What Works: Success in Stressful Times. Hamish McRae

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      The world is at one of those inflection points that historians will look back upon with awe. Economic power is rebalancing away from Europe and, to some extent, North America and principally towards Asia. It is the biggest shift of power since the Industrial Revolution, which enabled Europe and then North America to leap ahead of the more populous Asia. In 1820, by far the largest economies in the world were China and India. Fast forward and, within a generation, China seems set to overtake the USA as the largest-it probably overtook Japan to become the second biggest some time in 2009-while India is likely to move into the number three slot. Other countries, including Brazil and Russia, will not be far behind. Most people in the West are vaguely aware of the rising power of the so-called emerging economies, particularly of China, but have hardly begun to think through the consequences of this.

      This shift is not just about economics; it is also about ideas. We are moving from a period when most of the ideas that have driven the world economy have come from the West, to one where many will come from the East-and the rest of the emerging world. For the moment the mixed-economy model of Europe, Japan and, in a slightly different form, the USA remains the one that is being adopted in the rest of the world. On the surface it looks as though a form of Western capitalism is being recreated in China and to some extent in India. In the summer of 2009 the Shanghai Stock Exchange became the second largest in the world after New York, in the sense that the value of the companies traded on it was second only to those traded on Wall Street. But that was in part because Chinese banks had adopted a different set of business practices to those of their US counterparts and it was in part, too, because the Chinese government had followed a totally different fiscal strategy from that of the USA or most European governments.

      China and India, together with many other emerging nations, came out of the economic downturn in far better shape than the USA, Europe or Japan. On the face of it, the ideas of the emerging world look rather more effective than those of the West.

      The purpose of this book is not to look at the future shape of the world, and the way it is changing, from a macro-economic perspective. That is what I spend much of my day job doing, and it was also the approach of The World in 2020. My aim here, in starting from a series of stories, is to illustrate how there are great ideas and innovations in Western societies but also similarly great ideas and innovations in the emerging world.

      That surely is the future. Good ideas will increasingly come from anywhere and everywhere. We need to learn from each other. You cannot, of course, lift one way of doing things, transplant it to the other side of the earth and expect it to flourish. You could not create an Edinburgh Festival in China any more than you could make New York as safe as Tokyo. You could not build as good a university as Harvard even in Bangalore, or at least it would take several generations to do so. And you could not transport Hong Kong’s lean government to the welfare states of Western Europe, though there are some things we could learn from that. Indeed I hope we can all learn a bit from each of these stories, and try to apply some elements of their success. I’ve picked out three key lessons (bulleted) in each example and highlighted some further lessons in the conclusion.

      We can also learn from the weaknesses. While every single example here is one of something that has been successful, every single story in some way encompasses threats that must be overcome or flaws that must be fixed. I have tried to highlight these for this is what makes the stories real. One of the great puzzles is the way in which clever, thoughtful and decent people can get things wrong.

      What interests me most about these examples is partly the extent to which the baton of success can be passed on from one generation to another but it is also the extent to which an entity has the capacity to correct its course when the winds change.

      As noted at the beginning of this introduction, the winds have changed sharply during the writing of this book. That makes for a much more interesting world, a much more challenging one, and one where we should dump ideological explanations and responses and simply build on ‘what works’. I hope you will enjoy the journey.

The UK and Ireland

       CHAPTER ONE

      I. WHAT IS THE STORY?

      A shouted warning for the audience to stand back and a burst of fire from a human flame-thrower surges towards the crowd of onlookers on the Mound. A troupe in silver body-paint hands out leaflets for the night’s performance. Down the High Street, a jazz band bangs out the sounds of New Orleans. It is clamour, clamour-‘come and see us, the most brilliant act ever’-as every group of talent demands your attention. For it is August in Edinburgh and the prim grey capital of Scotland is once again home to the largest arts show in the world.

      As the International Festival guide puts it: ‘There is no place on earth like Edinburgh in August.’

      Nothing, but nothing, prepares the first-time visitor for the scale of what is on offer. You could in theory set to work every morning at ten, jam-pack the day with visits to shows and go all the way through the wee hours to 4 a.m.-and still see only a tiny fraction of what is available. There are more shows, more world premieres, more tickets, more new talent, more critics, more media moguls, more authors and playwrights-in short more talent on display-than at any other arts festival anywhere. What have Rupert Murdoch, Billy Connolly and J. K. Rowling got in common? They have all, in one way or another, appeared on a stage in Edinburgh in August.¹

      In fact, so, too, has just about everyone involved in the British arts or media scene. Every student theatre troupe in the land wants to put something on there; a dear friend commissioned a new piano composition that had its world premiere there; other friends have done book readings or shows; one of my cousins puts on or acts in a play there most years. And my own modest contribution was once to go on stage as a panellist for a TV event.

      There is a host of other arts festivals around the world but Edinburgh is three times the size of any of them.² It is an extraordinary, if improbable achievementxd-and one that many other cities would love to emulate. How has Edinburgh done it?

      The short answer is slowly. This is not one festival but-depending what you include-ten. Each reinforces the others, giving the city an artistic critical mass that makes it impossible to topple.

      There is the original arts festival,³ organized like so many others by the city authorities. There is a jazz and blues festival,⁴ Europe’s largest, bringing in groups from all over the world. There is the book fair,⁵ the largest of its kind on the planet. There is a film festival,⁶ the longest continually running one in the world, for Cannes had a break during the Second World War.⁷ There is a television festival.⁸ In 2003, a video games festival joined the clutch;⁹ Scotland is one of the key world centres for creating new video games.¹⁰ There is the Mela,¹¹ a celebration СКАЧАТЬ