Culture, Crisis and COVID-19: The Great Reset 1527561607, 9781527561601

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Culture, Crisis and COVID-19

Culture, Crisis and COVID-19: The Great Reset By

Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner

Culture, Crisis and COVID-19: The Great Reset By Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6160-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6160-1

The Chinese Symbol for Crisis

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” —Prof. Paul Romer, Stanford University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ........................................................................................ 13 Private Enterprise is in the Best Position to Manage This Pandemic Chapter 2 ........................................................................................ 30 How Do the Values of Nations Stand up to the Coronavirus? Chapter 3 ........................................................................................ 59 Why East Asia Copes with This Virus So Much Better Chapter 4 ........................................................................................ 92 It’s Teams That Change the World Chapter 5 ...................................................................................... 112 Public-Private Alliance: A Matter of Life and Death Chapter 6 ...................................................................................... 128 Overall Wellness and Health: Skill and Knowledge at Work Chapter 7 ...................................................................................... 147 Putting Females and Youth in the Vanguard Chapter 8 ...................................................................................... 167 Giving the Disadvantaged an Advantage Chapter 9 ...................................................................................... 182 Business Belongs to Those with a Stake in Its Future

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Table of Contents

Chapter 10 .................................................................................... 204 The Case for Servant Leadership Chapter 11 .................................................................................... 224 Massive Fiscal Stimuli: But to What Purpose? Notes ............................................................................................ 246 Bibliography .................................................................................. 253 Index ............................................................................................. 256

INTRODUCTION

The Chinese word for “crisis” is “danger-opportunity”, two characters juxtaposed. Within any crisis there is both dire peril and the opportunity to learn something new, and to rebuild creatively, something more innovative, more inspiring, and more robust. So it is with the coronavirus pandemic, currently costing nearly 1.3 million lives and threatening economies worldwide. There is no doubt about the threat to lives; the death toll in the USA and Brazil will have topped 300,000 by the time you read this. 170 economies are forecast to shrink by the end of 2020. The Euro area is forecast to shrink by 8.7% by the year’s end, the UK by 9.5%, Spain by 12.6%, Italy by 10.8 %, and France by 10.4%. Despite all of this grief, there will be a recovery – such things pass. Yet the question remains: what form will this recovery take? Do we want an economy just like our old one? The argument about government interference is over. Governments are interfering on a massive scale across the globe and will have to do much, much more to bring us out of the depression. The question therefore becomes what kinds of business should governments encourage and what kinds should they allow to become relics? Quite suddenly, we have a chance to choose what kinds of industry we want and do not want, and those governments that represent us are going to have to do the choosing, by providing stimuli to some but not others. They are going to have to borrow billions and our children are going to have to pay all this back over two decades or more. The debt is likely to exceed that generated by World War II and we will need something similar to the Marshall Plan, save that the USA may not be able to help on this occasion, given that COVID19 is raging there with particular ferocity, although better leadership looks likely.

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Introduction

On June 3rd 2020 the World Economic Forum, in the person of Klaus Schwab, its founder, called for ‘The Great Reset’, which is the subtitle of this book. In this, he was backed by Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund and by HRH Prince Charles and Sharan Burrow representing international labour (1). The chief executives of Microsoft, Mastercard and BP were among those at the launch ceremony, which has been backed by 1,000 businesses worldwide. We need nothing less than a new social contract to deliver a low-carbon economy and a job-rich recovery that respects our eco-system and fights climate change. The word “culture” means “to work upon”. Hence, “agriculture” is to work on land, “aquaculture” is to work on water, and “horticulture” is to work on gardens. Culture by itself, whether corporate, urban or national, works on whatever it may encounter. In this book, we will be describing the impact of the pandemic on different national cultures to explain why some appear to have escaped almost unscathed, while others have encountered neardisaster. What is it about cultures and the values these organise that allows Vietnam to have but 13 deaths as of November 11, 2020, despite its long border with China, while the USA, its old enemy, has passed 745(2)? The latter spends much more on its health system and is far, far wealthier. This book aims to explain such mysteries. We agree with the Stanford University economist Professor Paul Romer that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” We hope to show that market capitalism itself needs to be reconceived. This crisis is only the latest of many. Homo sapiens is a great killer. The planet is warming up. The ozone layer that protects us from deadly rays from the sun is now dangerously thin. Climate change could make parts of the world uninhabitable, with millions storming our shores in a movement provoking fascist reactions. Science needs to take charge of our destiny. We need to become consciously aware of what market forces can do very well and cannot do, like protecting us from pandemics. Our argument proceeds by the following steps.

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Chapter 1: Private Enterprise Is in the Best Position to Manage This Pandemic argues that, once the pandemic takes hold of a nation and spreads, then its private enterprises are in a better position to contain it than are governments, nations, regions or cities. Companies have a younger age profile and are in a position to put those least susceptible to the virus at the forefront of their activities, while older top managers keep their distance and remain connected electronically, protected by their younger subordinates. The threat from the virus varies from company to company, from technology to technology, and from process to process, and generalizing to whole cities or regions makes no sense. The shifting balance between lives and livelihoods has to be spot on and varies between companies over time, so that lives saved now allow a greater subsequent emphasis on livelihoods. Now that vaccines are becoming available, it is companies you can rightly insist that their employees protect themselves, fellow workers and the company at large. Chapter 2: How Do the Values of Nations Stand up to the Coronavirus? This chapter tells of a quick survey into the nations that have stood up to the coronavirus and those who have signally failed to do so. We see that their values differ markedly, as do the reactions of their values to the virus. We look at values that more resemble natural processes like the Yin and Yang of Taoism and values that resemble rocks of rectitude and have been inscribed on tablets of stone and in sacred texts. The latter are far less adaptable to such crises. Nations whose values resemble solid things and objects are at a serous disadvantage. What we in the West are up against is less communism, than East Asian civilization influenced over two centuries by China, which looks like returning to the dominant role it long held. China looks like emerging from this crisis in a much stronger position. The world will turn to nations that best manage this crisis and are prepared to help other nations.

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Introduction

Chapter 3: Why East Asia Copes with This Pandemic So Much Better asks why East Asia has ridden out this virus with less loss of life than Europe and the West. The differences are truly massive, with America’s rate of deaths per million will pass 800 before Christmas 2020, while China’s sticking at 3 for the eighth month in a row. We show that it is a matter of values and culture. A culture based on individuality and force of personality is helpless against an affliction grounded in the community, which needs to escape as best it can by mobilizing that community. This virus needs us to cooperate, not compete in taking advantage of each other. Letting prices go sky high and chasing profits slows our response. The pandemic spreads much faster than markets can react, doubling infections in just days. The West’s community spirit, insofar as it can summon this, resides in its corporations. A private enterprise is in a position to influence those it pays for their services and can require that they obey its rules. It is in a much stronger position to demand compliance than are federal or local governments in much of the West. Governments can be very effective in the early stages of locking down whole countries and regions of countries, but they are insufficiently selective and nuanced in the process of opening up the economy which needs to be done enterprise-by-enterprise and workplace-byworkplace. It has become glaringly obvious that the virus has killed many more in the West than in East Asia, despite the fact that it originated in China and neighbouring countries had less time to react. While the West has a framework of laws, the East relies more on particular relationships. While the West stimulates consumerism and selfindulgence, the East emphasises productivity and self-control. While the West sees leadership as calculating and power-hungry, the East sees leadership as paternal and caring. The West sees contending values as rocks of righteousness. Taoism sees them as dynamic processes ever-shifting, more obedience now means more freedom in the future.

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Come a pandemic like this one, the West hesitates to curb freedom and limit self-indulgence, while the virus doubles its infection rate every three days. The West tries to open up too soon in the name of freedom, even as the plague increases. It distrusts what governments implore it to do, believing its liberties are being eroded. Used to self-indulgence, it reacts resentfully to any controls. The consequences are very real. Most of East Asia has deaths per million in single digits, while much of Europe and the Americas has them in three digits or more. The differences are stark indeed. A selfish kind of Individualism may be the West’s Achilles Heel. Chapter 4: It’s Teams That Change the World shows how teams can erect barriers to COVID-19 even while hatching ways to lift the siege. A team of say six to eight people meet as normal, face-to-face, but maintain social distance from others in the company, so long as the virus threatens. Should anyone in the team test positive, all are sent away to isolate, only to meet again fourteen days later and continue their work, which has, anyway, taken place remotely via Zoom while they were shut down. There is need to track and trace only private contacts, since team members were exposed to each other, but not the company at large. The outbreak, if any, is confined to 6-8 people who are promptly distanced from the rest. They may emerge from the situation immune as a group, which could help the company resist a spike in the virus and allow members to interact with all others in the company. Spending longer with five to seven other people than with casual acquaintances tightens group bonds and makes these more supportive, as members learn more about each other and how to elicit talent from their group. Margaret Mead famously wrote, “Small groups of committed citizens have changed the world, indeed nothing else ever has.” It is small groups that solve complex problems, that grow in effectiveness over time, that experiment and learn fast, that innovate and turn ideas into realities, that engage with each other and develop lasting bonds, and that propel the socially skilled into leadership positions. What we need in this crisis

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Introduction

are less answers than new questions. The face-to-face team is the origin of most entrepreneurialism and innovation. Chapter 5: Public-Private Alliance: A Matter of Life and Death reminds us that all values, everywhere and however different, depend on our staying alive to fulfil them. One potential “advantage” of this pandemic is that it asks whether what we do contributes to saving and enhancing lives, and to what degree. For example “caring” has a very low market value since so many people, especially women, do it for nothing, but has a very high value in a pandemic where we stand and clap those saving us. What a systematic attempt to open up with as few casualties as possible shows all employees is that everyone cares for their health and for their career prospects and that the company will stand by them, if they, in turn, support the company and help it survive. What employees do in this pandemic is very much more meaningful and responsible than anything they ever did before, as both lives and livelihoods depend on it, as is accurately reporting your condition day by day and not coming into work if symptoms arise. Each one of us is responsible for all others and the prospects of the company as a whole. In this crisis, companies can be extolled for saving lives along with the economy. Quite suddenly, what companies do and how they do it are matters of life and death. You no longer just make widgets for the man who has everything, you give extra years of life to members of your working community. You do this by taking good care of their health and telling the world of your more successful and safer practices, so that others follow. Those who have given their blood plasma to the seriously ill keep a scoreboard of the lives they saved and those lives that the company as a whole community saved. We save lives in a way that assures our livelihoods by taking care of each other and publicising those vaccines and those precautions which have been found to work and those that have not. In the end, do we not all want to make a difference? Is there any difference greater than

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between life and death? Could our work be much more meaningful than it was before? Chapter 6: Overall Wellness and Health: Skill and Knowledge at Work asks whether companies might add immeasurably to public health by keeping employees well. McKinsey reckons that health adds as much as 30% to economic growth. For some years now, Johnson and Johnson, the US hospital supply corporation, has run a Wellness programme for volunteers among its employees. Nearly everyone volunteers and the extraordinary thing about the programme is that for every dollar spent on the programme the company saves an additional $2.71 in the costs it had earlier incurred. Why should this be? Because it is incredibly cheaper and smarter to keep your employees well than to wait for them to fall ill and then doctor them. Just compare the cost of joining a companybased Weight Watchers group and being applauded by friends for every 6 ounce drop in your weight, with having surgery for the morbidly obese which carves three feet out of your intestines. Those that enjoy a healthy lifestyle and carefully monitor their condition often do not fall ill and need surgery in the first place. Insurers charge higher premiums for those in poorer health, so companies could help their profitability and the health of their employees by getting as many as possible into the lower risk groups. It now seems that the number and strength of antibodies can be counted by recent tests, so we can discover who is most resistant to the virus. It could become company policy to increase this antibody count, to recognize who amongst their number can take otherwise risky jobs and to combat type II diabetes with liquid diets. In Chapter 7: Putting Females and Youth in the Vanguard, we look at the inherent strength of young women vis-a-vis the coronavirus. If we look first at age, rather than gender, then those dying from the virus, between the ages of 18 and 44 are just 3.9% of the total. Women are less likely than men to die of the virus by a ratio of 1.4 to 2.4. This would indicate that the proportion of young women 44

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Introduction

years and under, dying is just over 1% of the total. Were we to eliminate young women with underlying conditions then the numbers get vanishingly small. Were we to allow for the fact that women do most of the nursing and caring, then the case for their near-immunity grows even stronger. If we knew a woman’s antibody count to be high and that she has been vaccinated, the chances of death virtually disappear. Thus far, women are losing their jobs faster than are men, partly because many women are in jobs of personal service, but this could change. What all this suggests is that the empowerment of young women is a strategy for re-opening the economy fast. Men are used to believing that they protect women. Here is a reverse situation with young women protecting mostly older men. They could do much of the face-to-face interaction which would be perilous were older men to do it. They could also do much of the travel. Giving them this added power would be experimental and discontinued were they to fall ill and it would require women to volunteer for such roles. In this chapter, we also examine the role of skill in maintaining mental and physical health and the much poorer mental health of those with low skills. We desperately need to train the trainable and rescue them from twilight existences. Everyone needs a skill with which to engage and to master their environments. Chapter 8: Giving the Disadvantaged an Advantage looks at the shocking statistics on race and colour. In the USA, black Americans are 2 ½ times more likely to die – in Kansas seven times. The UK’s National Bureau of Statistics has produced age-adjusted comparisons, which estimate the much higher toll among the elderly. Blacks are four times more likely to die. In the UK, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are between 1.7 and 1.9 times more likely to catch the virus and their chances of survival are lower. There appear to be no genetic causes; rather, the evidence points to front-line roles in caring, to density of living conditions, to poverty in general and to more predisposing conditions like asthma, diabetes, hypertension and obesity, and to distrust of white-run

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institutions. Most American insurers make the insured pay the first $500, so many people cannot even afford to be diagnosed and pass on the infection. Yet in these sad statistics, there is an opportunity to turn things around and turn disadvantage on its head. The number of COVID cases in the USA has passed ten million, but the number of those recovered stands at nearly seven million, rising to eight. Most of these ten million people will recover. Most of those testing positive will survive and the vast majority will be immune, assuming the virus is sufficiently similar to MERS, SARS and flu. In the latter case, it might mutate and the immunity may fade in time, but Dr Anthony Fauci is quoted as saying that this is improbable. At the moment, those who get re-infected make up less than 1.0% of the total, and doubts remain on the accuracy of their initial positive findings. The sheer number of recovered minorities grows by the day. Since they suffered disproportionately on the upside of the pandemic, it is entirely reasonable and prudential that they gain on the downside, being more employable and less likely to infect others. There is a strong case for positive discrimination, based not on race but on immunity. Chapter 9: Business Belongs to Those with a Stake in Its Future asks whether this pandemic might not make at least one lasting change to the nature of capitalism. The epidemic reminds us that wealth is created by employees, suppliers and those who hold a stake in the business and without whom it could not exist. Shareholders are only one kind of stakeholder, those who have invested money, but others may have invested the best part of their lives. “Here is some money, give me your life as long as I want it,” is hardly a just relationship. The truth is that only the USA, the UK and the exdominions place shareholders above others and uphold their right to “own” the creativity and innovation of a whole community. This is widely rejected in East Asia. If companies are going to take responsibility for lives, as well as livelihoods, then their people matter above all. It is going to be employees who endorse, or refuse

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Introduction

to endorse, the efforts of a company to open up in a safe manner and deploy its workforce responsibly. Consumers are in a position to reward those companies that treat their people fairly, where information on this is supplied. Moreover, there is growing evidence that stakeholder-oriented companies out-perform shareholder dominated companies. There is a burgeoning movement called “Conscious Capitalism”, a group of some thirty or so well-known US based companies, who have turned the good that companies do to their societies into a conscious, purposeful strategy of positive social impact. These have announced their intention to take the lead in rescuing their country from the COVID-19 virus. These include IKEA (US), Patagonia, HarleyDavidson, Honda (US), Trader Joe’s, Johnson and Johnson, Jet Blue, Southwest Airlines, John Lewis, Commerce Bank, COSCO, IDEO, Toyota (US), UPS, 3M, Jordan’s Furniture, REI, Caterpillar, Wegman’s, the Motley Fool and LL Bean, among others. They were selected for research because the public said they loved them, not a category used in most business research! Their profitability over recent years was multiples of Standard and Poor’s 500 averages (3). Chapter 10: The Case for Servant Leadership: By what right does business lord it over us? What is the justification for earning so much? Why should we “give the time of day” to soap merchants like Unilever? Some say they are “winners”, but does that makes the rest of us “losers” in comparison? The real legitimacy of business is that it serves us so well that we gladly confer the mantle of leadership upon it. Business is a “Servant Leader” and its legitimacy derives from how well it serves us. This pandemic vastly increases this capacity for service. Business can literally save lives as these chapters will show. In fact, Unilever’s disinfectant soap and public hand-washing campaigns may have saved hundreds of thousands from typhoid and cholera. It has over a million young people enrolled in self-esteem classes and drills for the fresh water which its products need. It was sovereign wealth funds that recently saw off Kraft’s attempt to take Unilever over. Business has the health

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and the future of stakeholders and much of the world in its grasp. We must demand more of it. We need statesmanship and imagination, and there is no time to lose. Great leaders are humble before the movements and institutions they serve. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned but his wretched captivity only elevated him in the eyes of the world, a prisoner-cumpresident who ruled over his jailors. Gandhi felt his life was of no consequence compared with Indian independence. However, his humble dedication to a cause meant that this cause raised him up. Servant leaders are focused on something bigger than themselves. We will show that several business leaders have behaved in a like manner. In the end, do not all of us want to make a difference? The difference between life and death is the greatest difference of all, and it is this which emerges from the way we combat this pandemic. Chapter 11: Massive Fiscal Stimuli: But to What Purpose? argues that we only get out of this crisis with the help of governments and financiers making massive fiscal stimuli to get us back to work. Laissez-faire will only leave as we were, prone to global crises and unprepared to meet them, our industry without purpose or direction, dreaming of Internet bingo, popular war-games and similar addictions. The USA with a reserve currency is in a position to print money for the whole world, but what should it do with that money? The Book of Deuteronomy 30/19 puts it well: “I have set before you, life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life.” Choosing life consists of asking ourselves what kind of industry we should resurrect from the rubble, what kinds we should speed on their way, and what kinds we should consign to history. We have been rudely reminded that life matters, now we must consider which kind of activities contribute to life and which do not. What we need are challenging infrastructure projects that make our spirits soar, that engage our enthusiasm, which give our lives a meaning they never had before. It has taken the UK a decade to bicker about a fourth runway at Heathrow. In that time, China has

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built fourteen entirely new airports. Such expenditures are not small change; the IMF has a trillion dollars, the Belt and Road initiative even more (3). The latter is twelve times the cost of the Marshall Plan which rescued Europe. We need public investments and incentives for private investments, to support climate resilience, to grow mangroves, reforest the land, insulate houses, replace fossil fuels, etc. As Nelson Mandela put it. “We must lay the scorch racism and divisiveness to rest. This requires strong democratic institutions and the will of everyone. None of this is possible without a strong economy and a culture of compassion in a cohesive society.” (4)

CHAPTER 1 PRIVATE ENTERPRISE IS IN THE BEST POSITION TO MANAGE THIS PANDEMIC

The theme of this chapter is that, while some government dictates have proved very effective in containing the pandemic in its initial stages, as with instant lockdowns, once we start to open up, this needs to be done in many different ways and there are no simple recipes for success. We must feel our way forwards in a thousand different contexts. Discovering how to create wealth while keeping those who do this safe, is not well-known and needs to be learned from scratch, if not invented by companies themselves. As such, it is better left to free-enterprise companies and those who run public institutions like schools. These should be judged on their results, by how productive and profitable they have become, while protecting the health of their people. Issuing general advice on how the populace should behave becomes less and less appropriate and at times laughable. Two families may meet indoors but “no hugging!” Seconds later, we are told to use common sense, and the “instinct” of a high official and father in breaking the rules for his child’s sake is praised (1). These kinds of muddle are farcical, like Trump wanting to cut back on testing because this raised infection rates and made him look bad. The reasons for leaving the many ways of lowering the infection rate to companies are several: x It is wealth-creating companies that are the units of economic survival and recovery; x Companies through their youthful profiles have the highest resistance to the virus;

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x Every company is different in its technology, its production process, its location and its people density; x Major spikes are occurring in key companies, and these must be extinguished; x Companies in the West command more allegiance, discipline and compliance than do governments; x Every company needs to ask different questions and find its own answers; x One answer may lie in team “bubbles” and cell-structures; x The optimal combination of caution with courage is different in every case; x Companies have opportunities to compete in activities that save lives and livelihoods; x It is high time companies took responsibility for all stakeholders.

x It is wealth-creating companies that are the units of economic survival and recovery. To a very large extent, it is not the working-age population that this virus kills, but those who are older. Indeed, the age-group on which business relies risks dying from the virus in quite small numbers. It is comparable to flu in winter months. The virus mostly strikes at those in their retirement years and not those in occupations (2). Those actually creating our wealth are generally sickness-free and there are strong reasons for unleashing their energies, provided they are not infected and do not infect others, which is not difficult for companies to discover, where testing and vaccinating is the norm. How well our economies perform depends on those least susceptible to the virus and there is everything to be said for putting these at the forefront of the struggle to re-open. What would be chronically unsafe for retirees is a manageable risk for younger employees. They can shield older people from the danger by discovering which activities raise the infection rate and which do

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not. Nearly all younger persons recover and their near-immunity could prove valuable. It is business that is in the arena of risk-taking that has learned over the years to act quickly on the basis of imperfect information and to tolerate ambiguity. The truth is we do not know many things about this virus and it is going to cost us to find out. There are also large elements of good and bad fortune in this equation. This pandemic is arbitrary in whom it infects and it goes after a Prime Minister, Tom Hanks and the president of Harvard. Businesses are used to trying things out to see if they work and this is what we urgently need. Most of the nation’s innovation, resources and knowledge are wrapped up in its businesses, and it is from them that new ways of containing the virus are likely to spring. An example of what business can do is evidenced by the Munichbased Bauer Group; despite its automotive clients suffering, it switched its efforts to the healthcare sector, to helium recovery systems and the generating of biogas. It has created a new filter that traps viruses, bacteria and mould from the air, essential in all hospitals. It will meet all its 2020 targets for revenue. It is seeing its markets recovering (3). It is expected to recover faster than other industries. Germany’s 5.9% forecast contraction is much smaller than the EU average and its deaths are 1/5th of those in the UK. Germany is expected to grow by around 5% in 2021. Spikes are occurring within key businesses like meat-packing, but these can be isolated and extinguished as they occur. South Korea traced a major spike to nightclubs and closed these down. There is much to be said for a business-by-business approach, with each unit held responsible for reducing infections. That we put our faith in businesses does not mean ignoring what governments can do. The German government has launched a $1.3 trillion “bazooka” of aid to companies, including its three million Mittelstand, or small and medium sized companies. Va-Q-Tec, a small flexible company, switched from insulating refrigerators to

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insulated, refrigerated containers for shipping medicines and virus test-kits, a market that is soaring. Because of its relative success in containing the virus, most of Germany did not have to close down (4). Germany has China as a major trading partner and orders are now increasing from East Asia as China, South Korea and Japan recover. Germany’s fiscal stimulus to companies as a percentage of GDP is over twice that of the UK and over four times that of the USA. It is also clear that the German government is not preparing to return to the status quo. There is a $50 billion “future package” aimed at a hydrogen economy, electric vehicles, quantum technologies, the carbon-free economy, digitalization and artificial intelligence. Consumer confidence is rising, and purchasing managers have recovered most of the morale they lost in April-May, although a second wave has recently hit (5). x Companies by reason of their youthful profiles have the highest resistance to the virus It is plain common sense to confront this virus with our strongest, not our most vulnerable people. For every 100 people who die of the virus in the UK, 88 are over 65 years old. Only 2 in every 100 deaths are under 50 years old. 90.9% of those who die, have at least one pre-disposing condition, like asthma, diabetes, dementia, hyper-tension, pneumonia and influenza. If we look at age groups, then 12.5% of all deaths occur among those aged 15-44, 14.5% occur among those aged 45-64, while 73% of all deaths occur among those over 65. If we take young people with no predisposing conditions then these are five time less likely to die than those of retirement age (6). Over 1 in 100 persons who die are white, while 4 in 100 are black in the USA. In the UK, 7 in 100 deaths are Bangladeshi, Pakistani or Indian, only Chinese women die in fewer cases than whites. This means that if companies maintained those who worked for them in the same condition as white and Chinese employees, deaths would fall substantially. There is no indication that these differences are genetic. They are socio-economic and hint at the difference companies could make if they tried.

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Suppose companies gave the jobs in which risks were inherent, to those best able to withstand this? There is no life without risktaking. Thousands who drive professionally, heal, care, travel, glide, box, climb, head footballs and volunteer to trial vaccines take calculated risks as part of their active lives. There are issues important enough to risk oneself, and helping one’s chosen company open up for business and staving off its collapse is one of these. The company is in a position to promote and reward those who came to its aid in a time of crisis. It is of course essential that young employees volunteer for the jobs that would be riskier if their seniors had to do them. They could be coached at a distance and engage more closely only when this was advantageous. One advantage of such arrangements is that young people could assume responsibilities earlier than would otherwise be the case and would be enabled to prove their autonomy and loyalty to the company. Very few young people die, but there is no such barrier to them becoming infective and carrying the virus to their parents and grandparents. This is why it remains imperative to test, trace and isolate them almost immediately. A sudden spike in infections may justify closing down for a short period and then resuming. In the meantime, the testing of the young becomes the canary in the coalmine. You are warned before deaths occur by those who are least likely to die themselves. x Every company is different in its technology, its production process, its location and its people density Another reason for putting individual companies in the driver’s seat is that it is virtually impossible for national, state, or local governments to specify what companies should or should not do about the virus in their unique situations. Companies have different technologies which may or may not require close proximities. They may have multiple people touching the same surfaces, crowded dormitories and/or canteens, unclean washrooms and noise so employees must shout at each other and scatter droplets. The only

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conceivable way of judging companies is by their results. They either open up successfully and safely so that few if any test positive, or they do not. They either have their least vulnerable people in exposed roles or they do not. They either accept responsibility for the medical conditions of their workers or they do not. Every company has a production process which exposes employees in different degrees to being infected. These processes can be varied, while hands and workspaces can be sprayed hourly, different spacings employed, the methods that infect people abandoned, and those methods reducing infections adopted. Much depends on geographical locations. There are regions of the USA which the virus has barely touched. To impose the same restrictions on the first as on the second is ludicrous. There are rural parts which the pandemic has passed by, thus far. Every region must be watchful, but act as suits its special circumstances. The virus is ubiquitous but also multi-local. There are different answers in different parts of the nation. The virus is also on different time trajectories. It peaked first in China, then South Korea and Iran and parts of southern Europe, then in the UK and Ireland, then in the USA and currently in India and the Americas in general. It rises and then falls, but falls only if precautions are first taken. This is less a second wave than the lengthening of the first wave, where states in the USA have opened up too early. We have to set companies free to find their own paths, if only because the virus flows and ebbs at different times in different places. If shut-downs are not rigorous enough, then the rates of death and infection remain at a worryingly high level. The US has been trying to open up without following its own guidelines, afraid that other economies will steal a march on it. (7) x Major spikes are occurring in key companies and these must be extinguished A further reason for requiring companies to lead in quelling the pandemic is that several spikes in infections recently witnessed are

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the result of particular industries. There was an outbreak in Singapore traced to the dormitory conditions in which immigrant workers lived. In South Korea a sudden spike was traced to nightclubs and to one infected person who had visited six of them. Meatpacking plants in Minnesota triggered 27,000 infections and were traced to poor living conditions and dense crowded working conditions imposed by the JBS factory. The Public Broadcast Service reported that the outbreak was blamed on the foreign immigrants themselves. They complained anonymously to PBS. Several packers were closed down by local governments, until President Trump ordered them re-opened. This occasioned more deaths but averted meat shortages. (8) A similar sudden spike occurred in a large German abattoir at Rheda-Wiedensbruck, which slaughters 50,000 pigs a day. The armed services had to intervene to trace, track and quarantine 6,500 workers. The Tonnies company was heavily criticised for its poor working conditions and its use of agency workers from Eastern Germany. (9) There were similar, if smaller, outbreaks at two meat processing plants in Wrexham, Wales, where nearly half the 500 workforce became infected. A recent incident was a Norfolk poultry farm. Much fuss is made over the “R number”, that is, the number of persons infected by a single infected person. If this goes above 1, the infection will spread. If it stays below 1, the infection will diminish. However, within companies doing particular jobs, the infection can quadruple in just two days because hundreds are confined in a limited space like a cruise ship, a floating petri dish where on several occasions the virus has run rampant and older people have suffered. We do not propose that companies should be allowed to endanger their people in search of profits, but that they be held wholly responsible for the health of employees and customers and be obliged to test them and compensate them where danger signals were present, yet ignored. In such places, infection rates can run away and action must be taken immediately.

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As such, an additional reason for making companies responsible is that they constitute the greatest danger of a sudden resurgence. We must make such errors very expensive to the companies concerned. x Companies in the West command more allegiance, discipline and compliance than do governments One problem with our adversarial system of politics is that governments rarely command the allegiance of a majority of their citizens. Where we add those voting for the opposition to those not bothering to vote at all, most democratic governments attract around a third of their citizens, while often describing this as a “landslide”. Local government garners even less support. When ordered to do something unpleasant like staying in quarantine and avoiding beaches, the populace is loath to comply unless they believe the warnings to be true, and, even then, they do this only grudgingly. This is why we need companies to step up to plate and show us what they can do. Any employer has much more leverage over what employees do and don’t do than does a government, national or local. An employer hires, fires, pays, promotes, trains, supervises, assesses and evaluates employees. Their futures depend on pleasing the company and following its procedures. If told to protect the health of fellow workers, they must do so. If being tested regularly is company strategy, then this will happen. In Germany, Westfleisch, a meat packer, has publicly undertaken to test all its employees every day, immediately isolating those who test positive and so nip any epidemic in the bud. (10) Those who do test positive are relatively young with mild if any symptoms. These constitute a “reserve army”, and, once back at work, are mostly immune. If opening up safely is the way the company relates to its market and to the public, then all employees can be assessed on how successful their efforts are in bringing this about. A company is a microcosm of the larger working environment and if companies

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compete with each other, not just in creating wealth but in creating health among their people, then they will be doubly successful. What a company does for its customers and what it does for those employees encountering customers become the twin reasons for buying from it, and the employees must be allowed to testify as to the care and the consideration with which they are being treated. x Every company needs to ask different questions and find different answers Because this virus is so new, the emphasis must be on asking it questions, to reveal how it assails each particular company. These questions need to be about the particular challenges a business faces. How to protect a wine bar is very, very different from protecting an open-air garden centre, or a lab for micro-chips. If some employees need to be in close proximity to each other, let this be the youngest employees who have tested positive and are very likely to be immune. A company of organized people who have agreed to operate as a single unit is in much the strongest position to test a myriad of propositions crucial to its survival and future prosperity. There are dangers in being too cautious and in being too bold. If you are too cautious, everything will take longer and you will consume gallons of disinfectant and hours of nervous absenteeism. If you are too bold, then spikes will occur in different departments and all occupants therein must be separated from the rest. As of now, we do not know how much difference the wearing of masks makes, but general answers are less important than specific answers, like “cashiers that wear masks are three times less likely to test positive in our company”, and, “One metre of distance is 90% as effective as are two, while doubling the number of people who can be served and raising revenues 50%.” We can disinfect one office every day and one every four days and see what difference, if any, this makes. Getting rid of needless precautions is vital, but this is done not because we are bored with the virus, wish to return to

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normal and only care about our own incomes, but because our own company information shows that this is expedient. What difference do hand-washing and hand sanitizers make? We may need volunteers to test the more optimistic propositions, but we believe these would be forthcoming. Some people will jump at the chance of opening up sooner rather than later and may be keen to help bring this about. Others will want to be more protective and will want to research areas of danger. Both can be given a chance to question the virus around the values they hold dearer. Some will want to protect their parents and grandparents. Some will want to see the back of needless regulations as soon as possible. The imperative is to test as many propositions as possible and learn as fast we can what serves a strategy of opening-up safely. x

The answers may lie in team “bubbles” and cell structures

Some of the ways of overcoming the virus could actually make a company more innovative and more able to solve day-to-day problems, whether connected to the virus or not. We do not have to either interact with each other normally or keep our distance; we can do both. We place people in 6-8 person “bubbles”, inside of which they may come as close to each other as they wish, but they must remain socially distant from everyone else in their company. This has the advantage of confining any spread of the virus to a particular bubble and we know in advance who has had contact with whom. If any member of a bubble tests positive, then all members are quarantined at once and the virus spreads no further. After saytwelve days, the healthy or immune members re-convene. Since these teams give members tasks, which are reported on when they meet periodically, work may be scarcely interrupted. However, small teams have some very interesting properties and are importantly involved in both innovation and solving problems. In the final years of Jack Welch at GE, he created hundreds of workout groups. These met outside the company’s premises so that routine tasks could not distract them and they could concentrate

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single-mindedly on the problems they were tasked to solve. Most of these teams had 6-8 people, sometimes more. They would come up with recommended solutions and report these back to Jack. In his final years, he was implementing 80% of these proposals without changes (11). Team membership was a microcosm of those actually confronting the problem, so that if it was Japanese-American communications that were failing, then an expert selection of those confronting the problem would become members of the team. Margaret Mead famously said, “Small groups of committed citizens have changed the world. Indeed nothing else ever has.” (12) Teams could be set the task of seeing which particular precautionary measures were necessary and which were not. They could identify and marshal those who were immune. They could create riskprofiles for each gender and each age group which give them the odds on falling seriously ill and the likelihood of being rewarded for their courage. They could organize volunteers to donate their blood plasma to anyone in that company who needs it. The company could celebrate this in ways of its choosing and acknowledge heroism. One effect of keeping 6-8 people close and many others distant is that your team of close friends takes on an importance it never had before and you rely upon it, not just for work, but for sanity in times of trouble. What really buoys our spirits is the love and support of those who know us well and intimately. There may be nothing more important in an age of Internet savagery than the re-assurance of close colleagues who know you well. If you can join those colleagues in the lifting of the siege, so much the better. The importance of meeting each other face-to-face may prove itself vital. Individually creative people are by no means popular in many organizations. They indirectly critique those running the show and force others to make changes in routines. However, supported by teams, these changes are carefully explained and facilitated. Moreover, the act of thinking creatively is supported and rewarded by team members. This encourages still more creative exploits and exciting ideas to be introduced.

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x Businesses are in the best position to test, track, trace and isolate Testing has been likened to turning on the light in a dark room. Quite suddenly, you know where you are, who is infected, who is likely (not certain) to be immune, having survived infection, what proportion are asymptomatic yet infective, and who should be at home and who out and about. Companies are in a much better position to test, track, trace and isolate than are governments or local authorities. Companies can legitimately require their employees to check on their own health and comply with rules-for-working, and daily tests could very quickly identify a carrier, so that the person can be isolated at home or in a hotel with others testing positive. A company is also in a much better position to know who among its staff had contact with that person and who did not. We get endless meaningless statistics from governments on how many people have been tested and how many trackers and tracers have been employed, but no one of these statistics taken singly matters very much, and it is here that governments in the USA and the UK have largely failed. It is no use testing people if the result is not known to them for days and their contacts have not been warned in time. There is no point isolating people by guesswork when they have not been tested. What matters is the synchronization of testing, tracking, tracing and isolating, so that all these processes are coordinated. Companies are in a far better position to join these up than any other authority. Testing someone on Monday and informing them on Friday at the earliest spreads the infection during those intervening days. A clinic within a business is by far the easiest place for tests to be conducted. You do not have to drive miles to a testing station. You are being tested by someone who wants to know how well you are. All your regular contacts are being tested at the same time. You will be told in hours, not days. You will be removed at once if necessary or discover that for the moment you are safe to be around. It is very

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much in the interests of the company to keep you safe and we can rely on tests being frequent as well as thorough since this benefits all concerned. There is an increasing number of things we can test for. Companies can test for predispositions that make COVID-19 worse and more likely to prove fatal, and take care that such people are not exposed to danger. Companies can test for the number and strength of antibodies and thereby identify a warrior class. They can test to see if people have had the virus and are likely to be immune. You can test to see how valuable your blood plasma might be to others. And since you are testing anyway, you can sort your employees by how high their insurance premiums are, to see which the insurer thinks will stay well or not. You can try to move your minority employees out of high-risk categories. Even with the best will in the world, Western governments are largely forbidden to discriminate and are obliged to treat all citizens the same. However, this pandemic DOES discriminate and so must we. The pandemic largely spares children and rarely culls those aged 40 years and under. It is younger people and women whom we need to mobilize to open up our economy. These, together with the recovered and immune, are the advance guard which companies can mobilize and deploy in a way that governments cannot. The optimal combination of courage and caution is different in every case. By now, we all know what it takes to halt this pandemic in its tracks, since much of East Asia has done so. You must first and quickly shut down and isolate infected areas, exercising Caution, and then find the Courage to open up and restore people to lives of industry, still exercising Caution. Ironically

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the more completely and readily you close down initially, the easier and the sooner you can open up again. We have diagrammed this process on the right. The loop in the centre is the occurrence of a spike necessitating a temporary return to caution, as in the closing down of bars in Texas at the end of June, or South Korea closing down nightclubs in May. What is clear is that we need an optimal combination of first caution then courage which shifts over time and that this combination is different in every case and situation. It really is not feasible for any government to know this, although it can insist that companies try their best and reward them for doing so. It is for each company to make these difficult judgement calls as circumstances change. Note that Caution and Courage are not two “opposed” values but one continuum. The more Caution you display early on, the more practical will any later Courage prove to be, and the fewer are the virus cases confronting you. An analogous case is rescuing a drowning person, first throw him a life-belt and only enter the water if you must. His “death grip” could drown you both. Make sure you can break it. What ultimately saves both of you is an optimal combination of both values, not one or the other. Nor is there just one optimal combination. They vary for each company, in each place and at each time. The rescue drill taught to life-savers is “first row, then throw, then go” (as a last resort). x Companies have opportunities to compete in activities that save lives and livelihoods What this pandemic has an opportunity to do is to vastly increase the importance of the work we do. We are not just saving human lives in the way we work, we are rescuing an economy whose fall could do irreparable harm to millions and ruin years of their lives. It will even occasion suicides. We have never heard of an employee taking pride in the enrichment of shareholders, nor even in the quality and price of electric kettles. As few as 30% of American workers feel they are engaged in their work. A life of ever- greater

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consumption is a long way from building God’s Kingdom on Earth, the inspiration of the Puritan ethic that founded the USA. “You have never had it so good,” is short of inspiring leadership. We now have a chance for genuine engagement with how we work. In this pandemic, the lives of co-workers are in the hands of each one of us and how we conduct ourselves. Ironically, we cannot take care of ourselves without first taking care of each other, since infectious agents jump from one person to the next. Any neglect of others will come full circle. Certainly “black lives matter”, but as a logical deduction of the truth that life matters. When we get together in our teams to chart a future, lives and livelihoods with depend on the judgements we make and the strategies we implement. Conservatives love the idea of competition, and so let all companies compete in keeping people alive and restoring our prosperity. There is no future in lost revenues. However, as with the courage-caution relationship we discussed earlier, the competing is in how well we cooperate in taking care of each other. It is one continuum, not Right vs. Left. The more we care the quicker we will get out of this. You want a meaningful life? Try saving those you love from a scourge! x It is high time that companies took responsibility for all stakeholders Who is it that creates the wealth that the rest of us enjoy? This pandemic should remind us that in most danger are those that do the actual work, employees and suppliers who make the goods and customers who buy and use purchases. These very same people now find their health and lives under threat depending on how these tasks are performed. If they work and shop in crowded conditions they find themselves and their families in peril. Stakeholders include employees, suppliers, customers, the community, the government, the environment and shareholders. However, it is the last mentioned whom many claim to “own” a company with all others as mere agents maximizing their take. This

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was never fair and in the light of the pandemic, it is even more unjust. Wealth is created by those who put their lives and health on the line to sustain the rest of us. The idea that those who supply not their working lives but some money, stay at home and bank dividends, should lord it over everyone else was wrong before this crisis and has now become obscene. Employers must be held responsible for the health, welfare and lives of those they employ. As subsequent chapters will show, it is incredibly cheaper to keep your people healthy than to wait for them to fall ill and then splash out on heroic efforts to save them. If you want your employees to create wealth for you, then the least you can do is to maintain their health at the highest levels possible and teach them how live fully and sustain themselves. It pays several times over as we shall show. A healthy person is loving and industrious as Freud pointed out. We do not work just for money, but also for meaning and for innovating ideas. Money enables us to do even more of what we love and comes after we have excelled, so we can excel on larger scales. Money motivates us to conform, not to originate, as research has shown (13). It follows excellence. It does not lead. Those who maintain the health of workplaces and the contexts of shopping should be properly remunerated. Shareholders will find they get more not less by treating other stakeholders fairly. Of course they have their roles, but so do all other stakeholders, and we need to take care of each other. If you treat wealth creators fairly, you will discover how much more they can do for you. The whole notion of labour as a commodity is an appalling underestimation of what life is all about. Labour, in the form of our humanity, is the source of all value. It is the point of it all. The very reason we exist is to contribute to life forms of every kind which sustain our planet. This pandemic has taught us respect for people who care, and such care lies at the foundations of everything. It is not just a market factor, but the source of our being. When we

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exploit stakeholders for gain by shareholders and the financial sector, we drain the life-blood out of our economy. We mutilate ourselves for high-level abstractions. We pay a price for every life diminished.

CHAPTER 2 HOW DO THE VALUES OF NATIONS STAND UP TO THE CORONAVIRUS?

The effectiveness of values depends on the circumstances to which they are applied. Our values either help us negotiate the crises we face or they do not. COVID -19 is a very serious crisis, but is only one of the many crises that loom before us, and is currently the most pressing, since it attacks world health and the economy. However, it may be but a taste of what is to come. If the sun’s rays break through the ozone layer and start to irradiate us, what then? Do we expect the economy to be immune? What about the carbon released by melting permafrost? If weather continues to deteriorate, how will we save ourselves from flooding, from the mass migrations occasioned by drought, from the poisons in our oceans, and from the extinction of animal species? If, in the face of such threats, we abandon science, however rudimentary, and such probabilistic knowledge is easy enough to disparage with a few back-handers, who is to save us from ourselves? What is at stake is Western civilization itself, because whichever nations deal with this pandemic most auspiciously are going to elevate their prestige in the world. If China shows us how to stay alive more effectively than does America, then it is to China the world will turn and rightly so. Life is the source of all other values. At this time of writing, China has three deaths per million population, according to John Hopkins University, and the USA has over eight hundred and rising. The USA with 4% of the world’s population has 22% of all deaths, while spending more on health than any other nation (1). The contest between the USA and China is

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not even close! Furthermore, it was China which was taken by surprise and was at first seemingly overwhelmed by an unknown virus, while the West had many weeks of warning. The capacity of China to restore order is remarkable. The Economist has forecast that it will grow economically by +1.9% in 2020, while the US retreats by -5.3% or more and the Euro area by -8.7%, and the UK by -11.3%. (2) This virus is going to accelerate China’s rise unless we awaken from our seeming torpor. Our company, Trompenaars Hampden-Turner, has been measuring the values of managers the world over since the early Eighties (see Riding the Waves of Culture, now in its 4th edition (3)). We will explain the differences between West and East in Chapter 3, but here we would like to share an enlightening survey of over 2,000 managers we undertook in a few weeks in June 2020, with the pandemic as its focus. It is only indicative, as larger samples are needed, but what it indicates is extremely significant and helps explain the downward trajectory of the fortunes of the West, most especially the Anglo-American sphere of influence. It is rough and ready, but we cannot afford to wait. Imperfect information may be precious and a lot better than the present ignorance. (4) We would like to make one more central point. Our opponent in this struggle for world influence is not “communism” as such; it is the spread of Chinese civilization throughout East Asia and now the world (5). We will show that East Asians as people have different values, whether or not they are allied to the West, as are Singapore and South Korea, two nations whose values will feature prominently in this chapter. Cultures influenced by Confucius and by Taoism think and behave differently in the face of COVID- 19 than do cultures influenced by the Word of God and the recorded utterances of supernatural beings. Communism is, in any case, a doctrine of Western Enlightenment, written by a German Jew in the British Museum. It is about as far from traditional Chinese philosophy as you can get, yet it is these ancient values and the twenty-two hundred years of Chinese-influenced civilization that could get the

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better of us. The USA and the UK have among the worst death-rates in the world. What part do our values play in this? We will proceed in the following sequence. x x x x x x x x x

Values are differences, joined by continua; Virtue lies not in values, but between them; Rules, exceptions and learning as fast as we can; Individuality and concern for the community; Is “science” one or many? Respecting leadership and leaders eliciting participation; Short-term urgency and long-term preparedness; World cooperation, not national rivalry; Do these figures anticipate the recovery of economic growth? x Chinese civilization is more comfortable with dilemmas.

x

Values are differences joined by continua

When studying ethics in the West, one tends to be constantly asked, “is this a good thing?” The difficulty here is that the very question is misplaced; a value is not a thing at all and assuming it is, gets us off on the wrong foot. A value is a difference on a continuum, like risking----securing, doubting----verifying, making a ruling------finding exceptions, thinking------feeling, erring---correcting, supporting---criticising, globalizing------localising, competing----cooperating, analysing----combining, diversifying -----including and so on. The reason for adding -ing is to remind us that these are present participles, less things than processes. (6) Unless my friend is genuinely supporting me why should I heed his criticising? It is unlikely to be constructive. What use to a company is employee diversity if those diverse persons are not included and listened to? What value lies in leading people if they are not participating and engaged in that leadership? If we are to

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strengthen and improve our values and the cultures of our nations, then entire continua must be upheld, not just lives but livelihoods, not just medicine but economics; more erring must lead to quicker correcting, and more cooperating must lead to better competing and we doubt propositions about vaccines, so that we may become more certain that they will be effective. Probably the machine that has saved more lives than any other is a stop-light or traffic signal. However, neither red for STOP nor green for GO is valuable in themselves. What keeps us safe in is the endless movement between the two. When asked to stop, we know we will soon go again, safely. When we wait for others, we know they too will wait for us on later occasions. A light stuck on red or green would not simply be useless but lethal, as are those value differences which cannot change when a plague strikes us. (7) The answer to the question as to whether values are absolute or relative is BOTH. They are an absolute as to their presence. There is an absolute need to love your child and an absolute need to correct your child; no unloved or uncorrected child ever grew into a responsible adult. What is relative is the movement from loving to correcting and back to loving, and how these harmonize and relate to each other. That varies with every particular relationship and situation. This requires social skill and Ren, Chinese for human heartedness and mutual understanding. x Virtue lies less in values than between them It follows that the place to look for civic virtue is not in any particular value, in say the individual or the community, but rather in the relationship between them. For example, does the individual serve the community in which s/he grew up? Is the aim of the community to nurture those with the individual courage to speak truth to power? When an infection breaks out which spreads from one community member to another, is it time for the individual to pledge allegiance to that community and alter his/her conduct, as required? The cultures in which this occurs will fare better than the

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ones in which it does not. Furthermore, of course, all individuals are members of a community, so these values were never separate in the first place. Consider universal laws, whether legislated or scientific. These are almost certain to encounter exceptions, which those laws failed to anticipate. However, it is these exceptions that will, in time, improve the laws so that these take account of former exceptions. In other words, laws and exceptions are one continuum of virtue, the quality of which relies on relations between them. Do we not wish to keep to the law while proving exceptional? Do we not want our laws to be even better, by accounting for what were once considered exceptions? (8) While East Asia gets its values from family settings, under the influence of Confucius, where a child is both loved and corrected in particular relationships, much of the West gets its values from the sacred writings in the Bible. “In the beginning was the Word and the word was God.” It has all been written down and we have but to obey. We have a tendency to turn those words into nouns and treat those nouns as if they were things. Hence, we have commandments chiselled in stone and true for ever more and a Rock of Ages in which we seek to hide. Our view of values is monumental; we set them in stone so they will endure. We even name our children after these values, like Patience, Hope, Prudence, etc., all one-dimensional polarities of rectitude. We praise law officers as being “untouchable” in their independence and picture lone cowboys riding into the sunset forever, free of all human entanglements, so long as they move on. It seems not to occur to us that a virus ends that independence by jumping from person to person in a community. You will infect others whether you will it or not. We will now return to the research we conducted. x Rules, exceptions and learning as fast as we can All we have to resist the virus are the rules of conduct we set one another and the rules of science that may hopefully lead to

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therapies and ever better vaccines. Although this is a novel virus of which we know little, so science could not save us immediately, we must take the best advice possible and learn as we go along, even where the experts are puzzled. They may well be right, whereas non-experts are almost certainly wrong. It is therefore important to follow the rules, if only to discover whether these rules are good or not. We must also put our faith in science, even where that science has is slow to come up with an answer. We assumed that those nations readiest to follow rules of mask-wearing, hand-washing, social distancing, etc., and those who showed faith in medical science might fare better than others. We, therefore, asked our samples to endorse the following statement. We lay out the measure of agreement. “We follow the rules and procedures set by authorities to protect people from COVID-19.” VEN SWI USA SPA CAN NL UK BRA FRA BEL SWE AUST GER SIN S KOR CHI 43% 48% 51% 55% 59% 68% 69% 69% 69% 70% 71% 71% 71% 72% 89% 90%

Here we see some surprises. China is twice as likely to follow rules and procedures as is Venezuela on the extreme left. As many as 49% of Americans are not minded to follow rules and procedures, which helps explain governors suing mayors in Georgia for mandating masks and the accusations of “fascism” made by Elon Musk at orders to lock down. Following the rules is an infringement of human rights. We should be free to do as we like, even if that results in death to others. Note that the three East Asian countries on the right with the highest percentages are the most compliant of all, but does that derive from varying degrees of oppression? China is a oneparty state and Singapore re-elects its one and only party, while South Korea, menaced by the North, is on semi-war footing and, like Japan, tends to re-elect pro-business politicians. Should such nations be called “free”? Surely, it is clear that such rule-following countries are going to outlaw any exceptions? However, this is where we fail to understand values not our own.

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As such, we asked for agreement on another statement, this time on tolerance for deviating from the rules where this was justified by exceptional circumstances. Here are the results we got. “We deviate from the rules for fighting the COIVID-19 virus if circumstances so dictate.” SWI BRA VEN GER FRA AUST UK NL CAN USA IND ITA S.KOR SIN SPA CHI 27% 40% 47% 49% 50% 51% 51% 53% 55% 56% 57% 58% 59% 62% 63% 76%

Perhaps the most instructive comparison is between Switzerland on the far left and China with a score of 76% on the far right. For Swiss respondents, 48% chose to obey the laws, suggesting that it is obviously wrong to deviate from such laws. They would be contradicting themselves! You either uphold the law or you break it. There is nothing in between. Switzerland, especially Geneva, is the source of Calvinism in Europe. The Bible instructs us and we obey! There is no room for backsliding. Note that 56% of Americans would deviate if they choose to do so, compared with only 51% who said they would comply. That is not going to be enough to halt the virus, since that 56% will be infecting the rest of the population. As such, America is in danger of being among the worst in the world as far as COVID is concerned. However, what are we to make of China? They just told us that 90% of them would comply with laws and now 76% say they would deviate! They cannot have it both ways. They must be lying or saying ‘yes’ to everything for fear of the consequences of disagreeing. However, in actual fact, if we think a bit harder, then there is no real contradiction between complying with rules of thumb and looking for exceptions. No laws about this new virus are set in stone. We still know far too little about it. What we need to do is apply the laws which in some cases are guesstimates and see what exceptions occur. If deviating somewhat produces better results, we modify the law and adopt the new procedures. What the Chinese have created is an error-correcting system, where some of the procedures will not

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prove effective, so the law is constantly improved (9), a good way of coping with a very uncertain situation (see the graph below).

Above, we see China at the top right of the chart, joining the values of science with the values of studying the exceptions to that science. If you are not sure of your ground, like a blind person with a white stick, you tap your way forward, getting valuable feedback from your environment, which helps chart the path ahead of you. What following the rules and then finding they are not yet good enough does is propel you forward in the race to learn by modifying those rules. This virus is a long way from being explicable, so examining every rule for its pay-off on saving lives and avoiding infections is an effective way of coming to terms with this threat. Note the extent to which the three East Asian countries are out on their own in both following laws and experimenting with new ones. Most of Europe and the Americas find themselves having to compromise as they see it, caught between an unreliable science in its infancy and the need to take some action for political reasons.

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x Individuality and concern for the community It is obvious that for the pandemic to be mitigated, the individual must feel a sense of duty and obligation towards the community so that its members are not infected. Each individual member of that community must trust that s/he will be taken care of by the community and any concern reciprocated. It is up to individuals to follow their consciences, despite the fact that they themselves, if young, are not in any great personal danger. They owe it to their parents and grandparents. There are two varieties of individualism, one of which is selfish, narrow and scorns responsibility. Here freedom is the right to be irresponsible if you are so inclined. Then there is the freedom to choose to be accountable to yourself for your conduct towards others. This second kind is joined to the community and is part of it. Unless you wish to damage the individuality of others, it is the only viable kind. Consequently, we asked our national samples if they supported this kind of individualism. Here is the statement for which we asked assent. “We are each accountable for our own health as individuals.” VEN BRA AUST GER USA ITA SWE IND NL UK CAN SPA CHI S.KOR SWI SIN 33% 38% 43% 48% 49% 50% 56% 57% 59% 60% 61% 66% 67% 68% 69% 76%

Note that Venezuela, which is close to being a failed state, is the lowest in accountable individualism, with Brazil, whose policy has been one of laissez-faire and populism, a close second. However, the USA has less than half its managers subscribing to individual responsibility, suggesting that its brand of individualism is of the more predatory variety. In reality, there is only so much an individual can do in the face of a pandemic, save making statements of optimism about “world beating” achievements and pretending that those who died did so out of voluntary heroism. Most of the efforts by individuals are attempts to raise money for charity and need a community to subscribe to these efforts. Charity itself is

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symbolic of personal generosity. Note that, once again, Switzerland, the home of Calvinism, is prominent among those extolling an accountable individualism, with Singapore, an ex-British colony and, influenced by both West and East, the highest of them all. The opposite of concern with one’s own individuality and selfhood is concern with the community and saving other people from being infected. The division between self and other is especially strong in this pandemic, since, among younger people, the self does not suffer as much as do older people to whom infections are passed. We are asking sons and daughters to save their parents and their grandparents. In the UK, police have had to break up “rave” parties of drunk and drugged revellers and been pelted with missiles for their pains. Individual travel and mobility must be seriously curtailed to save the community, a precaution widely resented. In the USA, food prices are soaring as suppliers cash in. We asked for endorsement of the following proposition. “We adjust our behaviours for the sake of the safety of others.” VEN SWI SPA BRA USA IND GRE UK GER NL FRA SWE BEL ITA CAN S.KOR SIN CHI 42% 45% 46% 51% 52% 56% 65% 66% 68% 69% 70% 70% 70% 72% 73% 75% 76% 88%

On the whole, our respondents saw more hope in a community response than in an individual one, a view justified by the nature of the pandemic, as highly infectious among people. Once again, Venezuela is bottom and the Swiss, having agreed that each one of us is responsible for ourselves, see little reason to endorse a community ethic in addition. The two values are seen as incompatible. Note that only 52% of Americans see the need to adjust their behaviours to suit the community, and the pandemic could easily rage indefinitely among the 48% not willing to change. In this, they deviate greatly from Canada, which has brought its virus under control, despite sharing the same continent. Brazil and Spain have a remarkably low endorsement of this view, which may account for their higher tribulations. Italy is high in its willingness to

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adjust, but this comes after much suffering, not before. Our study was done in June 2020. Here again, we see that Singapore, South Kores and China manage to reconcile individuality with community, a feat we find so hard in the West. The accountable individual serves his/her community for the simple reason of membership therein. We care voluntarily for one another like any warm family, instead of worshipping the opposed ideals of capitalism vs. socialism, competing vs. cooperating, and the individual vs. the group, and engaging in endless ideological debate. China at 88% greatly outstrips any other nation. Managing the pandemic has everything to do with being in the top right corner of the chart below and in getting individuals to support group goals.

An interesting case is the relatively high scores for Belgium, which is only slightly below our three East Asian countries. Yet in comparison to them, Belgium has suffered grievously, and, as of July 2020, had the highest death toll per million citizens in the world and is believed to have botched all early efforts. Those on the frontline turn their backs on politicians when they visit hospitals. Given the timing of

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our June survey, Belgium was over the worst and opening up again. It had gone several days without any deaths. Its view may be of what it should have done, a bitter reflection on past mistakes and a determination to do better. This could be one of the lessons we draw in retrospect. The chart clearly shows Brazil’s parlous position and the malign influence of President Bolsonaro. The USA is relatively low on both scales and seems to believe they contradict each other and call for an opposition between the economy (Individualism) and lives of people (Community). The hot air generated in this argument is probably infectious! We shout at each other in vain as the infection gains ground. x

Is “science” one or many?

Science generates a vast amount of prestige in our society, and watching politicians trying to wrap themselves in the prestigious mantle of science, make doctors stand on the platforms next to them, and blame the experts when anything goes wrong, has been painful to watch. “We follow the science” has been repeated as a mantra. The most prestigious science of these is medicine, but in fact medicine has never encountered this virus before and is having to guess too. In reality, the answers lie between disciplines and how artfully these are combined. Medicine is certainly important, but then so are the economics of opening up, the behavioural sciences, the use of statistics, epidemiology and the management of companies and organized communities. We argued earlier that East Asia focuses more on the “between”, the relationships between bodies of knowledge. Their view is more diffuse and less specific, but we decided to test this proposition with research. One problem with enthroning medicine is that it is more useful in the early stages of the pandemic, and still useful but less so in the later stages, when the time has come to open up. Nor is medicine free of politics and somehow “above us all”. Doctors and epidemiologists, by dint of their professions, are always going to be on the side of saving life, while economics and business are going to

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be on the side of opening up the economy as soon as possible. What makes the difference is how well these forces are orchestrated. As businesses open, spikes are bound to occur and doctors will need to be called back. Medicine is absolutely essential and Dr Fauci is trusted by the American people in a way that Trump was not, but this is still not the whole answer to the pandemic. As such, we asked for endorsement of the following statement. “We listen to the recommendation of health experts when dealing with COVID-19” VEN BRA SPA USA IND FRA GER BEL UK NL CAN ITA AUS CHI SWE S.KOR SIN SWI 36% 43% 41% 51% 56% 59% 60% 61% 62% 63% 64% 65% 66% 75% 76% 78% 80% 93%

The champion of medical science above all is Switzerland at 93%. This is in accord with its Calvinist leanings. Written laws are supreme. Medical science guarantees life and its prolongation. You follow it to the letter. Once again, Venezuela barely qualifies and Brazil reveals the terrible cost of having replaced two health ministers with a general and describing the pandemic as “a little sniffle”. The USA disagrees on whether medicine should predominate by 51 to 49, a very even split in the nation. This research was done in June just as the US economy was opening up and the sun-belt and the Southwest, who had been ignoring medical warnings, were about to be hit. The argument between medicine and business is still raging and Dr Fauci was attacked by Trump’s henchmen. Medicine is “alarmist” when you seek to open up and you suddenly do not want to hear what it is telling you. The UK’s Boris Johnson promised no lockdown even if a second wave hits this winter, a promise soon broken. Medicine retaliated with a second wave model which made this essential. The blame game between experts and politicians is being readied for an inquiry. Note that China, South Korea and Singapore put strong faith in medicine, but do not do this exclusively. Sweden appears to have gambled that the strength of its medical system

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would make it unnecessary to lockdown at all and other disciplines were not brought to bear. We suspected that the real answers lay between disciplines, since a vaccine must still be distributed and in the meantime persuading people to behave differently is the only game in town. We have to erect social barriers in the path of the infection, isolating hot-spots and shutting off areas yet to be visited by the pandemic. China has kept its death rate at 3 per million inhabitants for seven months on end and only a large second wave will notch this up. In truth, it does not matter how much PPE you buy, if it does not get to frontline medics in time to stop them falling ill and infecting the hospital along with its patients. The specific numbers are of little consequence unless the system combines them in the right proportions. If you release untested hospital patients into care homes as happened in the UK, you create a pandemic there. If the tests you give outrun the verdicts you communicate and six or more days elapse, then thousands of the infected will pass it on before they are told they have it. What slows the pandemic are seamless connections among such activities and disciplines, such as a company opening up, but testing its people three times a week to ensure it is safe to continue. Therefore, we inquired into the multiple activities that needed to be coordinated. Below are those agreeing with the statement: “We take into account recommendations from different disciplines in fighting COVID-19” SWI SPA BRA USA VEN IND ITA NL S.KOR AUST UK BEL GER FRA SWE CAN SIN CHI 30% 38% 41% 49% 51% 57% 59% 59% 60% 61% 61% 62% 63% 64% 66% 68% 73% 80%

Once again Switzerland’s purity and singularity leads it to eschew “lesser” disciplines compared to medicine. Spain, Brazil, and the USA all prefer a single source of scientific authority rather than a mix of voices. They seek unambiguous advice from the one source that they can rely on. Curiously, South Korea is situated alongside the European countries in this question. It locked down early and

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completely on medical advice, and this saved it from a very serious pandemic, with at one point 10,000 cases a day. It may see medics as its saviours. Note again the large gap between the USA and Canada with the latter much more comfortable with a multidisciplinary approach. Sweden resisted its doctors and alone among Scandinavian countries refused to lockdown. Mixing disciplines is not guaranteed to end well. You may get a messy mixture. Singapore and China are again out in right field. The real world does not conform to the disciplines we have created, and the art is to come up with just the combination that solves the problem. What seems to have worked in several countries is an early emphasis on medicine and locking down and a later emphasis on commerce, economics and opening up again. Those nations concerned with what is between disciplines and joining elements into a working system, are on the top right of the diagram below.

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Once again, Singapore, China and South Korea feature separately from most of the others, respecting medicine but finding room for other disciplines to participate. The lower left, in contrast, features nations that have mostly made a hash of the virus, with disciplines largely blaming each other. These include Brazil, Spain, and the USA. Switzerland is by itself in the lower right with a single avenue to truth, but, with 506 deaths per million population from the virus as of November 2020, it has fallen far below Asian standards. Germany, with a moderately high score in crossing disciplines, has dealt with the virus better than most in Europe. x Respecting leadership and leaders who elicit participation from stakeholders When a pandemic strikes, you want very much to trust in the authority of your leader. If that leadership is incompetent, then the whole nation is threatened and people are very reluctant to believe this to be the case. In the early days of COVID-19, the reputation of many leaders increased, more as a result of hope than of sober reflection. However, faith has since ebbed and alarm grown. Trust in a leader has everything to do with strengthening that leader’s influence and doing as s/he bids. You need the whole nation to wear masks, wash hands, keep social distance and not shout in each other’s faces in order to prevent the spread of the virus. You need to trust that it is safe to return to school and that the leader cares about serving you, rather than just being re-elected. America’s plight was worsened by the pre-election culture of adversary relationships. Face coverings had become politicised. It seems that not wearing a mask had become a political statement of defiance. In a pandemic, we want people to do as they are asked not out of fear or coercion, but because they agree it must be done and would like to help. Good leaders engage their followers, elicit their ideas and efforts, and invite them to participate in discussions. A pandemic raises the stakes with leaders either praised to the skies or eternally damned. The two essentials of leadership are

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participation flowing up and informed decisions coming down. On the subject of influence coming down, we asked for agreement on the following statement: “We respect unconditionally the advice of authorities.” VEN SWI USA UK BRA BEL IND FRA GER ITA AUST NL CAN SWE SIN GRE S. KOR CHI 41% 49% 50% 57% 57% 57% 60% 60% 61% 62% 62% 63% 66% 72% 73% 77% 79% 80%

While the word “authorities” is rather vague and lumps doctors together with politicians, economists and public health officials, it is clear that Venezuela, Switzerland, the USA, the UK and Brazil have the lowest levels of respect for authorities in the world, while Singapore, Greece, South Korea and China are among those with the highest respect. A big complaint among the countries scoring low is “mixed messaging.” Authorities are not agreed among themselves and so contradict one another in what they urge. Respect does not mean complete agreement. It means we pay careful attention and trust that they are advising us as well as they are able. We are puzzled as to the low scores of Switzerland. Perhaps its people expected more of a country dedicated to health provision and the Red Cross. Its record in fighting the virus is not particularly good and it may have expected to do better. Greece locked down faster than most countries and has fewer cases. It is also a country of urban pockets and semi-isolated cities in mountainous terrain, which may have slowed the spread of the virus. Note that Singapore, South Korea and China are once again prominent, representing three of the top four in terms of respect, and that Canada is sixteen percentage points above Trump’s USA, despite near identical exposures to the virus. Canada has brought its infection rate way down, as the USA’s rate has climbed. A surprise here is Sweden, where respondents seem to be keeping faith with authorities widely criticised for never locking down. However, Swedish trust in government is historically high.

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The respect in which authorities are held is very important, but it is not enough. You can only lead well if you are well-informed by the persons you lead, and for that you need to engage them in discussions. You must know what they think and need. Orders coming down depend crucially upon the accuracy and quality of the information going up. In addition, the discussions must precede the decisions. It is not until you have consulted and discussed issues with your followers that you can decide what best to do. You must know the state of play before you act. That much is surely obvious. It does not follow that one-party states like Singapore, which elects but one party and does not vote for any opposition, South Korea, where the pro-business Liberal Democratic party has twice the support of any other, and China, whose government is not elected at all, do not use participative decision-making in running businesses or fighting the virus. They do so for the simple reason that participation and discussion around leadership have been found to be superior in countless research studies. Quality derives from those led, not from the single person at the top. China participates successfully for the same reason it is growing so fast economically, because this is the best way and it has studied American research on this issue. To accuse China of “tyranny” is to miss the point. Provided you subscribe to the legitimacy of its government, that government will discuss issues with you and allow you to participate. The trouble in Hong Kong comes from the refusal of demonstrators to accept China’s right to rule. It is in the Chinese government’s own interests and that of its economy that people participate. We asked for agreement on this statement and the results are laid out below. “We take decisions after consulting with stakeholders when managing the risks of COVID 19.” SWI SPA BRA USA VEN ITA UK GER SWE FRA NL AUS GRE BEL SIN S.KOR CHI CAN 41% 50% 50% 51% 52% 53% 58% 59% 60% 61% 62% 63% 68% 69% 69% 71% 74% 77%

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The low score for Switzerland probably derives from their defining this as a largely medical issue. You do as your doctor tells you. You are supposed to be “patient”, not participative. The doctor is the expert, not you. In addition, leadership means telling others what to do, as does the Bible, which Calvin saw as the final authority. You obey His Word. You do not discuss it. Most European nations seem caught in this trap. Participative leaders are seen to be less real leaders when they permit discussion. We too rarely pause to ask how a leader gets informed initially. Note that those suffering worst from the pandemic, namely Brazil, the USA, Italy and Spain, are among the low scorers on consulting. The most participative nation of all is Canada, some 26 percentage points above the USA. Canada has brought its infection and death rates way down, like much of Europe, while the USA still climbs at this time (November 2020). Belgium, with its miserable record of over 1,400 deaths per million, may be participative through hindsight. Note that the Chinese government may reserve final decisions to itself, but it is the second highest nation in the world in eliciting input from stakeholders with extensive discussions. Where high quality information ascends, high quality decisions are more likely to descend subsequently, and the pandemic successfully curbed. As usual, Singapore and South Korea are not far behind China and what they have in common is Chinese civilization, over two millennia in the making. China was in world leadership positions for seventeen of those twenty-two centuries. If we put our two value dimensions together, this is what we get.

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Once again, we see that respect for authorities does not mean that we kow-tow to them and bury our critical faculties. They can be informed and engaged even as we respect their right to make the final decision. Leadership involves eliciting from others the very best they have to contribute, and that starts with the exchange of ideas. An outstanding leader presents a novel synthesis of what s/he has been told by others. It is said that the UK delayed locking down twice, because it feared its people would grow restless and disobey instructions. This may be true. Politicians fear looking foolish, which happens when their orders are flouted. Approval ratings for governments in East Asia are much higher than in two-party systems where adversaries slang each other off and some of the mud sticks. They need to keep people on-side and avoid hard decisions. Once again, we find East Asians better at combining values in a choice harmony. This applies to more than COVID-19 and may be part of the capacity to generate wealth and better manage eco-systems. A name for this sort of leadership is servant leadership (see chapter 10). The leader retains legitimacy via his/her service to the health of the nation. Such leaders are modest because their persons and their fame are not the issue; rather, the point is what they do for their people and for the wider cause. As the cause flourishes, the leader

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is elevated by the success of that cause. What matters is not the leader’s ego but the principles fought for, in this case saving lives wherever possible by smart strategies (10). x Short-term urgency and long-term preparedness No one can deny that this is an emergency, requiring urgent attention and it demands of nations some very quick footwork. A careless slip tomorrow could cause infection followed by death, and there is no time to lose in stopping the path of the virus, in the shortest time possible. The impulse to get out of the way is altogether understandable. While Wuhan in China suffered terribly, large areas of China were virtually untouched. By far the best strategy is to avoid infection in the first place. Vietnam closed its border with China after eight cases, while America allowed 8,000 cases to occur before stopping air travel and passed the quarter million deaths mark by mid-November. Nations that had suffered from SARS and MERS, and those like China which had fought EBOLA in West Africa, appear to have been more alert. While South Korea suffered a major outbreak before tracking and tracing successfully, several countries have either eluded the virus entirely or minimized its impact. These include Macau, Mongolia, Taiwan, Myanmar, Thailand and Singapore. In Europe, Greece locked down fastest and appears to have achieved a lasting benefit with only 87 deaths per million as of mid-November. It is smart to be afraid and useless to be belligerent. The virus spreads exceedingly fast. If one person infects five others in three days then we are looking at 5, 25, 125, 625, 3,125 and on up, in just two weeks. Moreover, lives are what all values are about. We must save ourselves now, to have any future or any values at all. As such, we asked for endorsement of the following proposition and reveal the results below. “Managing the health risks of COVID-19 is our first priority.” SWI AUS BRA GER NL SPA ITA FRA BEL USA SWE IND SIN UK CAN S.KOR CHI 53% 58% 61% 65% 68% 73% 75% 77% 78% 78% 80% 81% 82% 86% 92% 92% 94%

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These scores are full of surprises and the fact that nations were at different stages in this pandemic in June may have complicated the answers we received. Some nations who had pushed down the rate of infection may felt that their priorities were now shifting to the economy. Germany may be an example of this. Switzerland is at first blush surprising, since we have seen that respondents put medicine first and do not like to be distracted from this priority. Perhaps the words “managing the health risks” were insufficiently single minded for them and hinted at trade-offs. They are reluctant to risk lives for money. Greece, at the very top of the scores, may be congratulating itself for its speedy lockdown. The UK and Canada had brought infections down by prioritizing life, but were not yet out of the woods with a second wave in the autumn. However short-term moves are reactions and however fast, these are by themselves not good enough. The longer-term objective is not just to save lives, but to restore livelihoods and whole economies. Consequently, we also looked for the presence of longer-term strategies. One of these would be preparedness. China had laid in stores of personal protection equipment and testing kits, while much of Europe and the Americas had not. You cannot build a hospital in nine days unless you have the pre-fabricated modules already in storage. China had such stocks, but private enterprise must be paid in advance for such precautionary moves and few governments in the West had paid it. The UK re-labelled its obsolete stocks and cancelled their use-by dates. However, the chief form of long-term thinking is how we rebuild our economies from their present slump. Should some dying businesses be allowed to die, like fossil fuels? Should some technologies of the future receive rescue funds to speed the transition? Since financial stimuli will cost us billions anyway (see chapter 11), should they be intelligently directed to a better future? We should not waste a crisis. There are opportunities within it.

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The chart on the right shows that a short-term emphasis on saving lives has to give way to a long-term effort to improve and to renew the economy, with environment-saving technologies moving to the forefront. Both values are present, all of the time, but their relative emphasis shifts over time once infections fall. We have seen how fatal it is to open up prematurely, as have America and Mexico, so timing is crucial. A vital principle we need to grasp is that the longterm includes the short-term but the reverse is not the case. Those using desperate expedients to save face, like emptying hospitals into care homes without testing, and saying that masks are “not needed” when in fact they are not available, will create muddle and havoc in the longer-term. We tested an orientation to the long-term among nations with the following statement: “We take measures like social distancing for the sake of long-term economic interests.” These were the results we got. BRA SWI USA FRA ITA SPA GER NL AUST CAN UK BEL GRE SWE SIN S.KOR CHI 45% 46% 52% 52% 53% 56% 57% 59% 59% 64% 65% 66% 67% 70% 78% 82% 86%

That Brazil is at the bottom is no surprise, as is the fact that Switzerland wants no exceptions to the purity of saving lives. The USA and its chronic short-termism comes as a surprise to no one. France, Italy and Spain were pitched into the epicentre of the pandemic early on and were pre-occupied with fighting it by any means available. Canada manages much better than the USA, as we would expect. The UK, with Brexit also on its plate, is starting to worry about its economy. Greece is faced with new infections and

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is trying to revive tourism, its major industry. However, it is the East Asian countries, Singapore, South Korea and China, that are looking furthest ahead. The latter plans to exit this crisis well ahead of the USA and the present signs are that it is doing so, with an economy forecast to grow in 2020 and by nearly 6% in 2021 according to the Economist, while much of the rest of the world declines. Once you have established a long-term strategy, you discover that this pays off day by day in the short-term. It is possible to open up first, and to subsidize those technologies which will play a major part in the future of the nation, the rescue of the eco-system and the communications networks for the whole nation. (We junk Huawei’s 5G network at our peril. It connects many other technologies in one net, all of which benefit from the quality of that connection.) China targets those technologies which connect us all. Where we turn these down, we fall behind in terms of infrastructure. Our chart below is further evidence that East Asia seems to be able to reconcile values much better than the West. We pursue the “quick buck” grabbed now, or the life saved now. East Asians see even an urgent crisis as an opportunity to think long-term and come out ahead, while also solving the immediate crisis. Greece locked down commendably fast, but between 2010 and 2019, China added an economy the size of Greece every six weeks. Greece will go back to being a tourist attraction when COVID has ebbed. Once again, Switzerland is an outlier and seems to doubt that saving life and growing the economy should be encompassed in one strategy. Brazil’s antipathy to thinking long term or even short-term is also on show. The crisis there grows by the day. The USA has seriously damaged its long-term chances of leading the world through its belated reaction to the pandemic and by insisting on opening up. It tried to catch up with East Asia and Europe as these opened up again. It got its timing seriously wrong as cases and deaths rose in the summer months of 2020 and are peaking again in

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November. It is obliged to back-track. Sweden tried not locking down at all, while taking other precautions, but its synthesis has been less successful than its Scandinavian neighbours. Those who run around the virus recover faster than those who meet it head on and tempt fate.

China, South Korea and Singapore show their powers to reconcile short-term strategy with long-term economic growth. They did have the advantage of having encountered SARS and MERS and, unlike most of the West, they had made some preparations. Markets cannot help us when the pandemic strikes, what with cases doubling every three days and one person infecting four others. The notion that we must first make fighting the virus profitable puts economics above human life. x Learning from other countries What characterises those coming to terms with a novel virus is their willingness to learn from the experience of others. Indeed all the variables looked at thus far are ways of learning. We learn from turning many exceptions into rules and then discovering more

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exceptions still, only to repeat the process. We learn by holding ourselves individually accountable by how well we serve the community. We learn by weighing several disciplines in the balance and combining these. We learn by engaging with our leaders and discussing possible ideas with them. We learn by evading immediate short-term crises and finding longer-term opportunities therein. As such, we asked our respondents about learning from other countries in general and this was how they responded. “We continually learn from the action taken by other countries related to COVID-19” SWI BRA VEN SPA USA ITA NL GER IND BEL S.KOR SWE UK FRA AUS SIN CHI 31% 38% 39% 40% 42% 48% 50% 51% 54% 54% 56% 57% 57 58” 63% 68% 70%

Here we see a summary of much that has gone before. South Korea scored lower than expected, in part because it pioneered ways of mitigating the virus and copied less than others. It was struck very heavily early on and had few forebears to learn from. Brazil and the USA seem not to have learned at all from Europe or from China, save to exclude people from both from travelling to the country, when it was already too late. It takes a certain amount of humility to learn, and this is in short supply. As expected, Singapore and China show the greatest propensity to learn. Much of Western knowledge is codified and hence easy to pick up and learn. Much East Asian knowledge is culturally imbued and more difficult to grasp. x Do these figures anticipate the recovery of economic growth? From the data presented in this chapter, we might expect that East Asia will suffer less economically from this pandemic, and Europe and the Americas more. East Asia locked down quicker and more completely and is now recovering faster and/or suffering declines in GDP which are substantially less. The Economist has published forecasts for the growth and decline of various national economies for the year 2020. Only two economies will grow: China and

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Indonesia, with Taiwan down but a fraction. All these are East Asian, this despite all other declining nations dragging their exports down. The figures are as follows and closely resemble the results of the questions we asked. Forecast Percentage of Economic Decline in 2020 Spain UK Italy France Mexico Belgium Austria Switzerland Netherlands Singapore Germany Canada

12.6 11.3 10.8 10.3 9.7 8.1 7.0 6.0 6.0 6.0 5.9 5.8

Norway Japan USA Malaysia Hong Kong Sweden Denmark Philippines South Korea Taiwan Indonesia China

5.5 5.4 5.3 5.1 4.2 4.0 4.0 3.7 1.8 0.3 + 0.2 + 1.7

There are nine East Asian nations in this list. Their average decline is -3.0 %. There are seventeen nations from Europe and the Americas. Their average decline is -7.3 %, over twice as large. Scandinavia does better than most -4.5. The East Asian nations suffering most are those most exposed to the West, namely Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. The gap between the fortunes of East and West has widened as a result. China may soon be in a position to rescue much of the world from this disaster. x Chinese civilization is more comfortably with paradox and dilemma We began this chapter by asking what “values” were. If they are things, then you cannot have two different things in one place at the

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same time. Capitalism excludes socialism, medicine excludes opening up the economy, competing excludes cooperation, leading is the opposite to following, and exceptions flout rules and undermine them. You cannot eat your cake and have it. You are either all out for yourself or you care more about others. However, all this is nonsense and grossly and crudely simplified. China blends capitalism and socialism into a system growing faster than any other nation in the world has ever grown. The better we cooperate with each other the more competitive an economy becomes; subduing the pandemic allows us to open up the economy all the sooner, and obeying instructions now means we will be more free in days to come. The Chinese word for “dilemma” is “Sword and Shield” illustrated on the right. These are as different as attack and defence, thrusting and parrying, assailing and protecting. Yet few would go into battle without both and the Chinese have an interesting legend on how these relate to each other. There was once an armourer, who was famed for making the sharpest sword in the land. Many were those who wanted to purchase such swords. However, then they began to worry. How would they protect themselves if such a sword was used against them? So the armourer set out to make a shield that could not be penetrated by any sword. His trade doubled, but then those with swords began to worry. (11) What we have here is a paradigm for the arms race and an explanation of how the USA with its $730 billion per annum military-

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industrial complex turned that nation into a superpower. You need only convince yourself that nations with a fraction of your arms are out to get you and you can subsidize high tech for a century or more. Certain pairs of opposites have the capacity to stimulate each other, like health and economic growth, like harnessing the wind and sun to provide energy. The nations of East Asia, influenced by China and by Taoism are more likely to grasp this than the West. Yin and Yang are less things than processes, forever joined and forever moving back and forth. This is Chinese folk wisdom two and a half millennia old, which Chairman Mao tried to expunge but could not. It reflects the ebb and flow of the cosmos. Guanxi or relationship is the supreme Chinese value. What dodges the virus and then grows the economy is how contrasting values relate.

What the world desperately needs are economic growth stimuli that do not threaten human lives with extinction and lead to the heatdeath of the universe, but rather save our planet and all its creatures. We must subsidize earth-saving, not earth-destroying, technologies.

CHAPTER 3 WHY EAST ASIA COPES WITH THIS VIRUS SO MUCH BETTER

This pandemic took the Chinese nation, the World Health Organization and the whole planet by surprise. It spread havoc initially, generating more than 10,000 cases per day at one point, with more in South Korea. Everyone was shaken. China and its neighbours had far less time to react and were very much caught by surprise. However, virtually all of East Asia now has the virus under control, with the partial exception of the Philippines. China has held the rate of incidence down to 3 deaths per million of its population for several months on end. Vietnam, with an extended border with China, has recorded 35 deaths, or 0.4 deaths per million, compared with 793 deaths per million in the USA. We are not talking of East Asia doing 30% to 50% better in mitigating the virus, but three hundred times better or more. The figures are on the right. They state the facts, and these are a damning indictment of the value systems of the West in encountering this challenge. We seem incapable of meeting this threat effectively. Even those countries in Europe dealing best with the virus, like Norway and Finland, are still several times inferior to nations in the Pacific Rim, like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand. How come they can mitigate the pandemic and we cannot? How come the USA spends $3 trillion on health, much more than any other country in the world, and, as of November 23rd 2020, had the world’s highest death toll (263,298)?

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Deaths per million 4/9/20 Belgium Spain UK Italy Brazil USA Sweden Mexico France Netherlands Canada Switzerland Luxemburg Portugal Germany Denmark Austria Finland Norway

853 629 611 588 587 578 577 514 470 364 241 232 198 180 112 108 82 61 49

Philippines Indonesia Hong Kong Japan Brunei South Korea Singapore Malaysia China Thailand Taiwan Vietnam Myanmar Cambodia Laos Macao

34 29 13 10 7 6 5 4 3 0.8 0.3 0.3 0.1 0 0 0

These flagrant differences are a matter of values. We all tend to see more readily what we value most. Indeed the pupils of our eyes expand to let in what we like and shrink in the face of what we dislike. The pupils of young women’s eyes tend to expand when they see a baby while young boys do not have the same response. Pupil expansion and contraction also reveal sexual preferences. None of this is voluntary (2). The virus is seen differently by the value systems of West and East, and the values of the latter deal with it much more effectively. We will explain why below. Our comparisons are between Europe plus North America on the one hand and countries heavily influenced by Chinese culture on the other hand (e.g. Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and China itself). We will examine this issue under the following headings: x Is Western individualism our Achilles Heel? x What do we do when science cannot help us?

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x Are shame cultures more effective than guilt cultures? x Protecting ourselves from the pandemic means we must think long-term; x Should we “fight” this virus or should we evade it? x Is it essential that we trust authorities? x If self-indulgence is the problem is self-control the answer? x Public health is an indivisible whole; x Are we dealing with rocks of righteousness or Yin-Yang processes? x The socially embedded nature of Chinese corporations.

x Is Western individualism our Achilles Heel? In the charts which follow, we have shown Western value preferences as black lettering on white and East Asian value preferences as white lettering on black. They are superficially opposite, but are actually joined together in one continuum-

We have sampled the values of managers worldwide (3). One question we pose to them contrasts Individualism with the Community. Do they work to gain “As much freedom as possible” or to “Look after the needs of their fellow man”? Here are the results we got.

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Above, the relative preferences are clearly indicated. The USA, Israel, Finland and the UK celebrate freedom and individuality. East Asians celebrate the community and serving that community. In practice, the two values are indivisible. It is the community which upholds the individuality of its members. What should we use our individuality for if not to bestow benefits upon our communities? However, national cultures tend to champion one against the other, claiming that communities crush individuality, as on occasion they do, or claiming that predatory self-interest ruins the community, as it sometimes does. It is for this reason that we have used white and black. It seems as if the values of the East negate the values of the West and vice versa. This occasions much suspicion and enmity. Yet this is similar to a photographic negative which helps to complete the total picture of “opposed” values reconciled. The whole picture emerges from the contrast between black and white. We are now in a position to consider the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. What this is requires is very quick and sudden curtailment of freedom to protect the community. Indeed, there is very little that an individual on his/her own can do about this crisis. Captain Tom Moore, aged ninety nine, showed how much he cared by pushing his walking frame around his garden, but even this generous gesture depended on the community donating some £30 million to his chosen NHS charity. Protection depends almost entirely on what members of a community are prepared to do for one another. Are they prepared to curb their freedom in the interest of those who might become infected? This is in part generational, because younger people infect the older and more vulnerable, without suffering so much themselves. They must genuinely care for older people in order to show responsibility. The West’s reaction to the pandemic shows that we are very reluctant to let our freedoms go. For the most part, we closed down too little and too late, and, with an infection rate doubling every three days, even ten days’ delay costs the lives of thousands. As Boris Johnson put it while still shaking hands. “We live in a land of

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liberty.” Leaders in the West were afraid that lockdowns would be defied and leave them looking impotent. People might obey, but only briefly and we must not try their patience with restrictions imposed too early and for too long a period. It is very important to get closing-down well-synchronized with opening-up. However, highly individualistic nations will want to open up too soon, while more community-oriented nations or “blue states” in the USA, like New York and Washington, will consider the danger to all citizens and open up more cautiously and only when the rate of infection has fallen. The virus seeks out populists, so that the USA, the UK and Brazil, which have been rejecting diversity and immigration in appeals to nationalism, are suffering far more from the virus than other nations. However, perhaps the major weakness of the ethic of individualism is that all problems of whatever kind are seen as originating in the weakness and sinfulness of identified individuals, so that these trigger a blame-game. This is the “Kung-flu”, the fault not simply of the Chinese, but also of the Obama administration, plus the failings of the World Health Organization, so that its funds were cut in midcrisis. The pandemic has been blown out of proportion by the proliferation of “fake news”. If it was ignored, it would fade away. It is all a conspiracy by those who wanted to get rid of Trump or Bolsonaro and hate them. Anyone who criticises the status quo is a left-leaning subversive, or a disloyal former staffer who failed in his job. It never happened and, besides, it is classified, so those who write of it are traitors. Hillary Clinton is a crook—despite there being no legal proceedings against her and not even an attempt to indict her. The accusation was just mud being thrown. The problem is that personal sinfulness explains everything, yet nothing of any significance. The “bad people” that Trump tweets about are everywhere conspired against his re-election. No one is credible any more, and everyone accuses everyone else of wickedness without end. Torrents of bile spill out onto Facebook, which grows rich on our hatreds. Moral judgments stop us thinking

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and understanding, because the moralizer heaps all blame on other individuals who are seen as the sole source of danger. The answer to taking drugs is to “just say no.” It is up to the individual who must simply stop sinning. It is this run-away moralizing that is turning democracy into a bear-pit of mutual recrimination, and is killing dialogue and coarsening communication. We have a leadership of the least disliked candidate, so that Boris Johnson beats Jeremy Corbyn with humorous and disarming asides, while governments as such fail. When something dangerous happens, we tend to fall back on those of our values most strongly felt. As such, in a crisis, individuals compete with each other to get personal protection equipment, instead of making sure it gets to those in greatest need and for weeks on end doctors and nurses plead in vain. As New York’s governor complained, a mask that used to cost 80 cents was being offered at $7 and states found themselves competing not just with each other, but with federal agencies. The UK set a record for complaints on price gouging and for information to police that neighbours are breaking rules on families isolating. (3) In short, stress makes us more not less individualistic. It is every man for himself when things get bad. The headline in the Financial Times on the 30th of June, 2020, pronounces, “Wall Street banks bag bonanza fees as pandemic debt sales soar.” It is true that many people are selfless in trying to help others. However, this too is credited to individualism of a sacrificial kind. We are really very charitable, until the danger goes away and we revert to our earlier habits. People help each other in emergencies and so prove how good they really are. We even pretend that people “laid down their lives”, when in fact they took a brave risk and were let down, or were unlucky. A few hours in a barrack room of soldiers will cure you of any notions of loving sacrifice. We pretend this, to get those in authority who were reckless with the lives of others, off the hook.

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We now face a situation where the wearing of a mask has become a political statement and loud-speaker requests to put on masks are booed by Trump supporters. You refuse to wear it, so as to proclaim your individual defiance of the pandemic. It will not intimidate you! You are stronger than your condition. “Give me liberty or give me COVID-19”, the placards read, and people bring their guns to the demonstrations, presuming the virus can be gunned down. In fact, a virus is not even alive in the usual sense. It is an infective agent that needs a living host to survive. It is part of us. Treating it as a personal enemy makes no sense. If you wrestle it, then it will infect you. The best we can do, until a vaccine is proven safe and widely distributed is to evade it and reduce the damage it causes. x What do we do when science cannot help us? A second reason that the West finds it hard to deal with this virus is because of our attitude to universal rules and science, while East Asia is much more interested in exceptional and unique occurrences. The West likes rules, especially scientific rules of universal application, while the East is more interested in what is particular. Once again, we are talking about two ends of a single dimension. There can be no rules without exceptions. The two terms help define one another. Moreover noting exceptions is what helps us to improve rules. Many of us would like to believe we are exceptional, and, in fact, most of the relationships we form ARE unique. Rules and exceptions are like Science and the Arts, the two cultures. We do not believe a novel should be like all others. We gave the following puzzle to managers worldwide. “You are a passenger in a car driven by your best friend in an area of the city where the speed limit is 20 mph. S/he is driving faster than this, when s/he suddenly hits and injures a pedestrian. You are the sole witness. Your friend is taken to court. The lawyer defending him/her tells you that, if you say the speed limit was not being broken, your friend will probably be acquitted. What right or reason does your friend have for expecting you to testify favourably?”

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This moral dilemma pits Truth against Love or the Universal rules and obligation to tell the truth in a court of Law against a Particular and exceptional relationship to your friend. Here are the worldwide results we received when we put this dilemma to managers.

Here we see that Switzerland, the USA, the UK, and the Netherlands would stick to the rules, but Singapore, China, Taiwan, and South Korea are much more likely to side with their friends. The Universalist nations are mostly Christian Protestant. God’s instructions are written down in the Bible or in law books. One should adhere to this code, while Confucianism is about personal and familial relationships. You should treat others as you would your own family and prevent them being hurt or punished. How does this effect the COVID-19 pandemic? We find ourselves faced with a disease that had, during 2020, no known and generally available cure, although researchers race to our aid and which has yet to be fully described and comprehended. In short, it is something very particular and very exceptional, about which we know far too little and to which science does not yet have a complete answer, although it may do so soon. This does not stop the West invoking science on every possible occasion. Politicians tell us endlessly that they are “following the science”, and insist that learned looking experts flank them whenever they are speaking. Millions of dollars are being spent on potential vaccines and the names of top universities are repeated like an incantation.

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In contrast, an exceptional situation that relies heavily on altered human relationships speaks directly to the East Asian value system. You save lives by the tens of thousands by getting tested, isolating yourself and thinking first and foremost of your older family members, who are more vulnerable to the disease. You are responsible to those with whom you have come into contact, and must protect these members of your community, even at inconvenience to yourself. If we take dimensions 1 and 2 and cross these so as to create four quadrants, then the West falls into the top left quadrant, Universal rules Individualism and Universal rules of science, Science tells while East Asia falls into people what the bottom right they should quadrant, Community do and Particular relations. In the top left, we get Individualism Community Science tells people what they should do with all the doubt and questioning Changed social attending this, and, in the interactions bottom right, we get protect family members Changed social interactions protect Particular relations family. Confucian values are very much brought to the fore here. People do not have to be threatened with the law. They want to protect their families and save their societies. They may need guidance and instruction, but willingly comply with this. The problem with putting “science” seemingly in charge is that there is much in dispute among experts and few agree. Moreover, more than one science is involved and the space between these is pure politics. Trump did not want to talk to his medical people. He knew they would want to save lives, while he wanted to open up

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the economy and restore his political fortunes. When various “sciences” do not agree, science as a whole suffers. The idea that you can fight a pandemic by way of legislation is also doomed. The pandemic moves too fast, while legislation moves much too slowly in response. You need people to adapt reflexively to this crisis, not sue the state of Texas for closing down bars when the pandemic spikes. Thousands will be dead before such cases reach the appeal courts. You have to do what is good for other people spontaneously, not under duress. Moreover, regulations seem to many to be stupid. What is the harm of having a family barbecue on the beach? No one else is around! That is true, but if others did the same, the beach would be crowded, so each individual must be stopped. Laws applying to everyone are ill-fitting for many. Universal laws

The supposed “laws” of Pandemic economics also move far too moves faster slowly to halt a pandemic. than supply Consequently, we get Pandemic and demand moves faster than supply and Community Individualism demand. The demand for personal protection equipment Governments will rise in a pandemic, so prices hold PPE in rise, but we cannot wait for the reserve market to rebalance. Unfortunately, with cases Particular exceptions quadrupling by the week, the market reacts far too slowly and Individuals are afflicted with price hikes for equipment desperately needed, so that poorer Communities cannot afford to survive and suppliers are actually rewarded for their failures. Indeed “the free market” cannot deal with pandemics, since these are particular exceptions to the laws of economics and there are no incentives to be prepared, unless Governments hold PPE in reserve and buy in stocks. Once the pandemic strikes, the public is not in the mood to

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see companies profit while it sickens, meaning that free markets see no profit in pandemics and ignore the possibility almost entirely. We may need society after all, whose existence Mrs. Thatcher famously doubted. She saw only competing individuals. x Are “shame cultures” better at fighting the virus than “guilt cultures”? Cultures vary depending on whether they make us feel guilty about breaking laws, for which they levy specific penalties, like fines of £1,000 for not obeying quarantine, or whether they rely on a set of diffuse human relations to make us feel ashamed of anti-social conduct. This distinction is important because pandemics may be better controlled by shaming people into doing as they are bidden, rather than making them feel guilty about any rule-breaking. Within close families, we tend to feel ashamed because those we care about know the wrong that we have done. They are confronting us with the consequences of what we have done and are asking us to explain ourselves. This is why human beings blush. The cultural dimension of interest in this case is that of Specific----------Diffuse; have some specific rules been broken for which there are fixed penalties, or have diffuse relationships between us been damaged? When we encounter a problem, do we analyse it into bits and pieces, reducing it to its basic elements? Or, do we search for an overall pattern or image, something that will make the picture whole and integral? Are we atomists or holists? We asked respondents about the nature of the corporation. Which of the two descriptions written below did they prefer? We have put words denoting specificity and diffusion into italics. “A company performs a variety of functions or tasks. People are hired to do these things with the help of machines and equipment. They are paid money for tasks performed.”

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“A company is a group of people working together. They have social relations with each other and that organisation. Their effective functions relies on those relations.” Here is how nations in the West and East scored.

Here, we see an unusually wide spectrum of opposed approaches. 91% of Americans see a corporation as a set of specific tasks, while only 17% of Chinese see it this way, with 83% opting for a set of relationships. Malaysia and Singapore have been influenced by their one-time colonial master, but Japan, South Korea and China are less influenced by the West. This could have affected approaches to the pandemic quite deeply. If you seek to protect families living in the same building as you, your neighbours, then one person may shop for several families including his/her own, taking it in turns with neighbours. This minimizes the chances of becoming infected. You will wear a mask, keep social distance and wash your hands because all those you are living close to want you to. You will inform them at once if you test positive and if you had come into contact with them. If you fail in these obligations, you will be shamed, losing face in the regard of those you know best. This is a very much stronger reason to comply with instructions than fear of infractions and fines imposed on you by distant authorities. You are endangering your friends and they know it. Where you misbehave, your surrounding community will hear of it and you will be less esteemed by it.

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We can cross the Specific-----------Diffuse dimension with the Universal law---------Particular relationship dimension, to form four quadrants. When we do this, we get the contrasts which follow. In the West, the combination of Universal laws and Specific instructions leaves us Feeling guilty about breaking an order set by authorities. We might also try and get around the instructions legally! In the East, we have Particular friendships within Diffuse relations with the result that we Feel ashamed before others for endangering their health. This invokes the spirit of the law, rather than the letter of the law. It is concrete, not abstract. You need to look those you may be harming in the face and explain to them your conduct. There is no hiding from their displeasure, no way to avoid “losing face” as they stare at you with hostility in their eyes. This is the distinction between cultures formed on the basis of guilt about falling short of standards, as opposed to shame about letting down one’s fellow beings. Shame may be a stronger force than guilt since identifiable people are involved, looking at you with reproach as you blush beneath their baleful countenances. They know what you have been doing. You were supposed to be buying groceries for three families, but instead you were seen chatting to friends without your mask in place. The social pressure brought to bear is much more effective in getting people to comply. If you behave lawfully only for fear of being fined, what does that make you?

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x Protecting ourselves from the pandemic means we must think long-term The historian Graham Allison could see from his window at Harvard the bridge being rebuilt to the Allston and Boston side of the river (4). He noted that it took six not three years. Its completion was twice postponed and it came in seriously over budget. He later observed on a time-lapse camera, a Chinese bridge twice the length and breadth, built in four hours! Nor is this the only example. When the SARS virus broke out, a hospital was built in Beijing in nine days to combat it. When COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, two hospitals were built in eleven days and 3,000 trained army medics were flown in to man the facilities. In one sense, these feats of speed are illusions. It is simply not possible to build a bridge in four hours or a whole hospital in just over a week. What is possible is assembling these from prefabricated modules. You keep four sections of a bridge in store or thirty prefabricated building modules, and you lift these into place with cranes and fasten them together. What this requires is less breakneck speed than thinking long-term. You have to be able to see that in an earthquake bridges leading to the stricken areas might come down and must be replaced in the shortest possible time. You must be able to see that something like SARS and MERS could return and the nation must be ready with nine-day hospitals. Geert Hofstede has measured the extent to which cultures think long-term vs. short-term and we portray his finding below. (5)

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Here we see a veritable chasm between West and East on this dimension. Why do East Asian nations cluster, in this case at the far end of the dimension? They are all heavily influenced by over 2,000 years of Chinese civilization. China spread Confucianism and Taoism to this whole area. The Vietnamese attributed their final victory over South Vietnam to the works of Sun Tzu, writing in the second century BC. Ancient China received tributes from neighbouring nations for the privilege of sampling its culture. Even conquerors fell under its spell and became Chinese, as with the Manchu. We witness this long-term orientation in its current “Belt and Road” initiative. Those who prepare in advance for pandemics, earthquakes and global warming may at some time in the future be in a position to save our planet, while our politicians fret over the next election and our financiers seek to make a quick buck. x Should we “fight” this virus or should we evade it? Western and Eastern cultures tend to think quite differently about where virtue is located. For the West, virtue is inside us, in our steely will-power, in our consciences, in our refusal to be daunted, and in our capacity to assert ourselves, in Churchillian rhetoric. When something or someone threatens us, we go out and subdue our opponent, insist on doing it “my way” and “thank whatever gods there be for my unconquerable soul”. However, suppose virtue was outside us, in the beauty of the cherry blossom, in the harmony of the eco-system, in the fierce heat of the volcano, and in the suffering all around us, calling out for alleviation. The distinction is between inner-direction, “doing it my way”, and outer-direction, meeting the needs of the social and physical environment outside of us. We measured this and here are the results we got.

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It should be noted that no nation seeks to be largely outer-directed, but that East Asians find themselves in the midst of global markets and seem happy to toss on winds and tides unleashed by others. Senior Japanese managers call themselves “white watermen”, paddling furiously down a raging river. Taoism defines strength as being able to bend before the wind and flow with the river to where you want to go. Asian martial arts are famous for borrowing the momentum of your opponent and redirecting that force to your advantage. What is desirable here is the balance of inner and outer so that your opponent is psychologically outwitted as in The Art of War. America’s hugely excessive force in Vietnam, where it poisoned the eco-system, lost it the allegiance of the populace. Inner-direction becomes destructive when you emulate a bulldozer. All this affects responses to COVID-19. For the West, “this is war”, to echo Trump. The pandemic is something to be scorned, defied, brow-beaten, and blamed on China, a part of some nefarious plot to lower our morale and upset stock markets. It is there to be ridiculed, “a little sniffle” according to Bolsonaro. It is exaggerated by Democrats to sap our will-power and used as an excuse to tilt elections away from Trump. It deserves our contempt. Boris Johnson talks of “wrestling it to the mat” and, with the help of Brexit, “taking control”. The problem with this mind-set is that a virus is not something to be “wrestled with”, but something we must respect (in the sense of respicere “to look at”) and do our best to evade and keep out of its way. What we need to do is retreat rather than advance and quarantine affected areas. The scope for

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non-medical heroism is small. We need to pull back initially so we can bound forward later on, but the most important first step is to minimise the chances of this infective agent finding human hosts. We need to be outer-directed and this goes against our cultural grain. We tend to be full of bluff and braggadocio, using punchy words and resounding rhetoric where only clever concessions to the virus will do. x A question of trusting authorities Reducing the damage done by the coronavirus has everything to do with trusting government authorities who give us instructions. Are they thinking chiefly of our welfare or accumulating power for themselves, never to let go? When a government acquires new powers over our lives, like being able to track our comings and goings, is this temporary or permanent? Is this a power grab, the end of liberty? When they say that masks (in short supply) are not necessary and then later make them mandatory, are they thinking of themselves or of us? Citizens will gratefully obey authorities whom they trust to have their interests at heart. We have not measured trust-in-government ourselves, but this is done regularly by Edelman, an American pollster. Once COVID struck, this became difficult to measure because faith and hope tend to soar in the early stages and then fall when policies prove insufficient. For example, trust in the US government were as low as 21% around COVID at election time , but estimates tend to be all over the place in the middle of a pandemic. Consequently, we have used figures from before the pandemic struck, when opinions were more stable. This trust may have strengthened or been dented when the pandemic struck.

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France and the USA scored 33% trust-in-government in 2018. China scored 83%, South Korea scored 45%, Singapore 70%, and Canada was one point above South Korea. Germany scored 43%. China’s score rose in 2019, but may have fallen in 2020. We lack reliable information and nations are in various stages of recovery, which distorts opinions. Is the report on China accurate and credible? The polling organization is American, and if we trust its other results then China should not be an exception. The Kennedy School at Harvard recently found trust-in-government in China to be as high as 90%. The Chinese government polls repeatedly to see how its policies are being received. Given the massive gains in China’s standard of living, the 83% level of trust is not too surprising. Singaporeans also trust their government after years of fast growth and have re-elected it without an opposition party, ever since independence. In the Confucian value system, authorities act like parents, so if they curb your freedom and restrict you, this is temporary and done in the hope you will grow up more free and strong. The 12 million inhabitants of Wuhan were all tested and pictures of them waiting in long lines for this to be done show their confidence that authorities were trying to help them. 143 million Chinese citizen travelled aboard as tourists in 2019. Why would they return home if their lives were oppressive and freedoms curtailed? Our political adversary system, with politicians slanging each other off, seems to lead to a distrust of all politicians on both sides of any divide. The

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two most trusted governments have one single party and a taboo on shouting abuse. x Is self-indulgence part of the problem and more self-control the answer? The worst things about this virus are that it is stopping us having fun. One problem with affluent Western economies is that we are more and more reliant on consumer goods, on entertainment and hospitality, and on people enjoying themselves and having a good time. More and more of us are in the service sector and in the gig economy on relatively low wages and not very high levels of skill. Since the virus strikes at scenes of conviviality, dining, drinking, dancing, concerts, sports, singing, etc., it is touristy economies, like Spain and Italy, which rely on La Dolce Vita that will be most damaged. It is getting so that we have a duty to enjoy ourselves or the economy will suffer! A great deal of our consumption is built around self-indulgence and the belief that no interfering busy-body should stop us having a good time. This plague obliges young people to pass up the opportunity to enjoy themselves in deference to the older generation. It is a lot to ask and crowded beaches in Florida and Los Angeles, illegal rave parties raided by police, football celebrations and noisy demonstrations against social distancing tell their own stories. Older people should not boss the young, who have suffered in this pandemic. The young have a right to do as they please and damn the consequences. It is of course possible to get pleasure from work, especially where this is creative and self-fulfilling, but this whole area of engagement with our work, although very promising, has been sadly neglected by companies. We mainly work to earn enough money to have a good time. Money marks the way to the feeding trough and consuming ever more, however obese we grow, is what life is all about.

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Is self-indulgence vs. self-control involved in the pandemic? It would seem so, since lockdowns and quarantining ourselves involve considerable sacrifices of our usual enjoyments. Are East Asians less self-indulgent and more self-disciplined? These cultural characteristics were measured by Geert Hofstede. These are the results he got:

Here we see that Taiwan, South Korea and China are the strongest on self-control, while Australia, the UK and the USA are highest in self-indulgence. Nations at both ends are deeply in debt, some would say to dangerous levels. However, the debt in the West serves to stimulate consumption, while the debt in the East is to build new industry. Both Australia and New Zealand have fewer virus casualties, but this is in part due to being located in the East Asian sphere of influence, among other nations which have successfully eluded the virus. American individualism is not necessarily a disadvantage, as it drives a lot of innovation. However, narrow self-indulgent individualism that seeks the lion’s share of everything probably is a disadvantage, and certainly it is when dealing with COVID-19. There are reports of “COVID parties” in Alabama. Young people mingle and make donations and the first to fall ill gets a cash prize. It is reported that at least one person has died as a consequence of such an event.

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If we combine Self-indulgence with Individualism, then in the top left quartile we get Putting your own enjoyment first. Young people tend to suffer less from the virus. In contrast, in the bottom right quadrant, East Asia puts Self-discipline on behalf of the Community first. From this, we derive Put elderly family members first, since they are most vulnerable to the virus, certainly a Confucian teaching and a filial duty. To a great extent, the West and East Asia increase the value bias within each culture and make each other worse. The more America borrows, the more the Chinese lend them by buying treasury notes. The more Americans indulge themselves, the more the Chinese exercise self-discipline in supplying them. The more Americans consume, the more the Chinese produce and sell to them. The more Americans think largely of themselves, the more profitable it is for the Chinese to focus their attention upon serving the US and other customers. (6) The truth is that the USA has never before faced a national trauma on this scale. Germany, France and much of Europe faced cataclysm during World War II. The UK still rationed goods five years after the war was over and was near bankrupt, while the sale of consumer goods increased by 9% in the USA between 1942 and 1945. America never really ceased its quest for pleasure, even with the war on. It emerged from the conflict stronger and more affluent than ever. That people should alter their life-styles completely as a result of a common emergency has never been a proposition put to most Americans. Why should they? Major sacrifices for one another was an untried concept.

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x Public Health is an indivisible whole, the basis of well-being. We must act to preserve it Many people in the West see public health as a form of socialism. If it cannot be chopped into specific pieces and privately owned, then market forces cannot operate. Ronald Reagan wanted Americans to give and store their own blood, as private property to be labelled and used exclusively by them when needed, a system which would have proved ludicrously costly and wasteful of blood. In truth, more lives are saved by drains, clean water, blood banks and sewers than any amount of private medical practice and feats of surgery. Vaccinations are not simply personal protection, but are essential to stopping diseases spreading. Those who refuse to have them endanger others. Anything infectious or contagious is a community issue by definition. As the New Yorker has pointed out, Trump had it in for public health from the beginning and the Atlantic Monthly has tracked the progress of this vendetta (7). Trump lopped off $25 million from the budget of the Office for Public Health and Responsibility. He cut the Hospitals Preparedness Program by $18 million. He also tried to cut $85 million from the budget of the National Centre for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, whose task it was to trace wild-animalto-human viruses, thought to have started the coronavirus in Wuhan. Foreign Affairs pointed out that Trump fired the entire pandemic response chain in 2018, while John Bolton dissolved the White House Global Health team, sending it to the Department of Health and Human Services, distancing the White House from the pandemic. He ended the foreign diseases surveillance program. Defences against the current epidemic were dismantled in the months before it struck. The US funds health insurance via the contributions of employers to employees, but that fails to support the self-employed and those in the gig economy and many companies strip out medical insurance when buying up distressed companies. The USA spends more by far

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on health per capita than any other nation, but is only 37th in Overall Health System Performance according to WHO indices (8). Health insurance is treated as a cost rather than a societal contribution or a duty. It’s a threadbare safety net beneath high-flying acrobats. One of the most important roles in public health during the present crisis is testing who has the virus and who does not have it, as well as those who have already had it and may be immune. This is especially important in weeding out the asymptomatic carriers of the disease who may spread it to others unawares. If 10 carriers spread it to just 3 other people each, that makes 30, 90, 180, 340, 1,200, 3,600, 10,800, 32,400, 97,200, and we find the disease growing exponentially as the graph shoots up. We hardly notice it until it reaches say 10,000 and by then it is too late! However, if, through lockdown, social distancing, masks, tracing, social isolation and immunity, it is passed on to less than 1 person each, let us say 0.3, then it swiftly declines, from 100 to 33, to 11, to 3.6, to 1.2 until it is a threat no longer. Note that it can decline as rapidly as it first arose, which we have seen in China and much of East Asia. It is not only essential to test, but also to test early in the epidemic. To test later on is valuable in some respects, but too late in many others. Testing early has been likened to turning on the light in a dark room. You know where you stand as a society, and who the carriers are, so you can trace their contacts and isolate them. You know where the areas of greatest infection are and lock these down. You know the areas of least infection and halt any spread to them. You know that hospitals and care homes are relatively safe or otherwise, and that you are not being doctored or nursed by an infected person. You know just where personal protection equipment is most urgently needed and so stop staff in the frontline being infected and dying disproportionately. If they suspect they may be infected, you can tell them quickly and reduce absenteeism. You can warn people by mobile phone that they are entering an area of high infection. Above all, testing is feedback on different ways of slowing the epidemic.

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However, once the infection rate starts to run way, as it has in the Americas, then testing, tracing and quarantining cannot keep up with the rate of new infections discovered, and infected persons are not contacted in time to take precautions. Testing becomes “bad news” which those in authority do not want to hear. It becomes “pessimism” and something that might lose you an election, unless you dispute the figures and spread lies. Nations that tested the most and the earliest like South Korea, China, Taiwan and Singapore have escaped the worst ravages of the pandemic. Deaths per million cited at the beginning of this chapter are a useful measure and move slowly. Testing is also vital to the process of opening up the economy after the worst is over. Book shops and baby clothes are among the first openers, but with every tentative step, as in opening schools, it becomes essential to test for any possible resurgence of the pandemic. What happens if we allow bars, restaurants and theatres to open? Are schools more important than bars? What about crowds at sporting events? We do not know for certain, but finding out quickly is vital to any strategy. Consumers are not going to risk themselves unless they have been re-assured by accurate research. Many sports and forms of entertainment will suffer unless and until we have investigated the consequences of allowing them to resume. It is not lives OR livelihoods, it is both, but the dilemma grows sharper the longer we delay. We still do not know if people can be re-infected and how long immunity will last. The virus seeks to perpetuate itself. Let us try to summarise this argument. Because of infection, contagion, obesity, the nutrition/junk in common foodstuffs and the diseases occasioned by polluted environments, public health is one indivisible whole; it is whole societies that are well or otherwise. Many carcinogens are unknown, but, given the rising incidence of different cancers, they are obviously present somewhere, if only we knew where. We have some shocking statistics on COVID-19. Minorities in various countries are much more likely to become infected and once

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infected more likely to die. Doctors and nurses who are also minority members are also more likely to become casualties. However, this does nothing to help the rest of us, but, in fact, harms us. So long as there are pools of people who are badly nourished, badly housed, densely packed with underlying conditions, and without health insurance, then it is from these groups that COVID will suddenly spike and then spread. We will be prey to this disease as long as chronic inequality persists and we have infective, denselypacked sweat shops and dormitories wherein an underclass subsists. The combination of Specific symptoms and Individual assessments by insurers leads us to Insuring each person’s profile separately, in the top left quadrant. The combination of Diffuse bonds with Community Health brings us Public Health preparedness as an Indivisible Whole in the bottom right quadrant. You keep modules for erecting hospitals in stock, for a lightning response and fly in medical teams from the armed forces. You tax and reduce the sale of junk foods and test the population for underlying symptoms that reduce resistance to the pandemic. Hyper-tension, higher among minorities, may be a disease of discrimination. The UK reports that

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type II diabetes has nearly doubled in this century and its prevalence makes COVID -19 fatal. While praise for the UK’s National Health Service now rings from the rafters, the truth is that it has been grossly under-funded since 2009 and there were 40,000 unfilled vacancies for nurses when the pandemic broke. 60,000 retirees were begged to return, but may have sad memories of the chronic over-work and under-payment of their final years. The advantage of dedicated people, who enjoy saving lives is that the market punishes their devotion and uses their idealism to trim salaries. Caring is classified as “low skill” and is paid the minimum wage. Those who keep us alive, and increasingly hold the hands of the infected dying, receive our kind words and our hand-claps but very little money. x Are we dealing with “rocks of righteousness” or Yin-Yang processes? Much of the foregoing stems from the question of what values are and how we should think of them. There is a tendency in the West to think of values as being rock-like in their eternity and their clarity. “In the beginning was the Word and the word was God…” We obey Holy Writ and the Ten Commandments chiselled in stone. In addition, we sing “Rock of Ages, cleft on me, let me hide myself in thee.” To our children we give polarized names like Hope, Patience, and Prudence, etc. When we attend ethical conferences, we constantly hear the question “Is this a good thing?” Aristotle taught us to divide things into “A” and “not A” and avoid all contradiction. You cannot be courageous and cautious. They are hard choices, partings of the way. The virus either defeats us or we defeat it. A rule is not an exception However, suppose values are not like things at all? Suppose they are processes, like sleeping and waking, and loving and hating. Certainly they are not like things in the mind-set of East Asia; rather they are an endless ebb and flow of Yin and Yang, cycles of eternal return. What controls traffic are neither red lights

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nor green lights per se, but the movement between the two, the knowledge that these will change. Let us consider the implications of this way of thinking. We are ignorant about this virus that we must seek to know more and gather all the knowledge we can. It is an exception to all known rules, but that does not mean that our science will not solve the puzzle in time. Individuals can do something about it, but only if the community assists. Moreover, individuals are of communities. It is less specific people that need to be enlisted, but the diffuse relations between them. It is not coercion OR freedom, but, rather, obeying the lockdown now in order to be free later. It is not lives or livelihoods, but saving lives first and then restoring livelihoods. Is the government shattering our human rights by its sometimes arbitrary orders, or is it creating conditions in which these rights are returned to us? What we have seen in this chapter is that these seemingly opposed values are joined together. We get the better of the virus by eluding it, not wrestling it. It seeks less to kill us than to live inside us. Values are differences on a continuum, so that rules and exceptions are how we improve rules while showing how exceptional we are. The individual is vindicated by serving the community. We break down phenomena into specific pieces only to reconstruct them into creative wholes. With enough self-control, we will soon be free to indulge ourselves. Long-term plans and objectives will pay off day by day. East Asia has in its Taoism, a folk wisdom which we have turned into raucous debates between imagined objects. It is not merit OR equality, it is treating many varieties of merit and diverse talents equally, in order to discover which serves us the best. x The socially embedded nature of Chinese corporations The fact is that Chinese corporations do not exist for the enrichment of individual shareholders. There are stock exchanges, but these have nothing like the dominant influence of Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange. The Chinese company is embedded in the

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social fabric of the society and its job Is to serve its community of stakeholders, its employees, its suppliers, its customers, its local community, its government, its nation and, yes, its shareholders, such as they are. This enables it to respond to the virus far more effectively. We will examine two outstanding examples, Alibaba, the $72 billion online retail e-commerce company, and Haier, the white goods suppliers with a 23.4% world market share. Both are number 1 in the world, in their particular field. Both are totally dedicated to the service of their societies, and both pioneer in finding new and better ways of conducting business for all stakeholders concerned. Both have stepped up to the plate when challenged by this pandemic. The Chinese celebrate Singles Day, so called because it falls on the 11th day of the 11th month, and people who are single set out to find a mate. In this quest, gifts are usually given. On the stroke of midnight on November 10th 2015, Duncan Clarke described the scene as the scramble began. By 8 minutes past midnight, sales of goods on Alibaba reached $1 billion and by the end of that day they totalled $9 billion, with most of these delivered the same day. By November 2020,, sales reached $56 billion by 30 minutes after midnight on the 11th. This comes to $583,000 per second. By the end of the same day they had reached $74 billion. The company’s revenue is $509.7 billion and its estimated market value is $460 billion. Before COVID-19, it was growing at 30% a year and grew 17% in 2020, the year the virus struck. It expects to top 30% in 2021, helped by being a remote form of shopping that maintains distance. It has the sixth highest brand evaluation in the world, despite its recent founding (in April 1999). Jack Ma, its founder, now retired, has a net worth of $42.7 billion. (9) In the West, we have got used to what we call “disruptive innovation”, companies assailing the status quo. Uber overworks part-time drivers and underpays them so that professional taxi drivers find themselves undermined. Airbnb squeezes the rental market with short-term lets, and has unregulated houses undercut

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hotels. Facebook makes millions from giving a platform and a voice to our social and political hatreds, for which it takes scant responsibility. However, Alibaba has a mission to make its online market fairer, more equal and more harmonious. Jack Ma went to the New York stock market and made an initial public offering of shares, while warning that shareholders could not expect treatment better than that offered to customers, suppliers and employees. All would be treated equally. Despite such warnings, he raised $25 billion, the largest public offering in the history of Wall Street. (Shareholders do not need to be privileged individuals!) There were at least five ways that Alibaba served its society. It struck a blow for middle class consumption. It redressed the balance between producers and consumers, made small companies more equal to larger ones, helped to resolve disputes among parties, and guaranteed all sales and purchases, thereby greatly enhancing levels of trust. Let us consider these. Communism is based on the proletariat and bourgeois persons had long been suspect. For many years, exports were given priority by the government and it was Ma who believed that the largest middle class in the world, totalling over 500 million, should be better treated and catered for. It is very hard to enable isolated individual consumers to stand up to organized producers. The legal axiom caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, is the best we seem able to do. We should all fear lest companies cheat us. The BBC One programme Rip-Off Britain, now in its eleventh season, testifies to our failure. Alibaba allows consumers to post any complaints next to a company’s advertisements, where everyone can read them. In practice, the dispute is settled and the complaint taken down. It also publishes score-boards on which consumers rate vendors for their service. All vendors must compete for customer approval. Many deliveries to new customers come with a gift attached, usually intended for any children in the family. Customers have seven days to return nonperishable items, after which they must pay. Alipay, also owned by Alibaba, has records of all transactions, deliveries and payments. All

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disputes between buyers and sellers are arbitrated by xiavers, young Alibaba employees in their late twenties. Nearly 100% of their rulings are accepted, since courts tend to be slow and business needs to continue without delays. All vendors appearing on Alibaba’s platform are potentially equal and equally trusted since Alibaba itself guarantees their authenticity and reliability and indemnifies customers. It also has the power to remove any buyer or seller who misbehaves. This could be a commercial disaster for that party, who would be wise to observe the rules the company lays down. It has an 80% market share of Chinese online sales. Thanks to Alibaba, even small, two-person vendors can reach national and international markets. Initial postings are free, but advertising costs. You pay according to the number of hits upon your advertisement, so you learn how to intrigue buyers. You pay little for mistakes and can calculate just how much a particular advertisement profits you, thereby greatly helping effectiveness and advertising sales. Everyone is helped to improve their appeal. It would take many years for any company to win a reputation for reliability and fair dealing, but with Alibaba as a family of vendors, vouching for its members, you get this from the beginning. What Alibaba and its tens of thousands of vendors do is learn by experience. The name Alibaba comes from the story-book 1001 Nights. Ma jokes that this should read “1001 mistakes”, because this is what members of the network do: learn from mistakes in relating to each other and learn to harmonize their efforts for maximum effect. Their reputation for straight dealing becomes ever more secure. Their appeals to the public become ever more accurate and trusted, and the quality of what they supply becomes ever more salient. Ma aims to empower all stakeholders and have them better serve one another. As we might expect with the onset of COVID-19, Alibaba has stepped into the breach. It has temporarily waived platform fees for

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suppliers in trouble. It is offering no-interest and low-interest loans to help small companies get back on their feet, and has helped its network members digitalize and given them logistics support. It has offered digital coupons to aid remote communication. The value of its delivery of medical supplies and logistics to other nations is estimated to top $1 billion, and Ma himself is among the world’s leading donors in this regard. It is clear that such companies exist to benefit their local and world communities. It is entire networks that rise as one with no one taking an unfair advantage or blocking others from being successful. In the West, we allow companies to crush each other, but COVID requires cooperation. A second example of a company being socially embedded is Haier, the white goods supplier. Zhang Ruimin was appointed head of the Qingdao Refrigerator Factory in 1984, a chronically unprofitable state-owned enterprise. He famously had his employees smash 72 defective refrigerators and filmed and broadcast this demolition. Shoddy work was forever banned from his premises. The government hastened to give him fifteen more failing factories and he transformed these into the Haier Group, the world’s largest and most profitable supplier of kitchen appliances and white goods. It grew from 1.4 million yuan in 1984 to $210 billion today. Zhang has a reputation as China’s “philosopher king” for business. 10,000 people visit his headquarters each year in order to learn, while his website has a million hits a year. He has received honours from Yale University and IMD in France, among many others. He calls his new management model RenDenHeyi. “Ren” stands for employees or “makers” (which include suppliers), while “Den” stands for value-to-the-user, and “Heyi” stands for alignment or synergy between the three of them—employees-supplierscustomers. This is subject to a multiplier effect. The product in the hands of the user must be more valuable to that particular customer than the product itself. Value inheres in the quality of its use and the manner in which it is mobilized. What is valuable is high quality washing, not so much the washer per se, but how well it serves the

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user. The only boss in this arrangement is the customer him/herself who must use the product effectively. Bosses within the organization tend to get in the way of this service and to distort priorities. The products themselves are less stand-alone items or things, as they are systems, so that the built-in screen on the oven door can feature your mother and her advice, as you try out her recipe. Haier sells you home kitchen systems controllable by mobile phone with appliances that communicate with each other. (10) Because it believes that the customer is the real boss and that hierarchies of rank only get in the way of providing satisfaction, Haier has taken two or three levels of what used to be middle managers and has abolished the management layers. This caused quite a shock and up to 10,000 did not want to change their customary roles and they quit; yet these were quickly eagerly replaced by risk-takers. Haier now has up to 6,000 microenterprises, of 6-20 persons each, who resemble so many entrepreneurial start-ups or small teams. They think up ideas, consult venture capitalists and inside experts, pilot their schemes on friendly customers, and may invest their own savings, as well as Haier funds, in new ventures. Nearly 1000 micro-enterprises directly interface with customers, while most of the rest supply resources and devices to one another and to customer-facing units. Each unit must generate a profit over time in order to survive. All units elect their own leaders and organize spontaneously around ideas they have generated. There are six thousand CEOs, each paying him/herself out of revenues received and receiving share options from their own particular units. There is no requirement to buy from within the company itself. Every unit of Haier competes with the wider world. If you can get 200 refrigerated vans from an outside source you are welcome to do so, so that every micro-enterprise competes within the industry as a whole. The company is essentially borderless. Whole teams have taken a new idea to Haier and been employed as a minienterprise. Where units fail, inside or outside employees can make

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a bid to assume leadership, which members can accept or reject. Would-be leaders present their turn-around plans and members decide on them as a body. We might expect that this company would take COVID-19 in its stride. Haier Biochemical makes freezers for COVID-fighting medical units, plus liquid nitrogen storage containers, blood bank refrigerators, and masks and equipment to protect frontline workers in many countries. It returned to full production after the pandemic struck as early as February 25th and filled 99.8% of the orders it received in that month. It now sells digital eco-systems to customers and has been praised by Forbes Magazine for the extraordinary speed and agility of its response. Leadership is won by how well you serve your customer. The company’s 20% annual growth rate from before the pandemic may even be exceeded, so well have these autonomous teams adapted to sudden turbulence and so electronically sophisticated has the company become. These teams are backed by the massive resources of the company, which have been organized into platforms for the supply of what is needed. These entrepreneurs are able to mobilize far more resources, far more quickly than most entrepreneurs could have dreamed of. It is to such teams and how well they resist the pandemic that our next chapter will turn. The secret of creative response is the small team of intimates.

CHAPTER 4 IT’S TEAMS THAT CHANGE THE WORLD

“Small groups of committed citizens have changed the world. Indeed nothing else ever has.” —Margaret Mead

Why might small face-to-face teams of employees help us deal with the COVID-19 virus? What these do is create a cellular network or series of spaced out bubbles, rather than a mass or mixture of casual acquaintances infecting each other. Each team or cell is distanced from others, but within teams there is face-to-face intimacy and human engagement. This means that where the pandemic enters an organization its spread is limited to the 6-8 persons who have conferred with each other, but is not transmitted to others in the organization who have been kept apart from that group. What this arrangement does is increase distancing and social intimacy at the same time so that employees at large are not separated but rather engage fellow team members more closely than they ever did before. Their relationships are concentrated within their team. Each employee has a close support group. In a few cases, the whole team may test positive and emerge from isolation with a measure of immunity. This strength could make them very valuable to the organization, doing exposed jobs which others dare not. We need to define “team”. This should not be confused with committees. Committees meet, decide what should be done, and delegate action to those below them in the organization. Should it not get done, then those delegated the task are responsible, not the committee members. In a team, members promise each other to take action and, when they meet again, they review the results of

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that action. They do the promised work themselves and have no excuses if they fall short. They are “project groups” prepared to be judged by the success of their joint project. Their part of, say, the space-craft will either work or not, possibly wrecking the entire enterprise where it falls short (1). It either operates as required, or fails the test and needs revision. Teams have huge advantages in dealing with the present crisis. We will now consider these in the sequence: x x x x x x x x x x

Teams, questions and knowing next to nothing; The best communication of all; “Hot” groups and human happiness; How teams grow; Teams are crucial to innovation; Teams as high context cultures and bodies of knowledge; The emergence of leaders who engage; Teams as an antidote to the Internet; Teams give us entrepreneurship and microenterprise; Teams can test and inform us on the coming vaccines.

x Teams, questions and knowing next to nothing It was Socrates who pointed out that, to learn anything, you must first admit that you are ignorant. We know very little about this scourge so the emphasis here must be on discovery and learning. This admission of ignorance de-clutters the mind and reminds us that the question precedes the answer. Loads of data will provide us with nothing if we lack any purpose or direction to our inquiry. What is it that we wish to discover? The focus must be on creating wealth and meeting customer needs without further endangering them or our employees. All business organizations and their teams are in reality inquiring systems (2), although they may not see themselves in this light. To put a product or service on the market is to ask, “Do you want this?” The take-up of the product and/or

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service answers this question. In our present predicament, we must ask “Can our product be safely supplied?” If the answer to this question is “yes”, then we are on the road to recovery. When a team first convenes, the members may know nothing about each other, and in the case of this virus we are all largely ignorant. What the team must concentrate on are questions. Who knows what and how are their talents relevant? How can we operate effectively while remaining healthy? In the last years of Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric in the USA, he instituted hundreds of “work-out” groups or teams, each with a different mandate or challenge to their combined intelligences. He gave them ongoing organizational problems to solve, and towards the end of this experiment he was implementing 80% of the solutions they proposed without modification (3). Each team was a cluster of organizational brain-cells. It became a major way of communicating from the middle to the top of the company and of identifying future leadership potential. These teams worked out because they met somewhere outside the company’s buildings, so members could not run back to their offices to clear up details, but instead had to concentrate on the team’s project without being distracted. If the company’s offices were in danger of infection, this might be an additional reason for meeting outside while still addressing company problems. Meeting outside would stress the team’s autonomy and distance. Each team would be given an assignment or project, possibly suggested by the members themselves. They would not just discuss issues, but might also test propositions and run experiments and seek validation for their ideas. For example, was two metres of distance better than one and how much difference did this make? Are masks better or worse than visors? Should we disinfect rooms twice a day or three times a week? How much difference do gloves, hand-washing, and sanitizers make? You do different things in different rooms in the

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office and collect results. The discovery that there is no difference is as important as finding one, because you want to lumber yourself with as few precautions as possible, since these may cost you and slow you down. The aim is to return to an improved normality. Can employees be trained to test themselves and not come to the office if they are positive? Can employees report what they did in their offwork hours so that dangerous pursuits are discovered? As far as possible, they should be allowed to test the proposition which they favour, meaning that they are more likely to be asking questions they deem important and will want to find solutions. Should we use the canteen, or eat lunch at our desks? It is essential that all employees be tested daily, so that any infection is caught in the bud and we know just who X has been in touch with. Is hotdesking a danger and, if so, how severe is it? Should we disinfect filing cabinets? Does ventilation lead to the outside or circulate air from room to room? Is humidity a factor, multiplying droplets? Such companies are essentially feeling their way forward like a blind man who taps the ground before him with a white stick, but he learns quickly where the obstacles are and are not. Another team might have a mandate to give everyone in the company the odds on their testing positive, the odds on having to be hospitalized, and those of eventually dying. The ratio of infections to deaths has been falling of late as treatments improve, so the odds on dying are quite long. However, everyone who volunteers to test an option with lower precautions should know where someone of that gender/age/absence-of-pre-conditions stands. We take 1000-1 chances on death and injury on long car journeys in winter, by hang-gliding, by climbing mountains, by parachute jumps, by heading footballs, etc. Those who want to advance their careers may gladly take the chance of suffering from COVID-19. They need their company to survive and to prosper. They may not want to grasp their lives in their hands like small change. There are also tasks within companies that are more exposed than others. It is safer if a tested waitress interacts with a cashier than if

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a customer does. The more interactions with strangers the more dangerous a job, hence the high infection rates among farecollecting bus drivers. It may be safer to use pre-paid cards than exchange coins. Paying via a machine may be safer than paying via a person. Does a table-cloth attract more or less viruses to its surface than does wood? Is there a role for sterile coverings? Yet another team may examine COVID-subduing innovations coming onto the market and express a willingness to test these for pioneer enterprises. These are new technologies designed to repel the virus, and companies would be wise to facilitate such experiments. They keep them on their toes and remind them of their mission to outwit the virus. It is possible, for example, to bond microscopic spikes to steel, and to other metals, wood and plastic that will pierce viruses trying to settle on their surface. These antimicrobials can damage and kill bacteria and viruses by rupturing their outer membranes. The virus can remain active on untreated plastic and steel surfaces for up to 72 hours, but not in the presence of tiny spikes that kill in seconds upon landing. Negatively charged viruses are attracted to positively charged antimicrobials which are prevented from growing or spreading on such surfaces. They are especially useful on surfaces touched often, like lift-buttons, handrails, door-knobs, buttons that dispense coffee from machines, and computer key-boards. They are made by NitroPep, among other companies, and work on viruses in general. They are currently being tested on the coronavirus (3). Ultraviolet light in short waves has disinfectant properties because it damages both DNA and RNA. Put in ventilations systems, it can prevent viruses from travelling from room to room, and can make sure that air-conditioning is virus and bacteria free. However, ultraviolet lamps must be kept away from humans and night-time might be the best time to use them. There are now biosensors, developed in Switzerland that can detect viruses in the air and flash a signal. These are being tested in hospitals, train stations and shopping malls. Companies have little to lose by piloting these and reporting

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on how well they predict outbreaks and how easily they can be read. There are paints and varnishes with virus-resisting and antibacterial properties. Companies have little to lose and much to gain by giving these a trial. (4) Team cells within an organization are similar to the joined-up brain cells in our heads which store knowledge. It is essential not just to know, but to know who knows, and a cellular network is able to summon the solutions from past problems and bring these to bear. The organization can also locate those who created these solutions and set them working on new challenges. The organizations that excel are those that learn fastest from a changing environment and they must be honeycombed with problem-solving teams of those with shared interests. x The best communication of all We tend to extol the latest technologies of communication and boast that these allow us to contact millions of people within a short space of time and address those who are thousands of miles away. However, we tend to overlook the fact that by far the best form of communication, unequalled by any technology for its clarity, its subtlety and its truth, is face-to-face human conversation (5). To outwit this pandemic, we must create tens of thousands of these tiny islands-of-sanity, each one of which is prepared to withdraw and repair itself if necessary, before re-entering the fray. Why are face-to-face conversations the best? Because they employ all of our senses, and because they reveal our reason, our emotion, our irony, humour and raised eyebrows, our inner excitements, our fervent dreams, our doubts, and our anxieties, and elicit our hidden talents. They are incredibly more flexible. When answering questionnaires, we are imprisoned within the assumptions of those who designed the questions. We cannot change the subject. However, in a conversation we can challenge the question itself, explain what that question misses. We can show why the answer

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lies quite somewhere else, that what has been taken-for-granted is false. Conversations permit us to keep our sanity. What ultimately matters is what those closest to you think of your personality and your character. Public popularity or hatred is as nothing compared to the verdicts of those who really know you, like you and even love you. We are brought up in families and the key to all socialization is loving correction. “I love you but hate what you just did.” Once we leave our families and go out into the world, we still need to be criticised by those who support us and the small face-to-face group or team is where credible, constructive feedback is most likely to occur. It is how we learn about our true selves, where we come to see ourselves as others see us. We can tolerate an ocean of bile over the Internet because these trolls have never met us and know us not at all, provided there is a group of close companions who know us well and recognize a slip of the keyboard when they see it and know our hearts are in the right place. The teams around us are essential to our mental health. Film stars and rock stars kill themselves even when they are widely worshipped by millions, because those of real significance and deep knowledge are not there for them, because those who really know them cannot be bothered to hang around this lover-of-himselfwithout-a-rival. The crowd is in love with a contrived image and, where that image is false, the crowd makes the real person very lonely. We need to know who we are and a peer group of supportive co-workers is essential to this. x

“Hot groups” and human happiness

Happiness is an elusive quarry. Americans have long claimed to pursue it, much as hounds pursue hares. The truth is that happiness is not some creature to be pursued; happiness ensues from how we behave towards each other. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian-American psychologist, had people keep diaries and report sudden surges of happiness when these occurred, often

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unexpectedly. He found this often happened in groups which had problems to solve. Some call these “hot groups” because they share peak experiences of shared delight. He looked at the contrasting values of the Challenge posed by the problems each team faced, and at the Skills which group members brought to meet this challenge. His model is illustrated below (6).

Where the Challenge is much greater than the Skills of the team members, they naturally feel ANXIETY at the top left. They may fail. Where their Skills are greater than the Challenge, they are likely to feel BOREDOM at the bottom right. They could do this in their sleep! However, what happens when their skills grow to within centimetres of the challenges and the team nears a solution? There is a great WHOOSH of excitement. Subjects then report a flow experience. Skills and challenges dissolve as opposed values and liquefy into one solution, which helps to explain why happiness is so hard to describe and so difficult to pin down. It engulfs us when we are looking elsewhere. That the word “solution” denotes both an answer and a liquid is no coincidence. Boundaries are transcended, oppositions vanish and the team is where this happens. We have exactly matched the human resources available with the problem at hand. We steer between the whirlpool of anxiety and the rock of

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boredom to achieve what we aimed for, and are at that moment ecstatic. We have elicited from each other the most each one has to give. We are joined into a bigger picture like pieces of a jigsaw. x How teams grow Teams grow their members out of the experiences just described. Indeed, teams with a reputation for solving problems may be awarded “golden handcuffs”, so they stay with that company longterm. However, it is crucial to grasp that teams themselves grow over time. When they first convene, they may know little about each other, much less the issues they have been invited to address. Of course, they have been appointed because they have skills and particular knowledge about the challenge of, say, keeping COVID-19 at bay, yet, in the early days, members are near strangers and have yet to discover who-knows-what and why they were selected. Over time, the team fills up with knowledge about itself and the problem and learns how to cope with this. Researchers have noticed that teams pass through successive stages: for example, Inclusion, Control and Affection. The first concern of each team member is am I included? No one wants to be left out and they are concerned about being accepted as members with something valuable to contribute. When this need has been met, as it usually is, they come to ask can I exercise some measure of control? Have I some influence and is what I say respected? Where this is answered in the positive, then there is less vying among members and affection grows among them. It is at this stage that the team reaches peak performance and may succeed in meeting the challenge put before it (7). Note that a team is temporary. It lasts as long as the task to which it has been assigned and then breaks up to help form other teams. This is important because no team improves indefinitely. There comes a time when everyone’s potential has been elicited and they have no more talents left to give. That is the time to move on and join another team with another mandate.

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Another observation on how teams develop over time is laid out below.

A team first assembles (FORMING), then members tend to struggle for relative influence (STORMING), and then eventually agree on the procedures they will follow (NORMING). It is then that they reach their best (PERFORMING), before finally breaking up (ADJOURNING). In this process they learn how to initiate ideas and actions and how to cooperate with others. Experience in serving on several different teams with different objectives makes members resourceful, flexible and versatile. x Teams are crucial to innovation There is virtually no innovation if a company lacks those who will pick up ideas and run with them. Dodging the virus depends on groups and teams putting ideas to work and seeing what happens. Every good idea should turn into an experiment to see if it works. New ideas originate in the brains of individuals who share them with those they trust, but that is where it will end without a team to champion, develop and operationalise the idea and turn it into a working prototype that demonstrates effectiveness. Creators are

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adored in hindsight, but if you find yourself sitting next to one right now, it can be tiresome. “The poet in history is divine, the poet in the next room is a joke.” What is needed are supporters that will improve and road-test the idea, until it works impressively and is ready to fly. Realistically, innovation needs inspiration, but also a lot perspiration. Any new product is likely to be full of bugs and weeding these out is hard work. God is in the details. An app that tells you are moving into an infected area and details to whom you were recently close should you prove positive takes a lot of work to get it right and get it delivering value. This requires much more than “brilliant” individuals. It requires constructive critics, those willing to implement, those working through details, those who know their science, those arguing passionately for the project, those prepared to organize support around it, and those with the forcefulness to overcome objections. None of such people may be personally creative, but they are essential to innovation in its multiple forms (8). The creative person by him/herself rarely prevails. Everyone is too busy and pre-occupied. What is being suggested would complicate their lives. The idea is isolated and dies. Some teams supporting innovative ideas have been called “skunk groups” on account of the fact that they offend those supporting the status quo and are regarded as odoriferous (9). Many excellent innovations have been incubated by such groups. However unpopular they are to the wider organization, their members remain passionately committed to each other and the novel project they are working on. The time to offer their innovation to the world is when it is up and running, so they remain in their tight enclave until they are ready and then unveil a working model, reveal how they tested it, and bid for public support. 6-12 persons rooting noisily for a project are much more likely to succeed than one or two. The prototype demonstrably works and would-be doubters can see for themselves. Potential customers may give evidence. Cellular teams in checker-board formation not only offer resistance

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to the spreading of the virus, but they may also hatch ideas that stop it going any further. x Teams as high context cultures with strong relationships. What do we mean when we describe the culture of a team as “high context”? A high context culture is one in which each member has a lot of knowledge about the others and about their shared purpose and mission (10). A low context culture is where that knowledge is sparse and lacking. High context cultures are less strenuous and more low-key. A visitor to Japan would have difficulty in watching a commercial to know what was being advertised. Reference is made to shared knowledge and associations, which strangers to that culture do not have. In contrast, a typical hard-sell commercial in the US would be obvious to nearly everyone, even strangers. Do you give a gentle nudge or loudly command attention? For the last half century, we have seen East Asia lay down a powerful challenge to the West. Even before the rise of China, there was Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. As part of Chinese culture and civilization, over two thousand years old, these are high context as compared to the West. The more deeply you know about each other, the more you care and the more prepared you are to protect each other from the pandemic. You do not need to be driven, commanded or bribed, only prompted. East Asians have much stronger and more abiding relationships, and, as world problems and world products complexify, they deal with these better than we do. For example, the pandemic is not reduced by high numbers of tests, high numbers of tracers, and high numbers of those who contact and urge isolation, or by the worldbeating numbers trumpeted by politicians. It is reduced by the relationships between these, and by tests which are finished promptly, which trigger tracing, which contact nearly all who test positive, and which induce these to isolate. The statistics for each of these are not of significance. Their close coordination is what works.

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One way of raising the context of a culture quickly, is to create project teams with high context on the inside, but low context and at arms’ length on the outside. Teams distance from each other to prevent the spread of the virus, but are fiercely and passionately engaged on the inside in face-to-face encounters. It can be amazing what better relationships can accomplish even when they are accidentally formed. This was done in the famous Hawthorne Experiment in the 1920s. A group of women were taken out of a factory and arranged around a table to assemble telephone relays. As members of a team, distanced from the rest of the organization, their productivity rose by 39%! (11) Another group of Harvard-based researchers observed them very carefully and at length, as their science called for. The women mistook this for respect, which in a sense it was. Since the researchers were so kind and respectful, the women chose to give them what they knew they were looking for, higher output! They gave it to them bit by teasing bit over two years, since the experiment was a lot better than normal working conditions and the longer it lasted the better! The team had high autonomy and, as productivity rose, came ever more fame and curious visitors. Since assembling relays is extremely boring and repetitive, you would not think that better relations would make much difference, but you would be wrong. The young women became fond of each other and of the researchers who had set them free by simply observing them. One similarly accidental effect of the pandemic is to intensify relationships inside groups, while increasing their autonomy from other teams and the company as a whole. Properly managed, this can ward off the virus, while making teams more productive and creating high context cultures within each team. Members should be encouraged not just to work together, but to socialize after work, allowing them to avoid the virus while learning more and more about each other. All companies are in a race to learn, especially about a pandemic about which too little is known. Teams leave in their wake islands of expertise, tied together in a neural, cellular

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network. These are the considered solutions to hundreds of problems. x The emergence of leaders who engage Another advantage of the team is that those who excel in this medium do so by reason of their social skills, their empathy, their power to engage others in dialogue, and their persuasiveness in general. Where you engage persons face-to-face in conversation, those who are most pleasant and engaging in their speech will grow into leadership roles. This is nothing to do with seeking power or influence, nor is it a deliberate plan to lead. Rather, those who are most pleasant to talk to, most polite, attentive and charming will receive most of the remarks from other members and find her/himself at the centre of all important discussions. Teams will lead to the rise of the interpersonally competent person, who may not be the formal leader, but becomes the informal one, the person people most enjoy talking to and whose views they seek. (12) What a team amounts to is a small, manageable culture which the individual can influence and then use its deliberations to influence the organization at large. The team is a way of showing what you can accomplish and a place for future leaders to practice their arts and rehearse for higher leadership roles. We need those leaders who can convince and get others to participate. We need leaders who are a pleasure to relate to and can inspire others to work hard. A team is small enough so all members count as individuals and have a chance to be creative, yet large enough to put momentum and solidarity behind whatever it decides and push this through. A team can work on a module that fits with a module created by another team. An overall plan to open up the company safely can consist of half-a-dozen intersecting modules combined into an overall strategy. It is not impossible for a team and its leadership to eventually take control of a company. A team will usually be staffed in a way that makes it a microcosm of the problem to be solved. Consequently, a discussion about why our

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larger customers are getting paid late will feature the head of that department, plus a customer, the person who insists that all large payments require two signatures, and the head of customer relations. The reason the problem gets solved is that team members like and respect each other while those complaining and complained against are annoyed with each other. Similarly, avoiding or not avoiding COVID -19 places people at odds with one another, for or against more precautions, while a cohesive team can devise solutions acceptable to all. x The team as an antidote to the Internet Whether the Internet has improved the quality of life is a difficult call to make. We can now contact millions in a few seconds, but if this consists of lies and malice, as in some popular accounts, then should the severance of freedom from any sense of responsibility be an occasion for celebration? If you say something you later regret, then tens of thousands of people may publicly curse you and wish you dead. The only protection against these tsunamis of bile are 6 -12 persons who know you deeply and will rally in your support and comfort. Their opinions are worth thousands of those of trolls, because they know who you are and what you truly intended. It is private popularity that upholds our spirits and keeps us trying. Once we leave our families and step out into the world, it is cohort of close colleagues which keep us sane and revive our spirits. These can save us from torrents of abuse and comfort us where this occurs. If one hundred people are telling you that you are a waste of space, you may consider suicide if you lack team backing. Mental health crises are in full flood and the message is to admit your distress, but do you have close friends to confide in, or just a hoard of remote abusers? The very real danger is that the pandemic will reduce the number of face-to-face groups and leave us with only remote, filtered and irresponsible channels of communication, which compound our loneliness in anxious times. The lockdowns many of us have

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endured made face-to-face meetings with peer groups illegal and impossible. In opening up, we need to re-institute face-to-face teams as quickly as we can and use these autonomous cells to steer our companies in directions indicated by science. If we agree to test vaccines and other forms of amelioration, we may be among the first to receive them when they are rolled out. Among things that teams could champion are those whose operations—some of them for cancer—have been delayed by the onset of this pandemic. We have yet to learn the toll caused by interruptions to routine medicine. These people need teams to draw the government’s attention to their plight. x Teams and families give us entrepreneurship and microenterprise It may not be properly appreciated, but virtually every enterprise in the world began as a family or a team. If we want the secret of something of substance growing from nothing more than mental constructs, it is here that we have to look. All companies, however vast, were once micro-enterprises, or less than that, ideas in the heads of a handful of founders. What happens is that an idea is shared between two or three people, and then talked up. Gradually, a group of fellow enthusiasts forms around them. Often, there is no money to pay them, but they work for a fair share in any future success, maintaining themselves for the time being. All have a stake in what is jointly wrought. Many will not succeed in their team experiment, but some will. By the time we hear of them, they have grown into bureaucracies, large and rich enough to tilt the playing field in their own favour, but it was the small team that inspired them in the first place and gave birth to them. Indeed, if large companies are to innovate at all, it is from small, dissenting groups that innovation will spring. It was from NonConformists and Unitarians like Josiah Wedgwood that Britain’s industrial revolution grew. Xerox Parc had the presence of mind to recruit many employees recognized as innovative by peers. It gave

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them the task of moving forward the Xeroxing of documents. Xerox was correct in its judgment. Many of those selected and hired have by now become famous, but there was a hitch. They all had to leave Xerox and take-off as team-oriented start-ups. To work on the next generation of Xerox machines was a vision too constricting for them. They needed a much broader canvas. (13) The Chinese company Haier abolished its several layers of middle managers and turned these into six thousand micro-enterprises, or small, start-up teams of 6-20 persons, who engage with customers face-to-face and create value for them. Haier is now the largest white goods company in the world, as well as the fastest-growing and the most profitable. It may finally have given us a replacement for bureaucracy. It is teams that change the world and could take this pandemic in their stride (14). x

Teams can test and inform us about coming vaccines

Pfizer and BioNtech recently announced that their vaccine was 90% effective after the second shot. A few days later Moderna made a similar claim. Many more are in the pipeline and fine judgements will be needed. Who should get the vaccine first? Should it be distributed to those most likely to infect others, to asymptomatic spreaders, to those visiting dying relatives or to those most likely to die? Does the vaccine stop you becoming ill, stop you spreading the virus, stop you worsening once you have it, or all three at varying levels of effectiveness? How does it affect different age-groups, since immunities fade with age. It might be smarter to vaccinate the stronger immune systems than weaker ones. Should multi-generational homes get priority? There are already looming scandals about black and Asian persons suffering far more from the virus with Native Americans among the worst afflicted. Those with learning difficulties are up to 30 times more likely to suffer according to the BBC! Should vaccines be distributed to them first? Unless this happens scandals may multiply, as those with more resources look after themselves, while the rest succumb. The

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pandemic is likely to linger among poorer pockets of the population and spread back persistently from there. It is already worse in the neglected North of England. Among the problems teams should urgently address is how to protect those helping us medically, so that hospitals, clinics and carers, do not spread the virus but help end it. How important is to protect those whose jobs require them to interact with many strangers, taxi-drivers, bus drivers, ticket inspectors, delivery staff, or those working in close, humid conditions, like meat-packers or shouting at each other in exchanges. What is worse, deaths from COVID or deaths from cancer, heart attack and other afflictions that would have been given earlier attention but for the pandemic? What priority should we give to possible breakdowns in hospital systems and their inability to function? If people avoid hospitals, would this be worse? Companies could become major distributors of vaccines to employees and could use these to become largely immune, so the work-place becomes among the safest of environments and you are safest of all outside the home. We need to compare one vaccine with another and this requires difficult calls. How does a vaccine at 90% effectiveness but the chance of a two-day fever for some 20% of recipients and which requires a follow-up second shot, compare to one that is 70% effective, requires but one shot and has negligible side effects? The first may be better for society. The second better for the individual Pfizer-BioNtech vaccines need refrigerators and not simply household ones. It must be 70 degrees below zero. This is difficult logistically and expensive. Can poorer countries equip themselves adequately? Might a vaccine that does not need a needle prove more popular? What happens in places where equipment is unavailable? What about cost? Those who can afford to pay may help those who cannot, in many but not all cases. Should those below certain income thresholds not have to pay? Should all carers be vaccinated

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free for life? There is a strong, consistent correlation of severity with age. Should the elderly come first, period? On top of all this we may soon have half a dozen promising vaccine candidates with different rates of success with different groups. Companies could be given vaccines free or at low cost on condition that teams within them report the results in detail. We need whole groups, departments and sites vaccinated to see if that eliminates new cases. We need vaccination to be a condition for being employed and paid, although the unvaccinated working from home might become useful as a control group. Companies are in the best position to organize such research and repay the supplier with intelligence on how each remedy fares. How long does any immunity last? Does this vary between vaccines? Does the virus evolve new strains, as do flu vaccines, so that vaccines must be modified year on year to keep abreast? There are likely to be national rivalries with one nation’s vaccines touted as better than another. We need team-based integrity to tell truth from falsehood, give Chinese and Russian products a chance and direct every device to its best destination. What price should we exact for healing the world? Does saving people’s lives require additional monetary recompense or would China do it “free” and show us up? The distribution of the virus will soon tell us who is continuing to die and who is not. What do we do about those who refuse to comply and infect each other and the innocent? The vaccine will not end all our problems. It may exacerbate many of them. Problems in Danish mink farms may remind us that our abuse of wild animals may be at the source of our troubles. It may be a new, more virulent strain. COVID-19 is not given a number for nothing. How many varieties do we have coming? The right to life is basic and all values depend on this. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness is predicated upon Life. What do we do as it becomes ever more obvious that the right to life is grossly unequal and pools of poverty risk triggering repeated outbreaks among

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those shouting about liberty, with nothing but guns to protect them? How often do we need reminding that “no man is an island?” In many respects this pandemic goes easy on us. What if the next pandemic culls younger people and children or infects urban dwellers most exposed to pollution? What do we do with anti-vaccine, anti-mask anti-social distance groups and those who spread unsubstantiated rumours? What if those they have influenced die? What do we do about accusations that some deep state is plotting to poison us? If we cannot get their numbers well below 30% might they threaten national recovery? What do we do about companies that grow rich on our divisive hatreds and suspicions? Big lies would seem to “go viral” and disseminate faster than does truth. You invent what people want to believe, like the US election being stolen. All in all we are going to have to make many fine and difficult distinctions. It is companies that have most to gain opening up safely. We should their teams in the vanguard.

CHAPTER 5 PUBLIC-PRIVATE ALLIANCE: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

Thus far, we have looked chiefly at what companies, schools and other institutions could do to open up economies. Government plays a major role in locking down economies quickly. As we saw in Chapter 2, this has been done very much faster and with greater thoroughness by East Asian countries. Europe has come next, with many governments flattening the curve, with the USA and South America a distant third, in part due to populist and expertise-defying governments and the belief that the virus can somehow be “defied”. However, with governments now trying to open up economies, their relationships to private companies become crucial and it is the latter who need to take the lead. What this pandemic has done is make what used to be quite prosaic, like making remotely operating garage doors, stationary supplies, or mattresses, and turned these into something far more important. Can we run companies so that these save lives while restoring our economies? Quite suddenly, the way in which work is performed has become a matter of life and death. Can we restore prosperity in a way that preserves as many lives as possible? Can companies find social purpose in combining lives with livelihoods? It may be recalled from Chapter 3, that we asked people why they worked in the first place. Most of those in the West said they worked to be as free as possible, while East Asians were more likely to work so as to look after the needs of fellow persons. The pandemic makes those needs for survival more urgent, but it also gives us the opportunity to use our freedom to take care of the needs of others. This requires

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a new deal between government and private enterprise, what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have called BUILD BACK BETTER. This is the theme we pursue here. x Build, Back Better: An industrial strategy at last; x What company teams must care about most, good working conditions; x A hierarchy of needs; x Values get their power from being contrasted; x This pandemic is a litmus test for much social injustice; x We work better, harder and smarter for superordinate goals; x Let those who have recovered bear witness; x Stamping on spikes no sooner do these appear; x Life is a state or organization; x “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls…”

x Build Back Better: An industrial strategy at last As of this moment, the phrase above is just a slogan crafted by the Joe Biden presidency in the USA and it remains to be seen what form it takes, what merit it embodies, and whether the Senate and electorate will support it. However, it is important in the sense that it sketches an alliance between the public and private sectors and the emergence of an industrial strategy at last. The USA has always protested that it has no industrial strategy and leaves any sense of direction to the free market, a phenomenon with no detectable direction at all! However, this is a falsehood. It spends $721.5 billion a year on defence, as much as the next nine countries combined and defence expenditure sponsors most of the sophisticated high tech in the world. America has pushed arms expenditure for more than a century, starting with World War I, when it armed the Allies before entering itself, and today boasts the largest military industrial complex the world has ever seen, with the capacity to kill the entire

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world’s population fifty times over. In its capacity to deal death, it has no peer. That is its strategy and has been so for years. Our most fervent wish is that most of this money is wasted and new means of annihilation never used. However, is that not, at the very best, a colossal waste? Given the climate crisis, should we not be sustaining the planet, rather than preparing to destroy large parts of it? In the meantime, weapons which build technological muscle and are largely free of foreign competition spin out into the wider economy, and constitute a roaring export trade among those who seek to suppress their own people. A large proportion of American basic research is supplied by agencies supposedly defending the nation. Mariana Mazzucato looked at the Apple iPod and the iPad and traced fifteen of their most innovative features to research sponsored by defence and government agencies. They originated with the government, not with Apple, who exploited those technologies once they had emerged. (1) It was the state that was being entrepreneurial. There is something perverse in sponsoring death-dealing in a world pandemic, brought about in part from our neglect of the living environment. While we believe that opening up must be led by the private sector, especially in those nations where the government hesitated to lock down, this does NOT mean that government has no role to play. What we need is a new deal between governments and enterprises jointly aimed at saving lives while restoring livelihoods. While private enterprise should lead this, governments must lend their support and target public funds at the kind of industries we wish to see arise from the ashes. Governments must also preside over lifesaving enterprise, keeping score and publishing the results, and insist that we compete at helping each other, not just at helping ourselves. Since the government is splashing out on huge stimuli to revive the economy, the question arises as to which companies should be targets of this largesse? Are we going to rebuild economies largely

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dependent on tourism, hospitality, leisure and consumption, manned by people earning the minimum wage, or economies requiring creativity, skill and knowledge that could save the world, decarbonize us, push renewable energy, reforest the land, and deal with future pandemics? When governments beg us to go out and eat a meal, so that the person making it can be paid, then something is very wrong. Our focus on consumption is getting too high. There is also joy in doing complex work really well and mastering new skills. What we need are markets that reward industries for keeping their people and their customers well. Every company should disclose how safely it is working, a verdict endorsed by employees. A company is responsible for all those with a stake in its success and its suppliers, its employees and its customers should be asked to validate the company’s concern for them and publicise with what success it has mitigated the virus. The health of workers may be even more important than the wages they have received and is the key to productivity. The government is in a position to demand much of those with whom it contracts, but health statements about stakeholders may become a way in which companies compete for contracts and for sponsorship. Industrial policy is often thought of as pre-empting markets, interfering with consumer choice and “picking winners”, a practice seen as offensive. In fact, what markets want can be anticipated and guessed at, and picking something that might help us all may be better than just picking stocks for your own gain. Renewable energies have grown much faster than forecast and wanting these technologies to succeed and take-off is smart in every sense of the word. There are a lot people out there worried about the state of the environment and when they discover they can help by what they buy, they may jump at it. Markets can be helped on their way by being stimulated. When we see solar energy starting to boom, we can go with that momentum and be among the first to offer the world what it craves.

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x What company teams must care about most: good working conditions In our attempts to open up our economies, spikes are occurring and these tend to happen wherever we encounter substandard working conditions. The city of Leicester in the UK had to lock down because of a spike in infections. However, the problem was traceable to several sweat-shops making garments and paying as little as half the minimum wage, with no mask-wearing, a case of run-away, exploitive individualism, triggered by the pandemic. The workers were so desperate for even starvation wages that they complained to the BBC via actors repeating their words, lest they be recognized and fired! There have been outbreaks in meat-packing plants, which use asylum-seeking and immigrant labour and keep temperatures low, so that droplets remain in the air. Parts of Catalonia have been shut down because of dormitory conditions among fruit pickers. What this virus is going to do for social justice is to produce a spike whenever and wherever people are being exploited by bad working conditions and are at the mercy of predatory employers. Shutting down whole cities because some employers are misbehaving is unacceptable. What the teams described in the last chapter can do is focus on those working conditions which allow the virus to surge and see that these are eliminated. Clothing companies must be held responsible for work conditions in their supply chains, and these should be checked up on regularly. (2) The problem with paying your suppliers late is that the pain gets passed down to the weakest party of them all: employees working for the supplier. Having been exploited, the supplier then exploits in turn. Teams have their uses in joining suppliers with their customers and improving mutual relationships.

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x A hierarchy of human needs Human needs have been characterised by Abraham Maslow as forming a hierarchy, or Self pyramid, with basic actualization needs at the bottom and higher needs at the top. (3) At the bottom Esteem needs are physiological needs, those essential Social needs to life itself and necessary if we are to Safety needs survive. Next are safety needs. Here, the individual is still afraid Physiological needs that his/her life is endangered and seeks protection. Next come social needs. These include friends and allies who not only protect, but make life convivial. Above this level are needs for status and self-esteem when one compares their position in life to those of others and competes to be noticed. Finally come needs to actualize one’s potential, fulfil one’s aspirations and fulfil oneself in becoming the best citizen possible. What a pandemic does is threaten to topple this pyramid and bring it down. There can be no safety without a sound physiology. There can be no social conviviality when your life is on the line. Seeking esteem is ridiculous if your life is ebbing and self-actualization is meaningless without a self to be developed. When a pandemic comes, it is like pulling a rug from beneath an elaborate edifice: everything is suddenly in question and about to topple.

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What has to happen is that we actualize ourselves by repairing the ladder, and saving lives is where we start in this regard. We need to improve the safety of working conditions, in order to strengthen social bonds so that people help each other and give elevated esteem to those who behave most responsibly. We simply cannot elevate ourselves as a society when millions of us occupy to the two lowest levels of this hierarchy and are unable to ascend further. Now that so many of us are threatened by death and incapacity, we have a chance of moving up together. As long as people feel unsafe, they will not go out shopping. What those nations who have minimised the number of COVID cases have done is saved lives first. They then discovered that higher needs followed. Nations hesitating to lock down quickly wanted those higher needs to be preserved. It was a fatal error costing tens of thousands of lives. We must put lives before livelihoods if we are to save both of these. The so-called “higher needs” depend upon their foundations. Were governments to insist on better working conditions and impose sanctions on those companies that offended, we would all be better off. The loop in the chart on the right is a spike in the infection rate. x Values gain strength and clarity from being contrasted Values are differences and the more stark those differences, the more those values stand out, and the more important we deem them to be. When the Prodigal Son returned home to his father, the latter rejoiced greatly. “For this my son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.” Being found strongly contrasts with being lost, and being alive contrasts with being dead. Colin Wilson reports that he was hitch-hiking and it was some time before a truck

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stopped to pick him up. The driver told him there was trouble with the engine and they must proceed slowly lest they break down. Never had Wilson been so grateful for every mile of a journey and for the survival of an engine! He rejoiced for every yard traversed. Our happiness depends very much on what the contrast is. In a pandemic, much of what we do gets compared with sickness and death. It raises the stakes. Grim although this situation is, there are certain advantages. Quite suddenly, what a company decides to do may spell life or death for its employees and customers and for those interacting with the company. The safety of the workplace becomes a vital decision. People’s very lives hinge upon it. Business is no longer dedicated to a “lovelier you”, to heavenly pink Camay, or to more consumption, indulgence and hedonism, but to the health and lives of people. We survive to the extent that we consider other people, not just ourselves. Quite suddenly, public health gets contrasted to private health, and we discover the connection as never before. Hope is contrasted with despair and we cling to the former. Science gets contrasted with not knowing, and we opt for science and vaccines that may yet save us. Of all values, the difference between people being alive or dead is the greatest difference of them all. It is the very source of valuing in the first place. Quite suddenly, what we produce becomes dwarfed by how we produce it, whether safely or dangerously, in a way that sustains life or threatens it. Buying a dress made in a sweat-shop in Leicester that caused cases to spike is very much more important than the dress itself, whose very cheapness relied on it being irresponsibly and carelessly produced. The pandemic gives us a sense of proportion, which values are vital and which are morbid, and what kinds of people care for us and which do not. The role of all business must be to preserve life and this is how we will come to judge it.

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Gallup polls have revealed that only around 27% of the world’s employees are engaged by the work they do. Does making money for shareholders thrill you? Is it a fit purpose for your life? (4) For disengaged employees, work is a mere means to consuming, a tedious prelude so they can put bread on the table and enjoy the non-working part of their lives. However, in this pandemic, everyone’s job takes on a new dimension, namely how to re-open the economy in the safest way. Here is something in which we can all become deeply engaged, restoring the confidence of our customers and employees so they can help each other prosper healthily. If that does not engage us, then nothing else will! If mankind is in search of meaning, then we must see to the health of the meaning-makers, and ensure that those reaching for the stars do not start coughing and gasping. x The pandemic is a litmus test for much social injustice It is becoming clear that many minorities suffer disproportionately from the coronavirus. They are not simply infected in greater numbers, but show more severe symptoms, are more often hospitalised, after longer delays, and once in hospital die in greater proportions. Their general health is lower, and one suspects they have weaker antibodies. They have more predisposing conditions, such as diabetes, obesity, hyper-tension, and pulmonary damage. They are more likely to be found in the medical front-lines of the pandemic and to be infected-on-the-job, and, indeed, appear to have been selected for such jobs. They are more likely to be uninsured and more likely to be buried with their bodies unclaimed. Victims in the USA are three to four times more likely to be black, with Latinos twice as likely to fall victim to the disease. You have to be an ethnically Chinese woman to be less susceptible than whites! In the UK, the more susceptible populations are Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Indians (5). It is very hard for research to keep up with such fast-moving crises, but at least some of what follows should be investigated. What is

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the relationship between poverty, poor housing, cramped work conditions, population density and multi-generational families under one roof, in succumbing to this virus? Who chose these people for the medical frontline and why? Was there discrimination in the distribution of PPE? Why do minorities show up for treatment later? Why are they more likely to die in the ICU? Racism is extremely hard to eradicate. It has to do with anxiety reactions by our bodies to people who look different from ourselves. This arousal can be slight and non-volitional, like our bodies shifting to a more comfortable position, quite unawares. We cannot help it. It comes in two main forms: the first, dominative racism, can be helped. It occurs when we try to control our anxiety by controlling the other. This is unpleasant and possible to limit, and can manifest in intimidation, stop-and-search, handcuffing and police shooting. Martin Luther King campaigned successfully against the very blatant variety common in the Deep South. However, the second type, aversive racism, is much harder to combat and near impossible to prove. Here, we treat minority persons as if they were not there, skirt by them when passing and almost never look them in the face. (Hence the complaint, “they all look the same to me.” People saying that have never looked at them for long enough to tell them apart!) We look at such people more briefly and less often and then forget they are there. We thereby keep our heartbeats and respiration down, but this is as unthinking as shifting on a hard chair and making ourselves feel more relaxed and comfortable. We can be politically correct and watch our own conduct carefully, but even this is artificial and robs the other of our natural and spontaneous reaction. However, just about the only remedy to stop us being unfair is to be in close contact with minorities and discover that this contact does not harm us, and can be pleasant and enlightening. One reason cities are more liberal than the countryside is that in cities you cannot avoid minorities, while in the countryside you can. Those who most reject minorities have engaged with them

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the least. Those voting for Brexit have the least actual knowledge of Europe. They dislike the idea. Yet another “advantage” of this pandemic is to reveal the sheer extent of accidental bias and the tragedies this leads to. Our neglect has calamitous consequences. We must count the results of seemingly casual decisions, like who to assign to what jobs. Why are more minorities in jobs exposed to the virus? Are minorities waiting longer for PPE? Are they being admitted to hospital at a later stage? This pandemic is a laboratory for the study of injustice. We have much to learn from the decisions we make. The price paid by victims is high (6). x We work better, harder and smarter for superordinate goals It is a truism that employees work more effectively for superordinate goals, not earning five groats an hour or pleasing the boss so much as building a cathedral to honour their creator (7). Sometimes, these higher purposes are contrived and bombastic, like a “world-beating track and trace system”, but often they are genuine, or even created by accident. We earlier mentioned the Hawthorne Experiment and its amazing increase in productivity. We attributed this to the dynamics within a team of women getting to know each other better, but there was an additional reason for their success. While assembling telephone relays all day is about as stupid and mindless as it gets, the task did not remain that way. As productivity climbed and the researchers became visibly excited, the women were less assembling relays than discovering how relays could be better assembled and helping Harvard researchers in that process. Word about their climbing productivity spread and more and more distinguished looking people were peering at them through windows and doorways as they worked. Moreover, the women must at some point have worked out a policy. If they liked the variables being tested, hot coffee, better meals, and longer rest periods then they would produce more. If they disliked them, the ban on talking, or doctors poking at their

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bosoms with stethoscopes, then they produced a little less. Soon they had the researchers working for them! Overall, the policy was to please the investigators whom they much preferred to their foreman, who was barred from shouting at them and in the end from visiting the test room at all. All in all, the women had a superordinate goal, the dawning of a famous experiment to be taught the world over. It will soon reach its centennial. If this led them to work a lot smarter—they had the researchers where they wanted them—then consider what outwitting a virus could do for morale of a company and, in some cases, a whole industry. Ways of keeping safe while opening up an industry are goals capable of inspiring people. “We pioneered and tested the substance which punctures the membrane of a virus and may have saved thousands of lives, while being in full production. We demonstrated it before our industry and it has been widely adopted. It is now being used on walls and on surfaces in hospitals”. Johnson and Johnson, the hospital supply company, has long proclaimed its mission to better health and to helping the sick recover. It has featured in three best-selling descriptions of corporate excellence, the only company to be extolled in all three books. It has rushed a $50 million grant to frontline health workers and budgeted another $250 million for a ten-year programme to train more of them in new skills. It is gearing up to manufacture any one of 17 vaccines now in a race to be developed. It clearly has a superordinate goal based on saving lives wherever possible. We shall have more to say on its Wellness Programme in the next chapter. (7) Many people say that what they really want is “to make a difference”. This pandemic gives them a chance to make the most dramatic and profound difference possible, between being and notbeing. You can discover this not just for your own companies, but for whole industries and eco-systems. All successful attempts to evade the virus should be shared and pooled and governments,

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which should shower publicity on the best solutions, in some cases paying for their wide adoption by other companies. These viruses spread fast and we are in a race to outrun them. The reputation of businesses has suffered of late, but if they become the major means by which we love the work we do, then they may become regarded as our saviours. It is one thing for companies to create their own super-ordinate goals, but where governments join them, like the government of India joining Unilever in a nation-wide handwashing campaign, leading to hundreds of thousands being saved from typhoid and cholera, then companies are celebrated for saving lives and are seen less as soap merchants than as public benefactors (8). We have one life and this is a good way of dedicating it. After this pandemic, our economies will have to be revived in any case. The question is what are the most important processes needing to be restored to life and which are not? x Let those who have recovered and who have cared bear witness Many of the precautions against the virus are pettifogging and time consuming. Moreover, it is unlikely to affect a particular young employee, so why be bothered? We must find ways of emphasising that precautions, although irritating, are worthwhile if not for the persons encumbered, at least for others, as is the search for safer ways of working. Public testimony from those who suffered is a good way of keeping your people on their toes and not letting their efforts flag. There were, as of November 16th 2020, 6.95 million Americans who have “recovered”. Some were asymptomatic, but others suffered much and some still suffer. Evidence from them could renew the determination of companies to eradicate the virus and remind governments that they represent all of us and are elected to look after our health, among other issues. There is also a large army of probably immune individuals.

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We still do not know how much long-term damage this virus does, but the heavy use of anti-coagulants indicates the danger of blockages in many organs of the body. The more employees are reminded of complications in the wake of the virus, the more they will concentrate on people not suffering in the first place and discovering the strength to resist the virus. Carers will have been there when patients died without the comfort of their children and partners. Their experiences could be even more poignant and could bring home to young people just how important their mission to eradicate the virus has now become. This could be their parents if they are not careful and they should not count on the ability to say goodbye to them or express regrets. Were we able to pay carers for their testimony this might supplement their meagre earnings and help them to deal with traumatic memories by talking about them. x Stamping on spikes as soon as these occur This virus looks like it will haunt us for some time and there will be spikes, due to such events as nightclubs, experienced in South Korea, the dormitories of migrant workers experienced in Singapore, political rallies like the ones organized by Trump, religious gatherings as in New York, and bars in Florida, Texas and Arizona. Spikes must be stamped on at once and those in the same room traced, warned and isolated forthwith. A company that does not close its own infected unit risks being closed by the government and not opening up at its own discretion, but only with permission from authorities following inspections. This could doom a company to weeks of diminished income so that they are motivated to act responsibly and shut down of their own accord in the face of infection. Restaurants and bars should be able to contact their guests within 24 hours of a test proving positive. Speed is of the essence. Those close to infected persons must be told within hours before they pass it on.

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x Life is a state of organization We finally get down to the question, “what is life?” A few minutes after we die, all our bits and pieces are still there. We are not missing anything. Our organs will soon deteriorate thereafter, but for the moment everything needed for life is present. What has broken down is the organization of our bodies. The living whole is no longer there. The nervous system no longer functions or communicates. The parts of our bodies no longer relate to each as they did when we were alive. It follows from this that the key to life is organization, biological, social, societal and global. We have health and wealth depending on how well we are organized. The bias of Western culture tends towards Individualism and Specific Resources, but it is not the sheer number of tests for the virus that saves us, and not some fancy app warning us of proximate infection, nor the numbers of tracers, nor even the number of persons contacted or isolated. True, all these are useful in their proper places, but it is the organization of all these into one living system that protects us. How fast does isolation follow after testing? Great piles of tests, of medicines and of money help us little. It is the combination of Community with Diffuse relationships that supports life. This helps to explain why the USA with all its money, all its resources and scholarship, and with its expenditure and research on health, which is the highest in the world by some margin, is among the worst in the world when it comes to resisting infection. Huge piles of loot do not help us. There

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are too many cracks in the edifice and we fall between these. We cannot organize our bodies if we do not organize teams, if these teams do not better organize companies, if these companies do not organize their customers, and if all of these are not organized by governments into bulwarks against infection. x Never send to know for whom the bell tolls We are born alone and we die alone, but we live in relationships with one another. On the quality of those relationships all else depends, including wealth, health and happiness. Deng Xiaoping was laughed at for saying “it’s glorious to be rich.” Welcome to the club! We knew that all along. However, “rich” in Mandarin means “well-connected”. It is glorious to be closely related and concerned for each other. This is brought home to us by a pandemic like this one. This is no time for personal heroics, for finding villains – was Spain ever punished for the Spanish flu or the Middle East for MERS? How it started is only relevant if we can prevent something like it happening again in the future. As early as the seventeenth century, John Donne reminded us. “No man is an island; entire unto itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in all mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls It tolls for thee.”

CHAPTER 6 OVERALL WELLNESS AND HEALTH: SKILL AND KNOWLEDGE AT WORK

“Wellness” is an awkward euphemism and, in its catch-all vagueness, is reminiscent of snake oil salesmen and substances that cure “the legs of persons and tables equally well.” However, we badly need some definition of positive health, of what it means to be healthy, wealthy and wise. The truth is we need people who are at the top of their game and resistant to viruses, if we are to move the economy forward and rally from this setback. The idea that anyone who is not physically sick and under medical care must be healthy is a fallacy. Wellness----------Illness is a continuum. There are gradations of each state, along with life-time susceptibilities to getting ill. Half of those with Type II diabetes are undiagnosed! Only a small minority of us turn to doctors at any one time. We need assessments of how healthy we are. We urgently need private and public sectors to share responsibility for the nation’s health. The public sector cannot do this on its own and the National Health Service in the UK is over-politicised and under constant financial strain. We need those corporations who benefit most from our health to take better care of it. We hope to show that the private sector would benefit commercially, as well as morally and reputationally, from stepping up to the plate and accepting responsibility for the better health of its employees. We know that the current virus weeds out not just the oldest, but also those with certain predispositions, including obesity, dementia, pneumonia, hypertension, high triglyceride levels (fat deposits in the blood), diabetes, any pulmonary embolism (blockage to the

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arteries), and defects to the blood flow. If being “well” can be defined as the absence of such conditions and the need to watch and care for these where they occur, then we are approaching a useful definition of what it means to be more or less well. Recent research has also revealed that the number and the strength of antibodies within our blood plasma are a potential marker for how well our bodies resist the virus. Were these to be routinely measured, we would know how well someone was and how well our employees were in general, plus the pay-back for raising higher their levels of health. Health insurers and health maintenance companies have long insisted that customers send in assessment forms and test results that establish the condition of their health. Typically, insurance companies sort the insured into three to five categories and charge higher premiums to those with underlying predispositions to falling ill. A company offering health insurance to employees is thus in a position to know how many of its people fall into one category or another, and some companies have a deliberate policy of propelling as many employees as possible into healthier categories. It is clearly in their interests to do this. Emergency medicine is much too expensive. Less healthy categories can act as a warning that one’s life-style has elements of danger. The company may also test employees for various problems and send these test results to the insurer so that the latter is more confident of the accuracy of information. The careful completion of forms can by itself lower premiums since the insured is regarded as truthful and the company is backing that person up with tests and data. We will discuss the issue of wellness under the following heads. However, one important fact underlies all the points we make. It is incredibly cheaper and more effective to keep people well as opposed to letting them fall sick and then doctoring and hospitalizing them.

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x Many life-threatening addictions are substitutes for poor relationships; x McKinsey’s estimate of the importance of health to the economy; x A description of Johnson and Johnson’s Wellness Program; x Does this programme benefit J&J and all concerned parties? x Research on wellness external to J&J; x How public and private sectors could help each other; x No health without skills; x Health, skill and knowledge are not parts of the market, but nutrients of its entirety.

x Many life-threatening addictions are substitutes for poor relationships Alcoholism costs the USA an estimated $249 billion a year, $807 for every citizen. This is 55% of all addictive drugs, which, together with alcohol, cost around $500 billion to treat. 77% of this comes from binge drinking, which is generally defined as 4 to 5 drinks consumed in half an hour or less. 15 million Americans are addicted to alcohol. About 11% of the $249 billion cost comes from medical and legal processes, while 72% of the cost comes from loss of workplace productivity. As such, we begin to see the value for companies in reducing this and keeping their people healthy. 88,000 Americans a year die from alcohol-related causes, which is equal to a quarter of American deaths from COVID-19 by the end of 2020. (1) Why is alcohol a substitute for close relationships? Because one near-constant in all alcoholics is their manipulative interactions with others. This makes them uncomfortably anxious and alcohol is a relaxant. When you are uptight, you yearn to relax. You take one drink but cannot stop, so desperate is your body for relaxation. The bottle becomes a substitute for relaxing with friends and lovers, and further wrecks your relationships with such people. Soon the bottle

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is your sole companion. Drinking is at first habitual, but then becomes addictive. (2) Other drugs give you the highs and lows, available from those whom you once liked or loved. You can assault your girlfriend and then administer a high to yourself to forget her screams and tears. Soon you have nothing but the drug. If we look at what Alcoholics Anonymous does, it gives you a buddy to sit with until the craving passes. Affection and relationships are restored. Had those relationships been stronger, you would never have become addicted in the first place, which is where positive health comes in. Obesity and hyper-tension, both of which predispose you to COVID19, stem from similar failures of relationship. Eating is a relaxation response initiated by your central nervous system. The worse your relationships, the more you seek to comfort yourself by selfadministered treats. As you grow fatter, your relationships are likely to fail and you grow increasingly unattractive, so that food becomes your comfort and substitute for love. In the early stages, this is not difficult to cure. Take Weight-Watchers. You join a group. Weigh yourself each day and celebrate each degree of weight loss with hugs and kisses from friends. Or would you rather have several feet cut out of your intestinal tract? The latter is not just traumatic, but many times more costly. A good company could prevent these conditions worsening. Were we to keep employees in the face-to-face teams described in Chapter 2, then their relationships would remain in a state of repair and they would not have to resort to addictive substances in the first place. To have a direction, learning and purpose to your life is what keeps addictions at bay and banishes loneliness. In both the US and the UK, productivity have been lagging and it’s time we asked whether positive health might reverse this trend. x McKinsey’s estimate of the importance of health to the economy McKinsey, the US consultancy, has estimated that, with the need for preparedness, the cost of finding vaccines fast, the cost of trials that

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do not succeed but are paid for in case they might succeed, and the cost of hospital modules kept in storage and erected within days of a disaster, the cost of protecting the world against disease could reach $12 trillion by 2040. (3) Any nation aspiring to be a superpower must show that it can master such a situation, and monies up to now spent on being prepared to blow up the world in imagined nuclear wars will now have to be spent on rescuing the world’s inhabitants from myriad dangers. We must now rely either on China or the United States, and, given the failure of the USA to control the virus, it now faces huge expenses in reclaiming prestige. No nation aspiring to lead the world can be seen as lacking resources, provision and competence. Prioritizing health will be seen as needed for prosperity, but, in addition, essential to world leadership. If you cannot help the world survive through your science and your organization, then the world will turn to those who can. The “New Normal” will be seen as maintaining health worldwide, less as a profitable opportunity than as proof that you have a mandate from heaven. Markets cannot cater to pandemics. These spread too fast and are far too unpredictable for investors and their calculations. Poorer people are those most prone to pandemics, although those visiting China were the first to suffer on this occasion. However, there is not enough money to be made in rescuing the poor. This must be done deliberately by governments seeking world influence. The Belt and Road initiative of China regards health as form of infrastructure for all nations, as vital as roads, bridges, ports and schools. What will the USA and the EU do to counter this? By McKinsey’s estimate, the world will lose 8% of its GDP during 2020, yet poor general health costs world economies as much as 15% of their GDPs. One result of this pandemic is that we will cease thinking of health as a cost and see it as an investment in people. There are, according to McKinsey, “Four Lessons”. First, we must make health a crucial element in our discussions on economic growth. Economic historians have attributed as much as one third

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of past economic growth in the last century to improvements in health, especially public health. It stimulates business (4). Second, we need to increase health resilience. This pandemic has taught us that underlying health conditions are crucial to who is likely to survive and who is not. This puts obesity, high bloodpressure, pulmonary disease and diabetes, etc., in a totally new light. By prioritizing their elimination, we can make ourselves considerably less vulnerable. Nearly 200 nations were surveyed, and it was estimated that the global disease burden could be reduced by as much as 40% by actively treating these pre-dispositions. By 2040, a 65 year-old person could have the life expectancy of a 55 year-old today. The spreading of current best practice could reduce infant mortality in the Third World by as much as 65%. There had been a special neglect of preventative medicine, and it was from this that 70% of improvements can come, especially from vaccinations being strictly enforced, and better diet, nutrition and child care. Proven therapies would supply the remaining 30%. A third approach was the promotion of economic and social equity. The pandemic has revealed the price we pay for the neglect of poverty and disadvantage. Black, Latino, South Asian and poor people die in larger proportions. There is a ten-year life expectancy gap in the USA between the affluent and the poor, and closing this would boost overall health substantially, as well as the economy. Ill health puts poor people in a poverty trap and cripples their growth potential. A fourth approach is to build upon the huge momentum set in motion by the search for a vaccine. Scientists around the world have exchanged 50,000 viral genome sequences and cooperated across both sectors and borders. 170 vaccines are in the pipeline and are being paid for even in the absence of proof that they work. This lesson in how to accelerate innovation and prepare to manufacture, even when the actual product is unknown, is unlikely to be

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forgotten, especially when the stakes are so large. The rates of innovation are likely to decide whose influence leads the world. x A description of Johnson & Johnson’s Wellness Programme Johnson & Johnson is a global supplier of products to hospitals and to consumers with 130,000 employees worldwide. It has always celebrated the healing powers of what it makes and stressed its mission to improve the health of all patients in all nations. From its earliest days in New Brunswick, it had amenities for its employees in the form of a swimming pool, a basketball court and a health centre stocked with its own products. However, it was during the late Seventies that it embarked on its Live-for-Life Wellness Centre, an initiative created by its then CEO, James Burke (5). The idea behind it was to maintain the health of employees so that they were less likely to fall ill. The programme was voluntary, but over 90% of employees participated. It cut smoking from 20% to 3%, and has now abolished it altogether. It cut hyper-tension from 30% of employees to 9%, and has propelled its employees to less than half the national obesity levels and substantially reduced the levels of fat in their blood. Its health care costs are below those of other companies, despite the elaborate precautions we describe. Its major programme was called “Energy for Performance”, the basis of which was exercise and high energy nutritious foods, heavily subsidized in its canteens with many fruits and vegetables being provided free-of-charge. 91% of participants reported that they were more productive as a result and 25% of those completing the course were promoted in the following year. Turnover fell substantially as did the cost of replacing those who left. Absenteeism was way down. 20,000 employees in 72 countries employ the Digital Health Tracker that keeps a person abreast of his/her vital signs. Each person is encouraged to take 10,000 steps a day, roughly 4.2 miles. Teams are encouraged to run or walk long distances for charity and the company contributes as much as $25,000 extra to those who raise the most funds through the most

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strenuous feats. There are walking trails around offices and some meetings are mobile. Employees are encouraged to record their heartbeat, respiration, cholesterol levels, weight, and blood pressure on mobile phones and laptops. A pedometer tells them how far they have walked. Employees are encouraged to work on health risk assessments and, when given a classification by their health insurance company, to attempt to get into the lowest-risk bracket there is. It is company policy to get all employees into the lowest risk category that is possible for them. While medical conditions are private to individuals, unless waived, the company knows aggregate profiles for all employees. Reporting your condition to insurers not only saves on premiums, but also on referrals. The company contributes money to the deductible part of an employee’s medical expenses so that they will not hesitate to come forward if they fear something is wrong. A form properly filled out with supporting statistics lowers the cost of a premium by an average of $500. The company, the employee and the insurer all benefit from the transparency involved. The company helps pay fees for gyms and sports clubs that promote exercise. The company does not want its employees to suffer the anxiety which we earlier argued was the origin of much pathology, addiction, etc. To that end, it has financial counsellors for anyone in financial difficulties, like debt. When this was first introduced, demand sprang up. The company helps with repayment terms for student loans. It also offers to cover the health of family members for a small additional charge and encourages mental health advice for the employee and their family, including 15 personal visits a year, plus telephoned advice. In case of illness in the family, it offers back-up help in the home for a modest annual premium. The programme is called “Me-quilibrium”, and the idea is to end worry and fretting about domestic crises and difficult situations.

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It also counsels those who are litigating or being sued. There is a group legal plan to which employees can subscribe and which allows them to select attorneys recommended by the company. You are more likely to receive out-of-court settlements if a big company and respected lawyers are representing you. New parents can apply for up to 20 days’ assistance related to pregnancy and child-birth. Health advice is extended to members of an employee’s family for no charge. Regular cancer screenings are urged for all, especially those with the history of cancer in their families, as are full checkups at regular intervals. One might well ask why companies should get involved with such matters. Are they not better left to the medical profession? The answer is that, while preventive medicine is known to work and many praise its effectiveness, it remains an unattractive field for many medical staff. It is emergency medicine, saving very sick people from death, that generates most of the drama, the praise and the money. Doctors want to use their skills and screening a lot of mostly healthy people hardly cuts it. It is boring and has to be well paid to get done at all. What is needed, and what J&J provides, are diagnostic tests which are either self-administered or use paraprofessionals as needed. If the person is not yet ill, it is not a doctor that is needed but watchful technicians and/or coaches who can showcase a better lifestyle, and friends to encourage a new routine. There has been a huge increase in diagnostic devices, and, since thousands of diseases share just a few symptoms, medical diagnosis is rarely simple and sometimes wrong. Computers may point out the possibilities more reliably than some doctors or, more importantly, draw a doctor’s attention to what could be harmful if undiagnosed. The time is approaching when patients will visit doctors with a printout of the possibilities, having entered in the symptoms on their computers. All of this costs money and it all sounds vastly expensive, an overhead most firms could never afford. Yet, strange as it might seem, this Wellness programme repays Johnson and Johnson

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handsomely and is run at a considerable profit to the company, a truth to which we now turn. x

Does the programme benefit J&J and all concerned parties?

Is all this a mixture of paternalism and giving away shareholders’ money on an outrageous scale? J&J is known for its slogan “shareholders come last”, dating from the days when the Johnson family owned most of the shares, but coming last by a mile or so is surely uncalled for. The results of the programme has been evaluated several times over the years since it started in 1979 and the verdict published in the Harvard Business Review is that for every $1 spent on the programme J&J gets back $3.27. This is a profit of over 200% and puts health in a new light, showing it to be less a cost than a vital form of savings. Why is this the case? Major contributors here are a lack of absenteeism through medical emergencies, illnesses caught in time with less trauma and quicker recoveries, better diagnoses through more accurate information, lower premiums because the patient was in better condition, and a much lower staff turnover rate since the whole family may be safer. This one statistic alone is thought to have saved the company $200 million a year. All of this is reflected by the eagerness of insurers to work with J&J, which markedly reduces the claims made on their companies. More of its employees are in low-risk categories and are much better informed on their state of health. There have been several evaluations over the years and one fashionable theory was that wellness boosted profitability, but just once, not as the programme continued. Note that “just once” would still be a justification for continuing it, even if benefits were to plateau. Employees retire and more are hired in more countries. However, since features were continually added to the programme, it was decided to evaluate the programme in its third decade of operation in several different countries. Results differed in various regions of the world, but in no case was the payback less than $1.88

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per dollar expended, and in some countries it was as high as $3.92 or nearly 400%. This was the measured advance on the second decade which strongly suggests that the programme is in a state of continuous improvement over several decades, and that the features added make it more successful still. (6) However, this covers only what it is easy to count. Many potential benefits are ignored because it is not possible to track them. Consider the effect of low turnover and the $200 million in cost saving. We know these costs are saved because we know the cost of advertising, interviewing, recruiting and training new hires. But what about the value of retaining knowledge within the organization? If you have one hundred employees and one leaves by the year’s end, then you have lost 99 relationships. However, suppose attrition is 20%. You have lost 1,980 relationships and it is in these relationships that knowledge is stored. At the end of three years, you no longer have a knowledge container; you have a sieve. Knowledge is draining away fast. Recall that in Chapter 3 we looked at the role of face-to-face teams and how they worked out solutions and stored this know-how. Within 3-4 years of high turnover, almost no team would have survived. Their fabric would be gone and with it their memories and discoveries. We know that 91% of employees feel they are more productive after this programme. Suppose that just half of these were right. We have no way of estimating what difference it has made and how much productivity has improved overall, but it could be very considerable. We know that money is saved when employees move into a lower risk category, but we do not know how this affects the morale of that employee and whether s/he is more productive. When employees feel that risks are reduced, do they take more risks in their work-lives and get better results? When the company does more for employees, do they do more for the company and for each other? Much of this is immeasurable but could be much more valuable than we know. Our guess is that the pay-back for better

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health and wellness has been under-estimated. J&J seeks to be the “Healthiest Company in the World”. J&J’s response to the coronavirus is what we might expect of such a company. It made major contributions to the fight against HIV, SARS, MERS and Ebola. It donated 1 million masks to the Chinese Red Cross as early as January, plus electro-surgery generators and 1,300 packs of contact lenses to stop transmission via eyes. It has picked what it regards as the most promising approach to a vaccine and is readying itself to produce a billion doses in its 72-nation facilities. It will supply this worldwide at prices nations can afford at no profit to itself, although it believes it will cover its costs and profit from its generosity in broad terms. It aims for a 70% effectiveness for any vaccine and believes that a combination of treatments may be needed. It has partnered with Harvard Medical School, Janssen Pharmaceutical, the Centre for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, and has ear-marked $250 million to go towards training medical staff. (7) x Research on wellness external to J&J Beyond J&J, the claims for the financial advantages of wellness are even bolder. The MD Andersen Cancer Centre reports lost workdays down by 80% and $1.5 million saved, with insurance premiums down by 50%. Staff turnover fell from 19% to 4%. The SAS Institute, the software firm, reported that expenditure on wellness paid them back two and half times, with staff not having to leave the premises to have their health checked. H-E-B, the supermarket chain with 70,000 employees, moved 10% of its employees from high and medium health risk categories to low health risk ones and saved $6.6 million. R. Loeppke examined 50,000 workers covered by preventive health provisions and found that the savings in production days not lost were 2.5 times the cost of the health provision. (8) All this has been known for the last thirty years or more. The return on investment for preventive medicine has been reported on scores

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of occasions, only to be ignored by a stubbornly individualistic US culture that seems to believe that everyone should look out for him/herself and only that. The USA spends more on health than any other nation, yet 30 million Americans were uninsured by the end of 2019, since their aggravating symptoms make such insurance unaffordable. With the job loss in the current pandemic, this has at least doubled since insurance is tied to employment. While ranking 1st on expense for health provision, the US rates 39th in the world on the effectiveness of its health systems, according to statistics from the World Health Organization. Individualism, infection and contagion do not mix well. (9) x How public and private sectors could help one another Since it pays a company so well to look after the health of its employees, it remains for governments to acknowledge the fact and reward that company for helping out. Suppose that, as a result of keeping its people well, J&J employees resorted to the National Health Service in the United Kingdom some 30% less often. It would be a simple matter to calculate the degree to which it has benefitted the nation and deduct part of this from corporate taxes; that way, employees, the company, the NHS and the nation are all better off than they were before. A company has much more knowledge of its people than does the government and more to lose if they fall ill. Screening for a range of diseases is more quickly, safely and easily done in a company than in a hospital with its high parking charges and its exotic collection of germs and viruses. It is the company which cares most if people miss their work or perform it poorly. With more and more people working from home, the distinction between home and work is blurring and it is in the company’s interests that life at home is supportive of work and vice versa. That you are likely to live longer if you join one company rather than another would be a great aid to recruitment and retention. Government could legitimately favour with contracts those who

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contributed most to public health. Investors might very well discover that long-term health was a key to company prosperity, survival and share-price increase. Sovereign Wealth Funds could invest more reliably in their national ideals. It is a fallacy to believe a company is either self-interested or concerned with others. The answer has always been both, and wellness is simply one more example of how to transcend these opposites. Opening up safely and returning to prosperity could be used as a hallmark, an example to all other companies. The health profile of companies could be assessed and become part of a Triple Bottom Line: “People, Planet and Prosperity”. (10) The capacity to move employees up from one health category to a better one could be featured in annual reports and checked by auditors. Health makes everything else possible. x No health without skills Health is crucially dependent on the skills people are able to deploy. Chris Argyris and his classic work Integrating the Individual and the Organization looked at the mental health of skilled workers, semiskilled workers and the un-skilled. (11) He reported on the number of psychosomatic symptoms, signs of poor mental health. Skilled workers had a quarter of the symptoms of the unskilled, and machine-timed semi-skilled and unskilled workers had six times the symptoms of disorder compared with skilled workers. (“Machinetimed” means having to keep up with the conveyor belt as it passes you.) The ability to exercise some sort of skill and personal discretion is vital to our mental and physical well-being, and to our capacity to engage with environments and learn from them. The mistake much of the West has made, especially the USA and the UK, is to outsource most skilled work to East Asia. Much of what remains are medicines and weaponry (thanks to the National Health Service and governments buying arms). When you lose your skilled manufacturing jobs, you are relegated to something akin to flipping hamburgers and when COVID-19 wipes out the hospitality sector you lose even that. We have millions of

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rudderless semiskilled and unskilled people floating aimlessly in our society like flotsam and jetsam, serving a consumer-led service society. If they work at all, they have dead-end jobs often with zerohour contracts and are jerked around at the whim of some casual employer, without knowing where their next rent payment will come from or whether it will come at all. Such a person has no means of forming a plan, much less a way of carrying it out. If we wanted a plague of physical and mental disorders, we could hardly do more to bring this about. If we are serious about keeping people healthy, what we owe them is a measure of skill, intelligence and discretion in the work they do. This is not so hard to create but it needs determination and persistence to see it through. All employees must be trained to work better in all the jobs they do. The trick is to enrich the job itself. The truth is that the manufacturing jobs which we outsourced to foreigners because wages there were once much lower include vast opportunities to work more skilfully and intelligently. The designation of “manual worker” is seriously out of date and knowledge workers have largely replaced these. The days when a manual worker just moved his/her hands as instructed by a foreman and did the same thing for the entire length of the shift are long gone. Workers meet in quality circles lasting at least half an hour, where they confer and decide how they will do things differently today, with every day as an experiment in cutting costs, enhancing quality and trying something new to see what works best. They do move their hands for much of the day, but doing so tests hypotheses which are being given trials by the quality circle. When they analyse the results, they decide whether to retain this new practice or try something else. Improvement is continual and with 50 to 100 manufacturing steps in some plants, there is plenty of detail to work on, a huge complex puzzle! The intelligence of such jobs is illustrated below, together with the very real pleasure some workers get from performing them. (12)

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You PLAN and DO, then CHECK and ACT to retain the new element or not, in a process of “Continual Improvement”. Note that you are working smarter rather than harder, using more knowledge and learning more about what works best. The process was taught to the Japanese by W. Edwards Deming, an American consultant, after the US automobile industry in Detroit had ignored his advice. Toyota was his prime pupil and is now worth more than the entire US automobile industry combined. Deming was honoured by the Emperor for his work. The two pictures above illustrate a finding made by Fons Trompenaars, that if you reward an entire team rather than just the creative members who thought up the idea, then you can rely on that team to celebrate its most creative persons and greatly enhance their influence and leadership. It has now become fashionable to “re-shore” jobs once sent abroad, but by now it is almost certainly too late and the damage is irreversible in many cases. The suppliers that used to surround their big customer have collapsed and dispersed, and the skills required have now scattered. East Asian suppliers that were once cheaper are by now also better and often irreplaceable. Western strategies are largely to automate and so shrink labour even further. We lack the skill levels to match foreign suppliers and are largely dependent

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on them. An economy that serves mostly consumers needs waitresses, barbers, delivery people, part-time Uber drivers and short-order cooks. We have a recipe for aimless ill health. Only a massive effort to re-skill the workforce will do. As CP Snow put it, “manufacturing is the last hope of the poor”. It allows the worker to master a sophisticated tool and to achieve expertise and autonomy in its deployment. When we smashed unions, we smashed skilled work. However, the truth is that most jobs can be enriched if we use imagination. Take a taxi-driver. S/he can do much more than drive you from one place to another. For a tourist, the driver can have incab information on every major museum in town, with illustrated pamphlets of what they are featuring. There can be menus from the best restaurants, reviews for films and theatres, prospects for the football game, race-cards for the coming fixture, special architectural tours, ways to buy tickets in the cab, exhibitions on at various art galleries, etc. Since drivers are not all-knowing they could specialize, with specific drivers, fellow enthusiasts for specific kinds of tourists. The tourist could ask to be driven by the bestinformed and handed over to another during the course of the day where necessary. Single mothers bag groceries for the American chain-store Wegmans, but this is just the opening shot. All of them are encouraged to train for management jobs, help each other care for children in the company crèche and over weekends and days off, and rebuild their lives. We need practical skills by which each person can make their capacities scarce and hence valuable. We talk much of investing in people but we do too little towards it. Let companies get major government grants for re-training, providing they employ those graduating with credentials for a minimum of two years afterwards. That way the training will be severely practical and tested by experience. It is little use inventing new technologies without persons trained to use them. How do you maintain an electric car?

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x Health, skill and knowledge are not parts of the market, but nutrients of its entirety. Enthusiasts for market forces and the selfregulating economy largely fail to grasp the importance of health, skill and knowledge. These may resemble commodities that can be bought and sold depending on how much people want them and value them in a market of rival products, but in truth these are not Specific alternatives subject to Individual selection. We cannot live without them. What the pandemic is teaching us is that health, skill and knowledge are the soil and nutrients from which whole markets grow. They are NOT goods which we can choose or refuse to buy, but rather the source of all other values in general. If we die than all else fails. These are Diffuse flows of knowledge that form Community cohesion. Without our health, everything turns to dust and detritus. Knowledge is not a piece of property but a tissue of meanings that connect us all. Skills are the ways in which we engage with our environment and make sense of our lives. We cannot dispense with them. They are social bonds, not objects on a shelf. The reason we rate carers and caring so low is that we have commoditised these along with health and knowledge. The reason we grossly underpay teachers and nurses is because they will teach and care in any event, so we can get away with paying them less, since they enjoy helping others. Doctors have the power of life and death and can extract more from those who are horizontal and are being patient.

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One reason we are being overtaken by large parts of East Asia and why they dodge the virus so much better than us is that they regard health and knowledge as the precondition for human betterment, not as things to be bartered for money. You do not go to college because you reckon you will benefit financially, but because your education will enrich everyone you ever meet, especially those close to you. We owe health and knowledge to everyone who is human. It is part of Confucian Ren or “human heartedness”. It should depend on your potential not your income. We owe health to all citizens, rich or poor, for without it they cannot help us. Any nation that seeks influence must educate all citizens, preferably freely, to the utmost of their capacities, not doom 25% to oblivion. Civilizations heading downwards should know why. Teachers and carers in East Asia get an income that recognizes their place in nurturing the community. They come before the market in the sense that they make it possible, rather than being an item of choice within the market. A teacher’s dedication should not be allowed to subtract from her market price. Great Britain has 120,000 vacancies for carers and is not minded to admit them under new immigration rules.

CHAPTER 7 PUTTING FEMALES AND YOUTH IN THE VANGUARD

What is COVID-19 going to do for women’s lifestyles and jobs? At first glance, things look pretty grim and there is a chorus of fears that decades of progress in women’s rights may be lost in a few short months, from which they may not recover for a decade or more. Locking down has vastly increased violence against women, with even neighbours reluctant to interfere and forbidden to enter houses not their own. Women are locked away from rescue and police are known to hate domestic violence since cases routinely collapse amid conflicting accounts of what happened. Many women face penury unless the complaint is withdrawn, especially as the shelters they once fled to are closing down. With children needing home-schooling, more responsibility has fallen on women. A multi-nation survey by the Boston Consulting Group showed that women are doing 15 hours more of unpaid work at home per week than men. The Fawcett Society in the UK fears that 150,000 child-minders (97% of whom are run by businesswomen) could go out of business, which would burden mothers even further. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that mothers are 47% more likely to have lost their jobs and 14% more likely to have been furloughed, in schemes that cannot be long renewed. Only 1 in 10 of the lowest paid workers can work from home according to the Resolution Foundation. The British government has now exempted companies from having to report their gender paygap, at a moment when equity is most needed. Many have consequently ceased reporting this. The problem lies in the fact that women are more likely to work in hospitality and retail, two sectors

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which are hardest hit. The Equality Trust estimates that, during the decade of austerity up to 2019, 86% of the burden of bailing out the banks was borne by women (1). Very serious as all this appears, the rights of women could be embodied in how societies bounce back from this crisis and reset the moral compass. We will consider the following: x How and why young women could protect men in opening up; x A lever of the greatest power is close at hand; x Unilever’s drive for better health and emancipating women; x Do women’s values revolve around relationships? x The values preferred by women are what this pandemic calls for; x Anita Roddick as an inspiration we can learn from; x How some major corporations have responded to disasters;

x How and why young women could protect older men in opening up Early results from China reported that death rates from the virus were three times lower among women than among men. European and American results are less favourable to women, closer to 2-1, but there are some reasons for believing that Chinese numbers were closer to the mark. Firstly, female death-rates in the West are hugely magnified by women of 90 or over, nearly all of whom die when infected, and women who reach that age group, outnumber men by 3 to 1, men having died off earlier. Secondly, women in the form of medical staff were exposed to the virus in large numbers, while PPE was still in short supply. In any case, if we concentrate on young women aged 34 or less, then people of that age constitute only 3.9% of those who die (2). Were we to look at young women with no predispositions, then the danger to their lives becomes

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vanishingly small. Young women might agree to be in the vanguard of efforts to open up the economy and thereby protect older men. Is it thus rational to ask young women to take the lead in opening up since the danger to them is very much less than that to more elderly executives? We could devolve responsibility upon them temporarily to see how well they discharge it and as an experiment, to see to what extent they can be trusted to deliver. All they need is an opportunity to show what they can accomplish. Doubtless it will come as a surprise, but a pleasant one! What won women in the UK the vote early in the 20th century were the tasks they volunteered to undertake during World War One. By the end of the war, resistance to their emancipation collapsed, and so it could in this case. We have another disaster, with women able to do much more than they had done before, or what many men thought they were capable of doing. The sudden switch from protesting to helping with the war effort showed the value of having women on-side and tipped the scales in favour of suffrage. The offer to protect men must of course be voluntary and can be accompanied by public praise, payment for more challenging work and by promotion. We risk our lives in many ways when we demonstrate amid pandemics, and we believe there would be no shortage of those willing to risk themselves for such a cause, by helping their companies and themselves. Women are selected not on account of their gender, but because of their lesser vulnerability. x A lever of the greatest power is close at hand It has always seemed curious to us that women have not employed their purchasing power to greater effect. That they do most of the shopping and are disproportionately employed in the retail and hospitality sectors may look like a curse amid COVID, but it has the potential to be a source of considerable power and influence. Women are in a position in the marketplace to reward those who treat them fairly and wipe out almost completely those who discriminate against them. Take the case of Unilever, which as we

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will see in a moment, has a widespread policy of helping women in many walks of life and pays its female staff marginally better than it pays its males. Suppose consumer associations were to approach Unilever and ask it to feature the ratio of male-to-female wages on its packaging and point of sale material, because this mattered to many women purchasers. Would the company refuse? We doubt it. It has already benefitted women with no thought of reward, so what is wrong in letting people know where you stand on this issue? After all we have populations 40%-50% of which are college educated, so is a better and fairer future for women more or less important than your choice of soap powder, assuming the differences were small, as they almost certainly are? Let us be pessimistic and assume that this wage-ratio information raised sales by only 6-8% which meant rival brands would lose that amount. The difference would then be around 14%. Could any supplier afford not to emulate Unilever? In addition, if its women received appreciably less in salaries, could it hide from this truth? Quite suddenly, justice and equity would be a selling point for otherwise prosaic products and companies that deprived women of their rights would be in peril. Being fair to your employees and suppliers would become a part of your marketing appeal. Women selling to women is probably more effective in the first place. Why not reward companies for being fair to their own people? Why not shop in a way that helps fellow women to find work? Might it not do good for the whole nation to move beyond materialism to what is just and fair? The defenders of capitalism have long argued that it was a “marketplace for ideas”, so why not try some ideas more important than “growing lovelier each day” or “snap, crackle and pop”? Is it more important that a company has less than 0.2 infections among employees and less than 0.01 deaths from the virus, or that it provides a “breakfast with a built-in bounce”? Women might find shopping less of a chore and more of

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an intelligent choice. Above all, they could exercise considerable power over major companies employing hundreds of thousands of people and capable of scaling up social reform. Advertising might even address itself to issues of importance, and cease being silly and trivial, giving us something more than a culture of foaming nonsense.

x Unilever’s drive for better health and emancipating women The Anglo-Dutch supplier of groceries and cleansers was headed by Paul Polman from 2009-19, when Alan Jope took over. During his leadership, Paul doubled the size of the company and halved its environmental footprint. £1 sterling invested in the company in 1986 would yield £88 pounds today. During his nine years, he produced a compound return for shareholders of 230%, roughly 13% a year. He was showered with rewards, for Responsible Capitalism, for Business Leader of the World (INSEAD), a Lifetime Achievement (Rainforest Alliance), the Oslo Prize of Business for Peace, the UN’s Champion of the Earth, and the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Award. Inevitably, there were sneers. The Economist referred to” the Parable of St. Paul” , and there were

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multiple references to God’s Grocer and Divine Detergents, all of which he took in his stride. His attitude to critics was to invite them to monitor and publish the result of his efforts. The company is No.1 on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and with the World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam. It pays Price Waterhouse to evaluate the impacts of its projects. Hindustani Lever has a joint venture with Oxfam and with the Indian Government to fund a nation-wide hand-washing campaign, using Lifebuoy disinfectant soap. This is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives from typhoid, cholera and dysentery, in a country where millions still lack flush toilets. Unilever runs a campaign on behalf of the 2.8 billion children in the world who still do not make it past their 5th birthday. The company’s website shows videos of a father walking on his hands to a Hindu shrine to give thanks for his daughter’s 5th birthday. Other videos depict five year-old children thanking their pretend “mothers” for taking care with hygiene, enabling them to survive. The videos are shown to pregnant women (3).

Lifebuoy is but one of Unilever’s eighteen “Sustainable Living Brands” (SLBs), so-called because they fight disease and preserve lives, especially in poor and emerging countries. While the company’s top brands grew by 10% per annum during Polman’s tenure, the SLBs grew by 50% thanks to the priority given to them. The company has helped create 1,000 “perfect villages” in Vietnam, with clean water and flush toilets as a theme. It has drilled thousands of water wells in Africa, explaining to shareholders that most of its products must mix with fresh water in order to work properly. However, if health is one major theme of Unilever’s strategy, then helping women is another. 19.4 million young women are enrolled in its “Dove Self-esteem” programs. In one of these, there is a demonstration project in which the girl describes herself to an artist who cannot see her and then draws her. She is then described to the same artist by friends, and a second picture is drawn. In the majority of cases, friends describe

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her as more attractive than she describes herself and the second portrait is kinder and prettier than the first. The course gives girls confidence and promotes broad and diverse, not narrow and stereotyped, concepts of what is beautiful. They are taught composure. In addition, the company runs free programs for 40,000 female farmers, provides career advice to 114,000 mostly South American women, requires its suppliers to train and employ stipulated proportions of women, and assists some 920,000 women worldwide. It helped to found and fund the McKinsey Global Institute whose research studies have been very influential. 33% of consumers think of sustainability when making purchases, while another 21% would like to, but have insufficient information to guide choices. In other studies, long-term company strategies which invested in people were compared with short-term attempts to maximize shareholder gains. The former was found to make all stakeholders including shareholders better off. Surely it is time that Unilever’s efforts were recognized and rewarded by consumers in the marketplace. Women have more power than they realize if they would but exercise it. However, a recent incident suggests that Unilever has friends in the right places. Kraft-Heinz was preparing a takeover bid that would siphon off all that money Unilever “wasted” on do-goodism and get it to shareholders instead. (When Kraft took over Heinz, 20,000 jobs were shed.) However among shareholders were several of the world’s largest Sovereign Wealth funds and they were having none of it. The takeover was aborted 48 hours after it was first announced—another kind of capitalism may have a chance after all, and may arise from the present crisis. Unilever’s specific reactions to COVID-19 are what one would have expected. It has donated $109 million worth of sanitizers, bleach, surface cleansers and food to the mitigation of the pandemic, channelling half of this through the World Economic Forum’s COVID

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Action Platform. It has donated Cif surface cleaners to slums in Brazil, and has helped its small and medium-sized suppliers to survive with cash-flow grants of $549 million. It had guaranteed the jobs of its people in the present crisis, and has switched its production to making ventilators for the NHS. Its various brands have their own income and have chosen additional causes. Gains in health care products have been more than matched by losses in its restaurant food business (4). Generally speaking, retail corporations are stepping into the vacuum created by the lack of American political leadership in this pandemic. Target, Consumer Value Stores, Wholefoods, Walmart, Trader Joe’s, COSCO, Best Buy, Kroger’s and Walgreens are all mandating the wearing of masks, despite the angry reactions to such requests, such that 44% of McDonald’s employees have been verbally abused for asking customers to protect others, according to the Financial Times. Stores have even provided free masks themselves to those who arrived without them. The hold-outs against mask-wearing like Foot-Locker sell mostly to sporting young men. x Do women’s values revolve around relationships? There is no doubt that women are different from men, but in what way? Let us steer clear of biology and genetics of which too little is known and controversy rages, and ask ourselves about the social situations in which most women find themselves, most of the time. A woman who becomes a mother wants a life-long relationship with a husband/partner and her children. The health and happiness of all concerned will depend on the quality of those relationships, on whether the family grows up loving one another and can pass that love down the generations to grand-children. As of the summer of 2020, most white American men polled still supported Trump narrowly, especially if they had not been to college, but Trump trailed Biden by 25% among women, half the electorate. They see things very differently, especially in regard to health and welfare.

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Trump’s tactic of endless division and the Divided States of America were not for them. Relationships are a curious concept. Common sense in the West would seem to decree that in the beginning are individuals and things who only then relate (or correlate) if that is what they choose to do. The Internet of Things would be an example of this. However, might it be the other way around? Might the quality of relationships among people and things define the value of those people and things? Might the quality of their relationships define how people grow up, learn, work and prosper? The major business value in Japan is wa, or harmony; employees should interact with each other harmoniously. In China, the chief business value is guanxi, or relationship; how well people relate helps shape their work lives. Relationships may be the secret. Confucianism is based on relationships within the family and the values arising therefrom. He famously said “The gentleman aims at harmony, not uniformity”. Taoism is not based on the things which are then related, but on the qualities of those connections, the ebb and the flow of opposites moving back and forth. It depicts how natural forces relate to each other. We have already adduced several reasons why this helps us elude COVID-19. Close relationships persuade us not to infect each other and to consider the peril to the most vulnerable. When you are staring at a malefactor, s/he is more likely to concede. It is not tests by themselves, tracing by itself, or contacting and isolating people by themselves, plus all the statistics and targets, that thwart the virus but the relationships between these. How quickly are those tested being told of the results? Do they respond to telephone calls? Are they agreeing to isolate or are they defying instructions? All in all, those best at creating and maintaining relationships should be in the vanguard when it comes to resisting the virus, which is where women come in.

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The American anthropologist Deborah Tannen has brilliantly illumined the major differences between men and women, and has enshrined these in short and familiar anecdotes which many of us must have experienced (5). Men are most interested in REPORT, often about their own achievements and/or the facts they have uncovered. Women are more interested in RAPPORT between themselves and others. A man was driving his female partner down the road when she asked, “Do you want to stop for a cup of coffee?” He answered “no” and drove on past the coffee shop. She was irritated as he was treating her question like a report, while she was attempting a rapport between them. He was being completely logical. She had not said she wanted to stop. She had left the choice to him, so he had made it, end of story. However, if her primary value was RAPPORT, then he was derelict in key respects. She was suggesting they stop and expected him to negotiate, which he had not done. Not stating her preference was out of consideration to him. She did not want to delay him against his will. He might have shown the same sensitivity to her wishes. Such differences appear early. An eleven year-old girl and boy were playing in the boy’s home. He opened the door of the refrigerator and helped himself to an apple. She looked crest-fallen, so he cut the apple in half and offered her the unbitten half. She declined, which annoyed him. Was she hungry or not? If not, why the sulky face? She was, of course, asking herself whether she should befriend someone so indifferent to her needs. The apple was not the point! The relationship between them was the issue. Until a vaccine is working and widely distributed, it is relationships between people and their reluctance to harm each other which remain the decisive difference between West and East and stopping the 300,000 deaths by December currently looming in the USA. Tannen also wrote The Argument Culture about the endless adversary relations between men and their need to score points off each other by debating exclusive alternatives. It turns into a blamegame of insults, so that various “democracies” have turned into

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choosing the less repellent candidate, while the reputation of politicians in general sinks ever lower. Ironically, it is the helping professions that maintain their status: doctors, nurses, carers, teachers, counsellors, soldiers and those delivering vital services. As the arguments rage on, the hearers call “a plague on both your houses”. The reputations of politicians are among the lowest. What the world needs desperately is understanding or rapport, which is what women value. Tannen’s work could be dismissed as anecdotal, despite the popularity of her work. In fact, however, we have hard data to back her up. It will be recalled from Chapter 2 that we asked whether a corporation was a set of specific things and tasks performed for units of money or a network of social relationships upon whose quality output depended. This issue not only divided West and East, separating those who have failed to deal with the coronavirus from those who have kept it at bay, but it also divides Western men from women managers. The results we got were as follows (6):

Male managers are nearly twice as likely to describe an organization as a set of tasks rather than a web of relationships, and female managers in the West score much closer to diffuse values of the East than to the values of their national cultures in the West. Why should this be? Western women managers are not exposed to the East in larger numbers—they are probably exposed to it in smaller numbers, since they are less senior and probably travel less. So how come their values fall closer to those of East Asia?

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The explanation is quite simple. Values come in pairs. If one of two people is talking, the other has to listen or no communication occurs. We need specific people to relate to each other diffusely, so that if a man insists on being specific, a woman listening has to connect, relate and join up what he is saying. If he reports on himself, then there will be no rapport between them unless she supplies this and responds to what he is saying. Men and women everywhere are socialized in such a way as to make their values complementary to each other. That way they will need each other, much as The Beatles need their screaming female fans in the audience. Individuals need their groupies. What has subordinated women throughout all history in every nation is that men get to play the roles and to personify the values which their cultures most admire and women get to embody the corresponding values which are absolutely necessary but less admired, like listening, supporting and maintaining. If a man lays down the law, a woman must try to be a particular exception. If he is efficient then she must become decorative or life becomes very dull. Women are everywhere required to do what men do not want to do, or the relationships they so much need will not survive. She needs relationship more than he does. However, in a crisis like COVID-19, relationships are the answer and if the East has fewer deaths by ratios of 100-1 or more, we had better listen to those we put down. Women may know things men do not. They bring children into the world with great pain and with considerable care and tireless effort in raising them, lasting years. It takes some idiot just a second to kill them. If we want to find champions of life, health and nurturance, we need not look far. They are in our homes and hearths. Women managers may have a clearer grasp on what needs to be done. They can nudge us back into equilibrium. In The Seventh Seal a Knight returns from the Crusades and greets the wife he has not seen in seven years. It occurs to him that the Holy Grail for which he had been questing murderously and

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uselessly is now in his arms and always was. He was searching in the wrong place for some revered and imagined object. x The values preferred by women are what this pandemic calls for If women managers’ values complement those of male managers and are much closer to the dominant values of East Asia, then they may be able to emulate its far more successful practices. Take the belief in Universal Science and in Particular Exceptions. The science view of COVID-19 is a very uncertain one. It makes obvious sense to follow the science so far as it goes, but it also makes sense to watch out for all manner of exceptions and modify that science as we learn more. Making rules and discovering exceptions constitute a learning process. Below, we see the national scores on these value-polarities and see that women managers not only resemble China, Singapore and South Korea but are far more alert to what is exceptional.

Women are far more comfortable in interpreting rules flexibly, which is what this poorly-known pandemic requires. They are also prepared to make these exceptions on behalf of particular people they know. This pandemic calls on us to protect one another, not to stand on platforms as close to scientists as you can. The pandemic also invites us to cooperate more, for the time being at least, and to compete less, since this is likely to lead to price gouging and profiting from others’ desperation. Women managers are by far the better suited to this new emphasis. They have always had to cooperate in order to maintain the relationships they so

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need. Improving the health of a nation requires that we work to serve others’ needs in the Community rather than our own Individual freedom.

Here we see that women are considerably more cooperative than men, just what this pandemic needs, and giving them more responsibility would almost certainly reward us. The agony that the USA finds itself in is almost certainly due to its excess of individualism that resists mask-wearing and social distancing in the name of freedom and glorifies lone dissent against all manner of necessary moves. It does not occur to such people that individual compliance can be voluntary and done for the good of others. Freedom is seen as a stone idol, fatally compromised by any hint of compassion. Another important value-dimension is Inner-direction as opposed to Outer-direction. Leading economies in the West, like the USA, the UK and France, tend to see our inner drives as responsible for success. Many regard being directed from within as the same as individualism but this is not so. France, for example, is communitarian but inner-directed. Angry crowds surging on to streets have changed its history. However, in the face of this pandemic, one’s inner determination and angry defiance become an illusion. The pandemic cannot be put down by the force of personality, by publicly refusing to protect oneself, and by opening up schools and bars as if an infective agent could be dismissed with contempt.

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No amount of presidential optimism can prevail against the virus. Indeed, we need to see our peril, elude it and lock ourselves away in a manner some men see as craven. The pandemic must be respected, not assailed like a living opponent. It is outside us but seeks to get inside and will do so even as we flex our muscles and point our guns. The virus cannot be intimidated. There is a large element of luck in how cruelly it assails us. Here are the differences: Once again, we see that how women managers think is a lot more relevant to dodging the virus. Women are more often influenced from the outside, by their husbands’ careers, the cries of children, the demands of schools and neighbours, and by what the family needs. The virus has come looking for us and elaborate precautions must be taken so it does not catch us. Men strutting their stuff and invoking scenes of battle are almost entirely irrelevant. If we wrestle the pandemic, it will infect us. If we try to face it down, it will jump from one face to another and our bravado proves fatal.

x Anita Roddick is an inspiration we can learn from Earlier in this chapter, we asked whether consumers might not respond to a different sort of appeal than that of simply purchasing a useful object. In fact, we know the answer here because Anita Roddick showed the way some years ago and was brilliantly successful as a counter-point to Thatcherism. Her untimely death from a tainted blood transfusion stopped us learning more, but there is still much to study from the example she set, about other ways of appealing to customers. The Body Shop she founded was, for a time, Britain’s largest export with over 2,000 retail outlets and

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was sold for nearly a billion dollars at her death. The details that follow come from her book (7). Hers was a supremely clever move because cosmetic companies have little price competition and have collectively damned cheap cosmetics as dangerous. Women actually want to put something expensive, not cheap, upon their skins. Their complexions are a precious asset deserving costly care. Cheap cosmetics are a trap into which no one is prepared to fall. However, suppose the skin care product was natural and already used by bronzed female bodies in exotic climes. Suppose it was free of drugs, not tested on animals and inexpensive because the natural plants and fruits from which it came were so? Suppose purity and simplicity were inexpensive? Anita Roddick had hitched across several continents, and had become involved in Hippie fashion, which gave her a life-long fascination with cultural diversity. When the women in Tahiti finished eating a pineapple, they would bathe their faces in its skin. She noted their fresh complexions. They also used cocoa butter. This was but two of the folk-remedies she would import from every corner of the globe. She hated the beauty industry She quoted Leon Lauder, Estee’s son, as saying he aimed to cater for the “kept woman mentality”, precarious bed-mates terrified of growing old, desperate to remain attractive. Men are also the target, witness Chanel’s new men’s fragrance aptly called L’Egoiste. Anita complained: “I am still looking for the modern-day equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently, worked hard, spent honestly, gave honest value for money, put back more than they took out and told no lies. This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.” So what did Anita teach us? First she taught us that individual selfinterest and concern for communities were reconcilable. Egoism and altruism could fuse. We gain by indirection by thinking of other people’s needs first. Consequently, Roddick set up a soap factory in

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a run-down Glaswegian slum, and imported foot massage rollers from India (and was cheated in this regard by local merchants), necklaces, bracelets from Kayapo Indians in Brazil, pulp paper from Nepal and so on. Under her slogan “Trade not Aid”, she purchased from producers who needed a hand-up, not a hand-out. Provided the consumer gets what s/he wants, also helping the producer to survive in adverse conditions is an additional appeal. It is possible to consume and to sustain your own appearance through helping others. She also taught us to sell not just the masculine product, but the feminine process of how it was generated. A conventional cosmetic product is a thing, an object, with “magic ingredients” hyped up as valuable. Roddick expressed amazement that her male critics were so blind to process, the way something is sold in the shop personto-person, and the process of preparing it without testing it on animals, without using excess energy, without despoiling the environment. Indeed, selling paper made from the pulp of water hyacinths not only helps clean up lakes, streams and water ways from a noxious water weed, it renders this a profitable activity. Saving the planet is a process. Preserving the Brazilian rainforest from devastation is the rescue of living processes. Letting your employees swap jobs with body-shop staff across the world is a process, as is letting franchisees choose their own community project, the way in which they would like to repay their community. Letting employees help set policy and ceaselessly educating them on world crises, as opposed to hard sell techniques, is a process. Identifying your shop with sustaining the environment, promoting social justice, and saving children from predators and distributing their appeals free is a process. Anita Roddick was selling a whole culture of caring, and so in the face of COVID can we. She pioneered the process of filling up old containers brought back to the shop, so as to save on single-use plastic. She was three decades before her time

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Anita always believed that, in the end, we sell not just products, but dreams attached to products, stories woven into a humane context. However, what sort of dream should we sell? That you “grow lovelier each day with heavenly Pink Camay” is an impossible dream. In truth, you are a day older and you may cleanse your skin but that is all. The Body Shop also sells dreams, some of them improbable, fiercely resisted with long odds against fulfilment, but still realizable, someday, some place. It sells the dream of a rainforest with one hundred thousand of its natural secrets preserved, of a place in the sun for poor communities, of Romanian orphans given an education and new parents, of a new age of business where veracity has replaced voracity. x How some corporations have responded to disasters? The truth is that major corporations have, in the past, been quite generous when it comes to responding to disasters. The interesting questions here are, why does it take a disaster for them to see where their own interests lie? What do we define as a “disaster”? Is it over one thousand Americans dying each day from COVID-19, the equivalent of two jumbo jets crashing, black Americans dying on average ten years earlier, hundreds dying at the hands of the police, the wanton destruction of the Amazon rainforest, or the extinction of whole species? Perhaps it is up to us to define “disaster” in the first place and explain to corporations what we expect of them Rosabeth Moss Kanter has a distinctly female approach to world problems. (8) She has a life-long devotion to the anthropology of Ruth Benedict and the latter’s concept of synergy, by which egoism and altruism are reconciled. Happiness derives from service to people and the resulting reciprocity and mutual enrichment. She chronicles what she calls “vanguard companies” and what these have wrought. It is quite impossible for a corporation claiming to set world-class standards to go missing when things go badly wrong. You cannot claim to engage stakeholders and help solve their problems and then stand idly by while they are engulfed in a great

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wave of water occasioned by a tsunami. The tsunami of 2004 in the Indian Ocean killed an estimated 225,000 people, 10,000 of whom were in India. It takes a disaster on this scale to remind any human institution what its prime purpose is, namely to serve humanity. If it has been profitable, it is in a better position to do this, but help it must. Employees taught to think for themselves and being a part of Indian society would anyway insist upon speedy rescue during this tsunami. They neither asked for permission nor waited to receive it. A company like IBM can contribute a huge amount and did so. Thousands of tons of aid flowed in and had to be tracked, labelled, housed, moved, identified and administered. Medicines were in multiple languages needing translation and emergency shipment. IBM’s logistics capacity was essential to integrating and locating thousands of pieces, and tracking and identifying missing people. All in all, $7 billion in cash and kind were donated for disaster relief in India. Keeping track of this was IBM’s responsibility. No wonder it received a public award from the President of India. Such occasions remind you who your true friends are. Nor was IBM alone in this regard. Pfizer donated $35 million. Microsoft $3.5 million, Cisco $2.5 million, and so on. IBM was there on other occasions of catastrophe. It brought aid in the wake of the Gujarat earthquake. It was there at 9/11, at the Chinese earthquake of Chengdu in 2008, and after Hurricane Katrina, which swamped New Orleans. It was there in Kosovo. It regularly works with the Indonesian government through myriad crises. It collects for the Red Cross, and has its own Peace Corps, which pays the volunteers their salaries. Graduates of the programme have been found to have greater leadership potential. In Proctor and Gamble (P&G), this is called PVP: “purpose, values and principles”. P&G persevered with the production of Children’s Safe Drinking Water, despite repeated set-backs and disappointing levels of sale. It was the product’s prospects in an emergency that drove them on and its life-saving potentials. However, when the

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Asian tsunami struck in December 2004, quite suddenly the aid agencies all wanted it and up to a billion glasses were delivered. The lesson was learned and the product is now kept in reserve by many institutions, yet on purely short-term financial grounds it would have been abandoned years ago. In the 2006 Lebanon War, P&G had to evacuate its employees and their extended families. The cost was considerable but PVP mandated such action. Vanguard companies, as Kanter calls them, are flawed like any human endeavour, but the secret lies in their aspirations and in the rewards for success and punishments for failure to meet these. That is the way we learn to do better. The higher the purpose invoked, the more people can meet under its appeal and push it forward. Perhaps the greatest dividend that a values and purpose-directed culture brings, however, is its influence on innovation, a characteristic that all vanguard companies share. As we might expect, COVID-19 and other contemporary crises have seen companies disgorge. Jack Dorsey of Twitter has donated over $1 billion, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation half of that and Google $908 thousand. Alibaba has given $200 thousand in cash but over $1billion in medical supplies and equipment delivered to where they were needed through its worldwide logistics. Lloyds Insurance has publicly apologised for insuring ships used in the slave-trade, and will now fund black education. Greene King has made donations to offset its founder’s role in slavery. The Royal Bank of Scotland has appointed a team of black employees to direct its charitable donations. The Bank of America has pledged $1 billion to the movement to improve black lives and the PMC, an Indian bank, has pledged another billion. It is becoming clear that major corporations envisage a very different world from the one we have now. They are stepping into the political vacuum of Trumpism. (9) Needless to say with the US and China vying for world leadership, the mantle will go to the most generous, to the one which saves most lives.

CHAPTER 8 GIVING THE DISADVANTAGED AN ADVANTAGE

This pandemic has thrown into sharp relief just how unfair and virulently racist we have allowed our societies to become. When black people died one by one, in different places at different times in near obscurity, it was possible to ignore their shorter life-spans. However, when enough people die each day to fill a passenger jet and then some, it becomes impossible to deny the gross disproportion of minority members who succumb. American Indians and Alaskan natives are five times more likely to succumb to the virus than white Americans. The same is true of Black Americans and Hispanics who are two times more likely to perish or worse. These findings were detailed in a report from the Centre for Disease Control in the USA. Among the reasons given here were overcrowded houses, multi-generational families, the absence of paid sick leave meaning that people stayed in jobs despite feeling ill, such people being three times less likely to have health insurance, greater exposure to pollution, fear and distrust of medical institutions, and greater exposure by job category (e.g. carers, nurses, public transport, food processing, delivery, and service jobs). They were more likely to be in jail in crowded conditions and live further away from testing centres, hospitals and other sources of help. Public Health England, in a repeatedly delayed report, admitted that minorities were nearly two times more likely to require hospitalization. Bangladeshis were most at risk with 1.9 times as many fatalities as white people, followed closely by Pakistanis, Indians, South Asians and people of mixed race heritage. It made

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recommendations but to no one in particular, so roles are still unfilled. People of South Asian heritage are 20% more likely to die in hospitals, possibly through late admittance or underlying conditions. The main cause of higher deaths were thought to be pre-existing conditions, like diabetes, hyper-tension, and obesity, from which minorities suffered more. Minorities are more likely to have faceto-face service jobs, like driving buses or taxis, which expose them to many strangers. Press reports and the BBC have pointed out that minorities are more likely to be fined for unnecessary walking about, are more likely to have been reprimanded by their hospital for complaining over shortages of PPE, and are more likely than white staff to report shortages of protective equipment. Black and South Asian doctors and nurses are more likely to be in the frontline, more likely to be infected by patients and more likely to die from this. All in all, the situation is dire. No wonder Kevin Fenton’s report was edited, eviscerated and released in bits and pieces to reduce its impact. (1) The situation looks so bad that many of us will despair, but there are remedies to hand and we shall now consider these. As the economy recovers, it could become a fairer one were some of the steps described below taken. x x x x x x

Let face-to-face teams work on solutions; Help minority groups to help themselves; How Tata and Sons reacted to tragedy; Treat those saving our lives like war veterans; Helping the disadvantaged pays off; More minorities will have recovered and have some measure of immunity; x Lifestyle counselling: getting pre-disposing conditions down.

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x Let face-to-face teams work out solutions On the subject of disadvantage and discrimination, minorities are the experts, having suffered this first-hand. No one knows better than they do or are more passionate about changing this situation. In Chapter 4, we explained how face-to-face teams could solve stubborn problems and come up with creative solutions, while distancing from other teams and so slowing the spread of the virus, by confining it to small bubbles of people. The company was a network of cells, any one of which could be briefly extracted and renewed. If black and minority doctors are assigned to the most dangerous jobs in a hospitals, then we need to know how and why this happened. There is nothing like a team of such persons, to carefully study the issue, take down evidence and come up with their solutions. The minority medical staff may have volunteered for more dangerous jobs. Many minorities feel they must go the extra mile to win acceptance. Should we allow them to do this? They may feel that, since it is their communities that are suffering more, they would like to help them. Is this fair? They may be younger in age and more recently hired, or people may value them less. However, the decisions on whom to deploy in what position remain crucial to the effectiveness of the hospital, as does a sense of fairness which is crucial to morale. The advantage of these team reports and recommendations is that their contents will become known and the suggested action will be difficult not to take seriously. The hospital is not being publicly shamed but reforming itself from within, using those it may have wronged to guide its policy. All teams are given a challenge and a framework in which to operate. Their solutions must be fair to all employees and not handicap anyone from advancing through the merit of what they do. The task is to remove obstacles to everyone doing their best and the obstacles in the path of minorities are more numerous and must be removed. Note that the formation of problem-solving teams

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gives their members a chance to define what is wrong and to introduce their own narratives into the culture. We are empowering them to innovate, to experiment, to question and to find new facts. Their ideas can be piloted and the results examined before being rolled out. What they suggest must prove effective before becoming best practice. If the problem is communication between whites and minorities then the team should be a microcosm of this problem, with white and minority members, studying what typically transpires. Because team members become fond of one another, they are more likely to find solutions and more likely to be credible and persuasive in managing those solutions in situ, since the concerns of both sides have been considered. We also stressed in Chapter 4 that those best at team-work were leaders-in-waiting, good at peaceful persuasion and socially skilled. Members of a minority team that come up with good solutions are qualifying themselves for higher positions in that institution. Specialized teams essentially consult to the larger corporation with minorities to the fore. As pointed out earlier, racism is an involuntary nervous reaction to those who are different. It is way of controlling inner anxiety by minimising mutuality and by-passing the other’s humanity. It is not a dastardly plot, although ways of dealing with that anxiety, like apartheid and segregation are injurious. However, mixed teams are the cure for this since mutuality cannot be avoided and you get to know the strange person and become veterans of the same battle and authors of the same remedy. Closely engaging specific minority persons is the only escape from prejudice. They become your friends, people you can relax with, as mixed-race civil rights demonstrators discovered in the Sixties. Teams can inquire into the how and why of higher mortality rates. Was the provision of PPE fair? Were those most exposed given higher priority for equipment? Who was tested most often? Who was informed quicker of the result? If those facing shortages

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complain to the hospital will their complaints be passed on or must they go outside? How come more minorities are exposed to danger? Could tests be conducted on the premises? Are predispositions to mortality known? Should we identify poor communities and test within them? Should an employee have the right to waive privacy and share his/her predispositions with an employer? Can high-risk persons be protected? Should companies reward those who volunteer to test vaccines and donate plasma? x Help minority groups to help themselves Not all minority groups are completely disadvantaged. American Jews get more than 85% of their children into college compared with just over 50% for whites in general. Japanese-Americans do even better in this respect. What constitutes advantage is the degree of cohesion and solidarity within the minority community, the extent to which they help each other and especially the extent to which they value education. It follows that you will overcome injustice faster and better where you allow minority members to help and to champion one another’s rights. Minorities should be paid and encouraged to help each other. An elder sister-younger brother system should be installed so that any new Bangladeshi is coached and advised by someone of the same background but more experienced. A system of mentors can be set up with career advice. This becomes much more effective if the mentor is rewarded and publicly thanked, even paid, for the success of a protégé. Another device is to pay a bonus to someone who helps coach employees after hours in skills needed by the company. Blacks should want fellow blacks to succeed, rather than competing with each other to be the first to break white-erected barriers. All minorities should have membership in support groups so they succeed as a flying wedge and owe their advance to one another. The poor only have each other. Encouraging teams to come up with solutions gives minority members a share in the strategy and purpose of the company.

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Such groups need to assess the health needs of their own minority members and report on these at regular intervals. If they have a greater propensity to fall ill, then who is most vulnerable should be known in advance and protected. We know the most risky jobs and the least risky ones and minorities should not be unfairly exposed to the most risky. x How the Tata Group reacted to tragic loss of life and injury In 2008, Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel in Mumbai was attacked by Muslim terrorists who killed 164 people and injured 308 in addition. It was owned by the Tata Group of India. Eleven hotel staff were killed, many while helping 1,500 guests to escape. Many staff exposed themselves to danger. The General Manager lost his wife and two sons in the massacre but stayed at his post and re-opened the hotel again twenty-one days later. No one was laid off. Ratan Tata and other top officials attended eleven funerals and visited those injured in the assault, 80 in all. He set up a psychiatric centre to help those traumatised and provided food, refreshment, first aid and counselling for family members of those killed and injured (2) All persons affected received a mentor to guide them. Family members flown in at company expense to comfort those alone in the city, were put up at a nearby Tata-owned hotel for free. Tata paid between $80,000 and $187,000 to the families of every deceased employee. In addition, the families were given life-time residencies, and the repayment of all loans and advances was waived. The dead employees’ final monthly cheques were paid for life to their partners. All children’s school and college fees were paid for, wherever in the world they studied. All dependents received free health-care for life. Every person was given free access to a counsellor. Similar generous provisions were made to those near the hotel when the attack occurred who died or were injured. One 4-year-old daughter of a street vendor outside the hotel had all her hospital bills paid. When presented with the bill for all this, Ratan asked, “Have we done enough?”

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Tata is a brilliantly successful company with an enduring bond with those who work for it. We owe gratitude to minority employees in hospitals and elsewhere who have borne the brunt of the virus and, since they died disproportionately, they and their families should be rewarded disproportionately, not because they are black or brown, but because they contributed more and suffered more. The nation must find a way of paying them back. We placed our most vulnerable in the firing line. When something like this happen, our humanity is tested. x Treat those saving our lives like war veterans In the USA, the GI Bill was signed by President Roosevelt on June 22nd 1944. It gave serial benefits to the veterans of World War II. These included low-cost mortgages, low-cost loans, one year’s unemployment compensation while they searched for a job and help towards school and college tuition. The latter especially was a huge success with $7.8 billion spent on education and training, and $2.2 million on college education. It gave a huge boost to the US economy, its schools and its colleges. The bill was not without its flaws. It almost completely excluded black veterans by adding Jim Crow clauses and has been described as “affirmative action for whites.” In addition, the Veterans Administration provided life-time free health insurance and hospitals, especially reserved for veterans. Similar attempts were made to compensate those caught up in 9/11, through the Post 9/11 Veterans Education and Assistance Act. We propose that many in the frontlines of the fight against COVID19 are similarly “veterans” in a fight for life that heals and does not kill. Just as America felt it owed its veterans for the sacrifice of their years, so we owe those who helped to heal us from this pandemic. Even with cases surging, the death toll seems to be flattening so that more and more people are being rescued from death by dedicated medics and nurses. When these get infected and suffer, then the least we can do for them is treat them as the warriors they have

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proved themselves to be. Since more of them are drawn from minority communities, more minority members of our society and their children will be helped by any social advantage we can bring to them. We are not favouring those of certain skin pigmentation, but are favouring those who have done most for us, many of whom are minorities. It is a way of saying thank you that makes society more equal and fairer. We should seek out other occupations that turn out to be perilous and thank their members for the work they did helping us to recover economically. Probably the best form this help can take is free skill training and college scholarships. This is effective because both givers and receivers must make a big effort in order to benefit, while recipients help themselves by undergoing education and it is the most ambitious of these that come forward and take advantage of what is being offered. Only to a limited extent can we free the disadvantaged. They must be given the means to free themselves and one another and the self-help team is the means for doing this. There are considerable advantages for any company in helping minorities, because anyone who has withstood oppression is that much stronger and more resourceful. We must also include in such efforts an attack on pre-disposing conditions. Boris Johnson has already announced a government policy to reduce obesity by limiting the advertising of junk food. He himself suffers from this condition and had a memorable attack from COVID-19. At the very least, those with pre-disposing conditions should know of this and receive protection. The government should also consider helping those who donate their blood plasma and thereby save others. The American Legion has been a powerful lobbying group in the US for war veterans. We need a similar body for health veterans. Clapping them and praising public health is not enough.

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x Helping the disadvantaged pays off Why does helping the disadvantaged reward a society and why should we search out those in the forefront of the battle for justice? It pays any company or institution to locate those who are succeeding despite the discrimination they have encountered. They are vying for good jobs despite the game having been being rigged against them for years past. God knows how well they would have done had the contest been a fair one! If you select such persons and remove the blocks to their progress, they will repay you many times over. However, much will depend on how you treat them. Among the less useful practices are selecting a mild-mannered minority person and displaying him or her in the shop-window in essentially a PR exercise and an impotent, symbolic role. Such a person gets privileges for not making trouble and stopping the company from getting into scandal. He or she will be wheeled out where any scandal threatens to break. The truth is that he or she has encountered prejudice and should be used to lessen this barrier among fellow minority members. What such people are experts in is confronting prejudice and this knowledge needs to be utilized in the team settings we have described. All great emancipatory leaders turned a personal dilemma into a social movement. Moses was a Prince of Egypt and a member of a slave race. He took the authority of the first and used it to free his people. Gandhi was a British-trained barrister and an expert on the rights denied to him as a colonial subject. He used the first to change the second. He had been personally slighted, thrown out of a first class railway carriage he had paid for, but decided to liberate an entire continent, not just himself. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela followed the same procedure. If you want to liberate black people, give each one a chance to help free others. This will make the best use of their experience and create a role model for others to emulate.

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The fact is that groups treated less than fairly can use that experience to better themselves. The British religious group the Quakers, or Society of Friends, were barely tolerated and treated most unjustly. They were barred from most professions because these educated their members in the religious mainstream of the day. They could enter neither Oxford nor Cambridge, nor most professions. The face-to-face team-meeting was their central religious practice and women typically convened these groups. They went into business because there were few other sources of economic support open to them. They ended up creating forty times more wealth than their numbers justified and they tithed themselves to pay for the training of apprentices in industrial skills, a century before this became a general practice. They played a major role in Britain’s pioneering Industrial Revolution and helped establish the City of London by keeping all verbal promises they had shouted out in exchanges. Lloyds and Barclays were both Quakers. The willingness of minority group members to help one another is the secret of that group’s advancement as a concerted effort. x More minorities will have recovered and have some measure of immunity The number of persons who have recovered from the virus in the USA has now nearing seven million and is still rising. We still do not know for certain that such persons have immunity as do those suffering from other corona diseases like SARS and MERS, but it is very likely. We also do not know how long immunity lasts. It could be years or just a few months. The flu virus changes itself regularly and flu jabs must keep pace. At least two vaccines seem very promising and their effectiveness at 90% or above has cheered the medical industry world-wide. Despite remaining uncertainties relatively few people have been infected twice, and the few that have been may have received a false positive on the first occasion. What is clear, however, is that the near even million plus who have recovered have far less of a chance of falling ill.

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It is also near-certain that the people who have recovered include a higher proportion of minorities than the population in general. Were we to issue certificates to those who had recovered, as Germany plans to do, testifying to their status, then these could become very valuable employees, with a minimal chance of passing on the infection to others or of falling sick themselves. All manner of jobs requiring close proximity would be available to this group and it would make sense to prefer them for such tasks. We are choosing those least likely to pass the virus on. That minorities are over-represented in such groups is to their advantage. The length of immunity must be watched closely and time elapsing after testing positive carefully noted. When vaccines are developed with, say, a 90% or higher level of efficacy, then those who have had the vaccine should also be certified. It lowers their chances of being a carrier substantially and we need nearly everyone to agree to be vaccinated or the pandemic will haunt us for years. The vaccination should become key to a successful job search. The more precautions you take in not infecting others, the more valuable you are as an employee. If you are young, female, recently recovered and have been vaccinated, then the chance of being a carrier shrinks to one in a million or less. x Lifestyle counselling: getting the predisposing symptoms down One way of tackling COVID -19 is to reduce the predisposing conditions and these have everything to do with the lifestyles adopted by people. Type 2 diabetes is just one of these conditions. It has been growing apace and has doubled since 1990. If we put all the world’s diabetics in one country, it would have the third largest population in the world, after China and India. 4 million people a year die of diabetes, according to death certificates, but that does not count undiagnosed cases, reckoned to be around the same figure, or the incidence of those dying from COVID-19 where diabetes may have been a factor. 1.6 million people will likely die of

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COVID by the year’s end, so diabetes is the greater scourge. Diabetes increases with urbanization and two-thirds of all sufferers live in the cities. The condition correlates with obesity and with inactivity and these may be driving forces. Obesity also predisposes a person to die of COVID -19. It follows that were companies to test for diabetes then twice as many people would realize that they have it and companies would know who was most vulnerable to COVID-19 and who was not. Yearly healthcare expenditure on diabetes is $1 trillion, so diminishing it would pay us back handsomely. Much research remains to be done but a “diabetes watch” would at least mean that the condition was treated. As of now, this occurs in only half the cases diagnosed! Diabetes changes one’s entire lifestyle and, in recent years, many improvements have been made by Novo Nordisk, the Danish company. In the past, being separated from one’s insulin was a potential death sentence and injecting it got you mistaken for a drug-addict. Thanks to NN, insulin is drip-fed by a cartridge put under the skin into the vein. Joining the war against diabetes would reduce death by COVID-19 and by diabetes and repay a company hands down. It would mean that diabetes could be treated, along with its own host of complications. All this is much better done by groups or teams that look out for each other and prescribe the exercise regimes called for. As we saw in Chapter 7 on Wellness, this repays the company with higher productivity and less absenteeism, as well as discovering who is fit for what assignments. It is not until we realize that diabetes can be treated that we realize how much money we are losing by not reducing its incidence and keeping our minorities healthy. Black, Asian and Chinese people have a higher rate of incidence in general. Diseases come in clusters and we must combat the entire cluster if we are to succeed. If we tackle the predispositions leading to death then we benefit twice over.

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x Fusing better health with profit and productivity One problem with protest and political pressure arising therefrom is that it raises consciousness, but sometimes at a price to business effectiveness. Strikes, walk-outs and agitation have the effect of reducing the profits from which any pay-rise would have to come. The longer the strike, the less money management has left to assuage any felt grievance or injustice. What is being proposed here are team-generated projects and innovation that enhance health, justice, engagement, profits and productivity of the company. We have provided ample evidence that a healthy work-force is a more productive and profitable one. The savings on absenteeism and days lost alone make up the difference. It is part of the mandate of every team set a task, that what it proposes enhances morale, reduces costs, increases welfare, heals conflicts and essentially pays for itself. A word should be said about profitability. This is, of course, essential in the long-term to any business activity. You cannot survive unless you generate a surplus over and above costs. The human body cannot survive unless it generates red blood-cells, but that is NOT to say the purpose of human civilisation is the production of red blood cells! What is necessary is not sufficient. Blood cell production allows us to dedicate our lives to issues of greater meaning and importance like saving our planet at a profit to all. Where this pays for itself, it can be scaled up indefinitely until it ceases to repay us, since the problem is solved. The cash nexus starts with the team itself. If it comes up with an idea which saves the company $3 million, then part of this should go to those who thought it up, part to those who actually made it happen, and part to shareholders and the company so that this activity can be expanded. Provided the cost savings and/or the quality enhancements are carefully measured, then any rise in wages is affordable out of enhanced revenue from customers and

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lowered costs. All concerned are better off than they were before. The entire company and the economy grows. Saving waste, for example, has been described as “not leaving profits on the factory floor”. It helps both the environment and the bottom line. A machine that cuts the acrylic backing off worn-out carpets and away from the nylon tufts, allows each of these to be recycled separately and saves a company millions in the purchase of new nylon and acrylic. The team that located and tested such a machine is very valuable to the company and should be paid accordingly. Those re-trained to operate the machine should be paid additional monies also. (3) No one should be ashamed of making and selling carpets. These are useful things. However, what if, in addition to making and selling carpets, you could help save the environment and leave a better world for your children’s children? What if you cut by 70% what you sent to landfill? What if you reduced your carbon emissions to zero? What if you switched to 90% renewable energy? What if you cut the gasoline used in delivery by half? We are describing the feats of Interface Carpets and its late CEO Ray Anderson. He could have done none of these things without making a profit, but saving the environment, not profiting, was his motive. Profiting was just the means to a higher purpose, a way of sustaining his mission. Could it be that a team realizing a higher purpose is more healthy, more productive, better paid and more innovative than other employees in that company? That is the sort of challenge that should be given to a team, to see if higher purpose pays and then spread it through the company as a whole. The employees of Interface Carpets entered their company for a listing by Fortune magazine of the “100 Best Companies to work for”. It was duly listed. A company that succeeds in overcoming disadvantage can expect that its general morale will rise. You need a healthy body and mind if you are to accomplish something of significance.

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Once money has been made and piled up then, it becomes scarce. It sits on the bargaining table like a load of loot. What shareholders get, employees, customers and suppliers must forgo. However, here we are talking about gains that are yet to be made from improved ideas and relationships. We agree in advance on who will get how much from innovations yet to be generated. We have moved from an economy of scarcity and enmity, to one of abundance and mutual respect. (4)

CHAPTER 9 BUSINESS BELONGS TO THOSE WITH A STAKE IN ITS FORTUNES

As the economy slowly opens up, we are bound to ask whose lives and whose livelihoods are now on the line? What do we owe to those risking their lives to return us to an industrious nation? Who is it that owns a company, those who may have dedicated many years of their life to its service and share their fates with that of the company, or those who hold shares in it, possibly holding those shares for a matter of days before trading them? It is the belief of only a small minority of managers that a company belongs to those who hold shares in it and that everyone else, the employees, the suppliers, customers, the community, etc., are merely the agents of those shareholders and that it is the duty of these agents to maximise the shareholders’ take. This is a relatively recent doctrine and is not subscribed to by a majority of managers in any country anywhere. When we asked this question here are the results we got. (1)

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We see above that only 40.4% of US managers believe in the shareholder model, and this is the highest percentage in the whole world. In contrast, Japan has not given shareholders priority from the very beginning and only 7.6% of its managers say that shareholders are supreme. Most of East Asia boomed in the wake of Japan and adopted the Japanese model of capitalism. If we look at China, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan and Germany, these are among the world’s leading economies. Germany and France’s influence in the EU is on the side of stakeholders. The only hold-outs for shareholders are the Englishspeaking four: the UK, Canada, Australia and the USA. The coronavirus will force us to face this dispute yet again, because stakeholders not only do the physical and mental work, but are now putting their lives in jeopardy and trying to save lives in general for the sake of our economy, while shareholders simply gain from the proceeds of their efforts. We will proceed by the steps which follow. x How businesses begin; x An historic anomaly; x A case of natural justice;

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x x x x x x x

The sequence in which wealth is created; Investing money and extracting it; Three searches for excellence; The Rise of Moral Purpose; Ways of capturing the lion’s share Wall Street and Main Street: Very different predicaments; All lives matter, but what are they for?

x How businesses began Virtually all businesses in the world were founded and owned by stakeholders. A very small number of these become public companies later on, through Initial Public Offerings, and thanks to huge subscriptions have become very large and, in some cases, global. It is these very few and very large companies that feature shareholders, many of whom claim to own these companies by dint of owning share certificates. There is scant legal basis for this claim and only since the early 80s has it become the norm in the USA, the UK, Australia and Canada. The Business Round Table changed its mind to endorse this view at the beginning of the Thatcher-Reagan era in the early Eighties, but has since changed its mind back again. Even a public corporation may be owned by its working people after all. Some public companies have shareholders, but give them no voting power. Alibaba launched on the New York stock exchange, the biggest offering in history, but announced ahead of proceedings that its employees and its customers came before its shareholders. This did not stop shareholders from subscribing! An increasing number of high tech companies in the USA believe that shareholders should not interfere with scientific calculations and that they must invest long-term. Non-voting shares are increasingly common as science complexifies.

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Businesses begin with an entrepreneur attracting a small band of enthusiasts who bet their money and their futures on a new proposition, sometimes working for nothing but shared gains. These are often heady and exciting days of great innovation. Bureaucracy is one of the demons of growing large. The thrill of a life-time grows into routine operations, lobbying and market power. Gallup shows that the American public admires small business but not large business. (2) When shareholders take charge, innocence is lost. x An historic anomaly Shareholding was the first and oldest way of raising money for investment in enterprise. In those early days, risks were very large; the first textile industry, the first chemical industry, and the first builders of ships, automobiles, and airships all took massive risks and lost much money. Consequently, shareholding was, and still is, an expensive form of capital. The investors had good reason to demand large returns. However, as other nations came from behind and caught up, the risks were nothing like as large as they had been. The third or fourth chemical industry in the world is nothing like as risky as the first. There are college curricula to teach students what the pioneers wrought just a few years ago. Moreover, today, money is advanced in the form of long-term loans by banks and such capital is much cheaper, especially when banks are allowed to invest in their clients. Shareholders, having once received the benefit of very high returns, are loath to receive less. Since risks are no longer as high as they once were, they have found other ways to increase their returns. For example, CEOs are paid astronomically high salaries but this is for a purpose. They must put shareholders’ interests above those of employees, suppliers, customers, communities the environment and tax authorities. The CEO’s salary is tied to the share price and s/he has options to cash in, when the price rises. He or she runs the company in a way that transfers monies previously paid to stakeholders to shareholders instead. Their risks may not be so high

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but their returns are. Mergers and acquisitions are encouraged because any bid for a company usually has its share-price rise and insiders know when to buy and when to sell. Buying back your own shares will cause a brief spike, at which point you sell before it falls again. It is a device to advance those with knowledge and shares in the company. It has little other purpose. GM bought its own shares back twenty times on the road to bankruptcy. x

A case of natural justice

It used to be the case, around 1946, that shares in the USA were held for 10 years on average, when capital was patient and longterm. Ever since that date, the interval for which shares were held has shrunk and shrunk. If high-speed automatic trading is taken into consideration, it shrinks to 22 seconds! If it is not, then estimates vary from 4 to 9 months. A famous study by McKinsey and the Canada Pensions Fund Board of one thousand C-suite executives found that 63% reported pressure on them to improve results shortterm. 79% felt obliged to demonstrate strong financial performance over the next two years or less. 73% felt they should have a longer time-horizon, and 86% thought that such a longer horizon would improve corporate performance overall. (2) It is ludicrous to put those who hold shares for months only in such a strong position. These are not investors. They are traders, if not speculators. To claim that someone who has owned a certificate for six months should be able to subordinate the interests of ten-year employees, a twenty-year supplier, or a thirty-year customer is obscene. In such a relationship, the trader says “here is some money give me your working life for so long as I want it.” Those who do the actual work and, especially with the coronavirus, put their lives on the line are subordinated to someone with a fleeting interest in their value. The system is so unjust it deserves to fail. When you give less and less to those creating genuine wealth, then their interest in doing so will flag. Blue-collar wages have flat-lined for a generation, and now

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middle-class managers are being squeezed out. Most Americans believe that their children will be worse off than they are. (3) Shareholders typically have less than 1% of their portfolios in any one company, so why would they give a damn for it? They probably do not manage their own portfolio in any case and see the company as a mere device for maintaining their income, a means to an end. One thinks of absentee landlords collecting rents from those who grow food. It is glaringly obvious that we should pay for various tasks in proportion to how much they are needed in the production process. That much of East Asia is out-performing us industrially is not exactly surprising. Stakeholders should allocate resources between them according to what the situation requires. This is done by start-up companies wherein much of the spirit of capitalism resides. x The sequence in which wealth is created The credo of Johnson and Johnson dating from 1943 reads “shareholders come last”. In those days, the shareholders were largely the Johnson family. Were they putting themselves down? No, they were not. Shareholders are of course useful in high-risk situations, but in the process of how wealth is created they are indeed last in time. It all begins with a leader giving an instruction to employees to produce something. In this process, employees seek components and/or raw materials from suppliers. The product once created is distributed to customers which supply the revenue the company needs. It is only at this point that any money for shareholders is generated. What shareholders receive other stakeholders must first create. If they fail to create it, then there is nothing. How much should the stakeholders receive for what they do? Were you to pay them more, train them more, develop them more, and better attend to their health they might surprise you! The problem with putting shareholders first is that you will never find this out. Where you insist that shareholders must get a fixed amount and do

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this before the productive process begins, then you will never discover what stakeholders might have done had they been treated more generously, been trained more assiduously and been better equipped. The money for shareholders comes from the pockets of other stakeholders, when it might have come from their innovation and their improved performance, so that all parties benefitted. Indeed, shareholders might have done much better if more money had been invested in those actually creating wealth, rather than being diverted in advance to their pockets. Singapore’s favourite mantra is EFCS, standing for “employees first, customers second.” The logic is that you must first inspire your employees, because only then will they cheerfully and skilfully serve customers, excelling in what they provide. Shareholders are not mentioned and seem to be prepared to wait until these earlier tasks have been completed. Economists always told us that investors were being paid for the risks they took. The risk is that investment in employees and what they accomplish may not pay off. The reward occurs when this pays off really well. However, giving what stakeholders might have received under the table to shareholders wrecks this whole equation and leads us to trail Chinese growth by an ever-greater margin. COVID-19 should teach us to value and to invest in the lives of our people rather than give back-handers to shareholders. You do not know how well you can do until you have treated your own people as best you can. x Investing money and extracting it once more You have to put money into a for-profit organization if you later want to take it out, and you have to be prepared to wait for longer than four months for that pay-out. Those holding their shares for weeks are not true investors and know nothing of the humanity of those who toil on their behalf. It takes more than a year of innovative work to make a vaccine, as we have discovered. If you want to react smartly to a disease, you have to invest in advance in your preparedness. The problem with putting shareholders first is

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that you become the master of extracting money rather than investing it. The problem with a narrow obsession with profit is that Wall Street and the City of London become experts at getting the largest amount of money out of an industry into the pockets of shareholders and investment banks and neglect the need to get money into industry so as to grow it long-term. The process is, of course, circular. Only what has first been put in can guarantee that more can be taken out. It depends on what a culture most values: its health or shaking the money tree.

Unless the two sides of the Frisbee are on an even keel, it will not fly straight. Too much will be extracted. Too little will be put back in. No one will be prepared to wait. It is openly admitted that the City of London could not make an Imperial Chemical Industry or a Rolls Royce today. There are not the funds, the patience nor the commitment to industry that was present in previous eras. Industry exists to be taken advantage of by money men. GEC, the British onetime electronics giant, disgorged millions to the financial sector but received almost nothing from it in return. It was essentially used up and shaken down and renewed its core competence not at all. (4) A

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moment’s reflection should teach us to invest in the industriousness of our citizens, not in lining the pockets of the minority of Americans who own stocks. Chortling with glee as the stock market climbs neglects the fact that the richest 10% of Americans own 84% of all stocks. The wealth is not shared at all. The real economy festers as salaries stagnate and productivity stalls. The lop-sided emphasis on making money means that growing people, teaching skills, building plant and equipment, and research and development are neglected. The CEO with an average six-year reign has time to fiddle some numbers but not time to build strength. Any long term commitment would favour his/her successor. A single investment in the future lasting ten years is passed over in favour of a thousand moves to make a quick buck and lobby to allow prices to be administered. A tilted playing field is the best bet. Unfair competition is the name of the game. x Three searches for excellence Three major attempts have been undertaken to describe excellence in US companies and all but the third attempt have met a strange fate. The first of these was In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman which sold many millions the world over and is justifiably seen as a classic. (5) We do not critique the contents of this book, which were largely insightful. We do, however, critique the selection of companies, all of which were highly profitable. What happened was that, within a few years of the book’s publication, these “excellent” companies began to under-perform. With some exceptions, their condition deteriorated. A similar trend occurred after the publication of From Good to Great by James C. Collins. (6) This book also broke all records for sales and we have little quarrel with its contents. It matched companies, one of which was merely good with one that was really great, teasing out the crucial differences between the two. Once again, the author selected companies which were highly profitable. Once again, there was a noticeable falling off of their performance in the years

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following their being selected as “great”, save that, in this case, the deterioration was even sharper. Ten years later the “great” companies were actually losing money as a group. So, far from exhibiting greatness, they were loss-making! How can we explain this? Is being cited as “excellent” or “great” some kind of curse, leading to over-confidence and the belief that one should not change? Do investors expect and demand too much from such companies? Do companies bask in their glory and lose touch with the business environment? There may be something in all of these notions, but we believe that they took too much money off their companies in the form of profits and put too little back into them. Being cited as great or excellent would make this worse and raise the demands of shareholders for even more money. If you push profiting too far, the other stakeholders will collapse beneath you. Too little is invested in their health and strength. Indeed, one of the “great” companies made cigarettes and probably cost the nation twice as much as it contributed. A third book trying to define excellence was published in 2013. This was entitled Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic of Business by John Mackey, CEO and founder of Whole Foods, the up-market grocery chain, and Professor Raj Sisodia, of Babson University. (7) It was a collaboration between business and academia. They did NOT select companies that were profitable, although many of them turned out to be so when this possibility was later examined. They chose companies that were loved by their stakeholders, employees, suppliers. customers, the community, the environment and, yes, shareholders, who had been persuaded to be patient and invest long-term. Moreover, there is growing evidence that stakeholderoriented companies out-perform shareholder-dominated companies. These companies did not deteriorate after they were nominated in the book. Indeed, their profitability resulting from the enthusiasm of stakeholders was better over 15 years than over 5 and they continue to grow strongly. If you first satisfy all stakeholders, they

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will produce the wealth that you can distribute to your shareholders. In the chart below, FOE stands for “Firms of Endearment”. Once it was established that these firms were loved, it remained to be seen if this “foolish sentimentality” had cost them. Had they given away the store? Had they erred on the side of being too generous? Had they over-invested in their own people and been too kind to customers? The comparison was with Standard and Poor’s averages and are presented below: Firms of Endearment, FOE, compared to S&P averages 5 Year

10 Year

15 Year

FOE

56.4%

254.4%

1646.1%

S&P 500

15.6%

30.7%

157.0%

FOE

9.4%

13.5%

21.0%

S&P 500

2.9%

2.7%

6.5%

Return Cumulative

Return Annualized

The longer the period the better they do Here we see that companies liked and admired by their stakeholders, including the general public, are over ten times more profitable than the S&P averages over a period of 15 years with cumulative returns. There could hardly be a stronger case for favouring all stakeholders rather than shareholders alone. When we rebuild from this pandemic, we need to put people (meaning stakeholders in general) first. x The Rise of Higher Purposes “Making more money for shareholders” is a moral vacuum. Most stakeholders do not even know who their shareholders are, and

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these turn over fast. That one’s wife or husband comes home from work, glowing with pride at having served shareholders even better, is a quite unimaginable scenario. These are abstract, aggregate persons to whom it is almost impossible to relate and feel devotion. Such devotion as top managers feel is to themselves. They can exercise their share options. If shareholders are united at all, it is only in their common search for gain. They generally vote for whatever will raise share prices along with dividends, and they enthrone the CEOs who serve them best. Higher purposes are notably absent. However, at first gradually and now at an accelerating pace, comes the search for higher purposes, and these demands are growing. With the stimulus of COVID-19, they are likely to grow even faster. The earliest manifestation was the movement towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and it is surely our responsibility not to let the pandemic spike, although we must act decisively if it does so, while protecting as many of our employees and customers as we can. (8) The idea has been around for a long-time and was central to the many businesses created by Quakers and other Non-Conformist sects. Josiah Wedgwood, a Unitarian, created a famous anti-slavery medallion, which was sold across the world, and was a strong supporter of William Wilberforce. Josiah’s sister was a major campaigner against the slave trade. He had all his workers inoculated against small pox, built a model village for them and trained them in craftsmanship. He was later elected to the Royal Society and was famed for his inventions. He helped to build canals so that his porcelain could be floated unbroken to markets. His products were known for their classic beauty and aestheticism. He donated these lavishly to crown-heads, and benefitted hugely when these were featured on their tables and guests emulated their styles. CSR has been criticized as being largely for PR purposes and for companies with surplus money, but it builds on a rich history. Wedgwood was Britain’s first and greatest plutocrat. He was a

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contemporary of Adam Smith who appears to have learned nothing from him! Smith might have described business in very different terms had he been influenced by this Renaissance Man and supporter of American independence. Corporate citizenship is a concept which holds that each corporation has the same responsibilities as a citizen and must play its part in the improvement of the environment and similar aspirations. The Sierra Club was created by corporate sponsors in the 19th century and still survives today as part of the conservation movement. Close to this is the more recent interest in Corporate sustainability. What is it that allows social and physical environments to last down the years? How do we renew ourselves? We must sustain not just the environment, but our people, our company and our social purpose. We owe to R. Edward Freeman, a Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School, the rise of Stakeholder Theory, originally conceived at SRI International in the 1980s. It considered all the parties that a company could not do without (i.e. employees, suppliers, customers, the community, government, the environment and shareholders). Each one of these was co-responsible for the operations of a company. On a temporary basis, stakeholders may include the legal system, the media, politicians and regulators. The prosperity of a company depended on how effectively these interacted with one another. Freeman has more recently pointed out in his book The Power of And the sum of what all these parties can do for each other, in cases where they work as one. They cooperate and co-evolve rather than trading off against each other. No party should be subordinated to any other party, much less shareholders. Depending on circumstances, each and any stakeholder can make a vital contribution. A stakeholder is defined as “any group or individual whose continued support is necessary to a company’s existence or health.” This would include all ways of countering the pandemic, so that all stakeholders are subject to certain disciplines which protect a company.

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A new kind of business strategy is known as Creating Shared Value (CVS), which was extolled by the late Clayton Christensen. POSCO, the South Korean, steel-maker pays all its suppliers within three working days after being invoiced, with the result that suppliers compete to be of service to that company. It has a “Win-Win” bureau that makes its preferred and sole suppliers part of its own operations. It will lend them money to survive a cash-flow crisis and come to their rescue if needed. Nestle is well known for doubling or better the revenues of its cocoa suppliers by training them in bean storage and selection. LEGO even cooperates with child customers in the software they create, which propels toy robots. We have already discussed the Conscious Capitalism movement. Some of its members do remarkable things, like UPS and its scholarship programs for its one-time drivers. It pays fees to 900 colleges, so that students can “drive their way through college.” Whole Foods encourages its younger people to provide microfinancing to entrepreneurs in developing countries, covering their salaries and expenses. It has no employees, only “team members.” Everyone functions as a member of a team with defined responsibilities and set purposes. The Whole Kids Foundation of Whole Foods fights obesity with more than a thousand salad bars and vegetable gardens, having discovered that children will eat vegetables they help grow themselves. Two-thirds of the shares in Tata and Sons are held by charitable trusts which fund India’s two largest cancer hospitals. It once supported the campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi. There is also a move to Inclusive Capitalism featuring B-Corporations (Benefit Corporations, or B-corps). These have changed their by-laws to include social purposes and benefits to all stakeholders and number in the thousands. Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream (B&J), now part of Unilever, is an example of this. Kickstarter, the crowd-funding platform, is another. No one in B&J earns less than 1/5th of the CEO’s salary. The company was recently denounced by the conservative press, for declaring sympathy for Syrian refugees. B-corps are

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certified legitimate by the B Lab which sees that they pass muster and helps set their standards. They must undertake to be “purposedriven and create benefits for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.” Capitalism 24902 is Richard Branson’s invention. The number derives from the world’s circumference. He co-invests with creative employees in companies dedicated to the whole Earth. Connected Capitalism is the brain-child of E. Neville Isdell of Coca Cola. He points out that NGOs and non-profits remain small, but it takes large corporations to tie their bottom lines to social projects and scale up efforts. UPS and Sun Trust Banks have joined Coca Cola in these efforts. Just recently, Lloyds Insurance and the Bank of Scotland have joined programmes to improve black lives and set up teams of minority members to advise them. There have been major changes in the investment community. Impact Investing is aimed at making a defined social impact on the social and/or physical environment and to estimate the value of doing this. It aims to do this at a profit to itself and a majority of these investors see themselves as competing with the investment community in general, so that the impact, although obligatory, should in no way handicap them in achieving a reasonable return. This is heavily supported by the Roman Catholic Church which needs a return on its money to run its operations. Some non-profits can receive rewards according to the impacts they have made. Another variant on this is patient capital aimed at making whole neighbourhoods bloom, and bringing markets and aid together. You give funds to the most capable, not the least capable, members of poor communities, in the hope of leveraging businesses. It is a form of social entrepreneurship wherein a resource important to the whole community is provided. A particularly large and ambitious departure is ESG investments, which stands for “Environmental, Social and Governmental investments” and combinations of the same. These amount to as much as a trillion dollars. ESGs have, for more than one year, out-

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performed investments aimed exclusively at profit, although not by very much. However, this does discredit the view that any aim other than profitability reduces, obscures and compromises profit margins. In East Asia, ESG investments beat for-profit investments by as much as 3.84% according to Gill Tett in the Financial Times. To have an aim of benefitting the environment or having a positive social impact does not hurt profits in the least and may even enhance them. Al Gore has even said that financial advisors that do not commend ESGs are failing in their fiduciary duties to clients. BlackRock has reported that sustainable investments beat nonsustainable ones on 88% of the occasions they surveyed. ESGs have been endorsed by the United Nations and incorporated into its Principles of Responsible Investing. Signatories to these principles have $70 trillion under management. There have also been recent gains in measuring environmental and social impacts. JUST Capital has pioneered a ranking of companies according to how well various stakeholders are treated. The Triple Bottom Line measures “Planet, People and Prosperity” and has been used by the Shell Group of companies worldwide and many others since. There is a broad movement towards Integrated Reporting backed by the Prince of Wales, plus an International Integrated Reporting Committee. There is a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) developed with the help of the UN’s with UN Environment Program. As of May 2019, six hundred companies worldwide participated in this, including Dell, Honda, UPS, Nike and PwC. In 2015, more than 190 countries pledged themselves to the Sustainable Development Goals. It would be a simple matter for their governments to reward those companies who came up to the highest standards. 169 tangible targets have been developed in this regard. There is strong evidence that employees work harder, smarter and longer for higher purposes like saving customers and themselves from the ravages of COVID-19, stopping the environment from

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further deteriorating, ending racism and supporting social justice. Up to now, we have largely demonstrated on the streets in the expectation that authorities will “do something”, although what will be done is in much doubt. Here is a chance to embed new ideas in organizations, test these out and measure what does and does not work. A company either pays the same to women as to men who do the job or it does not. It either trains and promotes those who are diverse or it does not. It is time companies were rewarded for being just and had the costs of injustice inflicted on them. x How shareholders grab the lion’s share Nothing else will work unless and until we prevent shareholders and their Wall Street/City backers from grabbing the lion’s share of wealth creation. So long as a diminishing share goes to those actually creating and producing this wealth, our economies will underperform, even as money markets ignore what is happening in the rest of the country. Unfortunately, the way in which shareholders have strengthened their position since the 1980s also does harm to the economy. This has happened in several ways. Companies have outsourced and threatened to outsource their manufacturing jobs to Southeast Asia. American and other workers must accept low wages or see their jobs replaced by foreign workers who do the job substantially cheaper. This reduces the wage bill and increases the profitability of a company and what shareholders receive. The prosperity of a blue-collar working class has always depended on the complex machines they operate, what Marx called the “means of production”. When a boss says “I run this plant”, he or she is not being accurate. He or she cannot usually operate the machinery by him/herself. It takes skill and experience to do so, which once put trade unions in a very strong position in withdrawing labour. The capacity to outsource work has undermined union power and altered the equation completely. It has also eroded the skill base of the economy and the nexus between skill and machinery. This does not

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just apply to workers, but also to suppliers. Unless they price supplies very low, they will lose out to foreign competition. Less and less goes to these stakeholders, and more and more to shareholders. The damage does not stop there. Manufacturing is among the highest added value of any industrial activity. What creates wealth is the difference between the cost of components and raw materials and, say, a finished electric car. The extent to which the whole exceeds the sum of the parts is a measure of wealth created. As such, when America and the UK de-industrialize, so that manufacturing is 11% and 10% of their economies respectively, their economic growth slows while China’s accelerates. Services like drafting wills and cutting hair improve slowly if at all. Unfortunately, out-sourcing is hard to reverse, although attempts are being made to do this. The suppliers that once were there have now dispersed. The foreign suppliers, although competent, are far away and speak a different language and the former intimate relationships are no more. Where there are five tiers of suppliers, which is not uncommon, all five may be in China and replacing these is a major headache, especially where skills have been lost. These five tiers can talk easily to each other but not to you and may now know more about your product than you do! Out-sourcing has built up China and shrunk America. China develops all the skills and all the learning. Taking these back may be difficult and unaffordable. While Chinese labour was once cheapest, it may by now have learned how to be the best and may be irreplaceable. Another way of transferring wealth to shareholders which does great harm is mergers and acquisitions (M&A). This assumes that big companies with cash reserves are somehow “better” than smaller companies and should be allowed to gobble these up and thereafter manage their assets more efficiently. The disappointments which follow M&A activity are legendary, but do not reduce this activity, because shareholders have so much to gain from raids on other companies. When a takeover bid is announced, the share

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price usually jumps because the raider is about to make a higher offer for the shares, not because the merger is wise or well thoughtout. Most shareholders want the bid to succeed because they gain from it in the short-term. This often includes senior executives of the target company, seemingly rescued from the slump in its fortunes! They can exercise their options when the share-price spikes. Before the cultures start clashing in discord at their forced marriage, the shares can be sold again. Among the problems with acquiring companies is that the bureaucracy takes over the small, creative company and totally under-estimates its potential. “Owning” the genius of other people is a doubtful proposition at the best of times. All you get is a temporary stream of income. The founders flush with your money will flee at the first opportunity and start again. If the motive for the merger is to buy up competitors, oligopoly may increase at the cost of diversity of talent. Those who become targets for takeovers include those who have invested in the skills and training of their employees long-term, done most for customers, spent most on R&D, and sought to make a positive social impact. An example of this is the attempt by Kraft-Heinz to take over Unilever. The strategy in takeovers is to cut back on all such long-term investments and give these to shareholders now, as part of the bidding process. They are offered the monies that were earlier invested in people. Once the target is acquired, typically burdened with the debt used to buy it, the cutting back can begin. Kraft-Heinz was famous for such tactics and Cadbury-Schweppes, a much loved Quaker-founded company with generous terms for employees was its target. The growth of private equity companies is another way in which shareholders gain. Private equity companies buy up other companies. Once acquired, they can order them to borrow from banks and give the proceeds to the shareholders in the equity company. When, several years later, the indebted company staggers to its death, the shareholders of the PE company may be well be ahead financially! Only the company itself has died. Too

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often it pays to disorganize, get rid of the people and sell the property. What such companies try to do routinely is turn around the companies acquired and sell them at a profit, but this has to be done fast, in six months to twenty-four, hardly a time-table for investing in people and innovating for the future. It does, however, give enough time to cut costs, make people redundant and strip out assets. Lean and mean is the order of the day. It is very usual for companies announcing redundancies to see their share price rise. Is that because the remaining frightened employees will work better? Hardly. It is because what used to be wages will find their way into shareholders’ pockets. Finally buying back a company’s own shares is a way of making the price spike. This spike will only be temporary, since nothing else has changed, but it gives enough time to make a nice profit at the expense of the less informed. We are not going to halt the advance of shareholders at the expense of stakeholders without making such practices illegal. x Wall Street and Main Street: Very different predicaments One of the extraordinary phenomena of this pandemic is that, even as actual economies slump in what could be a depression of uncertain length, Wall Street makes strong gains for much of the time, although the ride is bumpy. Why would this be? Why will the financial sector survive, whatever happens to the rest of us? Why is there virtually no connection between industry and money? Why does Wall Street lead a separate existence from the ordinary citizens of America? This is because the Street knows that massive financial stimuli are coming down the pike and, the worse things get, the more relief will have to be injected into the economy. There really are very few ways in which they can lose. The more money passing through their hands, the more they will make, and if the money has to come from tax-payers, so be it. Banks will be needed to circulate it in any case. As we discovered in the 2008 Recession, they are the only real

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experts on the errors they themselves made and you have to keep paying them to put things right, just as you once paid them to get things wrong. Without money, nothing else works and they can be relied upon to siphon this off into their own pockets, come what may. There are five financial lobbyists in the USA for every member of the House and Senate. It costs a million dollars or more to defend a seat. Most members have to be in someone’s pay or they would not survive economically. Special interests run the show and have done so for at least half a century. We badly need to even things up. Mergers and acquisitions should require the consent of employees. They know the past record of a company towards its stakeholders Jack Welch of GE had the nickname “Neutron Jack”. This invoked the neutron bomb rumoured to be in preparation at that time. The bomb preserved property and only killed people. That is essentially the function of shareholder-dominated economy. People and their working lives are sacrificed to money abstractions. There are people who work, people who manage those who work, and people who manage the managers and get most of the money. The base of this abstraction ladder has broken off from its top. Wall Street Is no longer in touch with Main Street. It was Jack Welch, once he had retired, who said that “maximizing shareholder wealth was the dumbest idea in the world.” He should know! (9) x All lives matter but what are they for? Yes, black lives matter and it is tragic that we need reminding. This pandemic also tells us that all other life matters too and we have to care in order to prevent it from being extinguished. What kind of society have we created when so many are too indifferent or too untrusting to obey medical instructions? Is it really time we asked “what do we want to do with our lives?” What were we given lives for? A life without purpose or direction is a squandered opportunity. We do not know for certain, but strongly suspect that those who work in a way that saves lives, that keeps all of us safe, that delivers

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genuine value to customers, that helps everyone learn and become the best they can be, and that saves the environment for our children’s children, can build a better world from the selfish chaos of our present one. All those with a stake in our organizations have a right to self-fulfilment. If we pull together, we can make it. Ultimately, wealth creation depends on the quality of relations between people.

CHAPTER 10 THE CASE FOR SERVANT LEADERSHIP

“There’s some talk about what might happen to me from some of our sick white brothers… but it doesn’t matter to me now, because I’ve been to the mountain top! Like everyone I would like to live a long life…Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned with that now. I’ve looked over and seen the Promised Land! I want you to know tonight… that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!... I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” —Martin Luther King: Speech made the night before his assassination

Did King really know that he was soon to die? It was at the very least a probability. However, it mattered less to him because he was the servant of something infinitely more important, laying to rest the monstrous injustice of slavery and all its madness and demons. He once said that if people had not found a cause for which they would die then they had not really lived. It is now more than half a century since he was murdered and the lives for which he fought are still in jeopardy. He was right about one thing: he had found something more important than his own longevity and his foreshortened life was far more significant historically than most of ours. He had found meaning and so must we. What matters most amid a pandemic is that small acts of inconvenience and denial and large visions of human betterment can save lives and we survive-to-serve by carrying these out. The theme of this chapter is that leadership must be dedicated to service. If President Trump was able to do nothing to save

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America from a terrible plague, then he was not fit to lead his nation. We expect our leaders to “abide with me”, a hymn sung as the Titanic sank. Leadership in time of physical and moral sickness is of great importance. We shall address this topic in the sequence which follows. x x x x x x x

When the servant went missing, all else failed; Our greatest leaders have been our servants; The vision of Robert Greenleaf; The crucible in the lives of great leaders; The ambiguity of servant leadership; The dilemmas at the core of all effective leadership; This pandemic gives us the privilege and purpose of serving life. x Two servant leaders riding rapidly to our aid

x When the servant went missing, all else failed The origins of servant leadership have been traced to a story by Hermann Hesse, Journey to the East. (1) The book tells of a mythical pilgrimage undertaken by a timeless religious seminar, which includes both historical and fictional characters, such as Pythagoras, Plato, Don Quixote, Baudelaire and Tristram Shandy, who are together questing after “ultimate truth”. The journey proceeds well until the disappearance of one of its servants, Leo. He was beloved by everyone, incredibly useful and had a rapport with all beings, including animals. It is not until he disappears that members realize his value and the pilgrimage now descends into dissension and bickering. Instead of feeling gratitude, members now complain that various of their possessions vanished with him. These turn up mysteriously and turn out not to be valuable after all. Years later, the narrator, HH, searches high and low for Leo and eventually finds him on a park bench, where they talk of the failed mission. HH later writes to him a letter full of his grievances,

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remorse and entreaties. Leo appears in person and tells HH he must appear before the High Throne of the League to be judged. Leo is the League’s President. It was his League who organized the original journey to the East. The humble servant turned out to be the real leader in disguise and, without his continued service, this distinguished group of people failed miserably as a mission. None save Leo deigned to serve others as they should, and so the travelling notables fell out with one another. x Our greatest leaders turned out to be servants If we look at some of the world’s greatest leaders, these turned out to be servants to a cause considered greater than themselves. There was nothing fake about their humility. Gandhi wrote Experiments in Truth and Love, and he clearly wished these forms of communication to survive him and infuse the democracy of a newly independent India. You tell the truth in all its force and distressing detail, but you do so lovingly, civilly and politely. The British had no right to colonise India. It was arbitrary, brutal and unjust, but he would obey the law in the process of changing it. He would offer no violence to those seeking to imprison him. He would both obey yet protest in the manner of that obedience. Just as servant leadership is a seeming dilemma, so is lovingly telling someone an appalling truth, as are assertion and passivity, protest and obedience and defiance and respect. Gandhi told a court about to sentence him: “I care so deeply about this matter that I am willing to accept the legal penalties, to sit in a prison cell, to sacrifice my freedom, in order to show you how deeply I care. Because when you see the depth of my concern, and how “civil” I am going to be about this, you’re bound to change your mind about me, to abandon your rigid, unjust position, and let me help you see the truth of my cause.” Martin Luther King was similarly convinced and much influenced by Gandhi. He marched as in war only to kneel as in prayer. He dreamed of a brotherhood that never had been and asked, “why not?” He confronted batons and savage dogs and forgave his

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enemies, preaching that suffering was redemptive. He fused the secular with the sacred and gave to the soul of black people a new power, especially on TV news broadcasts. Following Immanuel Kant, he rebelled against unjust laws, but did so in a way that new Civil Rights laws could be created out of the manner of his rebellion. With quite extraordinary discipline, he married passion with selfcomposure. He upheld the values that had made America great and thrust these into the faces of white hatred. He died in the process of giving his people life, as did the saviour he served. The longer Nelson Mandela stayed in prison, isolated, idled, and seemingly disgraced, the more famous, influential and revered he became. Finally, his jailors had to concede that he was likely to become the president of their country, as the dragon’s teeth of apartheid were finally buried and the appalling stories of murder and torture were wrung from the haunted henchmen of the regime. He shamed his enemies with his leadership of humble service and, so long as he lived, hope remained. When thousands across the world drop on one knee in respect for black lives taken then this spirit lives on. However, all these examples are from social and political leadership. Does this have any application at all to the economy? x The vision of Robert Greenleaf Greenleaf’s career was with “Ma Bell”, which later split into some 400 hundred “Baby Bells”. His experience convinced him that the telephone industry was an invaluable public resource and that the prime purpose of his life was to serve that network and thereby society in general. What he experienced we today call “the Net Effect”, in which relationships formed are multiples of the actual membership of any network. If you have one telephone you can make no connections. If you have two, you can make just one connection. If you have 12 phones, you can make 66 connections, and, if you have 100, you can make 4,950 connections.

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Note the exponential growth here, not unlike a virus, so we say things “go viral” on the Internet. In the USA, the price of calls only fell between 1882 and 1965. More and more people could be reached at lower and lower cost with information on numbers provided free-of-charge, so more people would use the network more often. Ma Bell coached her babies and helped them become more effective, so that everyone benefitted. Greenleaf may have asked himself if other types of leadership might share these qualities of service. He was an outspoken critic of leadership as characterized by coercive power and control. He was a recruit to Quakerism in mid-life and argued passionately that powerful leadership could only be legitimized by underlying services given to employees, customers and the public. Great leaders, and there were several of these, were servants first and leaders by the consent of those they had served. Servant leaders developed their followers. These were more mature, healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous and more willing to provide service as a consequence of that leadership. Greenleaf founded the Servant Leadership (SL) movement. (2) The servant leader had the following qualities: he or she listened, empathized, and healed; was fully aware; persuaded and conceptualized; and was a steward of his/her social and physical environment. All of the above describe relationships between people. While in some senses the qualities of leader and servant were very different, even opposed, all leaders were somewhere on the continuum between these values and giving good service was the rationale, legitimacy and foundation of great leadership. You had to be a servant for your leadership to be acclaimed. Leaders serve their followers first and foremost. Greenleaf contrasted the Power Model of Leadership with the Servant Model. The Power Model rejects all the attributes of a servant. The Servant Model accepts all the attributes of leadership. It is inclusive of other values, not exclusive. He taught this at the Harvard Business School and at the Sloan School at MIT.

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It was Kent M. Keith, later President of the Pacific Rim Christian University in Honolulu, who was another leader of the movement. He first pointed out that Servant Leadership is paradoxical. The virtues associated with leadership are highly contrasting with the virtues associated with humble service. He suggested a series of paradoxical commandments. “If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway”; “Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway”; “People favour underdogs but follow top-dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway”; and “People really need help, but may attack if you help them. Help people anyway.” What are we to make of this? Clearly, Keith is not recommending that we help and serve only to get slapped in the face or that this is desirable. He is saying we should persevere in selflessness and service until we learn to serve effectively. Such acts are not easy and we may get temporarily rebuffed. The aim is to have such attempts at service crowned by leadership. He also rejects that SL is about self-sacrifice: “Some people say that Servant Leadership is about giving up one’s self-interest. They think Servant Leadership is about self-sacrifice or self-denial. I disagree. Servant Leadership is not about self-sacrifice or self-denial. It is about self-fulfilment [italics in original]. It is about living closely to your most important sources of meaning.”

In reality there are Net Effects in many places and many industries, especially now that the Internet is in operation and information abounds. The more people you inform, the more they will re-tweet to other people, and the more associations we can make. (We must solve the problem of lies spreading faster than facts.) Communities of knowledge are everywhere and these share values and convictions. There is clearly a Net Effect in public health, in drains, sewers, hospitals, care homes, vaccinations, diagnostic instruments and GP practices which serve millions. Catching the virus and not catching it is a function of how whole nets behave, to which nets you belong, and how well these are equipped. It is equally clear that to serve a

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net is to serve its members and humanity in general, and that your influence can get magnified in transmission. If we improve nutrition, test and treat diabetes better, and reduce obesity and high blood pressure, then most of those who would have otherwise have suffered and died will be saved. The cost savings from better public health could repay us many times over. If people were screened for cancer once a year, how many tumours would be caught in time? If type 2 diabetes was treated not neglected, how much money would be saved? Such questions deserve answers. The savings here could be massive. Servant Leaders are propelled to the top by the excellence of their organizations, networks or social movements. It follows that if you serve your movement-cum-organization and this succeeds hugely, then you can be a servant to that organization, which in turn will elevate you to the heights of leadership and fame. The more faithful and devoted that service becomes the better will it advance you. Give it loyalty and it will be loyal to you. Give it effectiveness and that virtue will be expressed on your behalf. The more you develop your employees and nurture them, the more effective their deployment becomes. Building the Internet took much care and devotion, much of it unpaid by enthusiasts, but by now it is a powerful network with a very wide reach. The servant status of thousands of hackers has given way to billion dollar companies. In short, being a servant and working in obscurity for twenty years like Sam Walton of Wall-Mart can yield to leading the world’s largest retailer. x The crucible in the lives of great leaders The late Warren Bennis, the leadership guru, traced great leadership to a crucible in the lives of those who led. (3) They had faced traumatic challenges and stark dilemmas, and dedicated their lives to resolving these conflicts and to situations resembling them. A crucible has been defined as “a severe trial in which different

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elements combine to create something new” (see illustration below).

To some extent, Bennis was recounting his own experience. He was a Jewish working-class boy fighting fascism as the youngest US officer on the Western Front in World War II and the recipient of a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He confronted those who were killing six million of his own people. To a large extent, he refought that existential battle all his life, as a Professor and counsellor to three Presidents. A passionate advocate of participatory leadership, he was an arch-critic of top-down, unilateral authority of any kind, which he blamed for the Holocaust. He led a university to show he could listen and respond. He looked forward to the day when innovative organization would become democratic, extolling all those with ideas, like the innovation consultancy IDEO. The mark of true leadership for him was the capacity to elicit vital ideas from others, to unleash their creative potential.

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He was a mentor to Bill George, the ex-CEO of Medtronic who was inspired by him. As a young man, Bill lost his mother and his fiancé from illness in one week and we can only imagine how traumatic that must have been. He had promised his father to rise to the top of a major corporation and he was making his way up the hierarchy at Honeywell but found the struggle empty and meaningless. Instead, he offered to act as number 2 to the CEO of a $1.1 billion, mid-sized company called Medtronic, a maker of pace-makers for the heart and defibrillators. He took the job in 1998. On the face of it, this was a demotion. The Honeywell career had assured prospects. Only one quarter of the number of people reported to him in his new job. However, the job enabled him to give extra years of life to tens of thousands. He took over the top job in 2001 and expanded the company sixty times over turning it into a passionate giant, with a growth rate of 18% per annum. With the millions of additional years he created for patients he was redeeming the lives of his mother and his fiancé over and over again, refighting the battles of his youth, gentling a cruel world of arbitrary bereavement. He recounts that, when he took over the company, although a total stranger, he felt “I had come home again”, back to the issue that had shaped his consciousness as a young man. While he had helped 300,000 patients to extra years of life in 2001, by 2011 this had reached 10 million (4). That the company had a mission to save years of people’s lives was forever the main thrust of his leadership. He presented silver and gold medallions which pictured a patient rising from a bed, to all his most outstanding employees and suppliers. Patients, doctors, nurses, partners and relatives testified at conferences to the extra life that these medical instruments had given them and the happiness this had made possible. A scoreboard of the extra years of life the instruments had facilitated was prominently displayed and rose constantly to hundreds of millions. Medtronic was in the business of saving lives and an ever-increasing quality drove that success. The key was to be authentic and follow the way of your

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moral compass, which points True North, the title of his recent book. He now teaches leadership at the Harvard Business School. PBS, the public broadcaster, placed him in the top twenty-five of the most influential leaders in the USA. It is this kind of spur to the higher goal of serving mankind that this pandemic offers all of us. We need to make a difference. The difference between life and death is tantamount, the greatest gift of all. We can work and manage in a way that lifts the nation out of sickness and chronic economic decline. COVID-19 is a crucible for us all. x The Ambiguity of Servant Leadership Servant Leadership is ambiguous. How can you both lead people and serve people? Surely servants are humble while leaders are famous? You cannot have it both ways! Servants are vulnerable while leaders are strong. Servants are responsive, while leaders are assertive. Servants respect rules while leaders break rules where they find these to be mistaken. The answer to this question is that Servant Leaders have all of these aspects. They show service, humility, responsiveness, vulnerability, and lawfulness towards their movement, their people and their cause. They show leadership, earn fame, show strength and are assertive and break rules where needed when confronting opponents. Different values are shown to different audiences. This essential ambiguity is shown in the picture below. (5)

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Is the Servant Leader at the apex of the pyramid above, displayed in deserved prominence, or is that leader at the depth of a deep shaft, humbly serving a cause far greater? Depending on how you look at the picture above, the answer is “both”. The humility comes from how his/her conduct contributes to something more important. The confidence and pride come from the rightness of the cause and its vast significance to the human condition. There is nothing irrational about such leaders’ humility. He or she and their followers are nothing compared with saving lives, conserving animals, cleaning up the planet, stopping pandemics, saving the seas and oceans, and stopping murderous wars. We should fall to one knee before such higher purposes, as many demonstrators do today. Were you to watch the Servant Leaders speaking to their own followers and championing their cause, you would gather that they think of themselves as nothing in comparison to the cause they serve. The environment will last forever hopefully, Al Gore only a few years. There is no false modesty in putting first things first. However, where the environment is saved thanks largely to such efforts, then his star will shine brightly and his fame will be assured.

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You are a servant to what is important and that importance then raises you up to a leadership position. What leadership requires are combinations of values. Being a SERVANT unqualified by any LEADERSHIP makes you servile. Being a LEADER unqualified by SERVICE makes you dominative. Being vulnerable unqualified by strength makes you a victim. Being strong unqualified by vulnerability makes you into a bully. Simply breaking rules, unqualified by a sense of justice, makes you into an anarchist. Simply enforcing rules without questioning their fairness makes you into a tyrant. The Servant Leader weighs values equally before uniting them into a new harmony. His/her leadership is blessed to the extent that it serves followers. Yet Servant Leadership, because of its ambiguous appearance, seems to elude us. In our terror, we seek to be saved by strong leadership, tough laws, arbitrary actions and overwhelming force, as if the virus could be cowed into some kind of submission, vanquished by force rather than re-directed by new information. The real problem is us. x The dilemmas at the core of all effective leadership If we are agreed that great leaders also model how we should serve customers and one another, then all manner of “opposed” values can also form one integrity. The leader does not pretend to know, but poses vital questions so that her/his people can find the answers. S/he has the strategic theory, but employees have the actual data and the second must inform the first. The leader may suggest higher purposes, but do these have significance to followers or not? What information going up enables the best decisions to come down? When the leader speaks does this reflect all that had been heard? How much originality comes from leaders themselves and how much do they elicit from others while wandering about? How diverse should a company become given the struggle to include differing points of view? How much decision making should be reserved for the top and how much delegated to develop future leaders? How can we better centralize the results from

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decentralized operations? It is not enough to test people for COVID19; they must know the result and act appropriately. All differentiated ways of minimizing the virus need to be integrated. If people are prepared to risk for their companies, what should be their reward? Where errors are found and openly admitted, these can be swiftly corrected and improvements put in place. In order for the organization to learn, it must doubt so as to become more certain of what it seeks to discover. The Servant Leader is the Listener-inChief so as to deploy all available talents. In the visionary strategy explained, hundreds see reflections of their own inputs. The Servant Leader treats others as equals, not because they all are (talents vary much), but because different voices thus treated allow merit to emerge. As situations change, the leader must look for new answers and weigh these equally prior to choosing the best. Equality is a process leading to the best results. The leader talks, but also walks and whether the talk is walked matters. The leader defines the conduct wished for, but also models this. The Servant Leader goes easy on direct orders that infantilize followers, but rather shapes the culture which shapes its members. x This pandemic gives us the privilege and purpose of saving lives Whatever work we do and whatever that job entails, we can do it in a way that saves lives and increases healthy living. Indeed, the way we do our jobs may be more important than what that job produces, so that the maker of widgets or garden gnomes serves us not just through these, but in how customers and co-workers are protected in the process of doing and distributing that work. Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the smallest mundane act like wearing a mask, keeping distance, or contributing to a food-bank may save people’s lives. There is nothing like infection to remind us that a society is one. We are more than an aggregate of striving individuals, elbowing each other. We are people who share an important stake in how our work is performed. Looking out for each other can save

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lives by the thousands. Those who care most for each other will predominate. The selfish will strike each other down. Those who spew hate and indifference spew the virus. What each one of us does, or does not do, has become important and cannot be lightly dismissed. A new duty to preserve lives is incumbent upon all of us. There can be no truer service than the one which saves your life and, for that matter, no better leader. We live to serve and serve to live. Whoever does this best deserves to lead us. What we should do is start elevating those who have long warned that peril lies in the path of those who wreck our environment. This disease comes from wild creatures, 3 billion of which perished in recent Australian bush fires. We should not be surprised if nature bites back. The virus probably escaped from a wild animal market in Wuhan. Our own destructiveness has found us out. However, if we are to nurture, rather than wreck, our environment, then such nurturance must be rendered viable and profitable so we can prosper by helping nature and our efforts to do so can be scaled up. Planet, People and Prosperity must be reconciled. In the picture below, we have combined crowd-funding, public entertainment, and an organic substitute for plastic. It would feed sea creatures not choke them, or would return nutrients to the soil. Someone like David Attenborough could make a pitch for what he has long championed and an audience of millions of stakeholders could be investors, employees and customers for a new product. There would be all the excitement and hoopla of massive popular investment by those who care and seek a caring society that heals people rather than tramples them We would discover a higher purpose that would unite the nation and like-minded nations to protect our oceans and conserve their creatures.

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Prime-time TV, Crowd-funded Sale of Shares in a Better Environment

As it happens, Simon Hombersley, the CEO of Xampla, a sciencebased start-up in the Cambridge Phenomenon, has founded a company that can produce the world’s first plant protein material to replace single use plastic. (6) Plastic bags, wrappings, cups, etc., would be replaced by organic materials, as could the tons of microplastics used in cosmetics, lotions, washing liquids, fabric softeners and agricultural and industrial products. Xampla’s alternative substance decomposes naturally, and feeds millions of micro-organisms in oceans, rivers and seas. It can be made from peas and other vegetables. The EU has called for a substitute for micro-plastics, and, unless one is found, we will be dumping the equivalent 10 billion plastic bottles in the ocean in the next twenty years. The discovery has been lauded by the Financial Times, featured by its Sifted organization as being at the forefront of seismic change.

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It provides nothing less than a sustainable, vegetable-based, nonsynthetic transparent wrap. One problem with the seaweed, mentioned earlier, is that it needs chemical cross-linking that limits its capacity to degrade. We could even eat this wrapping, if we saw fit! Here is a planet-saving industry that thousands of us would be glad to serve as investors, customers, employees and suppliers, and which would bring purpose and meaning to lives that had long lacked these. Crowd-funding gives you a cheering section of likeminded enthusiasts which hopefully takes off and empowers those who care the most. Working with nature leads to far greater prosperity than does working against it with toxic pollutants. The purpose of featuring such ideas on mass-media is to get the whole nation engaged with a new kind of economy, to spread and democratise share-holding, and to take proud ownership of lifesustaining enterprises that can change the world. Millions are raised for Children-in-Need by the BBC, but even more could be raised by companies that promise major healing of our ransacked environment and depleted public health, that ask not just for charity, but for converts to a cause that enriches all of us. What matters is not just who invents things, but with what energy and enthusiasm they are taken up. Graphene was invented in the UK and inventors sensibly took out 100 patents, but the Chinese have taken out 1,700 patents on the same material! How come their enthusiasm catches fire and ours do not? Being cleverly creative is not enough. We have to care. How come the Chinese are seventeen time more enthusiastic about patenting graphene than the British inventors themselves? What counts is the “crowd” getting behind innovations. We should not wait for a market to arise, but construct it ourselves and give it a flying start. We should start to count the value of NOT polluting waterways. A major democratic objective is a life-sustaining environment that benefits all citizens and this needs less to be debated than simply acclaimed. We require this to be publicly celebrated on TV, so as to set our nations on a new course, to fire our imaginations and to re-set our moral compasses. The purpose

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of business is to serve—ask any entrepreneur how s/he got excited! What the British economy, among others, needs is a sense of momentum, of changing the world for the better and creating industries that will do this. The entire culture needs to get behind such efforts. x

Two servant leaders riding rapidly to our aid

Two days before this book went to press, while our final proofs were being read, the press broke the stories of two leaders, a husband and wife, who had devised a COVID-19 vaccine, 94% effective when trialled by Pfizer. Their names were Professor Ugur Sahin, his wife Dr. Ozlem Tureci, the Chief Medical Officer of their company BioNtech. They are the first generation children of Turkish guest workers, who had migrated to Germany to feed its booming postwar economic surge. Sahin’s father worked for Ford in Cologne. Tureci’s father was a surgeon. Their parents put them through college and graduate school. In 2008 they founded BioNtech, a start-up, now grown to medium size with roughly 1,300 employees. Their initial speciality was issuing new instructions to cancer cells. The company acted as the research arm for a joint venture with Pfizer, aimed at COVID-19. It was this married couple, reminiscent of Marie and Pierre Curie, discoverers of radio activity, who have pioneered a new way of combatting the virus, using messenger RNA to give infected cells new genetic instructions. That this was remotely possible had been doubted by most researchers in the field, but they stuck by their convictions and a whole new line of inquiry has been opened up. A Nobel Prize may follow in due course. Their whole approach is novel. The company is located in Mainz, a Rhenish town and home of the famous Gutenberg printing press. We may judge for ourselves whether these are servant leaders by the interviews they gave to the London Times, to the Financial Times, the Guardian and to the BBC, over the weekend of November 14th -15th (7). They described the vaccine as “our duty and our passion. The Guardian newspaper marvelled at their modesty. “We

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are not important” Their feat was considerably more significant than their own lives and could save millions of other lives across the globe. They like nothing better than their joint work and even worked on their wedding-day. They take vacations but are in touch with their company work-place every day. They show great admiration for each other. They describe themselves as very different yet complementary. “We synergise our skills.” As early as January 2020 they saw that COVID-19 could become a world pandemic and launched “project light-speed,” with the help of funds from Pfizer and Fosun in Shanghai. 600 of the 1,300 employees at BioNtech were switched to work on a possible vaccine. Many gave up their vacations to meet the emergency, although Europe’s suffering had yet to start. The couple are not driven by competitive science or by the prospect of wealth but by the horror of worst-case scenarios and the sheer extent of human suffering that might occur. As cancer researchers they also feared that cancerous tumours might not receive enough timely attention. They seek cures for both. The “reward” Sahin seeks is not to have to tell patients he can do no more to save their lives. He has had to say that too often to too many. They have studied the human immune system for years and describe contributing what they know as “a moral imperative”. They have both American and Chinese partners. They want West and East to collaborate. They insisted on total independence from Trump’s “operation warp-speed” and his America First policy. No politics or power-seeking were relevant to finding a vaccine. Their company works shifts, night and day and all through week-ends. The scientific method has become their major imperative. They live to serve it and nothing must distract them. Tureci adds, “Our duty is to make sure that our data is presented transparently for everyone to evaluate, to ensure that people can inform themselves about our and other vaccines.” Ozlem reportedly once wanted to be a nun, but she now says, that science is her “high passion”. “I think the most noble thing you can do is use science to serve people.” Dr. Sahin believes that

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“science must do more”. His work in shrinking tumours gives his mission urgency. The experience of others’ suffering “is what drives me on” The search for a vaccine has “taken over their lives” but they regard this as right and proper. “It is a huge responsibility,” adds Dr. Sahin. Work and home merge. “At the end of the day it is our passion. We are not important, it is rather the task we are doing. We have to try everything and just accept that it may not be enough.” “What drives us is the knowledge that there is so much need, mothers, teachers, the old and the isolated, need what we can bring.” Yet to move quickly must never reduce diligence. Safety is essential. There is a very real prospect that their methodology could combat viral infections yet to come. The coming race will be to manufacture what the vaccine can deliver, including refrigeration. They worry that rich countries may try to buy up all the vaccines leaving the developing world unprotected. They are NOT looking to profit personally from their discovery although the value of their company is now $25 billion. “We do not even have a car and a yacht would be highly impractical.” They both bicycle. They live in a modest flat with their teenage daughter. They take working vacations in the Canary Islands. Neither of them drink alcohol. They toasted their recent triumph with Turkish tea, a stimulant for harder work. Much interviewed on TV, they do not have a TV set themselves. Which one of us would watch TV if we would spend that time in saving lives? The moral essence in what they do lies in the cosmopolitan exchange of ideas the world over. “Our company employs people from 60 countries. In science it matters not where you are from but what you are willing to do.” (The CEO of Pfizer is Greek). They love the fact that they are in contact with human immune systems the world over. These can trigger the bodies of millions of people to help themselves and produce their own resistance. Give everyone a chance and they will contribute to their own and others’ survival.

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Out of diversity has come unity. Healing is an essential part of nature and can be elicited by genetic information. The effect on older people has still to be measured. It was not considered ethical to give a placebo to COVID- infected seniors If the world overcomes this pandemic, it will be servant leaders of this stripe who led the way. This seeming disaster has given all businesses a moral purpose they did not have before and sense of duty to all stakeholders creating wealth. Can they grasp this? China has supressed the virus by social means alone and has had to find research subjects in Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Brazil etc. Its “corona-vac”, hailed a trouble free, is already tested on its own travellers and medical staff and is destined for foreign countries first. Could servant leadership of this kind redeem the whole world? Will we elevate to the peak of fame those who save most lives?

CHAPTER 11 MASSIVE FISCAL STIMULI: BUT TO WHAT PURPOSE?

It is clear that governments are going to have to spend trillions to get us out of this mess, and that China looks like emerging from the this crisis well ahead of America, India and Europe. The question is no longer, “should the government interfere in the economy?” It has done so and must continue to do so on a massive scale, incurring sizeable debt. Laissez-faire or doing nothing will leave us deeply depressed and not buying. There is no possibility whatsoever of “returning to normal”. Normal is forever flown. We are going to have to stimulate the economy and expend huge efforts in reconstructing it. The question, then, arises to what ends and for what purposes should we do this? In the years-long absence of strong demand, what is it that democratically elected governments want? They are going to have to choose, or choose not to choose and let the stagnation spread. There is no alternative. Many industries will collapse and go out of business. Of these, which would we wish to assist so that they rise again? Fossil fuels have won subsidies estimated at $59 billion. Do we really wish to restore this so that renewable energies are less powerful in comparison and lag behind in being installed? What we call a “level playing field” is in fact the money-strewed terrain left by lobbyists, so that those with the most money get forever more advantages and tech giants get to shut out their competitors. It is clear that we have to rebuild, but what should be re-built and what allowed to expire un-mourned? Here are our final recommendations:

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x Devolve much of the responsibility for opening up safely to companies; x We do not “follow” the science so much as create it; x Every company of size should make a statement of its social/planetary purposes; x All such companies are responsible for the health and wellness of their stakeholders; x A new social contract of “gain-sharing” between companies and stakeholders is needed; x Companies transferring wealth from stakeholders to shareholders need to be identified and shamed; x Vastly improved infra-structure is part of the answer; x Anticipating green technologies and innovative public health infra-structure; x What is needed is an ecology of mind and of values.

x Devolve much of the responsibility for opening up safely to companies The scene of governments telling hair-dressers that they may trim sideburns but not eyebrows, that friends could meet in the open air but not hug, and that the thirty-first person to arrive at a party must be barred is quite ludicrous. Are we to have anti-hug policing? Companies and schools come in every shape and size. No government, however wise, can possibly know the ins and outs of the challenges they face. Companies above a certain size, say 200 employees, must take responsibility for opening up safely by conducting business while protecting people by tests, tracing, isolation and the vaccination of all staff, customers, suppliers, etc. The institution must take responsibility for results, not endlessly issue confusing directions and blame non-compliance. They must keep records of what they have done and divulge these on request to public authorities. We need “best practice” to emerge. Companies which deceive or hide information will be closed down.

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Those who divulge and lead in extinguishing spikes do us a favour and may receive extra assistance and consumer patronage. The results that companies provide must be widely shared and compared, especially within industries. They are competing with each other but in new ways. What kind of work is the most and least safe? Where are spikes most likely to occur and why? Are all employees willing to be vaccinated? Are they all prepared to take precautions? If not, they are a danger to co-workers and may be less employable. It is vital to grasp that disciplines imposed by a proximate employer are more likely to be trusted and obeyed than disciplines imposed by distant, pontificating, adversarial and overcentralized governments. What we are in search of is Safe Practice, and, when this is discovered, it should be announced, gratitude expressed and consumers or customers invited to reward that company. Saving lives and providing jobs are the most important things companies can do. Quite suddenly, what they produce may become less important than how they produce it. Those companies with the best records of safe opening can consult with those with the poorest. The safest will naturally attract the smartest and most alert employees, whom they should look after carefully and tell immediately of any danger. Employees sent home to isolate should not be punished in any way, or they will hide symptoms. They should return when no longer positive with their value enhanced by probable immunity. The checker-board structure of isolated teams should become the norm in companies. It is teams of intimate persons that are responsible for most innovation and complex problem-solving. Because each team is isolated from all others, infections will be confined to that single team, which accepts responsibility for testing its members at least thrice weekly. In case of any infection the whole team is isolated and continues to confer on Zoom, until ten to fourteen elapse, when it confers face-to-face once more.

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Teams of persons who know each other intimately contribute massively to sanity, personal resilience, ego-strength, self-esteem and abiding relationships of affection, offering protection against the panics of our times. They are antidotes to Internet spitefulness, run-away rumours, poisonous keyboards, cultural cancellation, threatened rape and the abusive adversary relationships of our times. They are tiny oases of calm in a tortured world, a second family of engaged peers. They are responsible for most human improvement, however small and incremental. They inch us forward and occasionally make great leaps. It will take new ideas provided by teams to lift us out of this mess. What we need are accurately reported track-records of success so that we can look carefully at how that company or school achieved these, what means it used, which experiments were successful and why, and what messages and inducements it employed. Companies who succeed will want to tell us how and why. They will attract more customers and eager employees. From all this will emerge recipes for success, the vaccines with fewer side-effects, ways of relating better to all stakeholders, and ways of promoting better health. x We must not “follow” science as much as create it The idea that science will point the way and we have only to follow it is an attractive fiction. Politicians would love to have the prestige and faith inspired by medicine, but any one science is, in any event, not enough. Those trained in health and medicine are going to urge caution. Those trained in business and economics are going to want to resume activities. Choosing which “science” to heed and which to ignore is a policy decision, not a scientific decision. In any case, medicine does not know this virus very well and will change its mind often, as the evidence comes in. This makes it easy to disparage doctors. Dr Fauci doubted somehow that the Chinese were hacking and stealing US vaccine research. They had only to wait a few weeks and it would be published! Doctors the world over were sharing their findings, the Chinese likewise. You become a

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super-power by healing and helping, not by dividing and accusing. The Chinese will probably gain on us even more. This pandemic requires multiple disciplines: medicine, public health, epidemiology, sociology, psychology, communications, economics, business strategy, electronics, political science, forms of modelling, statistics, and big data. These need not only to be present, but to work together as a single system. Even if medicine were to find several reliable vaccines, some 33% of Americans say they would not take it, so deep is the distrust of government, (1) while others raise doubts about it. This is clearly a problem in communications and political science, not in medicine, yet it could reduce the benefits of medicine and doom America to a long recession. Were the vaccine to come from China, Russia or India, who would take it then? Were it to be Western yet pronounced to be only 70% effective and require constant updating like the flu vaccine, what then? Science is supposed to be exact and show us how to kill people many times over with absolute certainty and precision. What kind of half-hearted effort and faint promise is this? The Deep State is out to inject us all. In medicine, there are always “second opinions” and these are widely available, even from doctors like Stella Immanuel, the Houston doctor who supports Trump on the benefits of hydroxychloroquine and also traces serious gynaecological conditions to sexual intercourse with demons. (1) She also holds that the government is working secretly on a vaccine to prevent religious faith. Anecdotal evidence abounds and too few people grasp that real science must doubt every proposition it encounters and have those doubts allayed by testing these. What we have to do is create a science around this particular pandemic and be parts of those experiments ourselves. Yes, we must follow scientific procedures in this search, but we are starting from scratch and early steps may falter and our solutions may be less than most us of hoped for. This is why we need thousands of companies all looking for a better formula and sharing their results

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with us. In the end, people will side with those companies serving us best, and these have every right to ask all those they pay to take precautions, including vaccinations. The question then becomes not “do you trust the government?”, but “do you wish to be gainfully and usefully employed?” If you are young, female, healthy with no predisposing conditions, and if you once tested positive but no longer, and have also been vaccinated just in case, then you are almost certain to survive and there could be very many in that position quite soon. x Every company of size must make a statement of its social/planetary purpose It is time that companies of, say, 200 employees or more came up with better ideas for their existence than just that of making money. We all must have digestive systems to survive, but that does not mean that the end purpose of our lives is their functioning. We must all profit, but to what end and to what purpose? In addition, why, with hundreds of businesses dying around us, should customers and employees want our company in particular to survive? What goal are we serving? Why in the world of the future, should we rather than others survive? If it is to be a struggle, entailing possible loss, what is it about our company that should attract devotion? All surviving companies have the purpose of saving lives and livelihoods. That is part of the present predicament, but what might be done in addition? How much waste has been saved? How much energy is now renewable? What percentage of recycled material is used? What percentage of employees are insured as to their health? How many are trained in the mastery of new skills? What sums are spent on management development? What reduction in carbon footprint is there? How many suppliers are paid, and how quickly? How much produce is sent to the medical frontline? What disparity is there between the wages of men and women, the CEO and the median wage? How many previously laid-off people are now reemployed?

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Part of the point of stating your social purpose is your willingness to be judged by its attainment. If 30 million people are using your pacemakers, what does this add up to in years of life? If you have provided 20,000 college scholarships per year to those who once drove your parcel delivery vans, then what was this worth to the educational system and the nation? They will choose UPS for the rest of their educated lives, but should you as a parent not do the same? The Royal Bank of Scotland has created teams of black employees to suggest how racial injustice might be reduced. What did they suggest? Was it accomplished? Were they satisfied? Unilever swore to increase the number of children reaching their 5th birthday. Did they succeed? How many more made it thanks to their efforts? Wegman’s gives jobs and management careers to single mothers. How many benefitted? What do they have to say? We should judge companies by the values they stand for and the extent to which these are attained. Have Whole Foods’ 1,000 salad bars in schools reduced childhood obesity in the places in which they were located? How much longer will they live as a result? When Oxfam put Unilever first in its environmental impact measure, what criteria did it use? What about a Good Earth-keeping Seal for outstanding companies? (2) Companies may be reluctant to flaunt the good things they do. It suggests these were done to curry favour with the population and raises questions as to motive. It would be better for an independent internet NGO, say the BBC or a comparison site, to draw attention to this in conferring benefits on the companies who are doing this well, and confer a seal on the most successful efforts. It is better to be publicly thanked than boast of your own generosity. However, demanding that companies have a social and planetary purpose may raise public expectations as to what they can do.

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x All such companies are responsible for the health and wellness of employees We saw in Chapter 6 that Johnson and Johnson and other companies made huge savings by keeping their employees healthy, active, freed from anxiety, and resilient. By pushing them up into higher health categories, the company made it less likely that they would fall ill in the first place and lowered health insurance premiums. Healthy people are quite a bore for the medical profession, but a great boon to those in search of a productive workforce. Millions of Americans are currently losing their employment and the health insurance which is attached to it. They are vulnerable at the very moment that they need insurance the most. The whole system assumes the absence of any pandemic which throws millions of people out of work at the same time. This is good for insurance company profits, but very bad for overall health.

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The value of estimating wellness is that many of the predispositions which make COVID-19 fatal can be spotted and eliminated. Millions of people have undiagnosed cases of type 2 diabetes, and millions more have not received proper treatment for this condition even when diagnosed. Millions have high blood-pressure and hypertension, or are obese. Most such conditions are overlooked until a pandemic strikes, and by then it is too late. However, with regular monitoring of health within the company, such conditions can be identified in advance. This puts the affected persons on guard or lifts them out of poor categories of health entirely. A company can actually assess how many of its employees are vulnerable and significantly reduce that number while saving considerably on costs. A wellness programme could become the mark of a purposeful company that cares for its people. Hypertension, diabetes, etc., are susceptible in general to a wide range of other diseases and do not need COVID-19 to trigger them. Insurers know this and fix premiums in accordance with their experience. The contribution of a company’s efforts towards wellness could be recognized by governments. For example, the UK could discover if as many demands were made on the National Health Service by companies with wellness programs. If the demands were significantly lower, then companies might be able to deduct from corporate taxes part of the costs of their programs, leaving both government and private enterprise better off. Those suffering similar conditions could form teams that would monitor one another’s vital signs. The life-spans of those working for different companies could be compared. The habits of monitoring your own health can last a lifetime. x A new social contract of gain-sharing between stakeholders is needed Large parts of the West have a productivity problem and an issue with low wages and low skills. You cannot afford to pay people more if they lack skills. They do not add enough value to make wage rises

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possible and you find yourself stuck in low-wage, low-income traps, since those you pay poorly cannot afford to buy from you. The Singapore government fines companies who pay low wages. They can get this fine back from the government provided it is spent on training the underpaid workers so that they become more valuable. What we need is a new social contract between a company, its stakeholders (employees/suppliers/customers) and its shareholders, one that ceases to take money out of the pockets of working people and slip this to shareholders. The latter have no role in productivity at all. It is an issue among other stakeholders alone and these have been starved of funds. What a company can afford to pay or not afford to pay was once settled by trade union power and the threat of strikes. Companies lost money through raising wages, but lost even more money by workers striking or shutting down the plant. The adversary system arising from such disputes meant that productivity tanked and much manufacturing was lost, and, with it, rare and valuable skills, along with high wages. Service industries and tourism pay far less. We need workers, employees and suppliers to be paid for being smart and a device called gain-sharing is a way of doing this. (3) What are important are innovative ideas successfully implemented with the gains therefrom monitored. Teams of workers, teams of employees, and teams drawn for suppliers and their customer can come up with better ways of doing things, so that output is higher and/or costs are lower. We then calculate the value of this to the company. Let us suppose that 50% of these savings go to stakeholders and 50% goes to the company itself. Out of the share gained by stakeholders, 30% goes to the team members who thought up the innovation and 20% to the employees who had routines disturbed and who had to implement their plan. Out of the 50% going to the company, say - 15% goes into R&D, 15 % into better training and 20% to shareholders.

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Shareholders receive a smaller slice of the pie than they got before, but the pie gains in size, so, in the end, they do better. It is not until stakeholders have been properly equipped, trained and organized into teams that you discover what they can do and the innovations of which they are capable. You then share the gains from this fairly, so that well-paid employees buy more and shareholders keep investing. The aim must be that all stakeholders win and none get to exploit others, or fight over finite amounts of money. You agree in advance to share what your relationships create between them, in proportion to the hours expended by different parties. The company first gains then shares those gains and neither unions nor shareholders shake it down. You create and then divide the gains therefrom in previously agreed proportions. x Companies transferring wealth from stakeholders to shareholders to be identified and shamed It should not be so hard to recognize and make unlawful or unacceptable the means by which companies move money from stakeholders to shareholders. In any takeover, we need two ballots, not one. If shareholders vote to acquire a target company, then employees and suppliers of that company should be able to vote on whether they wish the company they serve to be acquired. After all, they have probably given more to that company than fly-by-night traders and they know it intimately. It is where many friends and colleagues reside; it is how they survive economically and how they share gains. Takeovers may indeed be useful. Someone with more money wants to invest in your operations and that may be welcome. However, the tactics of some raiders are well-known, since they have done this before. When Kraft took over Heinz, 20,000 Heinz jobs were shed and shareholders took these wages. Buying up companies, saddling them with the debt incurred by doing so and then cutting the work-force are repeated tactics and well-known. Surely we owe it to employees to listen to them as to whether they want it done to

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them? When Kraft acquired Cadbury’s, the promise made to a parliamentary committee not to close a plant was given and then promptly broken. That should bar Kraft from ever bidding for another British company. If it breaks an undertaking made to lawmakers, all bets should be off for at least two decades. Similarly, buying back a company’s shares must be accompanied by a record of who gained from this at the expense of shareholders less informed. How many senior executives had share options and exercised these? The typical number of those with optiond in the USA is seven, enough to align top managers with shareholders and against their own employees. However, in the Chinese-owned General Electric Appliances in the USA, 6,000 employees have options and that includes stakeholders in general. We need employee-owned companies to be given a boost. We already know they out-perform those with fewer owners. Companies that squeeze wages and jobs must be identified and their customers and consumers informed of the fact. Government contracts should be withheld from such companies. We should also ask not just whether private equity companies profit, but how long the companies they acquire last. Stripping their assets and selling these off does an economy no favours. We disorganize what was once organized at our peril. Shedding the live people and grabbing the dead assets can destroy wealth overall, while making money for asset strippers. We strip out the saleable things but lose the human relationships in which much knowledge was once stored. x Vastly improved infra-structure is part of the answer One way to get out of a deep depression is to spend on infrastructure. FDR tried some infrastructure and public works projects under the influence of the “multiplier effect” proposed by John Maynard Keynes. If you paid someone to do something many could enjoy, then the wages paid fed into the economy, were spent by workers quickly, lifting the economy. This added to the use of the

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infrastructure itself. It was a modest expenditure with a quite limited impact and the Depression lingered. What really lifted the USA out of the Depression, and Germany also, was arms expenditures. What gives this type of infrastructure spending a special edge is the high tech involved. Preparing to kill is technologically sophisticated and very knowledge-intensive. You sponsor the most innovative weapons and these spin-off into civilian use, so that airliners grow out of troop carriers and acquire jet engines. Indeed, the US owes its National Highway System to the need to move weapons coast to coast, north to south and back, and to evacuate cities under attack. Even the Internet was a defence project, enabling communication in a nuclear crisis. If we want an explanation for America’s super-power status, this has to do with a mixture of high defence expenditure lasting more than a century and expenditure on space, which reached 4% of GDP in 1968 and was a symbolic fight with the Soviet Union. America spends more on defence than the next nine nations combined. The military industrial complex is the reason for US economic dominance, rather than assorted “freedoms”. It is now being challenged by China’s mostly non-lethal infrastructure spending, and, provided we all survive, harnessing natural forces will prove more effective than preparations to destroy. The Belt and Road initiative is budgeted at more than $1 trillion, with 170 nations participating in mostly infrastructure projects, ten times the cost of the Marshall Plan that revived Europe. (4) If we want an explanation of why first Germany, and then Japan, spurted economically after World War II and had their economic miracles, we need look no further than the need to rebuild destroyed infrastructure in up-to-date forms. If we want an explanation of why several emerging nations grow at double digit rates for years on end, this is because they are in their infrastructure-building phase and a new road bridge allowed two million to travel to work in 10% of the time and made adjoining land

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one hundred times more valuable. If we want an explanation as to why so many people in the West saw hope in communism between the wars, it was because the Soviet Union was growing at 3.0% to 5% all through the Great Depression, an infrastructure effort that finally halted Hitler a few years later. However, it is to China we must turn if we really want to appreciate what infrastructure can accomplish. Up to the end of 2019, it added an economy the size of Israel every 25 weeks. It built the equivalent of Europe’s entire housing stock in the last 15 years. Its 2.6 million miles of road represent the largest highway system in the world, 50% larger than the USA. It has the world’s most extensive network of high-speed railway track in the world, covering 12,000 miles, with 580 bullet trains serving 300 cities. Some 850 million of its citizens have been lifted out of poverty, according to the World Bank, a feat without precedent in world history. It graduates 1.3 million students from college every year, four times as many as the USA. In addition, it built two fully equipped hospitals in Wuhan in eleven days, in part because it had the building modules in reserve. During all this time it grew economically between 6% and 10% a year, at least three times faster than the USA and five times faster than the UK. (5) One wonders why so much of the West has not done the same. In part, we have trouble calculating what infrastructure is worth. If a ferry takes twenty minutes to cross a river and a bridge cuts this to twenty seconds what is the size of the benefit? What if 200,000 now cross, whereas 2,000 crossed by ferry before? How much more has the city grown as a result? This is almost impossible to calculate, yet it is immeasurably large because the benefits spread so far and wide. Perhaps one hundred additional businesses decided to locate in the city and one or two of these look like growing to a global scale. Do you cancel an infrequent bus service because too few use it, or treble its frequency so many more will use it? It all depends on how you think of infrastructure. The more it creaks, the fewer will use it and its “expense” will be dismally confirmed.

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The other reason we eschew infrastructure is that governments are the prime mover in this regard and we increasingly dislike government authorities. Anything they provide (except defence and space travel) must be cut to the bone so that these do not compete with the private sector. AMTRAK is applying to Congress to further cut rural services on which it loses money, and American mail services were accused of aiding fraud in the US Presidential election and must have their equipment costs cut! Even so, one of the surest routes out of our current depression is massive infrastructure spending. It is not as if this was not needed already. Thousands of American bridges are in disrepair and will collapse entirely before long. The same applies to roads. Even broadband is in insufficient supply and the current pandemic has found out many Western countries. PPE was scarce, tests unavailable, reagents in short supply, health services under-staffed and under-funded, and nurses and carers insufficient in number and so poorly paid that many had resigned. (6) Minorities are in such a poor state of general health that they suffer disproportionately, as do poor regions like the North of England. Care homes had been neglected, and, when sent infected patients, pushed out of hospitals, could not stop them dying. That we should at least double our spending on public health has grown all too obvious. However, the suspicion that this is quasi-socialist is still rife. We have chronically under-funded health for many years. In a very real sense, this pandemic spreads sickness in the same way that infrastructure spreads health, wealth and opportunity. The pandemic connects people in a bad way just as infrastructure connects them in a good way. What the pandemic has to teach us is that we are all connected for good or ill, and just because credits and debits are hard to count does not mean that they are not still real and would help us recover apace. If we do not fill pot-holes in the roads, tens of thousands of drivers must buy new tires, if not whole new wheels and suspensions. Repairs to the road are vastly cheaper than the sum of garage bills for motorists, yet we persist in

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our folly of underestimating the value of what we can do collectively, as if this were an ideological disgrace. We are all related by infrastructure, and upon the quality of such relations wealth, health and happiness depend. To force “austerity” on shared infrastructure because over-excited bankers messed up is the height of folly. The sinews of nations bleed from a thousand cuts. x Anticipating green technologies and innovative public health infrastructure The present urgency to manufacture and distribute vaccines show what priorities we can fund if we are minded to do so. The nations which supply effective and affordable vaccines first will grow greatly in prestige—three of the leading candidates are Chinese, so the race is on. The six or more years it usually takes to create a vaccine can, it seems, be cut to one, possibly less. Companies can be paid for trying even where they do not succeed. Preparations can be made for manufacturing and distribution before there is anything to manufacture. Testing can overlap rather than be done in sequence, thus saving precious time. Those in the frontline may be willing to test a vaccine in which there is confidence, just to keep themselves safer. If all this can be done in search of a vaccine, why not in search of a greener and better future? What the pandemic has done is force upon us the Chinese model of governmentindustry collaboration. We did this in space and with the H-bomb, but only because outer-space and nuclear war were “out of this world” and there was no markets in these spheres. If government is going to intervene massively to facilitate early vaccines and bail businesses out, why not intervene in other fields also? It is said that we should go with what markets decree and there is much to say for this. Markets are how human needs register. However, markets do not need to be “followed” once they form; they can readily be anticipated. If good vaccines emerge, we can safely anticipate that these will be in great demand. Likewise, we can anticipate that products which make our planet more

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sustainable will also be in great demand and will propel the nations that produce them soonest into world leadership positions. Leadership in electrical vehicles and less polluting aviation already belongs to China. Markets can tell us much about what is likely to happen in the future and we need trajectories that aim for a rendezvous in that future. Take the case of wind and solar energy. In 2005, forecasts were made of the likely development of these industries. Al Gore points out that the forecast for wind energy was exceeded twenty-one times over, while the forecast for solar energy was beaten sixty times over (7). Obviously there is an enthusiasm for such changes which we had not anticipated. No sooner is such energy on offer than it is seized. Millions of us want to make a difference and when costs fall well below those of fossil fuels (which we currently subsidize) this rapid flow will turn into a flood. We know it is going to happen—so why not help it on its way? If we sold our surplus electricity back to the Grid at a good price, our roofs could earn us an income as well as cover our energy costs, and people would eagerly invest in making their homes sustainable. Consider for a moment two different sources of energy. The first necessitates digging or drilling many holes in the earth, leaving huge slag heaps. The substance extracted is highly polluting and inflammatory, and is a finite resource, costing much to distribute and making driving and operating the vehicle dangerous. The fuel took millions of years to form, but may be exhausted in three generations or less. Nothing is left behind, save dry wells and empty holes, carbon deposits, polluted terrain and slag-heaps that slip and bury whole schools. Mining communities die and flip burgers instead at a fraction of the wage. Alternatively, consider a second source of energy where our futures are harnessed to the blowing wind, the shining sun and rising tides, which will last as long as the earth itself, and whose price will fall in perpetuity as the technologies of capture and storage improve. It is

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as free as it is abundant and all we have to pay for are storage, use and appliances. It leaves no trace and does no harm, nourishes the earth and renews itself in perpetuity. Which of these two would you choose? Would you give $59 billion of price supports to the former because they were paying your election expenses? The meanest of intelligences will tell you that we are going to have to move to renewable energies over time. There is no real choice. The crucial question is how soon will it happen and who will lead the way? The economies that help bring this about the soonest will prosper and those that lag behind will not. There are scores of ways in which governments can help this process on its way. Since oil and coal will be dying a slow death in any case, why not use the pandemic to switch over faster than would otherwise be the case? Why not let electric cars use bus and taxi lanes, pay less road tax, park at lower fees, and pay no VAT? Why not multiply the charging points and decree that public vehicles, or those which end up where they began, like buses, taxis or farm vehicles be electric by a given time? Norway has nearly 40% electric car traffic by setting such rules. Denmark now aims to be completely renewable by 2027. Part of the social and planetary purposes of companies must be to reduce their carbon footprints, and they should compete with each other in doing this, with results reported as part of the auditing process. Customers can patronize selectively those who make the most progress in the least time. Mitigating this pandemic is but one of the many crises bearing down upon us. Slowing this pandemic is merely the most proximate crisis, but, while solving this, why not try to solve some of the other crises? We touched on plastic in the last chapter and the possibility of creating a substance from vegetables. Plastic is choking seas and oceans and will, in time, poison the fish that a billion people eat in order to survive. Because plastic is used in PPE, the pandemic is making this crisis worse. We know that plastic-resembling materials can be made out of seaweed. There are extensive operations to do

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this in Indonesia where the plastic problem is most severe. When you drink from a seaweed “glass”, you can eat that as well, but if you do not want to eat it but throw it in the garbage, then it returns to the weeds from which it came and is essentially re-cycled and biodegrades in the process. This is not the place to tout specific solutions, but, rather, to cite the plethora of possibilities. Seaweed or vegetable products in the place of plastics could save the oceans, while there could be yet more sources that are organic not toxic. One major source of toxicity in water is the dyeing of textile materials. 20% of toxic pollutants in water come from this one source. However, colours can also stem from genetic processes, like the bright feathers on some birds, and many micro-organisms have vivid, non-toxic coloration. The prospects of replacing chemical dyes with non-poisonous substitutes, derived from animals or vegetables, look quite promising. However, the real point is for governments to go in search of these earth-saving substitutes, and, when they pump money into their economies, to do so in a way that favours life-enhancing innovations and ecological solutions. In addition, they should not underestimate the enthusiasm of some customers. When Interface Carpets, run by Ray Anderson, produced its Cool Carpets in the form of carpet tiles to augment the places where carpets get worn and pronounced that 90% of its carpets were made from recycled materials, since such carpets were leased and returned, not sold outright, the University of California gave it a contract to carpet all its buildings in perpetuity (8). It is not so much demand that runs an economic eco-system, as innovative supply and the response of customers to this. People may not know that there are organic substitutes to chemical dyes until you offer this to them. That more money will now be spent on public health goes without saying. The richest country in the world has been caught napping and totally unprepared. Free markets cannot deal with pandemics. They strike too fast and too unexpectedly and fail to line pockets.

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We are resigned to praying that, since being prepared is unprofitable, pandemics will not occur, but, when they do, we flounder. 675,000 Americans died in the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-20, including soldiers returning from Europe after the Armistice. Once again, the USA has been caught flat-footed by a system with no adequate defences against mass infection and no community ethos. There are a number of questions about public health we never ask. For example, suppose we reduced air pollution by 20% in an urban centre and we then observed a 35% reduction in respiratory diseases, 20% fewer hospitalizations and 15% fewer deaths. We might conclude from this that not cleaning up the air was unaffordable, that anti-pollution measures paid for themselves twice over or better. It has taken America several months to devise tests, having failed in its first attempt and refused to import these from Germany. Hospitals in Florida were out of ICU beds by midsummer. States had to compete with each other to buy PPE as prices shot up. At this time of writing, November 2020, the USA has the highest death toll in the world, with Brazil following closely behind. Populism fares poorly in such circumstances. x What is needed is an ecology of mind and of values For most of our lives, the two authors have been trying to establish a logic of paradox, what Gregory Bateson called Towards an Ecology of Mind (9). It runs through this entire book (and all of our books on culture) and is prominent in Taoism, explaining why that part of the world has weathered the pandemic so much better than the West. However, we, in the West, steadfastly ignore social quandaries like the “sounds of silence,” and the consumer society eating up its own tail like Uroboros. It never was a question of lives OR livelihoods: it was BOTH, with the proviso that you must first preserve lives quickly and then win back your livelihood. It never was individualism vs. community, but both. You must first serve your community and lockdown, and it will restore your individualism to you when it has

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saved itself. It never was free enterprise OR government, but what governments can do to coach and inspire free enterprise to take responsibility for this crisis. It never was private vs. public health, but what public health can do better for private individuals. It never was about the number of those tested, tracked, traced, vaccinated and quarantined, but how well these five were coordinated into one system. It never was erring OR correcting, nor knowing OR discovering, but how quickly and intelligently the second follows on from the first. Of course, life is better than death, yet the prospect of death makes every lived day and hour more precious. The needs of ill persons should clearly have priority, yet might we do better to keep them well so that they fall ill more rarely? The young and the female should not always follow us, they can lead us too. The disadvantages of a minority can be transformed into advantages. All great leaders are really the servants of the organisations they build. They serve the very movement that lifts them up. Great leaders wrestle with crucibles in their lives, of which this pandemic is one. Clearly our economies urgently need momentum, but they also need a position, some more elevated place at which to aim. The pandemic is but one of the crises in which there are huge opportunities. It was Scott Fitzgerald who feeling himself cracking up inside, wrote these words: “The test of first rate intelligence is to hold two opposed ideas in your mind at the same time and still retain the capacity to function. You must, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” (10) This pandemic threatens our mental health, fills us with a sense of hopelessness, and poses fundamental questions as to the purpose of our existence, so this is the moment to say loudly and clearly what our economies are for, and to explore how we can reset our moral compass so it points to a better world to which all business should

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dedicate itself. The Great Reset, called for by the World Economic Forum, must begin.

NOTES

Introduction 1 See The Great Reset Initiative: weforum. org 2 Those of Johns Hopkins University are very similar 3 See Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2013) 4 Quoted by Karl Schwab in statement on the Great Reset

Chapter 1 1 Dominic Cummings’ visit to a beauty spot to “test his eyesight” with his family in tow. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2020/may/25/do minic-cummings-says-he-drove-to-barnard-castle-to-test-hiseyesight-video 2 See “coronavirus age-groups at risk” worldometers: info 3 Bauer, CUSTOMER INFORMATION I COVID-19 VIRUS ACTION I 31st March 2020 4 Emerging COVID-19 success story. Germany strong enabling… ourworldindata.org 30/6/20 5 How the coronavirus has revealed the strength of Germany’s model New Statesman 1/7/20 6 Coronavirus round-up. Office of National Statistics ons.gov.uk 7 A good history was on PBS, “The Virus: What went wrong?” Friday/Saturday 7-8/7/20 8 Why have there been so many outbreaks in meatpackers? BBC 23/6/20 PBS 21/6/20. 9 Clemens Tonnies: Latest news and stories. OneSub 10 Exploitative Conditions: Germany to reform meat industry The Guardian 22/5/20

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11 Jack and Suzy Welch The Real Life MBA New York: Harpers, 2006 12 Flavia Medrut, 11 Margaret Mead Quotes goalcast.com 9/4/18 13 Drive: Daniel Pink (London: Canongate Books, 2010)

Chapter 2 1. The relative expenditures are from the WHO; for other contrasts see Worldometer 2. The Economist August 8-14th 2020 3. Published by McGraw-Hill in the USA and Nicholas Brealey in the UK 4. Available from thtconsulting.com and from Achillesstraat 89 1076 PX Amsterdam 5. Brilliantly presented by Martin Jacques in When China Rules the World (Penguin, 2012) 6. Gregory Bateson pointed this out in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago Univ. Press, 2000) 7. Claude Levi-Strauss coined the metaphor; see Edmund Leach, Fontana modern Masters, 1996 8. For more detail, see the introduction to Nine Cultures of Capitalism by Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars (Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2017) 9. This was originally taught to the Japanese by W. Edwards Deming, an American and has spread through East Asia. There is a Deming Prize in Japan for continual improvement to this day. 10. See Servant Leadership across Cultures by Fons Trompenaars and Ed Voerman (Oxford: Infinite Press, 2009) 11.I received a framed picture of this from Chinese friends.

Chapter 3 1 This source has been criticised but it remains very close to WHO statistics and Johns Hopkins University scores 2 See Elements of Psychology David Krech et al. (4th edition, Alfred Knopf, 1982) pp 284-287 3 Riding the Waves of Culture op.cit.

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4. TED Talk by Graham Allison 5 Geert Hofstede, The six-dimensional model of national cultures, geert-hofsted.com 6 Niall Ferguson coined the term “Chimerica”, for the symbiotic relationship between China and the US 7 The Atlantic Monthly COVID tracking project 8 COVID-19 and ethnic minorities. The British Medical Journal, bmj.com 9 Alibaba: The House that Jack Built. Duncan Clark (New York: Harper-Collins, 2016) 10 The Haier Model, Yangfeng Cao (London: LID Publishing Ltd., 2018); see also, Humanocracy, Gary Hamel, (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2020)

Chapter 4 1 NASA is entirely formed by project groups; see The Titans of Saturn by C. Hampden-Turner (London: Cyan Press, 2003) 2. The Design of Inquiring Systems is by C. West Churchman (New York; Basic Books 1971) 3 COVID-19 “Radical technologies appear to keep offices safe” Financial Times 3/7/20 4 Ibid. 5 Gregory Bateson extols the conversation above all other communications; see Steps to an Ecology of Mind, op. cit. 6 See Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (New York: Harper, 1990) 7 See “Stages of small group development” by Bruce Tuckman and M.A.C. Jensen in Group and Organizational studies vol. 2 no. 4, 1977 8 Meredith Belbin, Management Teams (London: ButterworthHeinemann 1996). He is very good at detailing all the roles that must be played to turn a creative idea into an innovation. 9 See In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman (New York; Harper and Row, 1982)

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10 Royal Foote had every level in the hierarchy interview the level below, thus filling Anheuser-Busch with information. The California plant moved from worst to best in the whole nation. Wright Institute, Berkeley, working paper, 1980 11 For a more thorough critique of the Hawthorne Experiment see Radical Man by Charles Hampden-Turner (Anchor Doubleday, 1972) 12 See Interpersonal Competence and Organizational Effectiveness by Chris Argyris (Homewood Ill: 1962) 13 See https://www.forbes.com/sites/tendayiviki/2017/07/01/asxerox-parc-turns-forty-seven-the-lesson-learned-is-thatbusiness-models-matter/#5c0336d97548 14 See The Haier Model Yanfeng Cao, op. cit.

Chapter 5 1 See Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (London: Anthem Press, 2015) 2 The Guardian summarizes the Boohoo incident; see Nils Pratley 28/7/20 3 Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper, 1954) 4 CIPD Employee Engagement & Motivation. Fact Sheet 19th December 2019 5 COVID-19 and Ethnic Minorities, op. cit. 6 Higher purpose is much cited in Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2013) 7 Johnson & Johnson Health Affairs; healthaffairs.org 8 See Unilever website

Chapter 6 1 Alcohol: Facts and Statistics, National Institute on Alcohol, Feb 4 2020; niaaa.nih.gov

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Notes

2 Gregory Bateson, “Towards a theory of alcoholism” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind op. cit. 3 The Real life MBA, op. cit. 4 Coronavirus Business Impact: Evolving Perspective: McKinsey. See also, Beyond the Coronavirus: The Next Normal 5 To see this programme self-described, visit Workplace Wellness: Johnson & Johnson’s Healthiest… jnj.com 6 To see this programme independently evaluated, see “What’s the hard return on workplace wellness?” hbr.org. See also Case Study: J&J, we-forum.org 7 J&J’s contributions are described on its website. 8 Statistics and Facts: Global Wellness, globalwellnessinstitute.com 9 The World Health Organization has comparisons for most nations in the world. 10 John Elkington, Cannibals with Forks; The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business (Oxford: Capstone, 1997) 11 Chris Argyris “Skilled Incompetence” Harvard Business Review, September-October 1986 12 W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000)

Chapter 7 1 “COVID-19 crisis could set women back a decade” Guardian 29/5/20 2 COVID-19 Mortality rates by age and gender: rgare.com 3 See scholarly articles on Unilever’s social responsibility programs on the Internet 4 COVID response. News. Unilever global corporation website 5 Deborah Tannen, You Just don’t Understand (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990) 6 Available from thtconsulting.com op. cit. 7 Anita Roddick, Body and Soul (London: Ebury Press, 1991) 8 Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Supercorp (London: Profile Books, 2009) 9 Announced on regular intervals on CNN

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Chapter 8 1 See Raj Bhopal, “Delaying the Public Health England Report on COVID-19” 2 A description of what Tata did is found in Conscious Capitalism op. cit. John Mackey and Raj Sisodia (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2013) 3 See Ray C. Anderson, Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist (New York. St Martins-Griffin, 2009) 4 ‘Gainsharing’; also known as ‘gain sharing’ and ‘profit sharing’. The first of these schemes was the Scanlon Plan established by union leader Joseph Scanlon during World War II. It was enthusiastically adopted by the Japanese manufacturing but remained marginal in the USA. See The Scanlon Plan by Frederick C. Lesieur (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1958)

Chapter 9 1 TH-T data base in Amsterdam, op. cit. 2 The Case against Corporate Short-termism, McKinsey survey, mckinsey.com 3 Millennials poorer than previous generation, Financial Times, 23/2/18 4 For a good discussion of GEC’s decline, see Firm Commitment by Colin Mayer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 5 New York: Harper & Row, 1982 6 New York: Harper Business, 2001 7 Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2013 8 This list of recent developments is taken from The Power of And by R. Edward Freeman, Kirsten E. Martin, and Bidhan L Parmar (Columbia University Press, 2020) 9 See “Jack Welch the GE titan who embodied the flaws in modern capitalism”, Guardian 8/3/20. GE has recently been reduced to 1/5th of its former worth.

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Chapter 10 1 Journey to the East (London: Peter Owen, 2002) 2 Servant Leadership: A Journey into the nature of legitimate power (25th Anniversary Edition) (New York: Paulist Press, 2002) 3 On Becoming a Leader (Reading: Mass, 1989) 4 Discover your True North by Bill George and David Gergen (John Wiley and Sons, 2015) 5 Servant Leadership across Cultures by Fons Trompenaars and Ed. Voerman (Oxford: Infinite Ideas Press, 2009) 6 See Xampla-natural alternatives to single use plastics; www xampla.com

Chapter 11 1. CNN News report 14/8/20 2. More details in Conscious Capitalism op. cit. 3. For an excellent review of gain-sharing, see Edward E. Lawler High Involvement Management (San Francisco Jossey-Bass, 1986) 4. “Trump’s Trade War Gives new Life to China’s Belt and Road”, bloomberg.com 5. “30 Chinese infrastructure projects that are reshaping the world”, businessinsider.com, 20/6/2016 6. US infrastructure gap, McKinsey report, mckinsey.com 7. Al Gore TED Talk, “The case for optimism on climate change” 8. Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist, op. cit. 9. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, op. cit. 10. The Crack-up (New York: New Directions Book, 1945)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Ray C. Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Bennis, Warren and Bert Nanus. Leaders: the strategies for taking charge. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Bogle, John C. Enough: True Measures of Money Business and Life. Hoboken: NJ John Wiley. Cao, Feng. The Haier Model. London: LID Publishing, 2018. Christensen, Clayton. The Innovator’s Dilemma. Boston: Harvard Business School Press,1997. Clark, Duncan. Alibaba: The House that Jack Built. New York: Harper Collins, 2016. Collins, James C. From Good to Great. New York: Harper Business, 2001. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper, 1990. Deming, W. Edwards. Out of Crisis. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. De Ronde, Mark. There is an I in the Team. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2012. Elkington, John. Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line. Oxford: Capstone, 1999 Freeman, R. Edward, Kirsten E. Martin and Bidhan L Parmar. The Power of And. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. George, Bill. Discover your True North. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2015. Gore, Al. Our Choice: A plan to solve the Climate Crisis. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.

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Greenleaf, Robert K. The Servant as Leader. Pamphlet available from Greenleaf Centre, Indianapolis, 1995. Hamel, Gary. Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People inside them. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2020. Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars. Nine Visions of Capitalism. Oxford: Infinite Ideas Press, 2015. Hagel, John III and Arthur G Armstrong. Net Gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997. Hesse, Hermann. Journey to the East. London: Peter Owen, 1994 Jacobs, Michael T. Short-term America. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1991. Kanter, Rosabeth, Moss. Supercorp. London: Profile books, 2009. King, Martin Luther. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in Why we Cannot Wait. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. Hofstede Geert. Cultures’ Consequences. Beverly Hills, Sage, 1980. Lawler, Ed. High Involvement Management. San Francisco: JosseyBass, 1986. Mackey, John and Raj Sisodia. Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit in Capitalism. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2013. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 1954. Mayer, Colin. Firm Commitment: Why the corporation is failing us. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pauchant, Thierry & Associates. In Search of Meaning. San Francisco, Jossey Bass, 1995. Peters, Tom and Robert Waterman. In Search of Excellence. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Roddick, Anita. Body and Soul. London: Ebury Press, 1991. Romig, Dennis A. Breakthrough Teamwork. London, Irwin, 1996. Roethlisberger, F and William Dixon. Management and the Worker. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939.

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Senge, Peter. The Necessary Revolution. London: Nicholas Brealey, 2008. Tannen, Deborah. You Just don’t Understand. New York: Random House, 1990. Trompenaars, Fons and Ed Voerman. Servant Leadership across Cultures. Oxford: Infinite Ideas Press, 2009. Trompenaars, Fons and Charles Hampden-Turner. Riding the Waves of Culture. Chicago: McGraw Hill, 2021. Zohar, Danah. The Quantum Leader. New York: Prometheus Books, 2016.

INDEX

Achilles Heel of West is Individualism 61-64 Addictions as substitutes for failed relationships, 130-132 Airbnb, 86-87 Alibaba, 86-89 Alipay, 87 Allison, Graham 72-73 Argyris, Chris, 141 Army medics flown into, Wuhan 72 AT&T, 207 Bateson, Gregory, 243-244 Bauer group 16 Belgium scores 33-52 Belt and Road initiative 12 and long-termism, 73 Bennis, Warren, 210-211 BioNtech, 219-2020 Brazil scores 33-54 Bridge built in 4 hours, 72 “Bubbles” 22 Build Back Better, 113-115 Canada scores 35-52 Challenges v. Skills, 99 China 11-12 and Chinese civilization 3132 the real threat, not Communism 31 and Chinese “tyranny” 47-48 and Self-discipline 79

tributes paid to Ancient China 73 Companies, different from each other 819, 21 socially embedded in China, 85-86 taking responsibility for stakeholders 27 Confucius and Taoism 31 Collins, James C. 190 Conscious Capitalism 10, 191 Continual Improvement, 143 Courage and Caution optimized 25-26 COVID-!9, 5, 8. 16, and Alibaba, 86-89 and age 14-17 exponential rise in numbers, 80-83 and Haier, 93 as revealing social injustice, 120-122 has exposed racism and injustice, 167 highest pre-existing conditions among minorities, 168 killed by ultra-violet light 9697 managing health risks 51-52 minorities suffer more 82-83

Culture, Crisis and COVID-19: The Great Reset pre-existing conditions, 25, 168, 232 stamping out spikes of infection, 125 surveys of nations 31-52 values of nations 30 -52 wealth generation 50 Crucible in Lives of Leaders, 210-211 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 98-99 Culture, definition of 2 Deaths per million compared 59-60 China three only 60 Taiwan 0.4 60 East Asia much lower than West 60 Deming, W Edwards, 143 Diabetes watch, 178 see predisposing conditions, type 2, 232 Disadvantaged, why helping them pays off, 175 Disasters, corporate reaction to, 164-166 Donne, John, “No man is an island...” 127 Ecology of Mind and values 235236 Economist 31, 53 Education as a nutrient for whole markets 145-146 Employers responsible for health 28 Engagement in work, 120 Error correcting system, 143 Exponential rise in COVID case numbers 80-83 Fauci, Anthony 9

257

Females 7, 11-12 could protect older men 148 COVID imposes greater burdens, 148 efforts by Unilever to emancipate women, 151153 female prime ministers 11 more resistant the virus, 149 shopping as a powerful lever, 149-150 violence against 147 women have greater interest in relationships, 157-158 women have more interest in particular people 159160 women more outer-directed 161-162 Firms of Endearment, 192-194 Fiscal stimuli, 224-242 Flow experience, 99 Gain-sharing, 179-180, 232-233 Gandhi, Mahatma 11, 208 George, Bill, 2012-213 Germany 2, 15-16, fiscal stimulus 16 meat packers 19 scores on COVID-19 33-55 scores on Cultural Dimensions 70-72, 76 scores of Deaths per million, 60 Good to Great, 190 Green technologies, 239-240 Greenleaf, Robert, 207-208 Group, see Team Guilt culture see Shame culture Haier, 89,90-93,95-97

258 Hawthorne Experiment. 104, 122 Health, see Wellness Hesse, Hermann, 205 Higher purposes, see Superordinate goals Hospitals built in nine days 7274 IMF International Monetary Fund 1-2 IKEA 10 In Search of Excellence, 190 Individualism as Achilles Heel 63-64 and concern for Community 38 two varieties of 38 Industrial Policy, 115 Infrastructure, 235-238 Inner-direction vs. Outerdirection and “fighting virus” 73-75 Investing money vs. Extracting it 189-191 Johnson & Johnson 19 its Wellness Program, 134139, 231 responses to the pandemic, 139 Journey to the East, 205 Kanter, Rosabeth, M., 165-167 King, Martin Luther, 175. 204 Labour as the source of all value 16 Leadership consultative 49 dedicated to service, 204210 eliciting the best from people 49

Index respect for 45-47 turning personal dilemmas in to movements, 175 Learning from others 55-56 Life as organization, 126-127 Long-term-short-term 57-58 advantages of long-termism 72-74 Losing face, 70 Ma, Jack, 86-89 Mackey, John and Raj Sisodia, 191 Mandela, Nelson 11-12, 175, 207 Marshall Plan 1,12 Martial arts, Asian 74 McKinsey, 7 its estimates of the importance of health to the economy, 133 Mask-wearing as political statement, 65 Maslow’s Need Hierarchy, 117119 Mead, Margaret 5,23 Meaning in our lives, 204-206, 209 Meat packing plants 14 Medtronic, 213-214 MERS 55 Minorities suffer more from COVID-19 82-83 NHS, grossly under-funded, 84 Net-effect, 207-209 Netherlands scores 33-52 Novo Nordisk, 178 One hundred best companies to work for, 180

Culture, Crisis and COVID-19: The Great Reset Pandemic, moves faster than markets 68 Personal protection equipment PPE, 43 Peters, Tom, 190 PLAN, DO, CHECK, ACT, 143 Polls and polling in China, 76 Predisposing conditions, 16, 178, 232 Public Health, an indivisible whole 80-85 and socialism, 80 US cuts back, 80-82 Public-private alliance, 6, 224-7 Purpose of company 11, see also Superordinate goals Quakers created 40 times more wealth, 175 Recovery from COVID-19, highest among minorities, 178-177 Rendenheyi, 89-90 Results, judging by 1 Riding the Waves of Culture 31 R-number 19 Roddick, Anita, 162-164 Rules and exceptions 36-52 following, 35 SAARS 55, and MERS, 74, 176 Sahin, Ugur, 220-222 Safety needs, 117-119 Science, create new science, 227-228 follow the science 66 generates prestige 41-42 Self-actualization, 117-119 Self-indulgence vs. Selfdiscipline in national cultures, 77-79

259

Sequence in which wealth is created, 187-188 Servant Leadership 10, 49-50, 204-228 ambiguity of, 213-214 Shame culture 69-71 Sisodia, Raj see John Mackey Short-termism, see Long-term Skill levels and mental & physical health, 141 Singapore, scores 35-44 and high trust in authorities. 76 EFCS, 188 Singles Day, 81 Social distance 53-54 South Korea 7,15, 18-19 cases under control 59 night clubs, 26 scores, 35-52 Specific vs. diffuse cultures, 7072 Spike in infections, 52 Stakeholders, 9-14 Stakeholders vs. Shareholders, 180-201, 234-235 business begins with stakeholders, 181 historic anomaly? 185-186 nations preferring stakeholders, 181 Natural Justice, 186-187 sequence in which wealth is created, 187-188 STORMING, NORMING, PERFORMING, 101 Superordinate goals, 122-124, 180, 192-194, companies should state, 229

260 and the pandemic 216-217 and Safe Practice, 226 Switzerland, scores 35-52 Synchronization of test, track, trace 24 Taoism, 89, see also Yin-Yang TATA’s response to attack on Palace Hotel Teachers get middle class incomes in East Asia, 146 Teams, 21-23, 91-101 antidote to the Internet, 106-107 best communication of all, 94, 97-99 checker-board structure, 226 crucial to innovation, 101102 definition of, 91-93 discover what changes would be profitable, 179 emerging leaders, 105-106 face-to-face find solutions, 169-170 gain-sharing and teams, 179180 growing over time, 100-102 Hawthorne Experiment, 104 high context culture 103-104 hot-groups and happiness, 98-99 inquiring systems, 93-94 look out for their members, 178 microcosms of the problem, 170 monitoring COVID 94-97 work-out groups, 94-95

Index Test, track, trace and isolate 25, 50, Testing before opening up 81 Three Searches for Excellence, 190-192 Traffic accident, 65 Traffic signals, 33, 85 Trompenaars Hampden-Turner 31 Trust in government and authorities, 75-76 Tureci, Ozlem, 220-222 Uber 86-87 Unilever, 10-11 United Kingdom, scores 33-44 Universalism 33-34 as compared to particularism 65-66 UPS United Parcel Service 10 USA, scores 34-52, 57-58, 65-66, 70-72, 77-79 cuts back on Public Health 80-83 lack of trauma in its history, 79 Vaccinations, should be key to job search, 177 Values, combined in making choices, 49-50 both absolute and relative 33 and time intervals, 85 as differences not things, 32 as present participles as “rocks of righteousness” 84-86 as words 33-34 gain from being contrasted, 118

Culture, Crisis and COVID-19: The Great Reset virtue lies between, 33-34 Vietnam, long-termism 7, 57-58, 72-4 Wall street banks, gain from pandemic 64 Main Street vs. Wall Street, 201-2 War Veterans treatment for those who fight pandemic, 173-174 Welch, Jack 22, 202 Wellness Program 7, 128-136

261

profitability if wellness, 139142, 179 wellness external to Johnson and Johnson, 139-140 Whole Foods, 191, 230 Women, see female World Economic Forum 2 Wuhan Army medics flown in 72 Xiavers, 88 Yin-Yang, 84-86 Zhang, Ruimin, 89-93