coterie will only be controlled if we try to understand the world from their eyes. We can hazard some guesses.

Russian history of the last hundred years has been repetitive humiliation. Losses in both world wars were horrific. The state collapsed in the 1980’s. Afghanistan showed the ineptness of the military. They were lectured by Reagan and then Bush. The country was led by an alcoholic stooge – when Yeltsin danced at conferences or failed to get off a plane in Dublin, the rest of the world laughed, but just imagine the hurt that would cause in a patriot. For all his flaws, the only one that seemed to project any authority was Stalin. And the Russian Orthodox Church gives God’s cover for doing what it takes to restore greatness.

Then there is the world map. Go back far enough and choose your date, and Russia encompassed much of Europe. Even now, its sheer scale is truly awesome. When Putin was growing up, the borders with places like Ukraine or Lithuania were more like between administrative regions than nations. He’ll have been raised on pictures of a Russian Crimea or Georgia. In his mind, that is probably the correct order of things.

Then, as a KGB man, he must take a cynical but perhaps realistic view of the CIA. He will know the extent of covert operations during the cold war and the tactics employed, and how nothing much was dismantled after 1990. Small wonder he sees CIA plots in Kiev, Tbilisi and everywhere else – and is he wrong? Responses about democracy and the will of the people wear pretty thin when we see the democratic weakening of congress and the double standards over Crimea.

Finally, he’ll take a jaundiced view of the US itself. Here is a nation that undermines international organisations, defends an occupation, invades at will, seems to have a congress controlled by sinister money, and rescinds on agreements at will. When poked by tiny Cuba, the US went into a fifty-year sulk, but it still has the gall to talk of freedom and values. Now there is ill-disguised cynical economic war too, from a nation supposedly espousing free markets.

I guess that will be a large part of the Putin perspective. We can add in some paranoia and politics at home, a perpetual fear of everything and everyone and a controlling manipulation to manage the indefensible. Further, he will feel a horrible shame and jealousy of others that have shamed Russia economically.

This has to be the start of a basis to respond. A report for the UK government today found that poor diplomacy meant that the UK and EU did not realise what a threat the purported Ukraine/EU agreement at the end of 2013 would be seen in Russia. True, but surely you don’t need an army of diplomats to deduce this, merely a simple willingness to see the world through other eyes. This does not seem to have been a strength of US or UK foreign policy lately.

It will be hard now to find a workable accommodation over Ukraine, without more loss of life or loss of face or risk of escalation. The only place to start, as always, is to gain the high ground by respectful use of genuinely international institutions, for example by involving China, and by scaling down the military rhetoric.

The Economist was right about one thing: in the end the only way to offer a better life for Russians is to demonstrate stronger values: then the Russian people will in the end come around. It is a shame that our Western values are so easily diluted. Up until now, one beacon has been the Economist itself. We can only hope that this poor article is a one off, and that the magazine does not start to become part of the problem too.       

Agility in Business

I do some work for a company called Synthetron (www.synthetron.com). This blog follows a public session I recently organized there.

More news: My "A letter from Queens" was published in the Guardian Weekly this month. Here is the link to the online edition: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/03/letter-from-united-states-queens-new-york

The Synthetron team recently organised a business think tank session on the subject of Business Agility, defined for the session as the ability to react quickly to change. You can download the report from here: http://www.synthetron.com/bttreport/. The session gave me pause to reflect, not least about my own agility.

Most of us started the session thinking that more agility would be a good thing. We have read the stories about the modern technology companies who seem to be able to create and implement new business models in a few weeks, and most of us have seen our own companies struggle to do very much at all in that timescale.

People in the conversation also had a good idea what an agile environment would feel like. We’d be able to get decisions and take risks and make mistakes. There would be a lot of listening and learning, and not much bureaucracy. Things would feel small and fresh.

But then we were asked to think about what first steps would help make our environment more agile, and what KPI an “agility czar” might be judged against. This was harder. The energy in the discussion increased, but there were few synthetrons and more disagreement. It was generally agreed that attitudes and behaviours would be key. Somehow we would have to demonstrate trust and empowerment, and engage and listen more. But how?

There were plenty of interesting thoughts. Someone made a connection between agility and relentless performance management: if we are all given strict tasks and targets and judged against these, we might have less incentive (and less time) to react to what we see changing around us. That felt credible, and also disturbing: surely intense performance management is a good thing?

Sacrifices for Agility

Why was agility seen as so desirable, but so little seemed to be available to practically achieve it? The menu for everyone in the discussion would be quite different. And there might be wider messages available too.

The comment about performance management got me thinking. Perhaps other well-established practices also come at the expenses of agility. Many of us have endured attempts by our companies to become bigger, to harmonize practice, converge regions and demand standardisation. That is hardly likely to support agility – not only is personal initiative downplayed in favour of conformance, but also decision chains get slower and more complex. In my own career, I’m convinced I’ve seen more diseconomies of scale than I have economies, and every time I’ve been part of a standardisation programmes I think it has made things worse – at great expense and great distraction from the customer. Mergers are even worse.

Who wins from all these so-called good practices? Winners include managers who love predictability and control, and people looking to build senior careers in service functions like finance. Power hungry CEO’s can see the allure. Weak management teams can create distraction from losing to their competitors.

But the group who gains the most are consultants – especially the biggest ones and the IT ones like Accenture – and other advisors like lawyers. They win from the standardisation projects and they win from the customer that emerges at the end – more centralised, offering bigger projects and unlikely to hire boutique competitors.

I wonder who is conning whom here? It is certainly worth thinking about. It is not only agility that loses out every time, but simplification too. Work-life balance usually loses as well, as expectations at work become more global.

We produced a From-To table as part of the report. Looking down the To column, and imagining a large company run along those lines, it would certainly be refreshing, but it might be a bit chaotic as well. For some situations, it might work well, but for others it would clearly lack discipline. So even the desire for agility should certainly be contextual, and for sure not everyone could thrive in that environment, since we have spent most of our careers developing skills in the opposite direction.

So agility does not come for free. Just as someone has to suffer for lower taxes and someone has to pay for higher spending, something has to be lost in order to acquire agility. So how much do we really want this? It is all very well hankering after an agile environment, but what would be sacrifice to achieve it? My suspicion is that most corporate leaders would take a lot of convincing to change radically in the direction of agility, and their consultants and advisors would certainly not help. It does not help that, judging from the conversation, KPI’s and links to financial performance are hard to come by.

Longer-term Consequences

Are we storing up later problems by under-prioritising agility? We can use tricks like creating hothouse environments where agility is most required. But surely the ability to react quickly to change really is critical in the whole business, and will become more so? Perhaps it is more important in the long run than standardisation or control. Firms can die from a lack of agility, paralysing complexity, or burned-out key staff. But I suspect the top pay lip service to the aspiration to improve, but are not really convinced and not ready to make the sacrifices. I’ve known many senior managers who thought things like agility are for wimps.

A frightening parallel might be climate change. We all want to stop it, of course. But it is hard to see meaningful first steps, and leaders are driven by opposing objectives and are not ready to pay the price. Until when?

I sense there is fertile ground here for smart consultants, ready to go against the grain. What are the smart moves that have low cost? When can they be applied with low risk? What are the hidden downsides of established methods? Can we find good KPI’s and prove links to financial goals? And how can we develop leaders who will see things another way?

Always start with I

One thing we can always do is look at ourselves. This may be one of those areas where we all think we are a little bit better than we really are. Are we part of the problem? My first advice to new managers is always: Get out of the way! But how well am I following my own counsel? This might be one of those irregular verbs: the boss should get out of my way, peers should respect my creativity, and subordinates should just do as they are told!

How do I know that I empower and engage more than my colleagues – or is that just wishful thinking? When did I last seek out feedback on these things, or do an assessment?

Which brings me back to Synthetron. It is a great way to capture signals and ideas, bring forward issues and find solutions and actions that really involves people, all in just an hour. This Think Tank helped to open my own eyes: somehow most Synthetron sessions seem to achieve that, often in surprising ways.