Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai,…or Bye Bye.

A week ago I was in Vancouver and visited with my good friend Paul. Paul runs a successful business connecting Asia with Canada. As we enjoyed a delightful dinner at a really super restaurant in the downtown area the conversation inevitably turned to the financial downturn we are all experiencing these days and I asked him “How is it in Asia?” His comments were distinctly optimistic compared to the doom and gloom we hear everyday on this side of the Pacific. So I asked him why this might be the case. His answer REALLY struck a chord with me. He said “Back East they have a phrase these days…” you guessed it! …”Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai … or Bye Bye” The financial power structure is REALLY moving away from North America and those of us who choose to look at the world STILL only through North American glasses (defining all of reality ONLY as NA centric) do so at our own peril.

It strikes me that just as the book that all of us in the “hippy generation” grew up on - I’m OK you’re OK” – shows, there are three phases in the development of anyone’s personality (I’m NOT OK you’re OK, I’m OK you’re NOT OK, I’m OK you’re OK) so also there are the SAME three phases in the development of North America as a persona in the global village. Certainly Canada is still in late phase ONE but the US may be in late phase TWO. In order to really thrive we need to all come to Phase THREE. We need to look for the STRENGTHS in each of our trading partners and ask what we can do with them not how we can develop the SAME strengths so that we can out compete them. Then we need to understand what the rest of the world perceives as OUR strengths and make ourselves excel at THOSE things – to REALLY become world LEADERS in those strengths - and attempt to recover real and sustainable value from them. The old order would be wrapped up in having sufficient amounts of all of the required strengths to create and sustain a COMPLETE human ecosystem in one country. This is OLD WORLD thinking in my opinion. It is no less parochial and no more sustainable than the same attitude in each province or each main city. We are a SINGLE entity – the world! We need to think of life in this way to survive the emerging new order of things.

Busting with all of these rather revolutionary thoughts (at least for me) I attended the annual Roger Martin event. He’s the Dean of the Rotman School of Business in Toronto and the head of the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity – to most of us fans he’s simply referred to as Dean Martin! I heard one speaker after another say how great and world-renowned our research in Canada in SEVERAL sectors is. Then they all went on to say (in one way or another) that we need to MATCH the spending on TECHNOLOGICAL innovation with spending on MANAGERIAL innovation (for the cynics this was sort-of self-serving for the head of a BUSINESS school but I was not amongst them) and I couldn’t help thinking ”Do we REALLY need that in Canada?” I could not help thinking that this was only true if we wanted to build the entire ecosystem WITHIN Canada’s borders only. What if we thought GLOBALLY for a moment? What if we contributed what the world CLEARLY identifies as our strength – TECHNICAL innovation? This would only work for Canada if we could recover enough ROI from the licensing of those technologies to ANYONE worldwide who could build them into successful products and profitable companies. What if we left that to those with indigenous VCs (REAL VCs not disguised bankers) and innovative managers? We hear a LOT these days about starting companies from the FIRST DAY with a global view of the markets. What if we take that one step further and start a company from the MANAGEMENT point of view by thinking globally too? Would such a company that seeks to draw what it needs (technologically AND managerially) from wherever in the world where it is STRENGTH actually have an edge? Would it make impossible demands on the cultures of the participants? Would travel become an unsustainable burden? Do we HAVE to develop all of the strengths that we need in EVERY country that aspires to succeed? It strikes me that the better way to reach Phase THREE for all of us is to acknowledge and demand the strengths from each country that they already have and create truly GLOBAL enterprises that could be housed anywhere in the world but which have multinational stakeholders so that EVERY participating nation gains from its success. This would be a world worth living in as long as we can TRULY work out an equitable share for each contributor NOT based on the dollar value of what they contribute but based on the added value that they CONTRIBUTE through their own special skills and expertise. As always your comments would be welcomed.