Globally Competitive Quotes

Any attempt to solve the ecological crisis within a bourgeois framework must be dismissed as chimerical. Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. Competition and accumulation constitute its very law of life, a law … summarised in the phrase, ‘production for the sake of production.’ Anything, however hallowed or rare, ‘has its price’ and is fair game for the marketplace. In a society of this kind, nature is necessarily treated as a mere resource to be plundered and exploited. The destruction of the natural world, far being the result of mere hubristic blunders, follows inexorably from the very logic of capitalist production.

In the United States […] the two main business-dominated parties, with the support of the corporate community, have refused to reform laws that make it virtually impossible to create new political parties (that might appeal to non-business interests) and let them be effective. Although there is marked and frequently observed dissatisfaction with the Republicans and Democrats, electoral politics is one area where notions of competitions and free choice have little meaning. In some respects the caliber of debate and choice in neoliberal elections tends to be closer to that of the one-party communist state than that of a genuine democracy.

Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.

An island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled [..] So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance.

In fact, the belief that climate could be plausibly governed, or managed, by any institution or human instrument presently at hand is another wide-eyed climate delusion. The planet survived many millennia without anything approaching a world government, in fact endured nearly the entire span of human civilization that way, organized into competitive tribes and fiefdoms and kingdoms and nation-states, and only began to build something resembling a cooperative blueprint, very piecemeal, after brutal world wars—in the form of the League of Nations and United Nations and European Union and even the market fabric of globalization, whatever its flaws still a vision of cross-national participation, imbued with the neoliberal ethos that life on Earth was a positive-sum game. If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.

This isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyong their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future.

Data alone has no value—it’s just masses of numbers or words.

When we are reaching for the stars, the challenges ahead are such that we will perhaps have to come together to meet them: to travel the universe not as Russians, Americans, or Chinese but as representatives of humanity. But so far, although we have broken free from the shackles of gravity, we are still improsoned in our own minds, confined by our suspicion of the "other," and thus our primal competition for resources. There is a long way to go.

Private property based on the labour of the small proprietor, free competition, democracy, i.e., all the catchwords with which the capitalists and their press deceive the workers and the peasants- are things of the past. Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of "advanced" countries. And this "booty" is shared between two or three powerful world marauders armed to the teeth"..."who involve the whole world in their war over the sharing of their booty.

Careers increasingly come with a reboot button, and companies that realize this early possess a competitive talent advantage

In the age of globalization—an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age—hope is not a fiction.

Competitive connectivity is the arms race of the twenty-first century.

Globally, It's important that we embed artificial intelligence into our systems such that it functions in service to humanity, and not in competition with it.

The Republicans have moved so far toward a dedication to the wealthy and the corporate sector that they can-not hope to get votes on their actual programs, and have turned to mobilizing sectors of the population that have always been there, but not as an organized coalitional political force: evangelicals, nativists, racists, and the victims of the forms of globalization designed to set working people around the world in competition with one another while protecting the privileged.

Bringing Leviathan under control will be the heart of global politics because of a confluence of three forces: failure, competition, and opportunity. The West has to change because it is going broke. The emerging world needs to reform to keep forging ahead. There is a global contest, but one based on promise as much as fear: Government can be done better.

Unfortunately, that basic sense of fairness and goodwill toward others is under threat in a society like ours that increasingly enriches the richest and abandons the rest to the vagaries of global competition. More and more our media and our school systems emphasize material success and the importance of triumphing over others both athletically and in the classroom. More and more, in an atmosphere of increased competitiveness, middle- and upper-class parents seem driven to greater and greater extremes to give their offspring whatever perceived “edge” they can find. This constant emphasis on competition drowns out the lessons of cooperation, empathy and altruism that are critical for human mental health and social cohesion.

The globalization and competitiveness of the world economy will ultimately result in the absolute division of human beings into two classes, and the more powerful of these classes will enslave the other until the human condition either evolves or comes to an end.

To be globally competitive, developed countries must offer something qualitatively different, that is, something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing countries. And that something is certainly not great test scores in a few subjects or the so-called basic skills.”4

There's an old saying: if something's too cheap, somebody is paying. Maher's workers earn $120 to $140 per month to work six days a week-low wages not only globally, but by Bangladesh's standards-to do jobs that are made more stressful with each acceleration of the fast-fashion cycle. Outside of factory gates, those workers endure environmental consequences of a nation cutting corners to keep its industries competitive. The air in Narayanganj, once known as the 'Dandy of the East," is typically an odorous grey-brown and sometimes makes foreign visitors nauseous-the city is one of those where blue skies appeared like a miracle during the coronavirus lockdowns. Bangladesh is one of the nations hardest hit by climate change, although carbon emissions per person there are radically lower than in richer nations.

Take politics in a place like the United States. To run for president in 2008 will require that candidates raise in excess of $100 million each in order to be truly competitive. That means that before there was one primary election among voters, there was a “money primary” in 2007 that selected which candidates voters would see.

Sustainability requires that every community meet the needs of all its members (including plants and animals), present and future, without compromising the needs of other communities meeting the needs of their members, present and future. From The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses are Beating the Global Competition by

Thank you," he said. "Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's a long way from Forster Hollow, isn't it?" "So, yes, welcome," he said. "Welcome to the middle class! That's what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don't like me. And I don't like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn't like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And, now you're middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it's a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It's the mainstay of economies all around the globe!" "And now that you've got these jobs at this body-armor plant," he continued, "You're going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they're not turned on! But that's OK, because that's why we threw you out of your homes in the first places, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!" "Just quickly, here," he continued, "because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you're going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you've joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don't want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn't that perfect?" "Just a couple more things!" Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. "I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn't give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That's part of the perfect middle-class world you're joining! Now that you're working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI's broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!" The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. "And MEANWHILE," he shouted, "WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON'T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANT! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!

Optimization' means moving toward peak performance.

The supply chain is all about four steps: buy—make—move—fulfill.

No company exists in a vacuum; each is part of an ecosystem.

although we have broken free from the shackles of gravity, we are still imprisoned in our own minds, confined by our suspicion of the ‘other’, and thus our primal competition for resources

The bigger story was competition causing more productive business enterprises to replace less productive ones...However, it provides even more reason to worry about all the people living in economies where protection and distortion of competition allow unproductive enterprises to persist and cause these people to fall further behind, but even more importantly, to remain in poverty.

The relationship between any two communities in the global economy is not unlike a marriage. As couples counselors advise, relationships falter when two partners are too interdependent. When any stress affecting one partner - the loss of a job, an illness, a bad-hair day - brings down the other, the couple suffers. A much healthier relationship is grounded in the relative strength of each partner, who each should have his or her own interests, hobbies, friends, and professional identity, so that when anything goes wrong, the couple can support one another from a position of strength. Our ability to love, like our ability to produce, must be grounded in our own security. And our economy, like our love, when it comes from a place of community, can grow without limit.

I find that most people serve practical needs. They have an understanding of the difference between meaning and relevance. And at some level my mind is more interested in meaning than in relevance. That is similar to the mind of an artist. The arts are not life. They are not serving life. The arts are the cuckoo child of life. Because the meaning of life is to eat. You know, life is evolution and evolution is about eating. It's pretty gross if you think about it. Evolution is about getting eaten by monsters. Don't go into the desert and perish there, because it's going to be a waste. If you're lucky the monsters that eat you are your own children. And eventually the search for evolution will, if evolution reaches its global optimum, it will be the perfect devourer. The thing that is able to digest anything and turn it into structure to sustain and perpetuate itself, for long as the local puddle of negentropy is available. And in a way we are yeast. Everything we do, all the complexity that we create, all the structures we build, is to erect some surfaces on which to out compete other kinds of yeast. And if you realize this you can try to get behind this and I think the solution to this is fascism. Fascism is a mode of organization of society in which the individual is a cell in the superorganism and the value of the individual is exactly the contribution to the superorganism. And when the contribution is negative then the superorganism kills it in order to be fitter in the competition against other superorganisms. And it's totally brutal. I don't like fascism because it's going to kill a lot of minds I like. And the arts is slightly different. It's a mutation that is arguably not completely adaptive. It's one where people fall in love with the loss function. Where you think that your mental representation is the intrinsically important thing. That you try to capture a conscious state for its own sake, because you think that matters. The true artist in my view is somebody who captures conscious states and that's the only reason why they eat. So you eat to make art. And another person makes art to eat. And these are of course the ends of a spectrum and the truth is often somewhere in the middle, but in a way there is this fundamental distinction. And there are in some sense the true scientists which are trying to figure out something about the universe. They are trying to reflect it. And it's an artistic process in a way. It's an attempt to be a reflection to this universe. You see there is this amazing vast darkness which is the universe. There's all these iterations of patterns, but mostly there is nothing interesting happening in these patterns. It's a giant fractal and most of it is just boring. And at a brief moment in the evolution of the universe there are planetary surfaces and negentropy gradients that allow for the creation of structure and then there are some brief flashes of consciousness in all this vast darkness. And these brief flashes of consciousness can reflect the universe and maybe even figure out what it is. It's the only chance that we have. Right? This is amazing. Why not do this? Life is short. This is the thing we can do.

The Danish experience remains to this day a powerful, though nearly forgotten, lesson on the appropriate government reaction to the challenge of global competition: support and fund, but do not protect.

My grandfather understood one of the curious conundrums of globalization: exposure creates not only opportunity but competition, and it can make us question and eventually lose our standing in the world.

Poor children face staggering challenges: increased risk of low birth weight, negative impacts on early cognitive development, higher incidents of childhood illnesses such as asthma and obesity, and greatly reduced chances of attending college (only about nine out of every one hundred kids born in poverty will earn a college degree). On top of this, poor children deal with greater degrees of environmental hazards from pollution, noise, and traffic, as well as other stressors harmful to their well-being. In a competitive and global knowledge-based economy, a nation's most valuable resource is its children. And yet we are reckless with this treasure.

At Newsweek, I get paid to meet amazing people and write about subjects that fascinate me: fusion energy, education reform, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, the rising competitiveness of China, the global threat of state-sponsored hacking.

The brutally relentless tactics of stall and defy, then stall and undermine—tactics that went on for at least four decades—left the United States with millions of citizens who lacked the education needed to be competitive in a global, technology-driven economy.

The “quality revolution” in the latter half of the 20th century has taken us to a point where all products that reach a supermarket shelf work. The competitive differentiators of the future will be products which are the most innovative, even though they may not be the best

At the root of desperate poverty, human trafficking, political violence and global inequity is a sense of scarcity and competition fueled by greed—the inordinate desire to possess wealth, goods or objects of abstract value far beyond the dictates of basic survival or comfort.

A focus on steady, long-term growth may be unheard of now in most public companies, but it was standard operating procedure for corporations in the 1950s and ’60s, until we wilted in the face of foreign competition and the global economy and became obsessed with shareholder value.

They resented meritocratic elites, experts, and professional classes, who had celebrated market-driven globalization, reaped the benefits, consigned working people to the discipline of foreign competition, and who seemed to identify more with global elites than with their fellow citizens.

Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated (by the American media expert Ben Bagditrian) that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies!

With the dizzying rate of change in technology and increasing competition driven by the globalization of markets and technology, we must not only be educated, we must constantly re-educate and reinvent ourselves. We must develop our minds and continually sharpen and invest in the development of our competencies to avoid becoming obsolete.

The llluminati Reptilian-hybrids are terrified of unpredictable people and situations and they are obsessed with controlling all sides to control the outcome. We see this in the way the global economy is controlled, not even by open competition in what we call 'capitalism', but by 'cartelism'. The market is rigged to ensure the desired outcome.

The Global Learning XPRIZE competition, which started in 2014, offered $15 million for “open-source, scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within 15 months.” Results from the winners, Kitkit School and onebillion, suggest that the goal has largely been achieved.

I wrote this book because I wanted to narrate the great, and a truly nation-building, story of US manufacturing—and because I believe that without the preservation and reinvigoration of manufacturing, the United States has little chance to extricate itself from its current economic problems, meet the challenges posed by other large and globally more competitive nations, and remain a dynamic and innovative society for generations to come.

The short-termism among US policymakers has meant that the gains from globalization have been misallocated in a way that frustrated millions of Americans and spurred the populist reaction witnessed in 2016. As Alibaba founder Jack Ma pointed out at the Economic Forum in 2017, by choosing to spend $14.2 trillion fighting thirteen wars over three decades, rather than investing in America’s infrastructure, industry, and jobs, policymakers misallocated the wins from globalization. What was clear is that even thirty years ago, industrial jobs in the United States were already on the decline and exposing the economy to greater competition inherent in open international trade, further harming the American worker. The outcome was a missed opportunity to distribute the gains of globalization more widely (and in particular to America’s Rust Belt) and to fund a longer-term infrastructure investment strategy to galvanize the US economy.

Without the context of the biblical teaching about Man, meaning, and morals, such rightful insights and tools as democracy, economic interests, global relations, and techniques take on a life of their own. Fanatical religion will replace truth and commitment. They turn the human being into a little god with monstrous, because untrained, irrational and unrestrained intentions who has tools at his disposal to justify the most murderous competition, selfishness, and greed.

If all markets could be made perfect, and all human beings made rational, then more financial contracts, more trading, more liquidity, and more price discovery would indeed bring us closer to an efficient competitive equilibrium in which all resources would be allocated as efficiently as possible. But in the real world of inherently imperfect markets, imperfect information, and of human beings part rational and part not, market completion and increased liquidity can have negative effects.

in today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol . . . And the list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its disturbing Otherness. Los Prisonieros add another key figure from our cultural space to this series: the decaffeinated protester. This is a protester who says (or sings) all the right things, but somehow deprives them of their critical edge. He is horrified by global warming, he fights sexism and racism, he demands radical social change, and everyone is invited to join in the big sentiment of global solidarity—but all of this only adds up to mean that he is not required to change his life (maybe just to give to charity here and there). He goes on with his career, he is ruthlessly competitive, but he is on the right side.

The most important lesson I took away from my year on the competitive memory circuit was not the secret to learning poetry by heart, but rather something far more global and, in a way, far more likely to be of service in my life. My experience had validated the old saw that practice makes perfect. But only if it's the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. I'd learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things.

When Dr. Fauci took office, America was still ranked among the world’s healthiest populations. An August 2021 study by the Commonwealth Fund ranked America’s health care system dead last among industrialized nations, with the highest infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy. “If health care were an Olympic sport, the US might not qualify in a competition with other high-income nations,”56 laments the study’s lead author, Eric Schneider, who serves as Senior Vice President for Policy and Research at the Commonwealth Fund.

When Dr. Fauci took office, America was still ranked among the world’s healthiest populations. An August 2021 study by the Commonwealth Fund ranked America’s health care system dead last among industrialized nations, with the highest infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy. “If health care were an Olympic sport, the US might not qualify in a competition with other high-income nations,”56 laments the study’s lead author, Eric Schneider, who serves as Senior Vice President for Policy and Research at the Commonwealth Fund. Following

During the early 1980s, anti-environmentalism had taken root in a network of conservative and Libertarian think tanks in Washington. These think tanks—which included the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Marshall Institute, variously promoted business interests and “free market” economic policies, and the rollback of environmental, health, safety, and labor protections. They were supported by donations from businessmen, corporations, and conservative foundations.

This isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyond their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future.

Some have argued that capitalism promotes democracy, because of common norms of transparency, rule of law, and free competition—for markets, for ideas, for votes. In some idealized world, capitalism may enhance democracy, but in the history of the West, democracy has expanded by limiting the power of capitalists. When that project fails, dark forces are often unleashed. In the twentieth century, capitalism coexisted nicely with dictatorships, which conveniently create friendly business climates and repress independent worker organizations. Western capitalists have enriched and propped up third-world despots who crush local democracy. Hitler had a nice understanding with German corporations and bankers, who thrived until the unfortunate miscalculation of World War II. Communist China works hand in glove with its capitalist business partners to destroy free trade unions and to preserve the political monopoly of the Party. Vladimir Putin presides over a rigged brand of capitalism and governs in harmony with kleptocrats. When push comes to shove, the story that capitalism and democracy are natural complements is a myth. Corporations are happy to make a separate peace with dictators—and short of that, to narrow the domain of civic deliberation even in democracies. After Trump’s election, we saw corporations standing up for immigrants and saluting the happy rainbow of identity politics, but lining up to back Trump’s program of gutting taxes and regulation. Some individual executives belatedly broke with Trump over his racist comments, but not a single large company has resisted the broad right-wing assault on democracy that began long before Trump, and all have been happy with the dismantling of regulation. If democracy is revived, the movement will come from empowered citizens, not from corporations.

Recent estimates have Chinese companies outstripping U.S. competitors ten to one in quantity of food deliveries and fifty to one in spending on mobile payments. China’s e-commerce purchases are roughly double the U.S. totals, and the gap is only growing. Data on total trips through ride-hailing apps is somewhat scarce, but during the height of competition between Uber and Didi, self-reported numbers from the two companies had Didi’s rides in China at four times the total of Uber’s global rides. When it comes to rides on shared bikes, China is outpacing the United States at an astounding ratio of three hundred to one.

Corporations are forced, by competition and by the fear of predators, to try to turn workers into machine-like production units; to make the hiring of a worker no different from the hiring of an electricity generator. And yet, however hard they try to turn humans into machines and to extract output from their ‘work’ (in the same way as they extract effort from a horse or electricity from a generator), it is an impossible task. The worker cannot discard her innate human quirks, rebelliousness, indeterminateness – not even if she honestly wants to. All the things that make her contribution to production inherently unpredictable are part of who she is.

The Irish butter market, like its competition around the world, wouldn’t have existed without the manual labor of women. All together, their ability to transform a daily tide of milk into tubs, balls, bricks, mottes, and prints of butter constituted a cottage industry of global proportion. Although their production varied in quality and quantity across the buttermaking world, the basic techniques and tools dairywomen used were nearly identical across time and place. It’s easy to forget that the simple equipment women wielded to make butter also drove dairy trade, and more than any other tools they were proof of women’s pivotal economic role on the farm.

The idea that the euro has “failed” is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do. … Removing a government's control over currency would prevent nasty little elected officials from using Keynesian monetary and fiscal juice to pull a nation out of recession. “It puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians,” [Robert] Mundell explained]. “Without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.” … Hence, currency union is class war by other means. — Greg Palast, “Robert Mundell, evil genius of the euro.” Unlike

And here is the difficult part. However messily it is expressed, much of the criticism of our class is true. We proclaim the “net” benefits of free trade, technological advances, and immigration, safe in the knowledge that we will be among the beneficiaries. Equipped with high levels of human capital, we can flourish in a global economy. The cities we live in are zoned to protect our wealth, but deter the unskilled from sharing in it. Professional licensing and an immigration policy tilted toward the low-skilled shield us from the intense market competition faced by those in nonprofessional occupations. We proclaim the benefits of free markets but are largely insulated from the risks they can pose. Small wonder other folks can get angry.

Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11

Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.

Good economic institutions will encourage citizens to invest, accumulate, and develop new technologies, as a result of which society will prosper. Bad economic institutions will have the opposite effects. One problem is that rulers, who have the power to shape economic institutions, do not necessarily find it in their interest to allow their citizens to thrive and prosper. They may personally be better off with an economy that imposes lots of restrictions on who can do what (that they selectively relax to their advantage), and weakening competition may actually help them stay in power. This is why political institutions matter - they exist to prevent leaders from organizing the economy for their private benefit. When they work well, political institutions put enough constraints on rulers to ensure that they cannot deviate too far from the public interest.

The pay scales at large cooperatives are either identical to those at collectives or somewhat more unequal due to competitive pressures. The plywood co-ops paid all their members equally, the major exception being the general manager, who was usually a hired outsider and received a higher salary than members.74 In the conventional plywood mills, by contrast, the wages of the highest-paid workers and the lowest-paid differed by a factor of about 2.5.75 At Mondragon, until the 1980s the differential between the highest- and lowest-paid workers was fixed at 3:1. In recent years, with the pressures of globalization and the need to attract skilled managers who could receive much more money in private enterprises, some positions have been raised to a 6:1 ratio, while the CEO of the entire Mondragon corporation earns nine times more than the lowest-paid worker.76

The case for bitcoin as a cash item on a balance sheet is very compelling for anyone with a time horizon extending beyond four years. Whether or not fiat authorities like it, bitcoin is now in free-market competition with many other assets for the world’s cash balances. It is a competition bitcoin will win or lose in the market, not by the edicts of economists, politicians, or bureaucrats. If it continues to capture a growing share of the world’s cash balances, it continues to succeed. As it stands, bitcoin’s role as cash has a very large total addressable market. The world has around $90 trillion of broad fiat money supply, $90 trillion of sovereign bonds, $40 trillion of corporate bonds, and $10 trillion of gold. Bitcoin could replace all of these assets on balance sheets, which would be a total addressable market cap of $230 trillion. At the time of writing, bitcoin’s market capitalization is around $700 billion, or around 0.3% of its total addressable market. Bitcoin could also take a share of the market capitalization of other semihard assets which people have resorted to using as a form of saving for the future. These include stocks, which are valued at around $90 trillion; global real estate, valued at $280 trillion; and the art market, valued at several trillion dollars. Investors will continue to demand stocks, houses, and works of art, but the current valuations of these assets are likely highly inflated by the need of their holders to use them as stores of value on top of their value as capital or consumer goods. In other words, the flight from inflationary fiat has distorted the U.S. dollar valuations of these assets beyond any sane level. As more and more investors in search of a store of value discover bitcoin’s superior intertemporal salability, it will continue to acquire an increasing share of global cash balances.

One of the advantages of living in a constitutional federal republic is that we have the ability, if not the duty, as citizens to repair or replace those acts of legislation under which we have agreed to live. We must act when it has become evident that said legislation no longer serves us as a people or advances the principles upon which this nation was founded, one of these being “the pursuit of happiness,” which may only be secured through wealth creation. If it burdens the debt obligation of the government, it cannot be creating wealth. If it does not advance the cause of regaining American competitive dominance in the global marketplace, it is not creating wealth. If legislation and regulation were proposed that taught people how to fish instead of providing fish, then the unemployed would find a way to create jobs for each other. Wealth creation is mankind’s natural objective when given the opportunity and the tools.

The medium of engagement between staff engaged in competitive and cooperative interaction to achieve things together is embodied communication. By talking, discussing, taking turns, gesturing and responding to each other, recognising and misrecognising each other, staff in organisations are structuring what they do as themes and narratives of organising arise between them. Staff make sense together in both abstract and particular ways and contribute to organisational narratives about what is going on. They take up more abstract themes of organising, the organisation’s vision, mission and strategy, but can only do so locally, in particular situations with particular others. Organisational activity, then, is always local, no matter how senior are the staff who are working, and it always involves communication. But it is from the many, many local communicative interactions that the global organisational patterning arises, which in turn constrains and informs the local interactions.

Geopolitics is ultimately the study of the balance between options and lim­itations. A country's geography determines in large part what vulnerabilities it faces and what tools it holds. "Countries with flat tracks of land -- think Poland or Russia -- find building infrastructure easier and so become rich faster, but also find them­selves on the receiving end of invasions. This necessitates substantial stand­ing armies, but the very act of attempting to gain a bit of security automat­ically triggers angst and paranoia in the neighbors. "Countries with navigable rivers -- France and Argentina being premier examples -- start the game with some 'infrastructure' already baked in. Such ease of internal transport not only makes these countries socially uni­fied, wealthy, and cosmopolitan, but also more than a touch self-important. They show a distressing habit of becoming overimpressed with themselves -- and so tend to overreach. "Island nations enjoy security -- think the United Kingdom and Japan -- in part because of the physical separation from rivals, but also because they have no choice but to develop navies that help them keep others away from their shores. Armed with such tools, they find themselves actively meddling in the affairs of countries not just within arm's reach, but half a world away. "In contrast, mountain countries -- Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, to pick a pair -- are so capital-poor they find even securing the basics difficult, mak­ing them largely subject to the whims of their less-mountainous neighbors. "It's the balance of these restrictions and empowerments that determine both possibilities and constraints, which from my point of view makes it straightforward to predict what most countries will do: · The Philippines' archipelagic nature gives it the physical stand-off of is­lands without the navy, so in the face of a threat from a superior country it will prostrate itself before any naval power that might come to its aid. · Chile's population center is in a single valley surrounded by mountains. Breaching those mountains is so difficult that the Chileans often find it easier to turn their back on the South American continent and interact economically with nations much further afield. · The Netherlands benefits from a huge portion of European trade because it controls the mouth of the Rhine, so it will seek to unite the Continent economically to maximize its economic gain while bringing in an exter­nal security guarantor to minimize threats to its independence. · Uzbekistan sits in the middle of a flat, arid pancake and so will try to expand like syrup until it reaches a barrier it cannot pass. The lack of local competition combined with regional water shortages adds a sharp, brutal aspect to its foreign policy. · New Zealand is a temperate zone country with a huge maritime frontage beyond the edge of the world, making it both wealthy and secure -- how could the Kiwis not be in a good mood every day? "But then there is the United States. It has the fiat lands of Australia with the climate and land quality of France, the riverine characteristics of Germany with the strategic exposure of New Zealand, and the island fea­tures of Japan but with oceanic moats -- and all on a scale that is quite lit­erally continental. Such landscapes not only make it rich and secure beyond peer, but also enable its navy to be so powerful that America dominates the global oceans.

Speaking of gendered differences in reaction and action—you’ve talked of a certain “bullying reception” to your book here in New Zealand by a certain set of older male critics. The omniscient narrator, the idea that you “had to be everywhere,” seems to have affronted some male readers, as has the length of the book. Have you experienced this reaction in the UK, too, or in Canada? Has it been a peculiarly New Zealand response, perhaps because of the necessarily small pool of literary competition here? This is a point that has been perhaps overstated. There’s been a lot written about what I said, and in fact the way I think and feel about the reviewing culture we have in New Zealand has changed a lot through reading the responses and objections of others. Initially I used the word “bullying” only to remark that, as we all learn at school, more often than not someone’s objections are more to do with their own shortcomings or failures than with yours, and that’s something that you have to remember when you’re seeing your artistic efforts devalued or dismissed in print. I don’t feel bullied when I receive a negative review, but I do think that some of the early reviewers refused to engage with the book on its own terms, and that refusal seemed to me to have a lot to do with my gender and my age. To even things out, I called attention to the gender and age of those reviewers, which at the time seemed only fair. I feel that it’s very important to say that sexism is a hegemonic problem, written in to all kinds of cultural attitudes that are held by men and women alike. As a culture we are much more comfortable with the idea of the male thinker than the female thinker, simply because there are so many more examples, throughout history, of male thinkers; as an image and as an idea, the male thinker is familiar to us, and acts in most cases as a default. Consequently female thinkers are often unacknowledged and discouraged, sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by men, and sometimes by women. I am lucky, following the Man Booker announcement, that my work is now being read very seriously indeed; but that is a privilege conferred for the most part by the status of the prize, and I know that I am the exception rather than the rule. I’d like to see a paradigm shift, and I’m confident that one is on the way, but the first thing that needs to happen is a collective acknowledgment that reviewing culture is gendered—that everything is gendered—and that until each of us makes a conscious effort to address inequality, we will each remain a part of the problem, rather than a part of the solution. Protesting the fact of inequality is like protesting global warming or evolution: it’s a conservative blindness, born out of cowardice and hostility.

In theory, the fact that the rich countries own part of the capital of poor countries can have virtuous effects by promoting convergence. If the rich countries are so flush with savings and capital that there is little reason to build new housing or add new machinery (in which case economists say that the “marginal productivity of capital,” that is, the additional output due to adding one new unit of capital “at the margin,” is very low), it can be collectively efficient to invest some part of domestic savings in poorer countries abroad. Thus the wealthy countries—or at any rate the residents of wealthy countries with capital to spare—will obtain a better return on their investment by investing abroad, and the poor countries will increase their productivity and thus close the gap between them and the rich countries. According to classical economic theory, this mechanism, based on the free flow of capital and equalization of the marginal productivity of capital at the global level, should lead to convergence of rich and poor countries and an eventual reduction of inequalities through market forces and competition. This optimistic theory has two major defects, however. First, from a strictly logical point of view, the equalization mechanism does not guarantee global convergence of per capita income. At best it can give rise to convergence of per capita output, provided we assume perfect capital mobility and, even more important, total equality of skill levels and human capital across countries—no small assumption.

That? It's nothing. A stupid mutation. A standard outcome. We used to see them in our labs. Junk." "Then why haven't we ever seen it before?" Gibbons makes a face of impatience. "You don't culture death the way we do. You don't tinker with the building blocks of nature." Interest and passion flicker briefly in the old man's eyes. Mischief and predatory interests. "You have no idea what things we succeeded in creating in our labs. This stuff is hardly worth my time. I hoped you were bringing me a challenge. Something from Drs. Ping and Raymond. Or perhaps Mahmoud Sonthalia. Those are challenges." For a moment, his eyes lose their cynicism. He becomes entranced. "Ah. Now those are worthy opponents." We are in the hands of a gamesman. In a flash of insight, Kanya understands the doctor entirely. A fierce intellect. A man who reached the pinnacle of his field. A jealous and competitive man. A man who found his competition too lacking, and so switched sides and joined the Thai Kingdom for the stimulation it might provide. An intellectual exercise for him. As if Jaidee had decided to fight a muay thai match with his hands tied behind his back to see if he could win with kicks alone. We rest in the hands of a fickle god. He plays on our behalf only for entertainment, and he will close his eyes and sleep if we fail to engage his intellect. A horrifying thought. The man exists only for competition, the chess match of evolution, fought on a global scale. An exercise in ego, a single giant fending off the attacks of dozens of others, a giant swatting them from the sky and laughing. But all giants must fall, and then what must the Kingdom look forward to?

The Delusion of Lasting Success promises that building an enduring company is not only achievable but a worthwhile objective. Yet companies that have outperformed the market for long periods of time are not just rare, they are statistical artifacts that are observable only in retrospect. Companies that achieved lasting success may be best understood as having strung together many short-term successes. Pursuing a dream of enduring greatness may divert attention from the pressing need to win immediate battles. The Delusion of Absolute Performance diverts our attention from the fact that success and failure always take place in a competitive environment. It may be comforting to believe that our success is entirely up to us, but as the example of Kmart demonstrated, a company can improve in absolute terms and still fall further behind in relative terms. Success in business means doing things better than rivals, not just doing things well. Believing that performance is absolute can cause us to take our eye off rivals and to avoid decisions that, while risky, may be essential for survival given the particular context of our industry and its competitive dynamics. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick lets us confuse causes and effects, actions and outcomes. We may look at a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and imagine that doing what they did can lead to success — when it might in fact lead mainly to higher volatility and a lower overall chance of success. Unless we start with the full population of companies and examine what they all did — and how they all fared — we have an incomplete and indeed biased set of information. The Delusion of Organizational Physics implies that the business world offers predictable results, that it conforms to precise laws. It fuels a belief that a given set of actions can work in all settings and ignores the need to adapt to different conditions: intensity of competition, rate of growth, size of competitors, market concentration, regulation, global dispersion of activities, and much more. Claiming that one approach can work everywhere, at all times, for all companies, has a simplistic appeal but doesn’t do justice to the complexities of business. These points, taken together, expose the principal fiction at the heart of so many business books — that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.

[A] central theme is why social, political, and economic institutions tend to coevolve in a manner that reinforces rather than undermines one another. The welfare state is not 'politics against markets,' as commonly assumed, but politics with markets. Although it is popular to think that markets, especially global ones, interfere with the welfare state, and vice versa, this notion is simply inconsistent with the postwar record of actual welfare state development. The United States, which has a comparatively small welfare state and flexible labor markets, has performed well in terms of jobs and growth during the past two decades; however, before then the countries with the largest welfare states and the most heavily regulated labor markets exceeded those in the United States on almost any gauge of economic competitiveness and performance. Despite the change in economic fortunes, the relationship between social protection and product market strategies continues to hold. Northern Europe and Japan still dominate high-quality markets for machine tools and consumer durables, whereas the United States dominates software, biotech, and other high-tech industries. There is every reason that firms and governments will try to preserve the institutions that give rise to these comparative advantages, and here the social protection system (broadly construed to include job security and protection through the industrial relations system) plays a key role. The reason is that social insurance shapes the incentives workers and firms have for investing in particular types of skills, and skills are critical for competitive advantage in human-capital-intensive economies. Firms do not develop competitive advantages in spite of systems of social protection, but because of it. Continuing this line of argument, the changing economic fortunes of different welfare production regimes probably has very little to do with growing competitive pressure from the international economy. To the contrary, it will be argued in Chapter 6 that the main problem for Europe is the growing reliance on services that have traditionally been closed to trade. In particular, labor-intensive, low-productivity jobs do not thrive in the context of high social protection and intensive labor-market regulation, and without international trade, countries cannot specialize in high value-added services. Lack of international trade and competition, therefore, not the growth of these, is the cause of current employment problems in high-protection countries.

supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election. In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment. MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry. It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment. No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem. We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the values

We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would e easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. we suffered from slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into n uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of science.

In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, aerospace, consumer electronics, and automobiles, where they are far ahead of most Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies. Unlike Southeast Asia, the Koreans have moved into these sectors not primarily through joint ventures where the foreign partner has provided a turnkey assembly plant but through their own indigenous organizations. So successful have the Koreans been that many Japanese companies feel relentlessly dogged by Korean competitors in areas like semiconductors and steel. The chief advantage that large-scale chaebol organizations would appear to provide is the ability of the group to enter new industries and to ramp up to efficient production quickly through the exploitation of economies of scope.70 Does this mean, then, that cultural factors like social capital and spontaneous sociability are not, in the end, all that important, since a state can intervene to fill the gap left by culture? The answer is no, for several reasons. In the first place, not every state is culturally competent to run as effective an industrial policy as Korea is. The massive subsidies and benefits handed out to Korean corporations over the years could instead have led to enormous abuse, corruption, and misallocation of investment funds. Had President Park and his economic bureaucrats been subject to political pressures to do what was expedient rather than what they believed was economically beneficial, if they had not been as export oriented, or if they had simply been more consumption oriented and corrupt, Korea today would probably look much more like the Philippines. The Korean economic and political scene was in fact closer to that of the Philippines under Syngman Rhee in the 1950s. Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically. He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led to disaster. There are other economic drawbacks to state promotion of large-scale industry. The most common critique made by market-oriented economists is that because the investment was government rather than market driven, South Korea has acquired a series of white elephant industries such as shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and heavy manufacturing. In an age that rewards downsizing and nimbleness, the Koreans have created a series of centralized and inflexible corporations that will gradually lose their low-wage competitive edge. Some cite Taiwan’s somewhat higher overall rate of economic growth in the postwar period as evidence of the superior efficiency of a smaller, more competitive industrial structure.

This hegemonic simulation, a configuration that seems triumphant and unyielding, has its reverse, its revulsive effects. By virtually yielding to this global dynamic and exaggerating it in several ways, all of these would-be emerging countries gradually become submerging instead. They slowly invade the Western sphere, not on a competitive level, but like a ground swell. This invasion occurs in many ways, like a viral infiltration. It is the problem of global, more or less clandestine immigration (Hispanics are literally cannibalizing the United States). But also in the contemporary forms of terror, a true filterable virus, made up of terrorism and counterterrorism, and which is a violent abreaction to global domination, destabilizing it from the inside. The global order is cannibalized by terror.

We aren’t trying to pretend that failing is fun, because it absolutely sucks. We celebrate not the failure itself, but the learning that comes out of that failure.

Competition for a financial reward is also what keeps Bitcoin’s blockchain secure. If any ill-motivated actors wanted to change Bitcoin’s blockchain, they would need to compete with all the other miners distributed globally who have in total invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the machinery necessary to perform PoW. The miners compete by searching for the solution to a cryptographic puzzle that will allow them to add a block of transactions to Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Deep work is not, in other words, an old-fashioned skill falling into irrelevance. It’s instead a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren’t earning their keep. The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate). Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.

14. He’s denied climate change. Then denied that he denied it.​​ Here’s Trump calling global warming a conspiracy created by the Chinese: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. @realDonaldTrump – 11:15 AM – 6 Nov 2012 More tweets of him calling global warming a hoax… NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX? @realDonaldTrump – 3:48 PM – 25 Jan 2014 This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice @realDonaldTrump – 4:39 PM – 1 Jan 2014 Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax! @realDonaldTrump – 7:13 AM – 6 Dec 2013 Then, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump denied that he said any of this. Here’s the video. Clinton says, “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” Trump interrupts to say, “I do not say that. I do not say that.” Actually, Donald, you’ve said nothing else. Trump has also said, dozens of times in tweets like this, that global warming sounds like a great idea: It’s freezing and snowing in New York–we need global warming! @realDonaldTrump – 11:24 AM – 7 Nov 2012 Here he is hating wind turbines: It’s Friday. How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today? They are an environmental & aesthetic disaster. @realDonaldTrump – 12:55 PM – 24 Aug 2012 Trump fought against a “really ugly” offshore wind farm in Scotland because it would mar the view from his Scottish golf resort. My new club on the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland will soon be one of the best in the World – and no-one will be looking into ugly wind turbines! @realDonaldTrump – 5:24 AM – 14 Feb 2014

How long American naval superiority will last is uncertain, but as to whether or not it matters, history shows the answer to be a resounding yes. China holds approximately $1.2 trillion of United States debt. In a global economy of friendly competition, many view this as a matter of course. But what if China used $12 billion of this debt—1 percent—to deploy an aircraft carrier operating off each coast of the United States? The dynamics suddenly change. Whether the threat comes from another country or from machine-gun-toting pirates or suicide terrorists, an international economy requires naval power.

The extraordinary accomplishments of Western science were achieved without regard to the complexions of its creators. Now we are to believe that scientific progress will stall unless we pay close attention to identity and try to engineer proportional representation in schools and laboratories. The truth is exactly the opposite: Lowering standards and diverting scientists’ energy into combating phantom sexism and racism is reckless in a highly competitive, ruthless, and unforgiving global marketplace. Driven by unapologetic meritocracy, China is catching up fast to the United States in science and technology. Identity politics in American science is a political self-indulgence that we cannot afford.

The only competition any woman has is another woman. Sadly, a trending global fact!

Traditionally, charisma was associated with religious and political leaders, not CEOs or school principals. This began to change in the mid-1980s. The tipping point was the appearance of two books in 1985: Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus’s Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge and Bernard Bass’s influential Transformational Leadership: Industrial, Military, and Educational Impact. These authors broke with tradition and argued that charismatic (now “transformational”) leadership can be learned and practiced in settings ranging from schools to corporations to art museums. The transformational leader, they argued, unlocks human energy by creating a vision of a different reality and connecting that vision to people’s values and needs. These works were followed by a raft of books and articles in a similar vein: The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations (1987), The Transformational Leader: The Key to Global Competitiveness

Chinese Communist strategic thought came to be dominated by the idea of struggle for survival in a harshly competitive world.

Dartmouth College built real-time energy displays to show energy usage in student dorms. The catch? The main energy display linked the health and happiness of an animated polar bear to the level of energy usage. Global warming is often seen as a vague, abstract problem that has consequences that are very far off; it’s easy to think that one person’s action can’t make a dent in this issue. But at Dartmouth, if students didn’t turn off their lights, the animated polar bear in the display would appear to begin drowning. The polar bear created an emotional connection between energy used and the impact on the environment. The animated polar bear energy display, combined with competitions to “save the polar bear,” reduced usage by 10% in dorms that used the polar bear.

We are entering a world in which we can rely less and less upon the state, the corporation, or family or friends to help and protect us. It is a globalized, harshly competitive environment. We must learn to develop ourselves.

Hughes has put forward a number of promising policy proposals to remain competitive. These include collaboration between the U.S. private and public sectors to increase competitiveness; fiscal and monetary reform; technological innovation; the creation of a lifelong learning culture;3 and increased U.S. civilian research and development.

President Teddy Roosevelt argued that organized athletics could be the means for instilling the character and values deemed necessary to make America a global power in the century to come. Sports could breed a sense of hard work, self-discipline, and the win-at-all-cost ethic of competition. Roosevelt once said, presumably while swinging a big stick,

Bill and Virginia both said that their association with the lions during the filming of Born Free had had an enormous influence on their lives, and we frequently discussed with them the whole question of the conservation and protection of wild animals. We realized for the first time how drastically short-sighted man has been. Many of these issues have since become even more urgent, with the competition between man and wildlife for habitats and resources, including water, the degradation of the environment, and the ramifications of global warming. What has become even more obvious to us in the interrelationships between man and the natural environment, and how holistic any solutions will have to be.

The advance of computerization and automation technologies has meant that many medium-skilled jobs—clerks, travel agents, bookkeepers, and factory workers—have been replaced with new technologies. New jobs have arisen in their place, but those jobs are often one of two types: either they are high-skilled jobs, such as engineers, programmers, managers, and designers, or they are lower-skilled jobs such as retail workers, cleaners, or customer service agents. Exacerbating the trends caused by computers and robots are globalization and regionalization. As medium-skilled technical work is outsourced to workers in developing nations, many of those jobs are disappearing at home. Lower-skilled jobs, which often require face-to-face contact or social knowledge in the form of cultural or language abilities, are likely to remain. Higher-skilled work is also more resistant to shipping overseas because of the benefits of coordination with management and the market. Think of Apple’s tagline on all of its iPhones: “Designed in California. Made in China.” Design and management stay; manufacturing goes.

The reason for this increase in temporary hiring, as you’ve probably guessed, is employers’ desire to keep their costs down. In the face of the global economy and online competition, employers across the country (and, indeed, across the world) have developed a budget-friendly strategy, hiring only when they need help, and letting the employee go as soon as they don’t need that help.11 Not to mention that part-timers don’t have to be paid any benefits or granted paid vacation time. Indeed, 20 to 30 percent of those employed by the Fortune 100 now have short-term jobs, either as independent contractors or as temp workers, and this figure is predicted to rise to 50 percent during the next six years.

It’s not so much that a strong or weak currency is inherently good or bad per se, but rather that an artificially strong or weak currency relative to a country’s trade balance is bad. If a country has a persistent trade surplus but constantly weakens its otherwise-appreciating currency by accumulating central bank reserves (mercantilism), then value is siphoned away from workers and toward the leaders. Similarly, if a country has a persistent trade deficit but has an extra monetary premium built onto its otherwise-depreciating currency due to its imperial prowess, then its workers are not very competitive in terms of global labor rates and will likely stagnate, while their political leaders, multinational corporations, and wealthy elite will thrive.

While there is still a strong constituency within several large member states for an interventionist approach to such questions, the rise of globalization, the need to maintain competitiveness, and the Eurozone crisis have moved the debate within the EU towards the British viewpoint over time, albeit with limited legislation at the European level.

The focus and need was shifting from simply understanding cultural differences and how to prevent embarrassments and resolve communication issues to how to leverage difference for competitive advantage, in a world where even local business may involve leading a diverse workforce.

One of the formidable challenges QYK Brands faced during this period was the fierce competition posed by international manufacturers. The global nature of the pandemic led to a surge in demand for hygiene products worldwide, resulting in increased competition for raw materials and market share. The international manufacturers often had the advantage of scale, making it challenging for QYK Brands to match their prices.

Thus for those in developed countries to be globally competitive, they must offer something qualitatively different, that is, something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in developing countries.

In June 2011, at Carnegie Mellon University, the President announced the Materials Genome Initiative, a nationwide effort to use open source methods and artificial intelligence to double the pace of innovation in materials science. Obama felt this acceleration was critical to America’s global competitiveness, and held the key to solving significant challenges in clean energy, national security, and human welfare. And it worked.

In the second year of the Trump presidency, I attended a dinner of American hedge funders in Hong Kong. I was there as a guest speaker, to survey the usual assortment of global hot spots. A thematic question emerged from the group—was the “Pax Americana” over? There was a period of familiar cross-talk about whether Trump was a calamitous force unraveling the international order or merely an impolitic Republican politician advancing a conventional agenda. I kept interjecting that Trump was ushering in a new era—one of rising nationalist competition that could lead to war and unchecked climate change, to the implosion of American democracy and the accelerated rise of a China that would impose its own rules on the world. Finally, one of the men at the table interrupted with some frustration. He demanded a show of hands—how many around the table had voted for Trump, attracted by the promise of tax cuts and deregulation? After some hesitation, hand after hand went up, until I was looking at a majority of raised hands. The tally surprised me. Sure, I understood the allure of tax cuts and deregulation to a group like that. But these were also people who clearly understood the dangers that Trump posed to American democracy and international order. The experience suggested that even that ambiguous term “Pax Americana” was subordinate to the profit motive that informed seemingly every aspect of the American machinery. I’d come to know the term as a shorthand for America’s sprawling global influence, and how—on balance—the Pax Americana offered some stability amid political upheavals, some scaffolding around the private dramas of billions of individual lives. From the vantage point of these bankers, the Pax Americana protected their stake in international capital markets while allowing for enough risk—wars, coups, shifting energy markets, new technologies—so that they could place profitable bets on the direction of events. Trump was a bet. He’d make it easier for them to do their business and allow them to keep more of their winnings, but he was erratic and hired incompetent people—so much so that he might put the whole enterprise at risk. But it was a bet that enough Americans were willing to make, including those who knew better. From the perspective of financial markets, I had just finished eight years in middle management, as a security official doing his small part to keep the profit-generating ocean liner moving. The debates of seemingly enormous consequence—about the conduct of wars, the nature of national identity, and the fates of many millions of human beings—were incidental to the broader enterprise of wealth being created.

1. Induce complacency to avoid alerting your opponent. 2. Manipulate your opponent’s advisers. 3. Be patient—for decades, or longer—to achieve victory. 4. Steal your opponent’s ideas and technology for strategic purposes. 5. Military might is not the critical factor for winning a long-term competition. 6. Recognize that the hegemon will take extreme, even reckless action to retain its dominant position. 7. Never lose sight of shi. 8. Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers. 9. Always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others.

Fourth is “flatness.” As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is “flat.” Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already?

Among Amex’s rivals in the luxury space is Quintessentially Group, a members-only concierge network with offices in fifty countries. Quintessentially promises incredible access for its global clientele, which includes, its founders have claimed, hundreds of billionaires and thousands of hundred-millionaires. (Virgin Atlantic’s Richard Branson, rapper P. Diddy, Madonna, and author J. K. Rowling have reportedly been among its clients.) Want a last-minute table at Noma in Copenhagen on a Saturday night? No problem. A private performance by Elton John? Done that. A safe driver to pick up your kids from boarding school in a clutch and deliver them to your vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard? Say the word. Polo lessons from an actual pro? Ask Catherine Mills, head of equestrian services, whose duties have ranged from sourcing a top-notch steed for an international competition to showing up at a children’s garden party in central London with a bunch of ponies “and walking them through the front door.

Marx’s specific argument was that, for certain technical reasons, value, and therefore profits, can only be extracted from human labor. Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization is actually to drive the overall rate of profit of all firms down. For almost two centuries now, economists have debated whether all this is really true. But if it is true, the otherwise mysterious decision by industrialists not to pour research funds into the invention of the robot factories that everyone was anticipating in the sixties, and instead to begin to relocate their factories to more labor-intensive, low-tech facilities in China or the Global South, makes perfect sense.

You visit these big companies. You walk in the front door and it looks like the Taj Mahal. You are expecting wonders, but you start talking to people and you find that it’s just an ordinary place with dispirited staff. They aren’t pursuing big ideas and, even if they are, there’s no mechanism for developing them.” He adds, “I often walk out of these companies depressed about the waste of the human talent working there. These companies must become profoundly more productive if they are to survive in our competitive global economy.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]

Both T cells and neural network nodes compete for the right to commandeer the resources of the system in which they abide. And both show a seeming “willingness” to live by the rules which dictate self-denial. This combination of competition and selflessness turns an agglomeration of electronic or biological components into a learning machine with a quandary-solving power vastly beyond that of any individual module it contains.

You decide that there is a viable marketplace and that you can create a differentiated and competitive

another school of evolutionary thought has been driven underground. It is known as group selection. Those few willing to admit to their belief in group selection argue that individuals will sacrifice their genetic legacy in the interests of a larger collectivity. Such a need to cooperate would have been necessary long ago to make a global brain and a planetary nervous system possible. On the other hand, if the individual selectionists prove correct, humans and earlier life-forms would have been unwilling to share knowledge which might have given others a competitive edge.

drought specialists, and while humid conditions prevailed, they had been confined to small patches of ground that had somehow been deprived of abundant rainfall. Now, not only were the tropical rains failing because of a global drying trend, but the North American plains were under a special disadvantage. With the Rockies in place, storms that rolled in from the Pacific tended to drop their precipitation as they swept up the western slopes. By the time they reached the plains, they were pretty much wrung out. But grasses don’t require much moisture, and this characteristic gave them a competitive edge. Over the next several million years (between about 24 million and 3 million years ago), grasses gradually became the dominant plants across the Great Plains.

In 2020 the EU announced partnerships worth US$91 million with Airbus, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Elbit to use their services to maintain an ongoing drone presence over the Mediterranean. Elbit’s Hermes drone and IAI’s Heron drone were used during Israel’s wars against Gaza since 2008.5 There’s growing competition in drone sales—Turkey’s TB2 can carry laser-guided bombs, be placed in a flatbed truck, and costs far less than Israeli or American drones, but Israeli models remain hugely popular.6 In 2017, Israeli drone manufacturers accounted for 60 percent of the global drone market in the previous three decades.

In any competitive environment in which there are winners or losers, the person who has the wider, more global perspective will inevitably prevail.

Companies that best anticipate and manage political risks will have the strongest competitive edge. The four-part framework we provide is simple yet powerful:

There is also a risk in some markets of a significant devaluation of the local currency. For example, if the country experiences a financial crisis and devalues its currency to the point that your goods are no longer competitively priced, you can lose your market position overnight. There are no easy answers when it comes to getting paid for international sales but planning in advance beats learning hard lessons after the fact. Choose the solutions that work best for your company and prepare for the implications of those choices. The best strategy is to do the due diligence on your new customers.

As a result of the greater competition, Russian gas exporter Gazprom had had to move to a flexible pricing strategy and is now focused on maintaining a set share of 33 percent of the European market, even if it means lowering prices.

In a freely competitive market, one might have expected the lowest-cost oil supplies to be developed first to the highest degree possible while higher-cost resources would be abandoned until depletion of cheap oil made room for them at a higher price point. Under this kind of competitive structure, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the other Gulf producers, whose lowest-cost reserves represent two-thirds of proven world reserves, could have increased their levels of investment and produced a vastly higher amount of oil. Instead, OPEC generally tried to hold oil prices up to maximize revenues over two years. In effect, OPEC had to choose between higher prices or higher market share. They chose the former. The New York University energy economist Dermot Gately noted in a 2004 paper that it was not in OPEC’s collective interests to meet rising demand for oil. He calculated that it made no sense for the cartel to add oil supplies into the market because the marginal gain in revenue from more output would be negative.

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More interesting than the fact that the Japanese company was a faster innovator than its Western affiliate was where it achieved its speed advantage. The Japanese did not score a significant advantage in any one step of the development and introduction cycle—design concept, design engineering, design review, detail design, field test, prototype manufacture, or first production. Instead, with the exception of the design review step, the Japanese company outperforms its Western affiliate a half-step every step of the way. Cumulatively, the advantage becomes significant.

Although the challenge to innovation is in originating new ideas, time is at the core of an innovation’s success. Certainly, there cannot be innovation without new ideas. But innovation means change, and change is measured by time. The magnitude of change is measured as innovations per unit of time. Timely execution is critical to successful innovation and to high rates of change. Thus, it is timely execution as much as ideas that is the challenge to innovation.

The principal thrust of management has been to invest in technology and to cut price to achieve account penetration. Very little effort was being expended in strengthening the field service responsiveness of the company. But the customers want service more than technology and low prices!

Timely execution is very demanding. The process of bringing an innovation to market is complex and harbors many unknowns. An innovation must often successfully defeat a thousand enemies—inside as well as outside of the enterprise—to become a reality. Once the innovation is in the market, continued effective execution is critical. The first company to move with the strongest innovation often reaps the greatest reward. But to retain the advantage, the innovator must prevail with the second innovation as well as with the third. Failure to accomplish this means risking all.

The Swedish firm SKF (Svenska Kullargen Fabrickn) almost became a victim of these attacks. With many small factories scattered throughout Europe, each geared to manufacture a broad product line to service the local demand, the company was a major target of the Japanese competitors with focused factories. SKF’s initial reaction to the Japanese attack was to avoid direct competition by adding new products to meet specialized applications that the Japanese could not supply. These products commanded higher prices and appeared to SKF management to be more profitable and therefore more attractive than the products facing direct Japanese competition. However, because SKF did not simultaneously drop its low-margin products, plant operations became more complicated, reducing the firm’s productivity and raising its overall costs. In effect, the more SKF sought to avoid competition with the Japanese by adding new, higher-margin products, the more it provided a rising cost umbrella for the Japanese to grow under by expanding their product offering and moving into more varied applications. As long as the Japanese stayed beneath the umbrella by maintaining a narrower product line than SKF, they could continue to pick off the parts of SKF’s business that they wanted, driving SKF into smaller and smaller pockets of demand.

In choosing to reduce product variety, however, executives attack the symptoms rather than the root causes of the cost of complexity. Costs go down because complexity has been removed not because the drivers of the cost of complexity have been eliminated. These drivers are hard to identify because they are management rather than activity costs and are therefore less visible. They include the costs of various decision-making processes involving the tasks at hand, as well as the costs of remaking earlier decisions. To support variety and market responsiveness, managers must identify these costs and reduce the complexity of the processes that generate them.

Being responsive to the needs of customers pays in four ways: Customers are more loyal to suppliers who are consistently responsive to their needs. Customers will pay a premium over the typical price to a responsive supplier. Customers will buy more goods and services from a responsive supplier. The supplier becomes strategically advantaged when it secures the demanding customer.

Avoiding price competition by moving into higher-margin products or services is called margin retreat—a common response to stepped up competition and a response that can eventually lead to corporate suicide.

Several realities have become clear in the course of exploring complex work cycles inside large companies. First, rarely do managers know the interaction map of the company. They know the organization chart and the critical path of projects, especially review dates. In other words, they know how long it takes and who’s involved, but they don’t know how to approach fixing

The purpose of benchmarking is to discover and confirm paradigms, not necessarily to set your own performance targets. The benchmarked company’s level of performance may be inappropriately low or alternatively may be well past your foreseeable level of capability. What matters is to get outside your company’s own assumptions and habits to see how system-wide time compression really works.

Competitive analysis shouldn’t aim to snap a picture of “the answer,” rather it should build a picture around common themes but allow for changing parts. For example, Toyota is now allowing more option-package flexibility as it advances its data systems. But the core competitive story remains the same. By coming up with new products faster, it puts competitors on the marketing defensive.

It is sometimes easier to study competitors than your own company because it’s easier to be objective. But it’s important not to assume that in those areas where information can’t be found, competitors are just like you. In fact, it’s more useful to assume they aren’t and force yourself to imagine how they might approach this or that differently.

Time is relatively straightforward to measure inside a company once management begins to focus on it. Time is captured explicitly in measures of elapsed time—lead time, cycle time, and so on—and implicitly in metrics normally used in engineering and finance—machine uptime, product yield, inventory turnover, and the like. When all these time-related measures are brought together with maps showing the organization’s main flows and interaction patterns, a powerful picture of the company’s problems and opportunities comes into view.

The results were astonishing. No one station had noticeably poor uptime or yield, but each had some small problems. Neither uptime nor yield was at 100 percent for any station. This mapping and measurement of the process showed that if each station’s yield and uptime were just 1 percent better than current performance, they would raise the effective capacity of the whole process by more than one-third. (Remember the 1 percent improvement is compounded 38—19 × 2—times.) In other words, the way to get higher and more flexible capacity was to control the existing process more rigorously. This would reduce the cycle time—increase throughput—for existing product volume so that there would be time to run additional products. It would also help reduce the cost of variety, because the faster the cycle time, the sooner a new product variant could be set up and run through the process and shipped to a customer.

Pilots work best when demonstration is the right first step and when a local manager already has a pretty good broad idea of the change he or she wants and knows it can get done if not exactly how.

Experience suggests that these teams must be given radical goals, like collapsing time in half. Otherwise, assumptions aren’t challenged. The whole premise is using bottlenecks, breakdowns, and unmet customer needs as opportunities to learn. The teams use a variety of techniques—root-cause analysis, scenario building, pursuing conflict between two people until the real problem crystalizes, and old-fashioned imagination. Between regular meetings, research into technical or other problems is done. There are no formal reports to the team members’ superiors. The teams report to a senior steering group that is responsible for all the breakthrough teams operating. This steering group is responsible for managing change under the time-based vision that the management team has decided to pursue.

A good summary measure of time compression is a simple cumulative elapsed time bar. Just lay out a bar from left to right, its length representing a total cycle, say, for a new-product test program that took two months. Each day is one slice of the bar. Color in each slice depending on whether value was added that day, with green for value and white for delays, queues, rework, and other avoidable downtime. Results usually show a little green in an essentially white bar.

We are moving into an era where cities will matter more than states and supply chains will be a more important source of power than militaries—whose main purpose will be to protect supply chains rather than borders. Competitive connectivity is the arms race of the twenty-first century.

Being able to predict next year’s prices is enormously important to management. Being able to predict prices in five and ten years hence is a major strategic advantage. The managements of certain aggressive companies have realized that well-documented cost behavior could be factored into their pricing strategies. They set pricing and investment strategies as a function of volume-driven costs. At times, they reduced prices below current costs in anticipation of the decline in costs that they knew would result from expansion of volume. Capacity was added ahead of demand. The earliest companies to adopt experience-based strategies ran roughshod over their slower-adapting competitors. They often preempted their competitors by claiming enough of a growing demand so that when their competitors attempted a response, little volume remained, and the leaders’ costs could not be matched.

TI hammered its competitors in diodes and transistors, moved on to prevail in semiconductors, and ultimately in hand-held calculators and digital watches. Later, however, the management of TI encountered severe competitive problems in its watch and calculator businesses. Overreliance on experience-curve-based strategies at the expense of market-driven strategies is often cited as the underlying flaw in TI’s approach. This is an oversimplification. TI’s determined effort to drive costs down allowed no room for product-line proliferation. That single-minded focus created an opening for hard-pressed competitors such as Casio and Hewlett-Packard to sell on features rather than on price—a strategy that eventually became the standard for the industry when costs and prices declined to the point that consumers cared more for function and style than for price.

In other words, individual businesses are more or less left to fend for themselves in the profit center structure. For example, in a profit-center corporate structure, a high-growth operation will generally receive capital commensurate with the returns it is generating. This can often mean that such a company does not get all the capital it could use because a high-growth operation must invest resources before demand, which increases its expenses and reduces profitability. Conversely, a slow growth operation in a profit-center corporate structure can generate large volumes of excess cash which more often than not, gets reinvested in the operation because it is profitable, whether the operation needs the investment or not.

The use of cash should be proportional to the rate of growth of a business. The rate of cash generation is a function of the profitability of a business, which, because profits are the residual of costs and prices, is itself a function of the competitive position or market share of not only the business but of its competitors. If a business can achieve a two-to-one market share advantage over its largest competitor it should have predictably lower costs for the same value added.

Traditional factories attempt to maximize the length of their production runs in an effort to amortize lengthy and costly setups over the maximum number of pieces. Flexible manufacturers, on the other hand, try to shorten their production runs as much as is possible. To prevent the costs of short runs from getting out of control, management focuses on reducing the complexity and hence the length and costs of setups and changeovers. The logic behind this approach is as simple as it is fundamental to competitive success: reduced run lengths mean more frequent production of the complete mix of products and faster response to customers’ demands.

Time is the secret weapon of business because advantages in response time lever up all other differences that are basic to overall competitive advantage.

As time is compressed, the following changes occur: Productivity increases Prices can be increased Risks are reduced Share is increased

Many executives believe that competitive advantage is best achieved by providing the most value for the lowest cost. This is the traditional pattern for corporate success. Providing the most value for the lowest cost in the least amount of time is the new pattern for corporate success. An increasing number of companies are achieving success by establishing competitive response advantages.

Directing their value delivery systems to the most attractive customers, which forces their competitors toward less attractive customers. The most attractive customers are those who cannot wait for what they want. The least attractive customers are those who will wait because the price they want to pay is low compared to the prices the more impatient customers will pay. Money is made on patient customers only if costs are low, while money is made on impatient customers from higher prices and low costs.

The refocusing of attention from cost to time is enabling the early innovators to become time-based competitors who can, literally, run circles around their slower competition. Time-based competitors are offering greater varieties of products at lower costs and in less time than their more pedestrian competitors.

Across a spectrum of businesses, the amount of time required to execute a service or an order, manufacture and deliver a product is far less than the actual time the service or product spends in the value-delivery system. For example, a manufacturer of heavy vehicles takes 45 days to prepare an order for assembly, but only 16 hours to assemble each vehicle. The vehicle is actually receiving value for less than 1 percent of the time it spends in the system.

Time as a source of competitive advantage is applicable whenever customers have to wait to receive the value they have decided they want. This leads to new ways of thinking about business. A business is a collection of systems for providing value to customers. The company’s resources should be organized to support the value-adding process.

The organizations of fast innovators are structured for ease of coordination and speed of execution. Slow innovators are structured for functional control, cost efficiency, and risk avoidance, a structure that results in a slow and cumbersome development process. With the functional organization come multiple hand-offs that consume time, cause errors to occur and diminish overall accountability. Coordination and control can only be accomplished through elaborate review processes and documentation requirements. Quality seems to decline, not improve. Functions have their firm budgets and manage themselves to their budgets even at the expense of time. To help ensure that budgets are met, performance targets are conservative. Senior management actively participates in program decisions, and, because of their very full schedules, further slow the decision-making processes of the company.

Before the management of the company just described could become fast innovators, they had to develop and embrace a new philosophy of organizing around time. The new philosophy is embedded in these eleven key principles: Time is the key performance variable to be managed to attain improved cost and quality. Time benchmarks are set by the performance of competitors and, if faster, by what is technologically possible. The support functions necessary to advance the development process are actively managed to be “invisible.” Their need is to be anticipated; they are to be invested in and kept up-to-date. They are never to be allowed to slow the development process. Each program is to be managed and executed by a small, dedicated, decision-empowered, and experienced team. Team members have common goals and are measured and evaluated as part of a team. The development programs are to have four steps, and the company will organize itself around these steps: Planning and preparation Product definition Design development Manufacturing ramp-up Product improvement The objective of planning and preparation is to avoid having to invent in the middle of the development process—make unknowns be knowns. After definition, the product specification is frozen. The definition is committed to and not allowed to be changed. The improvement phase is to be used for costs and feature enhancements. Functional expertise resides in the development program. Manufacturing and design resources are full-time participants in the definition team. Manufacturing resources are full time participants in the design team. Team members are collocated. Senior management reviews are few. The role of senior management is to ensure that the program teams have the appropriate resources, incentives and environment to execute their tasks quickly. New programs are generated continuously, at regular market-driven intervals, and incorporate more incremental advances and fewer “great leaps forward.

However, more intriguing than either the dramatic improvements in labor or in net asset productivity was the fact that as these companies became more productive they could also expand the variety of the product line they offered their customers. They grew by giving their customers more choice. Variety expansion is far more important to growth than is the cutting of price facilitated by improved labor and net asset productivity. After prices are cut, customers have little more to look for, while expanding choice enables companies to become increasingly relevant to their customers. On average, these companies expanded their product lines by 30 to 270 percent.

Time-based competitors know the value of time in their businesses, just as Henry Ford knew it in 1921. They know that as they increase their abilities to give their customers what they want faster than their competitors can, their profitability grows. The managements of these companies know that when their responsiveness exceeds that of their competitors, they can charge consistently higher prices, their costs to provide value and to serve their customers are reduced, the costs of their product development resources decrease, and as a result of these advantages, the productivity of their assets improves.

The trick was to have a portfolio rich with cash generators and with high opportunity cash users while maintaining a positive cash balance (Exhibit 1–6). Surprisingly, this is not much of a trick in the long run. Most companies develop balanced portfolios over time by default as severely disadvantaged businesses are closed or sold off under the continual pressure for profits and cash. The real challenge is to consciously manage the movement of businesses within the portfolio. Management must allocate the corporation’s resources to move question-marked businesses into the star position before the growth slows, to keep the stars advantaged so that when growth slows the stars become cash cows, and to manage the cash cows for cash. The dogs need to be worked out of the portfolio.

Strategic advantage can be achieved against a competitor—often a profit-center-oriented competitor—who is not coordinating its collection of businesses as a portfolio. Such a competitor will tend to underinvest in a high-growth business and overinvest both in a low-growth business and in businesses having poor competitive situations.

In the competitive environment of the latter twentieth century, innovations in competitive strategy have life cycles of ten to fifteen years. Each innovation is followed by major shifts in competitive positions and in corporate fortunes.

When a time-based competitor can open up a response advantage with turnaround times three to four times faster than its competitors, it will almost always grow three times faster than the average for the industry and will be twice as profitable as the average for all competitors.

The theory of the experience curve is that the costs of complex products and services, when corrected for the effects of inflation and arbitrary accounting standards, typically decline about 20 to 30 percent with each doubling of accumulated experience.

The steering group that charters and integrates the breakthroughs becomes the principal orchestrator of the change. The number of teams is important. Setting up too many teams will fragment the problem and fail to confront the real issues of organizational complexity and distance. Too few teams will overwhelm each team with an impossible charter. Breakthrough teams should be set up to succeed.

Letting go of the past means doing away with the myopic reductionist perspectives that have dominated Western thought for hundreds of years. They are clearly no longer suitable for solving the severe systemic crisis we face. Old dualistic worldviews are based on outmoded notions, such as that mind is separate from matter, that we are isolated individuals living in a random, mechanical universe, that life is a competitive struggle for survival, that unlimited material growth is the key to happiness, and that nature is simply a resource to be exploited. It is time to clean up our concepts, our ideas—what Yuval Harare in Sapiens531 calls our “imagined orders” that form our global systems and society. When we change our worldview, all else follows.

First, the poor often lack critical pieces of information and believe things that are not true. They are unsure about the benefits of immunizing children; they think there is little value in what is learned during the first few years of education; they don’t know how much fertilizer they need to use; they don’t know which is the easiest way to get infected with HIV; they don’t know what their politicians do when in office. When their firmly held beliefs turn out to be incorrect, they end up making the wrong decision, sometimes with drastic consequences—think of the girls who have unprotected sex with older men or the farmers who use twice as much fertilizer as they should. For example, the uncertainty about the benefits of immunization combines with the universal tendency to procrastinate, with the result that a lot of children don’t get immunized. The richer you are, the more the “right” decisions are made for you. These decisions are difficult for everyone because they require some thinking now or some other small cost today, and the benefits are usually reaped in the distant future. As such, procrastination very easily gets in the way. For the poor, this is compounded by the fact that their lives are already much more demanding than ours: Many of them run small businesses in highly competitive industries; most of the rest work as casual laborers and need to constantly worry about where their next job will come from.

Digital marketing expert Angela Liberatore explains that digital marketing allows businesses to connect with a global audience, target specific groups of people, and track their campaigns in real-time. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is more affordable and effective in building brand awareness, generating leads, and increasing sales, while also providing insights into customer behavior. By using data, businesses can make their marketing more personalized, build better relationships, and keep customers loyal. Digital marketing also helps businesses quickly adjust to market changes and customer needs, keeping them competitive in a constantly changing digital world. This makes digital marketing a key tool for businesses of all sizes to grow, innovate, and succeed in the long term.

Raising capital. Organisations like Rio Tinto, TomTom and GKN have all raised significant sums through the equity markets. Refinancing debt. Some companies, like Yell and Schaeffler, have rolled over billions in bank finance. However, many businesses are still finding banks reluctant to lend and have turned to bond issuance as an alternative. Divestment. Companies can sell off valuable assets, such as Barclays did with Barclays Global Investors, and it is always better to do so before a crisis; otherwise it will be seen for the fire sale it is and the price will be a fire-sale price. Furthermore, any sell-off that weakens a firm’s core capability or its long-term competitive position may also shorten its life. Cut costs but not capability The managing uncertainty survey revealed that the most common action that companies took when the financial crisis struck was to cut costs. Some 82% of respondents cut costs. When asked about their future responses to uncertainty, 76% indicated they would continue to focus on cost reduction.

The reformers define the purpose of education as preparation for global competitiveness, higher education, or the workforce. They view students as “human capital” or “assets.” One seldom sees any reference in their literature or public declarations to the importance of developing full persons to assume the responsibilities of citizenship.

This discussion of war then lays the foundation for an understanding of change as a process and as an essential component of military affairs. Militaries must change to cope with the changing environment in which they function. The U.S. Army has a robust process to guide change in its combat developments community. Change is also present in the business world, as industry seeks a competitive advantage in order to survive and prosper. The present transformation initiatives in the U.S. Department of Defense seek to maintain the U.S. dominance in military capability in the world and to exploit the opportunities afforded by new technologies and concepts of organization and warfare that use those technologies. The future of military requirements remain a challenge to define. The transformation process tries to define that future and the capabilities needed in order to maintain the security of the United States. Yet enemies of the United States and its allies also seek to predict and mold this future to their advantage. The rise of Islamic fundamentalists or radicalism has changed the global security environment. Western nations must prepare to defeat this threat that is not really new but has risen to new levels of ferocity and lethality. Regardless of the changes in technology, organizational and operational concepts, and external or internal threats, people remain a constant as the crucial element in war. People make decisions to use military and other elements of national power to impose the will of a nation on another group or nations. People also comprise the military services and man the component systems within the services. Any study of war and warfare must address the impact that people make on the conduct of war and the effects of war on people. The political process always includes people. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, war is a continuation of that political process. Leaders who make a decision to fight and those who lead those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines into battle must not forget that people implement those decisions and are the object of any offense or defense. Protecting the citizens of the United States is why the nation maintains military forces.

EARNINGS McDonald's Plans Marketing Push as Profit Slides By Julie Jargon | 436 words Associated Press The burger giant has been struggling to maintain relevance among younger consumers and fill orders quickly in kitchens that have grown overwhelmed with menu items. McDonald's Corp. plans a marketing push to emphasize its fresh-cooked breakfasts as it battles growing competition for the morning meal. Competition at breakfast has heated up recently as Yum Brands Inc.'s Taco Bell entered the business with its new Waffle Taco last month and other rivals have added or discounted breakfast items. McDonald's Chief Executive Don Thompson said it hasn't yet noticed an impact from Taco Bell's breakfast debut, but that the overall increased competition "forces us to focus even more on being aggressive in breakfast." Mr. Thompson's comments came after McDonald's on Tuesday reported that its profit for the first three months of 2014 dropped 5.2% from a year earlier, weaker than analysts' expectations. Comparable sales at U.S. restaurants open more than a year declined 1.7% for the quarter and 0.6% for March, the fifth straight month of declines in the company's biggest market. Global same-store sales rose 0.5% for both the quarter and month. Mr. Thompson acknowledged again that the company has lost relevance with some customers and needs to strengthen its menu offerings. He emphasized Tuesday that McDonald's is focused on stabilizing key markets, including the U.S., Germany, Australia and Japan. The CEO said McDonald's has dominated the fast-food breakfast business for 35 years, and "we don't plan on giving that up." The company plans in upcoming ads to inform customers that it cooks its breakfast, unlike some rivals. "We crack fresh eggs, grill sausage and bacon," Mr. Thompson said. "This is not a microwave deal." Beyond breakfast, McDonald's also plans to boost marketing of core menu items such as Big Macs and french fries, since those core products make up 40% of total sales. To serve customers more quickly, the chain is working to optimize staffing, and is adding new prep tables that let workers more efficiently add new toppings when guests want to customize orders. McDonald's also said it aims to sell more company-owned restaurants outside the U.S. to franchisees. Currently, 81% of its restaurants around the world are franchised. Collecting royalties from franchisees provides a stable source of income for a restaurant company and removes the cost of operating them. McDonald's reported a first-quarter profit of $1.2 billion, or $1.21 a share, down from $1.27 billion, or $1.26 a share, a year earlier. The company partly attributed the decline to the effect of income-tax benefits in the prior year. Total revenue for the quarter edged up 1.4% to $6.7 billion, though costs rose faster, at 2.3%. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters forecast earnings of $1.24 a share on revenue of $6.72 billion.

Globally competitive companies don’t eschew profit or financial well-being, but they do not believe businesses achieve financial goals by using accounting variables to control people’s work. They see employees as a source of learning, not as a cost.

upgrading broadcasting to global standards, increasing user welfare, stimulating competition

market of global standards; creation of global competitiveness through advanced internet advertisement distribution; and creation of

New Economic Policy Since the announcement of the New Economic Policy (NEP) by the Government in July 1991, several important legislative and administrative policy changes have been brought about, which have had an enormous bearing on the economy. The NEP is very clear in its intent to dismantle control on business, make Indian industries globally competitive, move away from am import substitution regime to an export led growth oriented regime and welcome foreign equity investments to meet the growing demands of technology, products, and capital.

global marketing of Korea's competitive broadcasting and communications products such as WiBro, DMB, IPTV, and broadcast

do not presume global competitiveness from any feature of society in Silicon Valley, save those which are directly related to building great tech companies.

Nonetheless, the lower intensity of interstate war in Latin America did lead to some familiar outcomes. There was much less competitive pressure to consolidate strong national bureaucracies along French-Prussian lines prior to the arrival of mass political participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This meant that when the franchise was opened up in the early twentieth century, there was no “absolutist coalition” in place to protect the autonomy of national bureaucracies. The spread of democratic political competition created huge incentives in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and other countries for democratic politicians to use clientelistic methods to recruit voters, and consequently to turn public administration into a piggy bank for political appointments. With the partial exceptions of Chile and Uruguay, countries in Latin America followed the paths of Greece and southern Italy and transformed nineteenth-century patronage politics into full-blown twentieth-century clientelism.

Since we human beings are the cause of the environmental problems that we face today, we can also be the solution. We just need a shift in our thinking. We just need to move away from the paradigm of competition and domination. Then this world will not end. In fact, the world will prosper and return to its original place as the cradle of self-discovery and the advancement of human spirituality. And such a world is a true democracy.

upgrading broadcasting to global standards; increasing user welfare and promoting competition in the telecommunications market

In a world where technology is allowing sharks to fall prey to minnows, business leaders have to become fluent in information technology. As companies seek to negotiate the new landscape, as they eye potential rivals and partners, they have to elevate technology to the core of strategic thinking in every business unit. In addition to employing a chief information officer, who generally tends to the nuts and bolts of the technology a company uses, there is a strong argument for having a chief digital officer, who oversees technology as a strategic issue. Technology is becoming the lever through which companies can disrupt their own business models and adapt to the changing basis of competition. Burberry,

In my consulting practice, I am astounded by the number of global executives who have developed or are developing business in emerging markets and lack even a rudimentary knowledge of, or interest in, frames that are historical, cultural, humanitarian, social, military, and political in nature. Not only do these business leaders not seek out these frames, they often dismiss such frames as being irrelevant, superfluous, and time consuming. Including diverse data, points of view, and perspectives in a strategic dialogue is essential to maintaining a competitive strategic edge. The implication of these missing frames is the emergence of blind spots, and their impact on long-term business strategy is the writing on the wall.

But now, for millions of Americans, the magic of the dream is tarnished. Something is not right and an alien sense of discomfort grips the dreamer. Despite the excitement and promise that heralded globalization, American business seems frenzied and fickle. Many Fortune 500 companies, once considered havens of lifetime employment, have transformed themselves into profit-driven workaholic cults. The scramble for “the dream” demands a lengthened workday, diminished sleep, continuous learning, unusual energy, and a high tolerance for financial insecurity. To be “successful” is to be a multitasking dynamo. We rise early and burn the lights late. We exercise to CNN at breakfast and telephone while driving, for there’s not a moment to lose. At dinner we graze on snacks and fast food, but with a laptop computer as the preferred companion. In the culture of global commerce, which is etched most visibly on the face of America but increasingly apparent in Europe and other industrialized nations, the quest for economic prosperity has become a competitive high-speed game. For some the pursuit is seductive—as when I rise at dawn in Los Angeles to dine at dusk in New York—and it offers a mask of accomplishment and purpose. But for those snarled in traffic jams and crowded airport lounges, and for the lonely children who do not understand, America’s accelerated lifestyle is increasingly a source of anxiety and frustration. Thus

Gen Zers were small children on 9/11/01. They graduated from high school and (maybe) went through college or university during the deepest and most protracted global recession since the Great Depression. They are entering the workforce in a “new normal” of permanently constrained resources, increased requirements placed on workers, and fewer promised rewards for nearly everyone. From day one, they find themselves bumping up against a crowded field of “career delayed” Gen Yers, not to mention plenty of even older workers who themselves may have faced their own career setbacks. Meanwhile, Gen Zers—unlike any other generation in history—can look forward to a lifetime of interdependency and competition with a rising global youth-tide from every corner of this ever-flattening world.

Conventional economics is the dominant intellectual rationalization of today’s world order. As we’ve overextended the growth phase of our global adaptive cycle, this rationalization has become relentlessly more complex and rigid and progressively less tenable. Breakdown will, all at once, discredit this rationalization and create intellectual space for new ideas to flourish. But this space will be brutally competitive. We can boost the chances that humane alternatives will thrive by working them out in detail and disseminating them as widely as possible beforehand.89 Advance planning means we need to develop a wide range of scenarios and experiment with technologies, organizations, and ideas. We’ll do better at these tasks, and we’ll also do better in the confusing aftermath of breakdown, if we use a decentralized approach to solving our problems, because traditional centralized and top-down approaches aren’t nimble enough, and they stifle creativity. Scientists have found that complex systems that are highly adaptive—like markets and even the immune system of mammals—tend to share certain characteristics. First of all, the individual elements that make up the systems—such as companies in a market economy or T-cells and macrophages in an immune system—are extraordinarily diverse. Second, the power to make decisions and solve problems isn’t centralized in one place or thing; instead, it’s distributed across the system’s elements. The elements are then linked in a loose network that allows them to exchange information about what works and what doesn’t. Often in a market economy, for example, several companies will be working at the same time to solve different parts of a shared problem, and important information about solutions will flow between them. Third and finally, highly adaptive systems are unstable enough to create unexpected innovations but orderly enough to learn from their failures and successes. Systems with these three characteristics stimulate constant experimentation, and they generate a variety of problem-solving strategies.90 We

appeal to non-business interests) and let them be effective. Although there is marked and frequently observed dissatisfaction with the Republicans and Democrats, electoral politics is one area where notions of competition and free choice have little meaning.

electronic offers (such as e-magazines, e-books, podcasts, webcasts, etc.) at any time, via smart phone or tablet. Mobile applications can also be used to create interactive games or to promote competitions. Cultural and regional differences must be considered when selecting

As Waterman has noted: In today’s business environment, more than in any preceding era, the only constant is change. Successful organizations effectively manage change, continuously adapting their bureaucracies, strategies, systems, products, and cultures to survive the shocks and prosper from the forces that decimate the competition.

Believers in liberal freedom should worry not whether their regime can prevail in competition with authoritarian ones, but whether they can prevail against their own forms of institutional entropy: elite capture, corruption, and inequality.

We wrote Shift Ahead to document how the smartest companies and organizations shift their strategies in order to stay relevant in the face of swift and exponential changes in everything from technology to the forces of globalization, from politics and culture, from consumer tastes to human behavior. We wanted to find out how they shift ahead – how they stayed ahead of the curve, the competition, and the evolving requirements of their customers – given the barrage of evolving challenges.

Every company’s supply chain should be its ultimate competitive weapon—not the gun with which you shoot yourself in the foot.

Hiring should always be part of your long-term strategy, not a quick fix to an immediate problem.

The goal is to hit the sweet spot of maximum value optimization, where foolish risk is balanced against excessive caution.

The leader and organization improvement process is effective when everyone at all levels of the organization is involved, engaged, and committed.

For it to be useful, awareness must lead to action.

Leaders need to embrace and master the art of transformation for their organizations to thrive.

At the end of the day, a company is made by its people.

In the twenty-first century, the winners will be those who stay ahead of the change curve, constantly redefining their industries, creating new markets, blazing new trails, reinventing the competitive rules, challenging the status quo. To use Charles Handy’s words, it will be those who ‘invent the world’, not those who respond to it. Of course, it requires far less effort to follow in the tracks of the leader than it does to find your own migration path to the future, and there was a time when this was an option. But not any more. Tomorrow’s global markets will show no mercy to the me-too crowd.

As in nature, the rules of survival in competitive global business are Darwinian—businesses must keep moving, and must continually develop advantageous variations in business to avoid irrelevance and extinction.

But such denial ignores that our instincts are those of an ancient brain that evolved over many thousands of years, and that the human body is tuned for optimum function under conditions radically different from those that we enjoy in America today. Hence, our ingenuity in creating novel environments—such as the competitive opportunities of a global commerce that never sleeps, or an infinite supply of high-calorie food—rather than enhancing well-being may actually disrupt the ancient mechanisms that sustain our physical and mental balance. Such is the potential danger of the social and economic environment developing in America today. The

Although much has been written about the decline of American competitiveness, in many ways this new global market plays to our strengths. The constant in the global marketplace is change, and change is what we Americans deal with best. We have always been innovators. Who else would choose as a national motto on our great seal "novus ordo seclorum" - the new order of the ages. This native adaptability is in itself a type of "infrastructural" advantage, an infrastructure of culture that will serve us well as long as we refuse to panic in the face of statisticians and pundits wielding yesterday's numbers and telling us we're washed up if we remain ourselves.

Political democracy, judged on its own terms (as a basic political value in itself), is not to be judged (consequentially) in terms of its outcomes (successful or otherwise), but in terms of engagement. This is obviously reflected, quite basically, in electoral turnout figures (which, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, are in global decline); but it is also reflected in related elements such as levels of public debate, competition for and accessibility of office, accountability of representatives, and so on. In other words, if people do not engage seriously or, at a minimum, even bother to vote at all, then the political system has failed and those who claim a democratic mandate lack popular legitimacy – lack authority.

This mismatch between home and export markets’ preferences is a competitive weakness in a global industry.

The third wave offered to free farmers from the C market. There might be a farmer in Ethiopia who had, for twenty years, been subject to dollar-a-pound commodity pricing—a rate that kept him and his employees in poverty. But if that farmer managed to create an exceptional coffee, he or she might enter it into a regional or global competition, and if that coffee was highly rated, he or she could get the attention of a third-wave roaster, like Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea or Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland. And then something extraordinary could happen. They could trade directly.

Properly understood, technology is the one way for us to escape competition in a globalizing world. As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.

There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73

Liberal democracy and capitalism remain the essential, indeed the only, framework for the political and economic organization of modern societies. Rapid economic modernization is closing the gap between many former Third World countries and the industrialized North. With European integration and North American free trade, the web of economic ties within each region will thicken, and sharp cultural boundaries will become increasingly fuzzy. Implementation of the free trade regime of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) will further erode interregional boundaries. Increased global competition has forced companies across cultural boundaries to try to adopt “best-practice” techniques like lean manufacturing from whatever source they come from. The worldwide recession of the 1990s has put great pressure on Japanese and German companies to scale back their culturally distinctive and paternalistic labor policies in favor of a more purely liberal model. The modern communications revolution abets this convergence by facilitating economic globalization and by propagating the spread of ideas at enormous speed. But in our age, there can be substantial pressures for cultural differentiation even as the world homogenizes in other respects. Modern liberal political and economic institutions not only coexist with religion and other traditional elements of culture but many actually work better in conjunction with them. If many of the most important remaining social problems are essentially cultural in nature and if the chief differences among societies are not political, ideological, or even institutional but rather cultural, it stands to reason that societies will hang on to these areas of cultural distinctiveness and that the latter will become all the more salient and important in the years to come. Awareness of cultural difference will be abetted, paradoxically, by the same communications technology that has made the global village possible. There is a strong liberal faith that people around the world are basically similar under the surface and that greater communications will bring deeper understanding and cooperation. In many instances, unfortunately, that familiarity breeds contempt rather than sympathy. Something like this process has been going on between the United States and Asia in the past decade. Americans have come to realize that Japan is not simply a fellow capitalist democracy but has rather different ways of practicing both capitalism and democracy. One result, among others, is sthe emergence of the revisionist school among specialists on Japan, who are less sympathetic to Tokyo and argue for tougher trade policies. And Asians are made vividly aware through the media of crime, drugs, family breakdown, and other American social problems, and many have decided that the United States is not such an attractive model after all. Lee Kwan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, has emerged as a spokesman for a kind of Asian revisionism on the United States, which argues that liberal democracy is not an appropriate political model for the Confucian societies.10 The very convergence of major institutions makes peoples all the more intent on preserving those elements of distinctiveness they continue to possess.

WHY IT HAS TO CHANGE Why should this time be different? Bringing Leviathan under control will be the heart of global politics because of a confluence of three forces: failure, competition, and opportunity. The West has to change because it is going broke. The emerging world needs to reform to keep forging ahead. There is a global contest, but one based on promise as much as fear: Government can be done better. Debt and demography mean that government in the rich world has to change. Even before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Western governments were spending more than they raised. The U.S. government has run a surplus only five times since 1960; France has not had one since 1974–75. The crunch has