emerging markets « Able and How

2012: A year of change

MARYLEBONE — This year is a big year of change. In technology, in the world economy, the world of sport, even in the way all our countries are run. There are elections in America, France, India…

What is more significant in a country than a change of government?

And that’s what is promised in India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Serbia, Kuwait, El Salvador, The Gambia, Armenia, Algeria, Madagascar, Libya, Mongolia, Mexico, Cameroon, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Belarus, Ukraine, Ghana, Angola, Bhutan, Guinea, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Togo.

New presidents in Yemen, Senegal, Mali, Russia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Albania, France, Kenya, Turkey, the United States of America, Venezuela, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Kosovo and Zimbabwe. Yes, Zimbabwe.

We know that the United States presidential election of 2012 is to be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. It will be the 57th presidential election. And it will get a lot of attention.

But how about the world’s largest democracy?

Yes. That’s India. How about that one?

Or the big red splotch above? Russia.

That’s important too.

There are other changes coming too. Some, we seem to know for sure:

Gold prices will keep going up. And hit $2,000 and ounce in 2012, they say.
The Internet is going to change. A new IP address protocol will mean that companies may start building two sites for a doubled up Internet — the old one, and the new one.
We’ll all be talking about faster, slimmer smart phones and The Cloud. If you don’t know about either, now is the time to do some research.
Plus many more things you may want to share?

This time next year things will be very different.

I promise.

Businesses will fail. Some will be dominant that you haven’t even heard of. Yours will merge, divest, make a 90 degree turn, or implement similar significant changes.

So, what are you doing about it?

Well it is a topic that is quite dear to our hearts at Able and How. We are launching our Able and How Change Index this year. And our change management work the world over continues at a pace.

We will be keeping an eye on business, political and social trends this year. And keeping you up to date with the Able and How Change List (look for it soon in our News section).

Change is good.

Get into it with us.

/df

P.S. And, by the way, NASA assures us that the world is not going to end. After many years of fielding wild calls, they were forced to put up this website.

Heart and Seoul: Why I want to work in Korea

LONDON — It’s been hard not to think about Korea this week. But I have different things on my mind. Not the loss of a dictator. Not the worry that still has South Korean’s practicing evacuations like WWII Britain and Cold War America.

I am thinking about Korea’s fertile business culture and the country’s uncanny ability to reinvent itself, rebuild and refocus just in time for tremendous success.

See if you can read this bit without stopping in your tracks:

in 1961 South Korea ranked 117th in the world for arable land per capita (behind Saudi Arabia and Somalia)
in the last 50 years Korea’s per-capita GDP has grown at 23,000 percent
today the tiny country (smaller than Iceland) has the world’s 12th largest economy by purchasing power
unemployment is 3.2 percent
one of the world’s lowest rates of public debt
80% of the 49 million people live in urban areas
Koreans are four times as likely to have high-speed internet access as Americans and they pay very little for it

A series of seemingly prescient government decisions have constantly shoved the economy in the right direction. Even through the tough economic times in the late 90s and mid 2000s the countries has seemed to make the right choices.

Today they are pushing — against their own traditions — for more entrepreneurship. And I wouldn’t bet against them.

In fact, I’d like to be there now. If the chaebols’ would give us a call? Samsung, LG, SK… we’d like a word.

/df

Business transformations: Same, same, different

DOHA, QATAR — We’re working on four different ‘transformation programmes’ at the moment. Combined they are on three continents, in over 30 countries.

You would think that would provide some shocking contrasts. But it does something quite different. It shows startling similarities.

Everything has superficial differences: language, geography, industry, structure…

Yes, those can seem superficial.

The issues in big business transformation generally fall into two buckets: human and process.

Human
When I worked in the airline industry we used to talk about “human factors in aviation”, and I thought that was very funny. In that, without humans we would not need commercial aviation at all… so humans were a pretty key ingredient.

Transformations can be seen the same way. Strategy teams and professional project managers can seem quite content to act as if humans are not involved.

And how many businesses exist without ‘human factors’?

Coordinating, informing, involving, managing, aligning, working with and working around humans is one of the hardest parts of any transformation.

Ask anyone with the scars of a big change programme, successful or not, and they’ll say communication and people are the two most under-appreciated areas.

Process
Businesses need a sense of direction. Even restaurants must know what is important (filling tables) and what to do to try to fill more.

However most large businesses are more complex than that. With function, regions, business units and many horizontal layers of people influencing or directing each others’ work.

To create and sustain a sense of direction you need processes.

There is no one set of words or no single way of talking to people. You cannot expect a data specialist to need the same information as an assembly line worker.

In order to be clear on what you are saying, to create a core of content and to move and support the transformation you need to have a plan… several plans often… and many processes to follow to see that you are consistent, coordinated and coherent across all of your business.

And then you need to sustain that over time.

Easy. Right.

Same, same, not always different.

/df

Business life in the Middle East: working in ‘the region’

BAHRAIN — This is my first time in Bahrain. That leaves only really Oman in the area that I haven’t been to / worked in.

United Arab Emirates?
√ Check
Saudi Arabia?
√ Check
Kuwait?
√ Check
Qatar?
√ Check

It’s a part of the world that many people can’t (or choose not to) understand.

In the last three weeks [...]

The real inflation: The cost of a human life

MY KITCHEN, VERY EARLY — Out of the corner of my eye I spotted an article this week:

The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year … [recently] the agency [had] used numbers as low as $6.8 million.

So said The [...]

Change management: Egypt and the limitations of men

WORLD’S END — I hadn’t realised how odd an address this is to be writing from. But maybe it’s fitting.

30+ years ago I arrived at a boarding school in rural Ontario. I had been living the previous two years in Paris and two years before that in Kenya. While still a Canadian, I was a smart-ass, and a French-fueled nihilist.

The Cold War [...]

Change management: Imagine you were Egypt

OXFORD STREET — Okay you’re not running Egypt. But imagine you were. Or let’s be clearer. You have been given a new project:

Get that Egypt thing sorted out.

Easy, right? They made it through the frogs and locusts, etc. No, okay. Seriously. (And apologise in advance to the people who are working hard to bring change to that country.) But what [...]

Elitist and personality-driven: What Wikileaks tells us about how the world works

PICARDIE — It’s like the world’s biggest gossip column has just brought out dozens of consecutive bumper, Christmas, double-issues.

Anyone who likes:
• reading rude comments about other people,
• listening in on boorish dinner table raconteurs, or
• subscribing to a Hello! magazine variant on public figures…
…will be delighted with the reading of the past few days.

Leaders are called names. Petty gossip is repeated. Minor faux pas [...]

The Middle East, India and Asia: New issues we’d love to work on again

HYDE PARK CORNER — I love Doha. I was thinking about that as I wrote a friend at QTel in Qatar. It’s a lovely place and I know some lovely people there. This week we have seen lots of poorly disguised derisive comments made about Qatar and it’s [...]

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