Plugging Into Finland? Kjell Nordström and the Reinterpretation of the United States as Idea

One of our favourite writers – particularly in combination with his former colleague at the Stockholm School of Economics (‘SSE’), Jonas Ridderstråle, with whom he co-authored the divine 1999 tome Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance  - Kjell Nordström is also an inspiring speaker, and we at Mediolana periodically check the Internet for new content from this marvellously distinctive and original commentator.

Recently however, our CSO did find himself wondering whether one of Dr. Nordström’s most brilliant notions – that of the United States of America not as a country, but as an idea – still has as much validity as it once did. In the excellent compilation Kjell in Concert, the Associate Professor at SSE’s Institute of International Business posits the idea (also featured in his work with Dr. Ridderstråle) that the USA is a virtually uniquely straightforward country into which to assimilate: within 3-5 years of ‘plugging in’, anyone can ‘become American’, with the Austria-born former Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger cited as an paradigm of this phenomenon. Nordström contrasts the United States with the ‘impossibility’ of ‘plugging in’ to European countries such as Finland, Poland and France, which are presumably (and perhaps correctly) perceived as less open and receptive to immigrants.

But while for much of modern history this dichotomy may have been essentially true, we at Mediolana have some qualifications of our own to the proposition that the United States is that much easier to ‘plug into’:

1. A Diverser Europe? In the past couple of decades, a European generation has grown up that is entirely used to the presence of people of foreign or even non-European origin, particularly those raised in large urban areas. For these people, multiculturalism is not so much good or bad; it just is, and monoculturalism, whether in cuisine, dress or language is simply unthinkable. This is not merely the case on the streets of London or Berlin, but even remote countries such as Finland: as of 2009, c.10% of Helsinki’s population has a mother tongue other than Finnish. When it is entirely normal for football players of African origin to represent non-colonial countries such as Switzerland and Norway, we can in at least some senses speak of a Europe in which diversity is intensifying.

2. A More Insular America? As Dr. Nordström has acknowledged elsewhere, the United States is not nearly as welcoming to at least some outsiders as it once might have been. 2000s creations such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Mexico – United States barrier evince a country which is actively seeking to become less diverse and which is no longer confident about the presence of people with certain (perhaps ill-defined) characteristics, despite the huge economic and cultural costs of such a disposition. In any country, when the political climate is pervaded by fear, militarism and uncertainty, those who are visibly and/or linguistically different from the perceived average are unlikely to feel at home, regardless of how well they have integrated into the mainstream.

Contemplation + Chocolate Cake = The Christmas View from the Desk of Mediolana’s CSO

Although - as our loyal and burgeoning readership will no doubt have seen – Mediolana is something of a 24-7-52-365 organisation, this does not at all render Christmas insignificant; for those of all denominations and no particular one, this time of year – with cold temperatures, unusual body rhythms and the near-universal predilection to eat vast quantities of chocolate cake richly in evidence – is one of contemplation. This is no less true for all those who, our of either choice, circumstances or insanity, are working through the festivities.

Who are we? What do we want to be? And what is the road that we must take to get there? These eternal questions are ones that are ultimately inescapable, and the CSO of Mediolana – who is hoping to view some chocolate cake later today – would like to pose them to all who read this blog post. On an even deeper level, the readers of this blog are invited to think about what it actually means to be – on what is real, and what is ultimately ephemeral. By forgetting preconceived notions and focusing on the transcendent if only for a second, maybe we can begin to formulate responses to the most pressing issue of all: the answer to the question of ‘Your Life?’

Alessio Rastani: Rogue Trader or Prophet of Doom?

Squeezed between the established CNN and the dynamic Al Jazeera, BBC News – all too often characterised by tired sets, characterless hosts and unchallenging programming – is rarely the choice of the global viewer seeking quality current affairs output. Yet in the last 48 hours or so, the channel has delivered a genuine ‘scoop’ of sorts: the definitive arrival into the pantheon of economic punditry of none other than Alessio Rastani.

Resplendent in a Bishopsgate suit and coral pink tie, Rastani stunned the watching lunchtime audience with his take on the latest proposed eurozone rescue plan. His comments can be summarised thus:

1. Markets are ruled by fear;

2. The euro is going to crash spectacularly;

3. There will be an investors’ rush towards the ‘safer’ assets of the US dollar and Treasury bonds;

4. The market is ‘toast’, with the stockmarket in particular being ‘finished’;

5. The savings of millions are in jeopardy;

6. The recession is a huge money-making opportunity for those that are prepared for it; and 

7. Goldman Sachs – as opposed to national, purportedly sovereign governments – rules the world.

Perhaps predictably, acres of coverage have ensued. Much of it has concentrated on the issue of whether Rastani is in fact a ‘prank’ or ‘hoax’ analyst; some of it has dwelled on how Rastani’s prosaic reality – accommodation in a semi-detached house in Bexleyheath, one of south-east London’s most remote and anonymous suburbs, and directorship of the presently indebted Santoro Projects company – contrasts with his Midlantic drawl, impeccable grooming and newly-acquired status as a fiscal savant.

Yet few if any in the media appear to be asking the following question: to paraphrase the legendary former tutors on the Advanced MBA programme at the Stockholm School of Economics, Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström, what if Rastani is even 10% right?

While Mediolana would question Rastani’s contention that – at least in the medium-term – United States Treasury securities and the American dollar will be viewed as ‘safe havens’ for international capital, many of his other assertions raise vital questions about the structure of much of the present historical phase of Western (particularly Anglo-American) capitalism that do not have any easy – or certainly palatable – answers. Those commentators and journalists who are quick to deploy crude snobbery over someone’s residential address or supposed City of London credentials (whatever that means in the current context) would do well to turn their pens to some of the most profound economic questions of our time and answer Rastani’s primal scream with a measure of cogency. Until they do so, the independent trader with a first name straight out of Shakespeare could yet return to haunt them.

BlackBerry Babes: The Future of Capitalism?

We at Mediolana are not an easily shocked bunch, but this week our chief blogger had that rarest of cultural experiences, one which has ever so slightly changed the way that he looks at the world; moreover, this experience did not take place in the rarified atmosphere of the Louvre or wandering through the streets of Albertopolis, but on a laptop computer in deepest suburbia: he sat through BlackBerry Babes.

Despite the mildly risqué title, BlackBerry Babes – or, to use its self-styled acronym, BBB – is a fairly standard title from the burgeoning film market of Nigeria, colloquially known as Nollywood. Barely heard of in Western Europe and North America, Nollywood is – almost unbelievably – the world’s largest producer of films outside of India, with approximately almost double the number of titles made in the chaotic, oil-rich West African powerhouse vis à vis the United States.

BBB charts the adventures of several strikingly young and glamorous Nigerian college students – led by the vainglorious Damisa, played by London-born Oge Okoye – whose entire existences are defined by their ownership of the BlackBerry mobile telephones manufactured by Ontario’s Research In Motion. The film follows the conventions of many Nollywood Productions in weaving its spell on the viewer, doing so in a manner that has convinced Mediolana that this company has witnessed at least something of nothing less than the future of capitalism itself:

1. Market Responsiveness. BlackBerry Babes is a 2010 title, but BlackBerry Babes 2, Return of BlackBerry Babes and Return of Blackberry Babes 2 have already hit the shelves – and, via an agreement between the NollywoodLove channel and YouTube, the Internet. Simony Pictures – the production house behind the ever-multiplying BBB series – have identified a popular idea and milked it to the hilt at a speed which puts economic agents in virtually every other film market we can think of to shame.

2. Profitability. While BlackBerry Babes will not win many awards for artistic merit or even technical proficiency – at times, the dialogue is barely audible, and continuity is occasionally tenuous – paradoxically, the low production values, refreshingly plot-free script and instant accessibility of the themes discussed ensure angst-free post-production sessions and require relatively little capital investment.

3. Aspirational Values. Like many countries whose citizens endured communicational austerity in the era defined by fixed-line telephones, Nigerians have embraced the mobile telecoms era with a gusto that is almost scary, running in their tens of millions to secure contracts with the likes of MTN Nigeria, Airtel Africa and Globacom; the devotion to the very latest telephone models exhibited with only some irony in BlackBerry Babes recalls the observation-cum-prophecy of the incomparable Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström in their 1999 magnum opus, Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance, on the 3,000 million people ‘joining the capitalist march’: ‘They are all in the process of building lives and societies similar to those in the West. They would like the same comfort, material possessions and decadence. They will achieve their objectives. It is simply a matter of when.’

Eurovision and the FA Cup Final: The Rarity of Shared Experiences

Saturday, 14th May 2011 should be a day archetypal of shared experiences: the date not merely of the English FA Cup Final but the Eurovision song contest, two occasions where hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide tune in to simultaneously watch the same respective cultural experiences. But this kind of day merely serves to highlight how fragmented the experience of culture as a whole has become. Amongst the many great observations in their writings, Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström record that as contemporary culture is defined by almost infinite individual choice, it becomes increasingly challenging for people to have many shared cultural experiences at all: people living in the same neighbourhood or even the same country have rarely perused the same books, sat through the same films or completed the same video games.

At the same time as this endless difference, recent developments in communications technologies permit an unprecedented amount of informational pooling. We have constant access to each others’ most ostensibly insignificant observations, as well as a range of more profound material. Contemporaneous cycles of divergence and convergence are at work.

Is this a good thing? Sting, a denizen of a postmodern MTV culture that is itself straddling import and obsolescence, once remarked that he preferred an era of relatively centralised cultural production, citing that 1960s BBC institution The Wednesday Play as a model with much to recommend it. However, twenty-first century technologies potentially permit not merely conversations on the scale of the nation-state, but international dialogues of unprecedented volume and complexity. This is therefore – at least in this respect – an epoch of immense opportunity; whether the global public splinters into ever-decreasing tribalistic circles, unites around the shared culture enabled by these new technologies or is characterised by the simultaneous intensification of intimacy and distance remains to be seen.

Deconstructing Osama bin Laden: Three Lessons from a Lost Decade, 2001-2011

With the 2nd May 2011 official demise of the world’s most infamous incendiary, it seems fairly clear that in at least one important sense, an era has come to a close. This blog has already outlined what we believe will be the three most salient consequences of the death of Osama bin Laden, but what of the lessons – for both American policymakers and the world at large – that can be drawn from the period 2001-2011, which in many respects represents a lost decade?

1. Don’t believe the hype. In their 1999 classic Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance, Swedish authors Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström presciently noted: ‘you never know where private terrorist Osama bin Laden will strike next’. The presence of bin Laden in this seminal management text illustrates that even before the tragic events of 11th September 2001, he had made some kind of imprint on the global public consciousness. With his pseudo-religious garb, remote hideouts and quasi-messianic language, bin Laden’s biggest asset was his image; in an epoch dominated by the visual, this amplified his significance.

However, the potency of bin Laden’s iconography was mirrored by the virtually negligible actual capabilities of his organisation, Al-Qaeda. Despite lavish funding and huge amounts of exposure, to date this entity has never come close to acquiring critical mass, with active membership numbering perhaps in the hundreds of people. While this does not mean that counterterrorism measures against Al-Qaeda should cease, or that this group’s threat to the global public should be ignored, it does indicate that good intelligence and reasonable precautions should be more than sufficient to address the danger that Al-Qaeda poses.

2. React proportionately and intelligently. The 2nd May 2011 operation in Abbottabad has been widely regarded as a success, with bin Laden’s death being recognised as perhaps the most significant blow to Al-Qaeda yet and the very future of the group now being debated. While this is a development of great import, it underscores the reservations that many hold about the war in Afghanistan, a conflict explicitly prosecuted with the aim of dismantling Al-Qaeda and neutralising its networks in the troubled South Asian republic but which has yielded results which do not seem to match those attained by one relatively simple US operation in Pakistan; Afghanistan itself has suffered – at the very least – tens of thousands of civilian casualties. Actions costing hundreds of billions of dollars and engendering human misery on an epic scale must be evaluated by their efficacy.

3. Develop new analytical frameworks. The causes and consequences of the events of 11th September 2001 were far too often seen in binary terms – good versus evil, the West against the Islamic world, civilisation against barbarism – which were at best often unhelpful and simplistic; at their worst, these presented a decade of incredible bloodshed in a way that normalised aggression and polarisation. A framework that recognised that – like so many other matters – Islamist, or to be precise, extremist Salafist violence is at the very least an issue of shared concern would have done much to provide a solid analytical base from which adequate solutions could be devised. A 2005 report by Rik Coolsaet, Professor of International Relations at the University of Ghent, is particularly instructive: from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, of an estimated 179,000 victims of this variant of terrorism, approximately 175,000 (97.7%+) were located in the Muslim world.

Constructive capitalism: impossible ideal or rational choice?

A recent piece composed by Andrew Hill, an Associate Editor and management doyen at London’s Financial Times, makes for thought-provoking reading. Society and the right kind of capitalism examines the apparently interchangeable notions of ‘shared value’ or ‘constructive capitalism’. Shared value was the subject of a prominent article by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in the January/February 2011 Harvard Business Review; constructive capitalism is a concept which has been strongly associated with Umair Haque, author of the freshly published The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business.

Hill summarises that both of these ideas point to the possibility of ‘a higher form of capitalism’ that generate profits whose benefits are accrue (and citing the words of Haque) ‘sustainably, authentically and meaningfully to people, communities, society, the natural world and future generations’. However, he asserts that ultimately, capitalists – whether constructive or otherwise – are still capitalists: when confronted with diminishing returns in even the most ethical of markets, most investors will chase the higher returns available elsewhere, regardless of the negative externalities generated.

However, while possessing a certain logic, this analysis is not without its flaws:

1. It cannot explain phenomena such as the fair trade movement, a campaign which as recently as twenty years ago was a marginal entity barely known outside of some student dormitories and churches but which has now blossomed into a multi-billion euro segment of the mainstream economy. ‘Rational’ capitalists of the kind that Hill describes would never give companies that pay significantly higher wages than their competitors – purely for ethical reasons –  a second glance, yet the inexorable growth in popularity of fairly traded goods such as coffee and chocolate tells us otherwise.

2. More broadly, it fails to recognise that the separation between ethics and profits – the economic equivalent of Cartesian dualism – is making a mockery of markets and killing capitalism. The relentless quest for growth at any cost is destroying the very nature – forests, oceans and particularly agricultural land – on which humanity depends. A one metre rise in sea levels as a result of global warming would endanger over 30% of the world’s croplands; low-lying areas of cultivation, such as those in Egypt, China, Indonesia, Holland, Bangladesh and Florida, might find it impossible to sustain agriculture at all. To suggest that rational capitalists – with perfect market information! – can ignore the impact of their own actions in this context does not bear scrutiny.

In their slow-burning 2004 classic Karaoke Capitalism: Management for Mankind, Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom warn that we have a simple choice in front of us: capitalism with a cause or capitalism with a curse. Aiming for the former surely precludes assuming that the limits of economic rationality stretch no further than a purported maximisation of short-run utility which may not even exist.

Karl Marx was right + Martin Luther was right = ?

If Karl Marx was right – and so is Martin Luther – what lessons can we learn from this, and what will the next phase of capitalism resemble?—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) February 25, 2011

Has multi-culturalism failed?

When David Cameron lamented what he sees as the failure of multiculturalism during his speech at the Munich Security Conference 2011, he was merely the latest in a growing band of politicians to regard this concept as a discredited one. German Chancellor Angela Merkel – speaking to an audience of young Christian Democrats in October 2010 – opined that ‘multikulti’ had ‘failed, utterly failed‘. And this line of thinking is far from being monopolised by those on the political right: Merkel’s compatriot and Social Democratic Party officeholder Thilo Sarrazin is a case in point. Sarrazin, author of the shrill 2009 tome Deutschland schafft sich ab (‘Germany Does Away With Itself’), was echoing and extending the arguments of Dutch leftist Paul Scheffer in claiming that multiculturalism was not merely bankrupt, but dangerous: evaluating different, particularly the non-Western cultures of many immigrant groups, as having value per se is fundamentally mistaken and engenders more social problems than it solves.

However, on closer examination there appears to be a number of problems with this thesis:

1. Firstly, in a globalized era, multiculturalism is not actually optional: it is a fact of life. In a world of easy international travel and instant, borderless communications, the interaction, melding and (sometimes) conflicting of different cultures is as inevitable as breathing. And it works both ways: as Indian and Middle Eastern restaurants proliferate in Western Europe, branches of McDonald’s are mushrooming from Bangalore to Bahrain. As the number of Japanese gardens outside Japan multiplies, landscapes from Sapporo to Fukuoka are dominated by office blocks.

2. Virtually every aspect of modern living – from food to clothing to transportation to sport to music to energy to architecture to spirituality – involves the combination and/or cooperation of people from more than one culture; moreover, successful entities – from countries to companies – know this and actively seek out and encourage cultural diversity. As Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars point out in their profound 1997 work Mastering the Infinite Game: How East Asian Values are Transforming Business Practices, one can view the entire Far Eastern economic miracle in terms of the successful combination of Western technologies and Eastern values.

3. In many senses, it is arguable that multiculturalism has not been embraced or understood particularly well in much of Europe. As the Swedish academics Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom point out, it is easy to imagine a nineteen-year-old South Korean becoming an American in a very short period of time even if that teenager has never set foot in the United States up to that point in their life, but to become a European may take three or four generations. The attempt at rejecting multiculturalism – if in truth this was ever possible – may represent a powerful sentiment in a continent which has often struggled with various ‘others’, but not a workable reality.

Multiculturalism may not always be perfect, but a monocultural world simply no longer exists. Politicians of all hues would do well to acknowledge this fact.