more memories than dreams?

8/3/2019 More Memories Than Dreams?

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More Memories Than Dreams?

Jacquelyn Suter

I want my country back! This was the chilling cry of one woman attending a recent Americantown hall meeting to discuss health care reform. Of course, this remark is not about health careat all. Its about a vague yet pervasive feeling of unease that America has lost its mojo, that thefuture is unpredictable and changing too fast.

The New York Times recently reported that the Chinese are now an astonishingly optimisticpeople, with 86% of them believing that China is headed in the right direction. And Americans?Only 37% believe this about their own country. In a number of questions put to the Chineseabout Americas future, the Chinese have more regard and faith in America than do Americansthemselves. Who would have guessed?

It wasnt always this way. For most of Americas history, its people had an almost maniacallynaive faith in the future of their country and in their own personal lives as part of that grandtrajectory. This naivet has been Europeans favorite little joke about Americans. Now, theyllhave to find another gentle barb.

In a 2008 Businessweekarticle, Harvard Universitys competitiveness expert, Michael Porter,outlined a number of areas in which America has always had, and to a great extent still has, aworldwide competitive edge that has driven its singular prosperity: entrepreneurship andinnovation driven by science and technology, deep and efficient capital markets, the worlds best


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institutions of higher learning. But Porter points out that what has heretofore driven Americassuccess is waning, because the U.S. lacks a coherent strategy for addressing its own challenges.

AnotherNew York Times article remarked that, it would be nice if some leader could induce thecountry [America] to salivate for the future again. Maybe we have that leader now. If so, thatleader needs to connect discrete policies education, technological innovation, funding for basicresearch into a single long-term narrative that the average American can resonate with.

The challenges that face America and indeed every country and every person are laid out incompelling and sobering detail by Thomas Friedman in his book The World is Flat, winner of theBusiness Book of the Year Award.

Comprehensive and highly readable, Friedman, a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize forjournalism, explains globalization in terms of how its forces have enabled companies and peoplefrom diverse parts of the globe to work together as never before for good as well as for ill. Theworld is now horizontally integrated its been flattened a connect and collaborate systeminstead of a vertically-oriented command and control one.

Friedman explains that while all of us were sleeping, the world changed dramatically and justthat fast by the convergence of three major events: the development of a global web-based

platform (the internet) enabling worldwide collaboration; new business processes, skills, andawareness enabling innovative use of this global platform; and creation of workflow softwareallowing, for example, engineers in India to work with their counterparts anytime, anyplace. Acompany can now source the best talent anywhere in the world, not just in their own backyard.

Consider some amazing stats resulting from this triple convergence: As of September 2009,there were more than 1.7 billion internet users in the world. There are now more than 24 millionblogs and growing, changing the face and force of mainstream journalism forever. 54% of Indiaspopulation (555 million people) are under the age of 25, many highly educated and all of themaspiring to do your job better and for less money. In 1998, Google handled 10,000 searches aday and ten years later, it was hosting 235 million searchesper day. This kind of connect-and-collaborate paradigm is unprecedented in world history.

Friedman is an unabashed supporter of free trade and the flattening of the world, believing thatin the long haul it will raise more people out of poverty than ever before witness what itsalready done in China and India. But development requires constant reassessment of educationand skill sets, on both the country and the individual level, to ensure that one is moving up thevalue chain of work. High skills = high wage.

But Friedman is not a starry-eyed globalization advocate. He knows well the trade-offs a countryneeds to make to put itself on a fast track. The developmental model has always bumped upagainst the real world full of friction and inefficiency. And one of the biggest frictions is acountrys institutional and cultural behavior.

In 2003, the same Michael Porter that recently so perceptively commented on Americas waningcompetitiveness, was commissioned by the government of then PM Thaksin to assess Thailandsworldwide competitiveness in view of economic threat from its regional neighbors.

The Bangkok Postreported several key points of Porters findings: Thailand is world-class inmaking plans, but not so world-class in implementation. Thailand is caught in a trap with lowproductivity, low skills and low wages.You cant compete on cost, you need to compete onquality and value. If you have low wages, it means you are poor. Competitiveness does notmean that you have low wage, but rather the ability to pay a high wage. And the capstone,raising productivity must be the centre of economic policy.

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What Porter didnt comment upon was the why question: Why Thailand seems to be stuck inthis ongoing roundelay of low wages, export economics, and education inconsistent withdemands of a fast-moving global economy. But Mexicos dilemma may shed some light onThailands.

In Friedmans discussion with the president of Mexicos Center of Research for Development, the

comment was made that a lack of self-confidence leads a country to keep chewing on the past.The administrator called this inclination Mexicos intangible things. In Thailand we might call thistradition. This focus on the past, instead of the future, is what has always struck me most aboutThailand. I dont recall reading any more about what Thaksins government did with Porterscompetitive analysis. I guess the government didnt like it very much. I suspect more memoriesthan dreams carried the day.

Heres a sobering thought: The chairman of Intel, Americas quintessentially innovative company,commented to Friedman that Intel can definitely thrive as a company even if we never hireanother American. If the anguished cry of the woman at the health care meeting who said Iwant my country back, meant lets go back to the way things used to be, that time has goneforever.

But just imagine, if that same woman could say, I want my country and its children to beprepared for the future, now thats the America the world has always known an America havingmore dreams than memories.

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more memories than dreams?

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