Books That Shook The World

According to Atlantic Books, London, these are the books that shook the world:

Republic by Plato
Origin of Species by Darwin
Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
The Qur’an
The Bible
The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer
Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
On War by Clausewitz
Das Kapital by Karl Marx

Karl Marx and Global Kinetics Today

15 years ago, a good friend of mine, Helena, invited me for dinner in her father’s Penthouse in Tokyo. She was excited to show me a painting by a famous Swedish painter sent to her by her mother who owns an art gallery in Stockholm. While Helena was setting the table, she asked me to take a look at the said painting which was just lying at the corner in the living room. The first thing I did was to turn the painting around to see it and I immediately told Helena there was nothing in the canvass. She then went to the living room and said, “What do you mean there’s nothing in it?” I said, “Well, I already turned the other side and there is no painting at all”. Then she said, pointing at the painting, “Norman, there is no need to turn it around. That is the painting!”

Embarassed as I was, I honestly thought there was nothing in the painting.

A lot of critics of the work of Karl Marx may have said the same. “There’s nothing in his murky, unintelligible work. Likewise, Das capital itself is intimidating to read. Francis Wheen, in his biography of Karl Marx said that, Marx probably anticipated this and that is why just before he delivered his first volume of Das Kapital to his Publisher, he asked Friedrich Engels to read Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece which portrays the story of Frenhofer working for many years on a portrait that would depict “the most complete representation of reality”. When Frenhofer invited his friends Poussin and Porbus to his studio to see the finished work, their reaction was somehow similar to what I showed in Helena’s living room. Worst, they even mocked Frenhofer that when they left, he burned all his paintings and killed himself.

Marshall Berman noted that the most delightful irony in The Unknown Masterpiece is that Balzac’s account of the picture is a perfect description of a 20th century abstract painting.“The point is that where one age sees only chaos and incoherence, a later or more modern age may discover meaning and beauty”. The same can absolutely be said of Karl Max’s Das Kapital. During his time and even during the cold war, many leaders professed to be Marxists but their programs and dogmatic ideologies represented only their convenient if not twisted interpretation of Marx’s work. It should be noted that Marxism as practiced by Marx himself was not so much of an ideology as a critical process, a continuous dialectical argument. Lenin and then Stalin however turned and froze it into dogma. In fact, citing Mikhail Gorbachev’s book Perestroika, Francis Wheen in Marx’s Das Kapital, puts it sharply on the line:

“One can even argue that the most truly Marxist achievement of the Soviet Union was its collapse: a centralized secretive and bureaucratic command economy proved incompatible with new forces of production, thus precipitating a change in the relations of production”.

What is also noteworthy is the fact that although Karl Marx only finished the first volume of his work, he actually contracted with his Publisher in 1858 that his critical expose of the system of the bourgeois economy would be divided into six books which shall then be issued in six instalments: 1. Capital 2. Landed Property 3. Wage Labor 4. The State 5. International Trade 6. World Market. This means that about 150 years ago, this great thinker already has some concepts of what we now know as globalization.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in their article in the Economist “A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (2000) as cited by Wheen, acknowledged Karl Marx as a prophet of universal interdependence of nations and that his description of globalization 150 years ago is still very relevant today.

In the latest issue of the Economist, the financial crisis claims twin victims: Fannie and Freddie, two mortgage giants that the American Treasury has to save. With this move of the American government, the overriding theme in the blogosphere is : "The profits are privatized and the risks are socialized". No wonder, one subheading in the same article of the Economist is "Mark to Market or Market to Marx?

Is this the end of Capitalism? or Could it be that Karl Marx all along had the answer on the question of preventing or perhaps containing the Schumpeterian prophecy of capitalism's "creative destruction"?

If someone can just talk to the ghost of Karl Marx and thereby restore to life his seminal work to complete his magnum opus, we will probably have a much better understanding of the complex global kinetics of today and beyond.

Meirelles and His Movies

I am crazy about movies. And in my opinion, directors are probably the most under-rated in filmdom. More often than not, people (including myself) tend to know or recognize more the actors than the directors who craft the entire film.

Given my limited knowledge about the directors, there is one however whom I like and who seems to stand out among many. His name is Fernando Meirelles, a Brazilian film director, who offers the world masterfully crafted tales about the darker side of globalization.

In his film “City of God” for instance, it’s interesting how he seems to be intimate with the subject of poverty and hopelessness, and of how he was able to realistically depict the angst-ridden mind engendering other people and society as a whole. "City of God," his portrayal of poverty, drugs and crime in the slums of Rio de Janeiro of course, won a lot of accolades worldwide but his other film "The Constant Gardener," is equally an outstanding work. Based on a book of the same name by British author John le Carre, the film is about a British diplomat's meandering journey to Nairobi, Berlin, London and Sudan to unearth the truth about the death of his wife, who is killed when she was about to expose the world's largest pharmaceutical firms for testing a tuberculosis drug that is killing innocent African patients. "Disposable drugs for disposable people," a doctor tells the diplomat. "Pharmaceuticals are up there with the arms dealers."

I would like to think the story emanates from the much-publicized real-life conflict between multinational drug companies and Third World countries trying to produce their own generic versions of AIDS medications.

Talking about globalization issues, Meirelles also worked on "Intolerance," a movie with multi-country settings with diverse characters: a 16-year-old Brazilian genius, a Chinese worker, a Filipino terrorist, a Kenyan runner, an American educator, and a young woman from the United Arab Emirates. The movie has not been released yet I think and I can’t wait to watch it. It would be interesting to see how Meirelles is able to intricately weave the stories of these characters into a film. Something to look forward to indeed!

Spider Web as Global Structure

I hate spiders. They are ugly eight-legged invertebrates with webs that trap insects. The web is also used to help them climb, form smooth walls for burrows, build egg sacs, wrap prey, and temporarily hold sperm, among other applications. Disgusting, right?

When I was working for an oil company, the Chairman and CEO always called his managers in his office to discuss his out-of-the box ideas about the business. This was in the second half of the 90’s when the industry was just recently deregulated. I was heading the corporate planning at that time and I thought the guy was really brilliant and very much ahead of his time. I was particularly amazed of how he tinkered on how to change the industry structure by changing the rule of the game altogether. Likewise, he loved playing on how to structure his companies as if they were a bunch of clay he could easily form and deform, integrate and disintegrate. In his mind were concepts like consolidation, bundling and unbundling, scalability, flexibility, alliances, and networks based on the idea of Tao. Although there were a number of legal entities (companies), the structure was designed as if there was only one independent organization represented by triangles within a big triangle – a radical departure from the delayering (or flattening) of the organization plantilla of the re-engineering era. As a matter of fact, he wanted to implement a structure as if it was a spider web where the spider can laterally see what is going on within the web and can respond to opportunities or problems speedily. I disagreed to him about the spider web structure not necessarily because I didn’t like the web-structure per se but more because of my shallow (partial) understanding of a leader as spider seeing and running around! At that time, it was a crazy idea and I would have the difficulty communicating and persuading the rest of the organization. We settled for the “triangles within a triangle” instead, although I must say for most people, it was still a rather weird stricture at that time.

Just like in that oil company, people generally find it hard to imagine a new world where many of the assumptions about political structures, authority, and legitimacy may well be changed. Norman Davies in his book Europe: East and West, says that one must attempt to imagine an entirely new type of political organism which has overlapping jurisdictions, multilayered/multinational authorities, and multiple concatenacity (i.e. members of one concatenation will likewise belong to other concatenations at the same time). I thought that Norman Davies is actually describing what my boss conceptualized 12 years ago for his complex organization just as Jean-François Rischard was suggesting network governance in his book High Noon. In my previous blog entry, I asked who will play as Ms. Luz in a networked and interdependent world. A possible question at this juncture is who will be the spider in such an imagined spider-web structure in the new world order. I realize though that asking such a question emanates from our conventional concept of legitimacy and authority where the spider or Ms. Luz may represent a person, a country, an organization, or the power politics involved – a world based on a zero-sum game. If I were to wear the lenses of a non-zero sum game (with a positive instead of gloomy vision about the world), perhaps the spider represents the self-managing process and/or the information that generate from and empower the concatenations.

With this in mind, perhaps a spider is not a scary idea afterall!

Manila in the 30's - Queen of the Pacific

http://raincontreras.multiply.com/video/item/310/Manila_Queen_of_the_Pacific_1938

This was forwarded to me with the subject "Manila we never saw". And I thought, did the Queen sleep for a very long time and woke up only to find out that she is sick? Or was she on a comatose? Indeed, those somnolent years that ensued until now make me wonder...

Ms. Luz and the Future of Interdependence

When I was 4 or 5 years old, I was in a Kindergarten class which I remember to be nothing but playing all sorts of games. One game which I particularly remember was the one introduced by our teacher Ms. Luz. She divided us into two groups. With a box of chocolates as the grand prize, each group was supposed to collect in 10 minutes all the toys scattered in our classroom. The group with the most number of toys collected was going to be the winner. Each of us of course went on to collect these toys as fast as we could and fought against the kids in the other group that it turned into a rambunctious riot. Two kids were on a little fist fight of some kind. My group was declared a winner as two of my group mates did look like little bullies. Immediately after that, the teacher suggested that we will have another game. She said, “This time, although I want to have the same groups, I have one and only one mission for you and that is to arrange all these toys in their proper places. If you guys are able to put them in order, I will give each group a box of chocolates”. Since some of the pieces of the toys were in the other group, all the kids collaborated with each other to put all the pieces together and the toys in their proper places. The two kids who earlier had a fist fight inevitably had to help each other. Looking back, I realize that Ms. Luz was actually trying to illustrate in her own way the game theory by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. The first race she introduced was a zero-sum game where everyone had to fight to earn the prize. At the end, there were winners and losers. The second game however was structured in such a way that all the kids regardless of the group would inevitably cooperate to claim their respective prizes. Within an hour or so, the game of greed became a game of cooperation as everyone, regardless of his or her group worked for one purpose i.e. the completion of the task and to claim the prize of each group.

If each group represents a corporation or a country, my sense of optimism is telling me that maybe we are heading to the future of such interdependence. This kindergarten wisdom is retrospectively telling me that for mutual benefit rather than parasitism, it is not much on how we play the game but it is more of transforming the nature of the game altogether.

If that kindergarten class represents the world, however, I am just wondering who will play the role of Ms. Luz?

Imagineering the Business School and the Corporation in Global Kinetics

As suggested by Engler, neoliberalism (which is essentially grounded on pessimistic assumptions about individuals and institutions) is the basis of corporate globalization. We know already that while corporate globalization has produced a few winners, it has unfortunately produced more losers in the global economic system.

But what makes this ideology present a rather gloomy vision about man and society in general? Various theories (agency theory, transaction cost economics, game theory, social network analysis, theories of social dilemmas, etc.) of the Chicago boys tend to be rooted on the following: Morals are matters for individuals, behavioural assumption of self-interest, and focus on human imperfections. According to Sumantra Ghoshal, a former professor of London Business School, if you combine ideology-based gloomy vision with the process of self-fulfilling prophecy (double hermeneutic), theories will induce management behaviours just as what we have seen in the high profile corporate scandals in the recent years. Isaiah Berlin calls it the dehumanization of management practice and this has certainly caused a kind of global kinetics which shocked not only shareholders of affected corporations but also the general public as a whole.

In view of the problem posed above, Ghoshal calls for reversing of the trend. The ultimate goal according to him must be to go from the pretense of knowledge (the deliberate effort in social science research to adopt the scientific model) to the substance of knowledge. According to him, management researchers should strike a balance with regard to the different and contradictory facets of human nature and organization behaviour. This means they should also focus on the positive problem which entails tempering the pretense of knowledge and re-engage in the areas of scholarship that have been overlooked (integration, application, and pedagogy). This requires a paradigm shift altogether especially in evolving a totally different culture in the academe – a massive change not only in the structure and context of how business faculty operate but also in the kind of leadership in business schools. For companies and individuals, this would mean they have to put significant pressure to realign the perspectives and priorities of the institutions they support. Academies of Management on the other hand will have to create a new intellectual agenda by accommodating and thereby relegitimizing scholarship pluralism.

With the self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in theories in the social domain, relegitimizing scholarship would hopefully re-legitimize the positive role of corporations and of management as a practice. Likewise, if we substitute the pretense of knowledge with substance of knowledge produced through a more pluralistic scholarship milieu, and complement it with a more optimistic vision about individuals and the world, perhaps this will result to a different kind of corporation on one hand, and to a more positive view of corporate globalization on the other. In such a Utopian-like scenario, global governance may not necessarily be about what or how much an entity or nation can get but more on what or how much it can possibly share!

Reference:

Ghoshal, S. Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices.
Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2005, 4 (1): 75-91

Uncertainty Is Ubiquitous

It's interesting that while this piece was written about five(5) years ago by a good friend, Joe Clements, the thought is still kind of real today:

The fog of politics has become a pea soup. It's so thick you can't see the hand in front of your face. The oppositionists have been questioning the integrity of the President, Congress thwarted the impeachment case, equities are very weak, economic data is soft, oil prices are up, consumer confidence is down, and the price of toilet paper is higher than a peso! In addition, S& P downgraded the Philippine credit ratings emanating from the slow implementation of new fiscal measures to combat the growing budget deficit. No matter how strong productivity is or how GDP grows faster than expected, uncertainty is ubiquitous.

Democratic Globalization and Network Governance

It's interesting to note that while everyone is busy doing his or her job, working for a company or dining, wining and partying, people in international politics are tinkering as to what values should define our international order. I personally do not worry about stuff like that but among global elites, it seems to me that what they have in mind pertains to the question on how to rule the world. This question is the very title of a recently published book by Mark Engler. According to him, there are two (2) schools of thought on the debate namely the Clinton-era vision of a corporate-controlled global economy(based on the neoliberalism of the Chicago boys) and the infamous Bush-era of imperial globalization which is characterized by US military dominance. Engler believes that neither will be sustainable as global problems still prevail or even worsen and that an alternative is emerging in favor of globalization from the ground up which he calls democratic globalization. According to Egler, this entails,

"...allowing local citizens to have a voice in shaping the economic policies that affect their communities; removing the straitjacket of the Washington Consensus and allowing diverse approaches to development to flurish; restructuring or replacing international financial institutions with bodies that have truly democratic representation; and crafting laws to protect the rights of people and the environment rather than merely the rights of capital. "

While the idea of democratic globalization may be sound, the devil I believe lies on how to actually manage such complexity from below. This issue resonates to what Jean-François Rischard suggested in his book High-Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. From someone who has helped shape the direction of the World Bank in his capacity as Vice-President for Europe, Rischard drives the message across when he said, "we don't have an effective way of addressing the problems that such a world creates. Our difficulties belong to the present and the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past". The author suggests the concept of network governance to address our global problems. What I like about it is the fact that his conceptual solution does not pretend to be all inclusive and he does acknowledge that it lacks the necessary implementation details. What he is trying to envision is kind of an institution for global governance with an inherent character of an extra-government bodies devoted to each problem area, a kind of institution which will be supported by governments. Each problem area is then composed of what he calls "global issues networks"(GIN) which will manage the necessary compliance of established standards. It is the same GIN that would also pinpoint nations and organizations that were not co-operating.

In one way or another, I think that the world is going to what Rischard foresees. In the academe, the network theory seems to be a hot item. Likewise, through the internet, we have become part of various networks and open systems. And in the real world, various organizations both in the public and private sectors and even within the civil society have been working on various global issues or problems that have been identified. The missing link amidst all these multifarious efforts, I believe, is the coordinated mechanism. Network Governance as posited by Rischard or democratic kind of globalization as suggested by Engler.

Just as the Standard Model of particle physics is an unfinished poem as physicists try to come up with a unified theory, national and global leaders, policy makers and economic pundits are likewise at the stage of unifying all the force-mediating lines and stanzas together into a single acceptable framework!

Global Kinetics

According to Dictionary.com, Kinetics, is the branch of mechanics that deals with the actions of forces in producing or changing the motion of masses. I personally like the sound of the word and I thought that with the increasing complexity of interconnected problems and issues in this planet, it would be interesting to sort of explore and discover the kinetics of the continuously changing world and learn from other people in the process. While I do not profess to understand the political or socio-economic actions and forces in producing the necessary global changes, I thought this blog can be a good forum of various ideas and opinions - important or trivial, intelligent or dull, relevant or irrelevant - just about anything actually! On that note, I consider myself to be a student of Global Kinetics!

The G8 Summit in Japan for instance is faced with a lot of criticisms. According to The Economist (July 3, 2008), global institutions are in fact, an outdated muddle. Global clubs like the G8 are talk shops teeming with people discussing issues they no longer know about. According to the article, "But what is the point of their discussing the oil price without Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest producer? Or waffling about the dollar without China, which holds so many American Treasury bills? Or slapping sanctions on Robert Mugabe, with no African present? Or talking about global warming, AIDS or inflation without anybody from the emerging world? Cigar smoke and ignorance are in the air".

G8 and all those types of imbalanced or misrepresented global groupings and the events that they shape form significant part of the overall Global Kinetics. From an individual standpoint, it's kind of scary that your personal or national future in one way or another, partly depends on the kind of direction that those elite global clubs decide to take on. The constraints cited by the author of the same article are thought-provoking when he said, "Any solution must accept three constraints. First, better institutions will not solve intractable problems. A larger G8 will not automatically lick inflation, a better World Food Program would not stop hunger. Second, no matter how you reform the clubs’ membership rules, somebody somewhere will feel left out. Third, you cannot start again. In 1945 the UN’s founders had a clean slate to write upon, because everything had been destroyed. The modern age does not have that dubious luxury, so must build on what already exists."

The article also mentioned about McCaine's proposed alternative which is a NATO-like democratic sub-committe within the global club. Such alternative of course poses a concern especially on which countries will you include and which ones are excluded (I actually wonder how different is McCaine's proposed panacea from George Bush' imperial type of Globalization). Given the status quo where G8, the multilaterals, the UN's imbalanced Security Council, etc. are not in the position to solve our global problems, what then could be the feasible solution?

I don't know.