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2016-07-30T13:08:24Z

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The New Industrial Revolution

2013-06-28T10:53:29Z

The world is on the cusp of another industrial revolution. New technologies allied with fresh thinking, increased customization and the leveraging of global networks connecting knowledge and materials are transforming traditional industries. In Sheffield - a center of past industrial glories - this latest evolution suggests a new role for the manufacturing sector in high-cost nations that have seen such business move offshore.

In a small factory in the British city of Sheffield, Brian Reece is buzzing with energy. A spare, intense 61 year-old with a background in tool making, Reece started Sheffield Precision Medical three years ago by acquiring an existing company making orthopedic implants. After spending £1.5m on new machines tools, he has pushed up the annual sales of his business threefold to £2.5m last year, in the process increasing employment from 13 to 30.

With the company’s products including highly accurate pieces of titanium and other metals used in artificial joints including hip replacements, Reece is preoccupied in installing a series of “web-cameras” inside the company’s workshops. “It’s so we can show our customers – which could be large medical device manufacturers anywhere in the world – precisely what we are doing at any time of the day and without them leaving their own headquarters,” he explains. Reece describes his company – with its roots in Sheffield’s long history of metalworking – as a “resurgent remnant.” He adds, “we are taking an age-old technology [metal-cutting] and refreshing it with modern ideas.”

Sheffield is one of the best places in the world to get a sense of how new thinking allied with clever technology and global marketing can transform traditional industries. I was in Sheffield to talk to Reece – and a number of other leading industrialists – in a visit geared partly to promoting my book The New Industrial Revolution, an account of the past, present and future for manufacturing that paints a fairly bright picture for this part of the global economy over the next 50 years.

In my book, I set out my case for the world moving through a new industrial revolution – the fifth such period of change to alter the field of manufacturing. I suggest this revolution will have a profound affect on boosting the capabilities of manufacturing businesses all around the world, but with a special impact in the high cost nations that have been somewhat disadvantaged in production industries over the past 15 years. The first industrial revolution took place over about 80 years from 1780, and involved a combination of technical changes in fields such as textile engineering, metallurgy and power systems (chiefly new steam engines) to deliver a competitive boost mainly in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, infiltrating the United States later.

The second industrial revolution took place between 1850 and 1900. It was brought about by a set of technology changes involving communications systems such as the railway, iron or steel hulled steamship and telegraph. The third industrial revolution occurred between 1870 and 1930. It was triggered by the stimulus of a number of new industries made possible by key science based discoveries, including ways to make metals such as steel and aluminum and other products (including pharmaceuticals) cheaply and in high volumes, with the new era greatly helped by the then-novelty of low cost and readily available electricity.

The fourth industrial revolution took place over half a century from 1950 and was based on the powerful impetus that cheap electronic computer processing provided to a huge part of the global economy, including manufacturing. The new industrial revolution started around 2005, and will probably last for about 50 years. It is characterized by seven principal themes.

These include: the intertwining and blending of a great many new and different technologies, taking in disciplines such as novel materials, automation and bio processing; the increasing separation of industry into pockets of specialty or niche activities; the growing importance of making products not on a mass scale but in a customized or personalized manner, where the characteristics of the item are suited to just a small number of users, or even a single person or organization; the evolving role of complex intellectual or material networks linking the world either with new thinking and ideas, or proving a conduit for the transfer of products and materials; the growth in importance of what might seem to embody the antithesis of the last feature but which is in fact complementary, and which concerns the effect of small concentrations of businesses and other organizations in specific geographic areas and which help each other to achieve greater global impact through cluster effects; the way in which China's recent and rapid re-emergence as a world economic superpower has not only helped companies and other groups inside this country but has also benefited other organizations around the world; and finally, the way manufacturers are using the power of their products (or the way the products are made) as a means to help the world to lessen the negative impact of other parts of human activity on the environment.

Sheffield – Britain’s fifth largest urban center by population – was known for decades as “steel city.” Iron-making has been important in the area since medieval times. In the 19th century, Sheffield became one of the cradles of the first industrial revolution – the set of changes in factory organisation and technology that radically altered life in Europe and the United States by boosting manufacturing productivity and increasing wealth. Probably the most famous episode in Sheffield’s history came in 1859.

Henry Bessemer, the prolific English inventor, chose the city as the place for the first of his ‘Bessemer converters’ – a system for making steel that cut enormously its price by increasing the metal’s rate of production and reducing the need for labor. It was in Sheffield where cheap steel – a commodity that has driven the global economy for the past 150 years – was made for the first time.

In the days when I was visiting, a resplendent mural was being unveiled in the city center to depict another of Sheffield’s favorite sons – Harry Brearley, a metallurgist who grew up and worked in the city and is credited with having discovered how to make stainless (or “rust-less”) steel 100 years ago. Later in the 20th century, Sheffield stainless steel became famous the world over, in applications such as cutlery and surgical instruments.

Today, Sheffield is still a place where – unlike in most other large British cities – manufacturing remains a highly visible part of everyday life. Outside the city center, factories remain well in evidence, even if many look rather shabby and have far smaller workforces than 50 years ago. The urban area, taking in the adjacent city of Rotherham, remains home to about 500 metals and engineering businesses, most of them with fewer than 100 employees, and many having connections to the area’s long production traditions.

Take London & Scandinavian Metallurgical (LSM), a maker of specialist metal alloys set up in 1938 in the Sheffield area by a trio of German engineers fleeing the Nazi regime. The company’s managing director is an outgoing Brazilian businessman Itamar Resende whose motto is “where others conform, we innovate.” The business is also highly international, with 87 percent of its £220m sales last year exported. By focusing on highly engineered forms of alloy with applications in sectors such as aerospace, automotive and machine tools, the privately owned company has doubled its revenues over the past seven years.

David Beare, LSM’s Corporate Director, told me “we have to keep finding new ways to use our metals, then we feel we are in with a chance.” The company has, for instance, been expanding recently in areas such as making new additive materials for use in tin-foil in the packaging industry, and in the field of high-power magnets.

Among other Sheffield companies, many have followed a similar path, avoiding commodity areas of industry and focusing on niche areas of production with fairly small numbers of competitors and where sales are made on the basis of original ideas and performance, rather than price. Another example is Gripple, a producer of specialist connectors for use in factory applications and fencing, which work by ‘gripping’ pieces of wire in unusual ways. Gripple was started in 1989 by Hugh Facey, a larger than life former wire salesman who remains in charge of the business as Chairman.

Facey has based his business philosophy on continually finding new forms of connection through encouraging experimentation. Nowadays the key work in this area is done in a 12-person “innovation centre” at his company’s headquarters. Referred to as “the madhouse” by Facey, the interior of the innovation centre is painted bright orange, with a key feature being a big red button displayed prominently on one of the walls. "When the people here come up with a particularly good idea they press the button,” confides Facey. He likes to surprise visitors by trying it out, triggering a loud screeching sound.

But for all the go-ahead demeanor of people such as Facey, it would be wrong to depict the city as without economic problems. Manufacturing in Sheffield has faced challenges, as indeed has the same branch of industry in much of the rest of the United Kingdom and further afield. The share of manufacturing in the GDP last year was only about 11 percent, down from almost 30 percent in 1970. Over this period the number of workers in manufacturing has fallen by about 5 million, to a little more than 2 million.

With manufacturing historically having represented a larger share of the local economy than in other parts of the country, Sheffield has found it hard to adapt to the new conditions for industry globally where smart thinking, rapid deployment of technology and a global mindset are all highly important. Unemployment in the city – as measured by the numbers claiming social security allowances on the grounds of long-term joblessness – is a fifth higher than the national average. Average wages are 16 percent lower than in the United Kingdom as a whole. This is a measure of the fact that – even with a relatively large number of engineering-related businesses in the city – overall employment remains skewed towards low-remuneration industries such as services or unskilled manufacturing.

A report by Sheffield First, a public/private organisation in the city geared to efforts to boost the economy, states: “Sheffield does not make sufficient use of the skills in its population, with a lower density of highly skilled private sector jobs than in other parts of the UK.”

While most of the local manufacturers are eager to link themselves to the long traditions of the city, not everyone among the city’s industrialists believes accenting the Sheffield link is a good idea. In the vanguard of this thinking is Andrew Cook, the idiosyncratic chairman and owner of William Cook, a Sheffield company that is the country’s largest maker of steel castings, used in industries such as railways, military vehicles and sub-sea engineering. One of the great survivors, Cook has been running William Cook since 1981 after he ousted his father from the job in a bitter family quarrel.

Today, William Cook employs 800 people and had sales last year of £90m, 90 percent of this exported. Cook always likes to speak of his company as being based in Yorkshire – the wider region where Sheffield is located – rather than in the city itself. He speaks witheringly of what he refers to as the “Sheffield manufacturing establishment.” The outspoken Cook reckons local business people do not do enough in adapting to new thinking and are too keen to look back at the “glory days” of past success. “They [other Sheffield manufacturers] have a misplaced belief in their embedded superiority,” he says.

However Peter Birtles, a director of Sheffield Forgemasters – another big metals business in the city – rejects this view. He says that his company, along with most of the other important manufacturers in the city, would not still be in business were Cook’s criticisms correct. “We [at Sheffield Forgemasters] have had to adapt to new pressures and become increasingly innovative in order to keep ahead of rivals from around the world – not just from countries such as Germany and the United States, but from new competitors including China and India.”

With sales last year of £100m and 800 employees, Sheffield Forgemasters – which can trace its roots back to some of the pioneering metals businesses in Sheffield of the 18th century – makes large metal parts for industries such as nuclear power and production systems for gas and oil fields. Some four fifths of its annual sales are exported. Since 2005, the company has spent more than £50m on new capital investments, such as improvements to its massive steel forging presses, while also putting £10m over the past four years into developing new production techniques and materials. For instance, to find more accurate manufacturing methods.

“We feel we have to do this if we are to have a future,” says Birtles. “Everyone keeps telling us the Chinese and Indians are catching up [in western know-how and technology]. Of course in 10 years time they will be up to the level we are now. So what we have to do is to move ahead over this period so that – when this time comes – we will be perhaps three or four years in front of where they’ve got to then.”

Having talked to people such as Birtles – part of the modern breed of European industrialist who shows a mixture of innovative verve mixed with resilience and technological acumen – my visit to Sheffield gave me some optimism about the future for the city in manufacturing. Sheffield made its name as a key center in the first industrial revolution that started to shake up the world 150-200 years ago. There is every reason to think Sheffield could have an equally big impact during the new industrial revolution that is now evolving.

Photo © Global Manufacturing Festival: Sheffield.

When Profit Meets Purpose

2013-05-13T10:11:35Z

As the first Internet stock bubble neared its popping point in 1999, IBM chief executive Lou Gerstner famously dismissed the dot-com start-ups of his day as “fireflies before the storm—all stirred up, throwing off sparks.” The Internet would truly achieve its disruptive potential, Gerstner argued, when thousands of big institutions around the world started using the new communication and technology platform to transform themselves. He was right. Although many of the dot-com players did not survive the 2000 market crash in technology stocks, they were indeed harbingers of a coming business revolution.

Nearly 15 years later, we see a new set of fireflies before a different storm. This time, an explosion of creativity in social entrepreneurship has unfolded against the backdrop of a crisis in global capitalism. Barely half of Americans polled in 2010 by GlobeScan said they believed in the free-market system, down from 80 percent in 2002. A large majority had lost trust in government. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer found that trust in business has been below 50 percent for 8 of the past 12 years. Throughout Europe, only small minorities said they believed in free-market capitalism.

Meanwhile, social entrepreneurs are developing innovative business models that blend traditional capitalism with solutions that address the long-term needs of our planet. They are tackling chronic social problems, ranging from healthcare delivery in sub-Saharan Africa to agricultural transformation in East Asia and public-school funding in the United States. Social entrepreneurs are working in close collaboration with local communities, incubating groundbreaking (and often lifesaving) innovations; modeling synergistic partnerships with governments, companies, and traditional charities; and building business models that deploy technology and enable networking to create wins for investors and clients alike. “Social entrepreneurs are mad scientists in the lab,” says Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University. “They’re harbingers of new ways of doing business.”

We believe this collaborative approach offers intriguing hints about how enterprises of all sizes can deliver value for themselves and society. Below we suggest four ways in which social entrepreneurs are showing the way forward.

Using profit to fund purpose

Many of today’s leading social entrepreneurs have created organizations that are neither businesses nor charities, but rather hybrid entities that generate revenue in pursuit of social goals. While not entirely new (the Girl Scouts have been selling cookies for many years), this desire to blend purpose with profit has more recently been formalized in structures such as the US “benefit corporation” (B Corp), a corporate entity legally required to create benefit for society as well as its shareholders.

While B Corps are still rare, many nonprofit organizations generate revenue to advance the parent organization’s social goals. VisionSpring, for example, is a social venture that provides eye tests and glasses to lower-income customers in more than 20 countries, including Bangladesh, El Salvador, India, and South Africa. Initially, VisionSpring distributed its eyeglasses through a dedicated sales force of microentrepreneurs. Like many business owners before him, founder Jordan Kassalow soon learned that pushing a limited range of products through a single sales channel was a tough way to make a living. “There wasn’t enough money coming in to support our operations,” he says. “We realized we could either be a really nice, perpetually subsidized nongovernmental organization, or—better yet—change our business model so we wouldn’t need subsidies.”

Today VisionSpring operates vision stores that generate income via programs in which higher profit margins on more expensive glasses subsidize basic eyewear for the poorest customers. Kassalow also distributes eyeglasses and vision testing through large organizations like BRAC, a philanthropy in Bangladesh with a huge existing network for distributing healthcare services. VisionSpring calculates that one pair of its glasses increases the average recipient’s labor productivity by 35 percent, which works out to $216 in additional income over two years—a 20 percent rise. Kassalow plans to continue operating on a nonprofit basis while working toward profitability in every country where VisionSpring operates. (All profits are poured back into the organization.) His El Salvador unit is already profitable, and he expects VisionSpring’s India operations to achieve profitability by 2015.

Kassalow’s blended approach to value creation is increasingly common. Living Goods, for example, is a US-based nonprofit that sells essential products such as fortified foods, pharmaceuticals, and high-efficiency cookstoves through an Avon-like network of microfranchisees in Uganda. According to founder Chuck Slaughter, this model provides a modest income to the franchisees while helping to fund his operating costs. “Avon has five million agents,” he says. “My thought was if you can make that kind of money selling discretionary stuff, imagine what you can do selling absolutely essential, life-changing goods.”

Similarly, Riders for Health is a UK-based organization that sells logistical services to health ministries in seven African countries. It runs a fleet of some 1,500 vehicles that deliver medical services to between 11 million and 12 million rural Africans. The organization funds its operating expenses in part by charging local health ministries a cost per kilometer that covers fuel, maintenance, replacement parts, and logistical costs. Originally founded to service health-ministry motorcycles in Lesotho, Riders for Health now operates in several African countries and has added a slew of logistical services to its product mix. The organization maintains ambulances and hospital generators, transports medical samples from rural clinics to labs for analysis, and manages compliance programs for patients taking medication. “We don’t charge profit of any kind,” says cofounder Andrea Coleman. “But from the beginning, our mission has been to earn as much money as possible from different income streams.”

Delivering individualized products that marry need and want

Successful social ventures leverage their small scale and intense customer focus to create products and distribution models that precisely match the needs and desires of the communities they serve. In this sense they are modeling a much broader economic trend. In a 2010 McKinsey Quarterly article, Shoshana Zuboff argued that the capitalist mode of production was going through a historic transition from mass consumption to the wants of individuals, a phenomenon that she called “distributed capitalism.” Obvious examples include various personalized shopping experiences enabled by interactive technology, also known as mass customization.

While we often associate distributed capitalism with digitized consumer transactions, the concept has broader application in the world of social entrepreneurship. Caerus Associates, for example, is a small consultancy that uses a combination of big-data analytics and local community knowledge to assess development trends, often in societies suffering from violent conflict. In an article that appeared last year in McKinsey’s special volume on social innovation, Caerus founder David Kilcullen explained how his social venture advises governments, corporations, and local communities on what he calls “designing for development.” The main idea here is that development programs must be designed with input from local actors because they call the shots on the ground.

Education delivery is another area where we can see the principles of distributed capitalism at work. In Bangladesh, a social entrepreneur named Mohammed Rezwan operates a fleet of solar-powered floating schools that provide mobile education to rural schoolchildren who are often isolated during the monsoon floods. Rather than building a school and asking children to show up, Rezwan brings school to the children, when and where they need it. Similarly, Pakistan’s Pehli Kiran School System is a network of schools for the children of impoverished migrant workers living in illegal settlements, or katchi abadis. Local authorities frequently raid and dismantle these settlements, forcing the families to move. Pehli Kiran schools move right along with them, with the goal of ensuring that students can continue their education no matter what happens to their homes.

Or consider how two social entrepreneurs have managed to customize the delivery of agricultural-development services in rural Myanmar. Jim Taylor and his partner Debbie Aung Din operate Proximity Designs, a social venture that develops innovative, low-cost products designed to raise agricultural productivity. Proximity Designs employs ethnographers and product designers who work closely with subsistence farmers in the countryside to develop products like solar-lighting systems and foot-operated irrigation pumps.

Proximity Designs funds its operations in part by selling the products through a network of for-profit agricultural supply dealers in small towns in Myanmar. To ensure that farmers can afford to buy its goods, Proximity Designs also developed a financing program that advances small loans at modest rates. “We look through the lens of what impact we can have,” says Taylor. “One farmer I met had piglets that were like children—they wouldn’t sleep at night unless the lights were on. He used to stay up all night with a lit candle because he was worried about burning the house down. Now that the farmer has our solar lights; the pigs are happy and he gets to sleep.”

It would be difficult to gather such granular insight from a product design lab in, say, California. By virtue of their small size and engagement with the communities they serve, social ventures like Proximity Designs are well positioned to deliver products that meet both the needs and the wants of their clients.

Crowdsourcing the solution

In a 2008 article, communications scholar Daren C. Brabham defined crowdsourcing as “an online, distributed problem-solving and production model.” Today we see crowdsourcing applications in many different realms, from open-source software development to financial-prediction markets and funding for creative projects through Kickstarter and similar sites. Crowdsourcing has been a particular boon to social entrepreneurs, who can use it to create disproportionate impact with modest resources.

Charles Best is the founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org, a Web-based platform that raises money to fund class projects in American public schools. Individual donors contribute an average of $50 apiece to projects that typically cost about $500. DonorsChoose.org vets every project, pays all project costs directly, and makes sure that the teachers write thank-you letters to every donor. Best covers his operating costs by charging each donor an optional 15 percent administrative fee. “We’re one of the few charities that doesn’t go hat in hand seeking donations,” he says.

Best crowdsources quality control as well as fund-raising. He used to hire college students to vet all the projects, which he says was costly and often ineffective. Today he uses a network of trusted teachers who have already received DonorsChoose grants and volunteer their time to make sure that all new projects deserve funding. This year, DonorsChoose expects to receive at least 150,000 project submissions from public schools all over the United States, and it plans to disburse about $50 million in grants, 85 percent of them to teachers working in high-poverty schools. Best’s organization has been entirely self-sustaining since 2010. Since inception, a total of 145,000 teachers at nearly half the public schools in America have received grants through the site.

In recent years, we’ve also seen a boom in prize competitions that crowdsource solutions to difficult social problems. Information technology and social media now enable cheap and easy collaboration. For social ventures, this dramatically expands the pool of potential problem solvers and lowers the cost of developing solutions. Ashoka’s Changemakers initiative, for instance, is an idea factory that encourages social entrepreneurs to develop concepts that transcend the competition itself, essentially building a marketplace for innovation in an issue area in just a few months. Changemakers judges are also potential investors. By requiring participants to post their ideas and selecting a relatively large pool of finalists, Changemakers and similar competitions can help match competitors to new funding.

Working themselves out of a job

One important test of any social venture is whether it can create sustainable impact beyond its own projects. Some of today’s most farsighted social entrepreneurs have created business models that allow them to effectively work themselves out of a job by creating sustainable, lasting change in the communities that they serve.

I-DEV International, for example, is a New York–based impact investment firm that’s in the business of what it calls “market-based sustainable development.” In Peru, I-DEV helped impoverished farmers build an international business out of tara, a native tree species whose fruit had historically been consumed locally for medicinal purposes. However, plant researchers had developed new applications for tara in the global food, pharmaceutical, leather, and pet-food industries. I-DEV helped some 200 Peruvian farmers to organize a farming co-op that today is the largest and most successful supplier of unprocessed tara in Peru.

The co-op generates nearly $4 million a year in revenue for its members. I-DEV is currently gathering investors to help the farmers build a tara processing plant. Managing director Jason Spindler says the deal will be structured as a joint venture in which the farmers take the majority stake while I-DEV and equity participants are minority shareholders. “Nothing we do is for charity,” he says.

Other social ventures scale innovation by partnering with local governments. Ned Breslin is the CEO of Water For People, an international nonprofit that works with local communities to install water pipes, latrines, and other sanitation infrastructure in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. His goal is to ensure that nobody in a district where Water for People works will ever need sanitation assistance from another international development organization.

To do that, Water for People mobilizes local authorities from the community level all the way up to the national government. It insists that all levels of government invest their own money alongside Water for People. The local communities are also asked to participate as investors, and their contributions must take the form of cash rather than sweat equity. Breslin maintains a low public profile for his organization, with the goal of ensuring that communities and local governments get the credit for improving sanitation and therefore feel ownership in the programs. “What we’re really challenging is the endless project-by-project approach of philanthropy,” he says. “The point of our investment is not to do another project. It’s to get the water flowing at scale so they never need another project.”

Social entrepreneurs and capitalism

Despite their early successes, social ventures in this new generation are still entrepreneurial start-ups. Some may survive and grow into major organizations. Others may disappear. Regardless of their individual fates, we believe these organizations demonstrate a way forward for the capitalist mode of production, one in which economic and social value creation are no longer seen as antithetical.

Social entrepreneurs are part of a broader conversation about the relationship between business and society that has been gathering steam since the Great Recession. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, McKinsey global managing director Dominic Barton argued that global capitalism was at a turning point. “We can reform capitalism, or we can let capitalism be reformed for us, through political measures and the pressures of an angry public,” he writes. Barton suggests that capitalism should return to the values of its founding philosopher Adam Smith, who believed that business and society were profoundly interdependent.

Similarly, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter argues that capitalism has betrayed its promise by focusing on the narrow equation of value with short-term economic returns. Porter urges companies to think in terms of “shared value,” which involves generating economic value while at the same time creating value for society by addressing its needs and challenges.

Meanwhile, the author and consultant Dov Seidman makes a business case for ethical capitalism. Globalization, he argues, has made it increasingly difficult for companies to offer unique value propositions based on their products and services alone. At the same time, the ubiquity of electronic communication and the rise of social media have created a transparent business world in which bad behavior is more difficult to hide than ever before. As a result, ethical behavior has become a point of competitive differentiation. Companies that “outbehave” their competitors will eventually outperform them as well.

We can cite many examples of large organizations that are already putting these principles into practice. Elsewhere in this volume, leaders from The Coca-Cola Company, Hindustan Unilever, and Royal DSM explain how their companies blend profit and social purpose by deploying advanced supply-chain technologies that deliver lifesaving goods and services to some of the world’s poorest people. Meanwhile, the social ventures that we have profiled in this essay are testing many ideas about the proper relationship between business and society, some of which may eventually scale up and become standard practice for organizations of all sizes. While the solutions are diverse, most are based on the working assumption that profit and purpose need not conflict.

Social ventures that create new value chains while generating profit in pursuit of social goals are a direct challenge to Milton Friedman’s dictum that the social purpose of a business is to generate profit for its shareholders. With public cynicism about business at record levels, we may well see more organizations following their lead.

The article originally appeared in McKinsey's online publication Voices on Society

The article was co-authored by Danielle Sachs, Director of Social Impact for McKinsey & Company, and Richard McGill Murphy, the managing editor of Voices on Society a print and online publication from McKinsey & Company.

Opinions voiced by Global Minds do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Global Journal.

Photo © DR

Richly Deserved

2013-03-18T11:26:45Z

The tale of two worlds – the fabulously rich and the increasingly poor – is a defining narrative of contemporary life, and it continues to throw up vivid reminders, at once doleful and grimly hilarious.

One of the latest examples was told by the writer and provocateur Matt Taibbi, famed for having described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

In a recent Rolling Stone blog post, Taibbi related a confrontation between Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and the analyst Mike Mayo of Credit Agricole Securities during an investor conference call earlier this year. These calls are where analysts get to question the masters of the financial universe about their actions. Mayo asked Dimon if investors would not prefer a bank – he offered UBS as an example –that had a higher capital-to-debt ratio. The exchange then went:

Dimon: So you would go to UBS and not JPMorgan Chase?

Mayo: I didn’t say that … that’s their [UBS’] argument…

Dimon: That’s why I’m richer than you [raucous laughter].

Taibbi used the anecdote to show, as he said, “how these guys think.” To push that thought a little further: It’s how people, who live highly stressed lives with much depending on their judgments, think of themselves: that they are worth it. The conventional view is that every company of size and reputation needs several of these people so it may survive. In effect, large wealth has now been given a rational, maybe even a moral, underpinning.

At around the same time, a number of other matters came to light. Forbes Magazine published its billionaires’ list, which revealed that there are 1,426 of these exotic creatures, with 210 in the superleague for the first time. A little over a third of them are in the United States; 23 are under 40; 386 are in the Asia-Pacific zone, 366 in Europe, 129 in the Americas and 103 in the Middle East and Africa. United, the billionaires of the world command $5.4 trillion, up from $4.6 trillion last year, and now worth one-third of annual U.S. output. The Mexican Carlos Slim, with $73 billion, remains on top, and Bill Gates, with $67 billion, remains at No. 2. But there’s a newcomer at No. 3, rudely elbowing aside the sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett – the Spanish entrepreneur Amancio Ortega, who owns a majority stake in Zara, the world’s biggest clothing company,. He added nearly $20 billion to his fortune in a year, which came out at $57 billion.

Most of these people are not shy, and many probably believe they deserve their billions; besides, many, like Bill Gates, give slabs of it to good causes. Most don’t boast of their worthiness, although the Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who is probably the world’s richest woman, recently used a column to address her fellow Australians: If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself – spend less time drinking or smoking and socializing, and more time working. Her rival for the title of richest woman is the French Liliane Bettencourt, whose family owns 30 percent of L’Oréal: She hasn’t said, at least not in public, that she deserves the money from the company created by her father, but its slogan is, irresistibly: “Because you deserve it!”

Ortega’s good (say, huge) fortune was made public at the same time as his country’s Department of Labor revealed that the 5 million Spanish jobless had increased by 1.2 percent, or just over 59,000 people, to bring the rate to 26.2 percent.

This ironic vein could continue for much longer because it has seemed that there’s not much to be done about it, and, when hopeless, irony is a better resort than the guillotine. Unlike the aristos who perished during the French, Russian and other revolutions, the rich now work hard. They create companies that create jobs, and political leaders vie to get them to move to their countries: The British Prime Minister David Cameron said he would roll out the red carpet for French business people fleeing high taxation.

There is a global market in entrepreneurs and superstars of all kinds, which Gerard Depardieu, the French superstar, dramatized when he bought a house across the French border in Belgium to escape a swinging wealth tax – besting Francois Hollande, the French president (who must occasionally long for the guillotine). On a recent trip to Russia, Hollande was careful to note Depardieu’s status – “If he decided to leave the country, if he loves Russia and Russia so loves Gerard Depardieu, then it is understandable. But still Depardieu loves France, which recognizes him as a great actor.”

The irony in the first part of his answer was an implicit recognition that the president of France was powerless – the more so since the French constitutional court had recently ruled that his proposed 75 percent super-tax was unconstitutional. The irony is that in less than a century, Russia has gone from being a haven for communists to being one for the rich.

Yet people who live on low, even middling incomes and who may be or are threatened by being unemployed are becoming more and more angry at the sight of vast wealth, and are ceasing to believe that nothing can be done. The Swiss are not known for their love of irony, but they do love referenda: They had 12 last year, on employment leave, second houses, building society savings, a fixed book price agreement, gambling revenues, healthcare, foreign policy, home buying, a smoking ban, secure housing in old age, music lessons at school and an Animal Diseases Act. Earlier this month, 68 percent of citizens who took part voted for a series of curbs on executive pay, including a ban on golden handshakes and parachutes and bonuses for organizing a takeover or a partial company sell-off. This in the world’s banking capital; moreover, it’s in the state that has struggled to preserve the secrecy of the often-dubious fortunes lodged in its banks.

The European finance ministers are this week debating a vote in the European parliament last week that would limit banker bonuses to a 1:1 ratio with salaries. The British, home to the biggest financial services industry in Europe, are worried that the high-rolling bankers in the City of London will seek new homes: several have said so. One banker told the FT: “This is big stuff. This wrecks the model of keeping salaries low.” (Salaries were kept low, but augmented with bonuses.) But a vote in the European Parliament is likely to be decisive: Something along these lines is now likely.

Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities begins “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” In today’s tale of two worlds, it is a time when nothing can be done, it is a time when something must be done. Popular anger and will is beginning to demand that the resignation to vast inequality ends, and something less gross takes its place. This will run on – and on.

Originally published in Reuters.

Opinions voiced by Global Minds do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Global Journal.

Photo © DR

#26 - Ceres

2012-01-23T12:50:57Z

Check out if Ceres is in The Top 100 NGOs 2013 Edition!

Integrating sustainability into capital markets.

Mobilizing $9.5 trillion in assets.

Best Buy, Bank of America, Ford, Levi Strauss & Co., Nike, Starbucks and Timberland – these are just a handful of the companies initiating sustainable business practices with support from Ceres. Since 1989, the Boston-based organization has led a normative shift in corporate governance as it pertains to environmental issues like climate change, clean energy, water scarcity and supply chain sustainability.

Uniquely situated at the nexus of the business, investment and advocacy communities, Ceres – which is comprised of a coalition of more than 130 institutions, public interest groups and investors – engages in a dialogue with leading companies and policymakers to influence critical decision-making. Alongside other initiatives, the organization also directs the ‘Investor Network on Climate Risk’, a network of nearly 100 leading investors collectively managing more than $9.5 trillion in assets, which mobilizes and leverages shareholder power to secure meaningful corporate commitments on sustainability challenges.

Working in collaboration with – rather than in opposition to – the private sector, Ceres’ approach has achieved tangible, gamechanging results. Its ‘Global Reporting Initiative’ is now the de-facto international standard for corporate reporting on environmental, social and economic performance, while it has spurred important – and sustainable – environmental reforms in more than 80 companies.

Let's Talk About De-Globalization

2011-12-13T11:18:19Z

While business schools overall have been highly prolific in teaching and writing about the opportunities arising from the global market economy and emerging markets, they – as with the global business community in general – have been too complacent in respect to the fragilities and the threats.

Much of the teaching we do is aimed at emphasising the wider context of business, highlighting some of the threats to globalization and how business education can counter these.

But although the ardour has diminished since the crises of 2008, more attention still needs to be paid to these escalating centrifugal forces. The forces of de-globalization can be put into two inter-related categories: the horizontal and the vertical.

The horizontal refers to relations between states. The premise of globalization referred to the “borderless world.” As markets came to dominate, states and borders would become increasingly irrelevant. Furthermore, achieving the goals of a global market economy and facing the threats – climate change, immigration, poverty, food security, water, etc – required a spirit of global co-operation and the means to impose it.

This has emphatically not been the case. Especially as the number and roles of major national actors on the global scene have increased – and in the case of China with hallucinatory speed – mistrust rather than trust between nations has risen to the fore. Many examples can be cited to illustrate this point: perhaps the most egregious was the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009. Nationalism, along with the spectre of protectionism, is back. As Philip Stephens recently wrote in the Financial Times (“A return to the world of Hobbes,” 27 October), “Thomas Hobbes is now prevailing over Immanuel Kant in the re-ordering of the global system.” This development, it must be stressed, has occurred in contradiction to the assumptions of business schools, consulting firms and the general global business ethos.

These horizontal centrifugal forces are in good part driven by the vertical forces. Among the generally upbeat books on globalization that appeared in the first decade following the implosion of the Soviet Union and the state collectivist central command ideology was one co-authored by John Micklethwait (currently editor of The Economist) and Adrian Wooldridge, entitled A Future Perfect. The authors coined the term “cosmocrats” to define a new emerging global elite that shares common backgrounds, values, aspirations, customs, lifestyles and so on. They described business schools as the “boot camps of globalization” and the training grounds of the cosmocratic elite.

Walk into any MBA classroom where there may be 40-plus nationalities (as there are at IMD) and one is struck not by the centrifugal, but by the centripetal forces. There are no tensions between nationalities; on the contrary, there are similarities. The problem, as Micklethwait and Wooldridge warned, is that by adopting values of men and women on the move and on the make, “in giving back less than they take out, they forfeit the support and undermine the health of their host societies.” There is not only a growing income disparity but also a cultural and psychological gap between the cosmocratic elite and the “ordinary” citizenry.

Not only has this new global class hierarchy created vast inequalities, but the fact that some members of the cosmocratic elite are seen also to be cheating has caused, understandably, a profound and increasingly strident backlash. For the multitudes who do not see themselves among those who have benefited from globalization, there is a profound sense of injustice borne of mistrust. Hence Occupy Wall Street, the anti-corruption protests of Anna Hazare in India, the demonstrations in Dalian, Athens and Rome, and the indignant movement in Spain. Globalization is perceived as having created a vast chasm between the “in” and the “out.” Perhaps an interesting – and encouraging? – phenomenon is that the plight and protests of the “outs” have generated a considerable degree of support and sympathy from at least some of the “ins.”

For the trends of de-globalization to be reversed and for the global market economy to survive, there is an urgent imperative for a radical change in attitudes, in policies, in strategies, and, for business schools, in pedagogy. Business schools and the business leaders they spawn must also recognise that only business is in a position to effectuate change that will at the same time ensure that the basic principles and structures of the global market economy are maintained, indeed strengthened, that growth will be sustained, and that greater social justice and fairness will prevail.

This requires serious attention to be paid to both the horizontal and vertical forces. In respect to the horizontal, business school curricula should include some basics of “international relations” to understand why global governance is currently at a perilous standstill and how business can make constructive contributions to enhance relations between states in a manner commensurate with the integration of global markets.

As to the pressing vertical forces, business schools must address the opportunities and challenges of inclusion. This in turn demands much greater attention given to the functioning (or malfunctioning?) of societies, to the psychologies of those individuals seen as the foot-soldiers of globalization, and to the excluded, the indignant and the oppressed. The humanities – literature, philosophy, history and the arts – have tended to be conspicuous by their absence in business school curricula. This is a mistake. In seeking to determine how business leadership, philosophies and strategies should evolve, studying the humanities will engender greater understanding of humanity.

Developments over the last two decades have provided hitherto undreamed of opportunities. Globalization has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty; markets – including huge ones, China and India – that were closed have opened; and innovative technologies have created a new and potentially tremendously exciting business paradigm. We live in an age of great expectations and great possibilities. At the same time, we know that our universe is fragile. Unless adequate measures are taken – and seen to be taken – to heal the wounds of discord between and within states and thereby reverse the tides of de-globalization, the opportunities might metamorphose into calamities.

World Bank Index Shows Progress in Africa/Eastern Europe

2011-11-24T09:34:05Z

The regulatory atmosphere for local entrepreneurs trying to start a business was made easier around the world in 2010-2011 with the greatest improvement found in several African and Eastern European countries.

The World Bank presented its annual Doing Business report at a conference in Geneva (November 23) under the title Doing business in a more transparent world. The report surveyed 183 countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe comparing the regulatory environments on matters such as property rights, start-up loans, construction permits and taxes. The indices show that reforms made in the past five years in 85% of world economies made it easier to for domestic entrepreneurs to do business.

When asked why the improved regulatory indices around the world had so far had little impact on improving economies and the jobless situation, Augusto Lopez-Claros, Director of Global Indicators and Analysis at the World Bank said only that the report did not include macro economic issues.

The current crisis in Eurozone countries, he said, is due to “poor management of public finances over the last 20 years." As for the US, which remains in the number four position on the Doing Business index, he said that it clearly “fails at the macro level with deficit problems creating a business atmosphere comparable to an emerging country.”

The report’s most positive results were in some unexpected places. “In Sub-Saharan Africa, 78% of the economies have adopted regulatory reforms,” said Lopez-Claros, adding that 88% of countries in Eastern Europe and Central have done the same.

Rwanda and Georgia were singled out for special mention. Rwanda’s Ambassador to the UN Mission in Geneva, Soline Nyirahabimana, said the World Bank report proves that there is something worthy evolving in Rwanda that she hoped would lead to foreign investment in her country.

Georgia’s representative in Geneva, Tina Bokuchava, said that while such reports provided excellent incentives for countries to reform their regulatory structures, what's more important is for governments to have the ‘political will’ to make changes. Georgia was rife with corruption, she said, until the current government "came to power with a mandate of change, of comprehensive reform, and in eight years Georgia has turned into a regional laboratory of reform and a global leader in economic reform".

The report noted that the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) did not do so well, although it said China continues to make progress.

The results of the report will be available on a new website permitting businesses and governments to compare and exchange information. “We call it the virtue of transparency,” said Lopez-Claros. “A minister in a given country can look at our data and say ‘hey, I didn’t know it was so complicated to get a permit (in his own country)'."

(Photo © DR)

First Companies With WindMade Label

2011-11-21T16:00:52Z

The first wind power consumer label, WindMade, has announced that 15 companies have pledged to derive a minimum of 25% of their electricity consumption from wind power. The announcement comes a few weeks after the launch of the consumer label, an initiative to encourage investment in renewable energy sources.

The companies that will receive the label after proving their commitment to wind power solutions include Motorola Mobility, Deutsche Bank, Engraw, Widex, Method and Becton and Dickinson and Co.

When it announced the label initiative in October, WindMade explained that in order to qualify for the WindMade label, a company must pledge that a minimum of 25% of its electricity consumption will come from renewable energy sources such as wind power, hydroelectric and solar power. To fulfill this criteria, companies may acquire a wind power generation facility, obtain Renewable Energy Certificates or through a power purchase agreement to obtain wind power energy.

Speaking to The Global Journal, Angelika Pullen (November 21) Communications director at WindMade, said that the initiative is trying to “broaden the basis of the label to corporations beyond the United States, Europe and Anglo-saxon countries to include companies from Latin America and Asia.”

According to Pullen, companies recognize that ‘’more consummers are demanding a label like WindMade’’ but she added that one of the main challenges for WindMade when dealing with large companies is the time it takes for them to make such decisions at the internal level and change the priorities of the company.

WindMade is the first eco-label supported by the UN Global Compact, a strategic policy initiative for businesses committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labor, environment and anti-corruption.

Innovation No Longer the Prerogative of High-Income Countries

2011-11-15T15:31:04Z

The role of entrepreneurs in finding innovative ways to turn creativity and ingenuity into new products and new technologies was heralded at two separate events in Geneva as crucial to driving future economic growth.

Geneva was one of 123 cities around the world to host events and activities for young entrepreneurs celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week (November 14-18) with a focus on encouraging green and social business ideas.

Keynote Speaker, Betty King, the US Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, made a strong pitch for what she called disruptive innovators, those whose ideas were born in a garage yet transformed the world.

“The late Steve Jobs was an incredible ‘disruptive innovator’," said King. “The iPod and iPhone created new markets, stimulating a boom of innovation and imitation around these path-breaking innovations. Because of disruptive innovation, we can travel faster, work smarter and stay connected in ways previously unthinkable.”

At a separate conference few doors away, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) released its annual report on “The Changing Face of Innovation” which noted that WIPO is facing a growing demand for patent protection from entrepreneurs around the world.

Traditional technology innovators like the US, Japan, France, Germany and the UK may still file the most patent requests and account for 70 percent of global research and development spending but the geography of innovation has shifted with a surge in applications from China, India and Brazil.

“Innovation is no longer the prerogative of high-income countries,” said WIPO Director-General Francis Gurry, adding that “the technological gap between richer and poorer countries is narrowing.”

The increase in patent applications over recent decades has created a backlog of pending applications with a current wait of an average of two and a half years. WIPO chief economist, Carsten Fink, noted that this has had a discouraging effect on many young entrepreneurs.

But according to Francis Gurry, countries like China and India that have recently joined the rush for patent protection realize that “a patent doesn’t allow anyone the right to do anything. It only stops others from doing something.”