Tony’s Blog

This was my first visit to the SWF and having had the experience of the Celebration of Entrepreneurship (CoE) in Dubai in November 2011 was really excited about the prospect for my days. I arrived home on Friday evening 1/4/2011, satisfied, exhausted, inspired, energised, humbled, full of learning, connected with so many great people I met and I would like to share my key takeaways.

Many of the key sessions are filmed and on the SWF website www.skollworldforum.org

1. Deep Leadership (Video available) – a great session with number of interesting perspectives including those of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Upon reflection, my own believe after some further thought and analysis is a hypothesis utilising the Heroes Journey. Each time you go through the “storm” within the journey you gain an understanding of your own humanity. By repeatedly going through and coming out of the storm successfully, you increase and enhance your own personal well of “deep leadership”.

Furthermore there is definitely a clear correlation between deep leadership and spirituality however we seem too shy to make the connection!!!!!!!

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Almost no country in the MENA Region experiences the 7-8% GDP growth familiar in the South East Asia economies that is needed to disseminate the benefits of growth to the middle and lower classes. This is largely due to the fact that most Arab nations are rent ridden countries with very little incentive to provide institutions and governance that favour entrepreneurship. In such conditions, only focused countries will be able to create a dynamic, diversified economy within a timeframe that generates gainful employment among the young quickly enough to bring social unrest to an end

Throughout my life, I have witnessed the conflict between business performance being built around solely shareholder value, and the requirement for business to serve the needs of communities and societies. This particularly came into focus for me when I returned from living in the Middle East to live in England in June 2009. I was stunned by the complete focus on profit generation to the total exclusion of customer value. Companies have learnt to put into place terms and conditions, and business processes that are able to legitimately extract revenues from customers whilst at the same time minimise their cost of serving the customer.

I had the opportunity to read a great article in the Harvard Business Review that I thoroughly recommend to you. Creating Shared Value by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer with the following link:-http://hbr.org/2011/01/the-big-idea-creating-shared-value/ar/1

The banks are dictating the way in which the financial and economic structures of the world operate financially supported by government, but expect to be compensated as if they were operating in free and competitive markets. Retail bankers operate as oligopolies, but are essentially performing a public service, which should be regarded as important to the security of the country as the military. It is too easy to use cheap Government credit and lend out sparingly at huge mark ups (or even lend back to the Government itself with a mark up) when people have nowhere else to go.

During the last two decades, banks lent imprudently creating economic bubbles, and were able to ratchet up their profitability and bonus’s. Furthermore they found ways to repackage debt into various instruments to further enhance their profits and bonus’s. We know today that much of this lending was suspect at best and reckless at worst yet bonus’s were due. The financial markets collapsed in 2007/2008. If banks wish to be treated as operating in free and competitive manner, then they do not deserve to be completely bailed out by governments. They were bailed out. Without the bail out to the banking industry, no single bank in the world would have survived the contagion effect and chaos would have reigned.

The financial collapse ensured that the economies of the majority of the world collapsed as banks withdrew their support for their economies and in particular withdrew lending from those countries which had the worst problems and from economies that were unlikely to have significant growth and focused upon developing lending in emerging economies.

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As many of you will know, the decision was taken by FIFA to award the 2018 games to Russia. How could this happen? What was the basis of such a decision? Were England mistreated?

Whenever one approaches a major opportunity such as the World Cup, the decision-making process comprises three elements: – technical, commercial and political. The 2018 decision was no different. From the outset, I wonder if England had evaluated correctly the likely weighting of these three elements that would take place when the final decision was being made in Zurich. Many capital projects, have a decision-making balance where the technical and commercial components represent >90% of the decision with politics <10%. I should point out that politics can cover both legitimate and illegitimate (i.e. corruption) aspects.

However, based upon what has been reported, the England bid was both technically and commercially superior to the Russian bid. It can therefore only be assumed that the weighting in terms of the decision-making was that political considerations would provide greater than 50% towards the decision. This is perfectly legitimate, in the event FIFA had made this known to the bidders. Alternatively, England should have ensured before they committed themselves to bidding (or their bid costs) of the evaluation criteria in terms of weighting. Was this done?

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I have spent all of my life since I was born in Zimbabwe, having the pleasure of travelling around the world, meeting people, exchanging views, enjoying conversations and learning from so many people. It’s now time to “get with the times” and go online where I can travel virtually around the world, meet more people and enjoy even more conversations and continue learning !

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