Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

Lumbering Giants

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

—U.S. General Eric “Rick” Shinseki

As institutions structurally geared to be slow moving, governments may face the greatest challenge—particularly those seeking to balance short-term fiscal pressures with long-term competitiveness and entitlements challenges. Time and again, the situation is aggravated by data paralysis and rigid organizational thinking. Successful governments, companies, and individuals need to defy the laws of gravity and both think and act longer-term and cross-border—and quickly. Enlightened policy decisions all too often promise benefits that are long term and diffuse, while delivering immediate, palpable pain that affects clearly identified constituencies: hardly a compelling political proposition.

Speaking of shorter half-lives, have you noticed the way the acronym BRICs (for Brazil, Russia, India, China) has gone from ubiquity to near-obsolescence in just a few years? People and organizations need to accept paradigms in order to be able to take action, and the BRICs idea provided useful shorthand for thinking about opportunities in the big emerging markets. The case of the BRICs paradigm makes this complex mix abundantly clear: Yes, the locus of economic dynamism, brainpower, and even military force is shifting fast from West to East and from North to South. The problem is that the exact implications are hard to gauge. China’s ambitions, for example, go well beyond economic ...