As is usual when I take a long break from writing, my blog posts end up becoming insanely long. Take it as you will, but I’ve tried to make it as coherent a post as possible. P.S. this is a post written under de cover of my “leave of absence,” which means I still write, but less frequently. – - Vincent.

A good friend of mine, Zihni Ozdil from the Netherlands / Turkey, Historian Extraordinaire, is now publishing his wisdom online. If history, politics, and culture (“beyond the superficial”) is something you find interesting, I encourage you to check it out. On his site, I found an article entitled ‘the real Evil Empire,’ which, ignoring the provocative title, deals with the interesting topic of the cold war and the ‘demonification’ of Russia and communism at that time.

Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion with some Canadian Swedes that moved to Florida with their kids and had trouble finding a school. The only way, it seemed, to guarantee that their kid ended up in a good one is to have an A-class school in your district (which you can find via a website that profiles attendees according to race and economic background… wow…) and to have paid your electricity bills. It worked out well for them, but clearly suggests the underlying problem of a long-term selection bias.

Last night, meeting the Canadian Swedes, where I was also in the company of a Russian and a Japanese, I noted that it was strange that while both Russia and Japan, being superpowers in their own right, have infamously challenging education systems, which result in some pretty smart people graduating from either country, the US does not seem to follow that pattern, at least not at the high school level, and certainly not across all demographics. Yet, by all accounts, the US is a superpower, if not the superpower of this and the last century.

My post today is not about comparing countries’ education systems, it’s more about the strategic purpose of education. Many people don’t know this about me, but I don’t vote and I don’t generally care about (regional) politics. To me, our planet should be one country, where anyone can move and work anywhere, and services don’t have to be moved just because you physically moved  XX km/miles to another country. But I do recognise the power of competition and how that can lead to excellence. Versus a ‘group think’-like mediocrity where everyone just tries to be like everyone else and no one exceeds. So, in a way, I endorse a system of divided regions, because I think it leads to competition and thus excellence.

Education plays a strong role on the competitive advantage of nations, as it does in certain companies. Last year, applying to a lot of consultancy companies and working as one myself, I was struck at the importance that the accumulation of knowledge plays in this industry. If I were to start my own consultancy, continuous education of the staff would most certainly be a cornerstone of the business strategy, because knowledge is your product as a consultant.

I know that this thinking plays a strong part in government circles as well: how to make your/our country as strong as possible, not (just) in military terms, but in the sense of knowledge, mostly measured by the no. of graduates and the no. of patents that are published every year (as well the commercialisation thereof, which doesn’t go quite as smoothly).

I know that the no. of graduates coming out of Chinese universities is tremendous, and the no. of patents coming out of US ones is among the highest in the world also. So clearly, the US, superpower extraordinaire, is doing something right. I don’t however entirely understand why the primary/secondary school system is so abysmal then in the US. My only explanation is that, in academic circles, there are no national boundaries, and a Russian researcher can just as well (if not better) produce patents in the US as anywhere else.

There are other dimensions to the US superpower status as well, of course. It’s a military superpower, it is a cultural superpower (in terms of films, music, and literature), it has a large consumer-base. These three dimensions—safety through military strength, an easily adopted culture, a consumer’s paradise—also have the effect that they serve as an attraction point for outside academic or other talent. And while other countries may have strong educational bases, the other aspects are perhaps ignored just a little too much, still making the US a prime export location for knowlegde.

In the strategic literature, there is the concept of the resource-based view, which stipulates that company strategies are nothing more than a collection of resources, some of which are internalised and some that are not. I think that in the context of the US and education, the resources that must be internalised are those that lead to the commercial exploitation of technological advantage, which sounds abstract, but basically means making sure that the best technology/knowledge is produced in-house and generates economic benefits in-house as well.

But there other resources that must most certainly not be held onto in-house. These include standards, which facilitate the assimilation of knowledge. In education, the standards that we use are the bachelor-master-phd system, which can easily be studied in different combinations and locations. And text-books, which as many students know, are often from US-origins.

In many ways, the cultural exports from the US—movies, music, literature—are nothing more than the spreading of a standard, that of a language and a way of thinking, which makes assimilation of outside talent easier. And as long as that outside talent is used for the benefit of the US, in the form of patent exploitation, the US benefits, even if their own primary/secondary education system is quite uneven.

As mentioned, I don’t care about politics, country-differences, or governments. But if my logic is correct, I wonder if a metaphor exists for commercial superpowers, i.e. companies that are market leaders and remain so by attracting the greatest talent and finding ways to turn that into economic benefits.

Organisations are not complete economies like governments are and also have the benefit of being mobile—by law they are considered single persons, which have residence, pay taxes, etc. just like everyone else. So, as long as they obey the law, they can choose where they stay and choose to ignore local conditions, much like, I theorise, some governments do, instead focussing on the bottom-line: attracting excellence and turning that into profit, while keeping ‘unnecessary’ expenses as low as possible. Well, at least that is the stereotype of an organisation, while pressures have certainly lead some to adopt a more socially-responsible attitude.

Clearly, the question of talent, whether attracting or training it, remains a vital one for both countries and organisations. But I don’t think there is necessarily a correlation between talent and local conditions.. at all.. though local conditions do play a part in the quality of life, or lack thereof, which affects the talent’s in question desire for a certain location.

Vincent out.

(Picture courtesy of thehindubusinessline.com)

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