America: Excelling at Mediocrity

Freitag, 28. Oktober 2011, 20:26:46 | Umair Haque Blog HBR

Recently, I’ve been around the world and then back to the US of A. And what strikes me is how fast many parts of the globe are forging ahead — and how decrepit coming home can feel in comparison (JFK airport, I’m looking at you). It’s got me wondering: what is America still the best at?

Consider this thought experiment. If you were really, really, really rich — say, not just part of the routinely opulent 1%, but a card-carrying member of the eye-poppingly decadent .01% — what part of your life would be American? If you had the money, I’d bet you’d drive a German car, wear British shoes and an Italian suit, keep your savings in a Swiss bank, vacation in Koh Samui with shopping expeditions to Cannes, fly Emirates, develop a palate for South African wine, hire a French-trained chef, buy a few dozen Indian and Chinese companies, and pay Dubai-style taxes.

Were to you have the untrammeled economic freedom to, I’d bet you’d run screaming from big, fat, wheezing American business as usual, and its coterie of lackluster, slightly bizarre, and occasionally grody “innovations”: spray cheese, ATM fees, designer diapers, disposable lowest-common-denominator junk made by prison labor, Muzak-filled big-box stores, five thousand channels and nothing on but endless reruns of Toddlers in Tiaras — not to mention toxic mega-debt, oxymoronic “healthcare,” decrepit roads, and once-proud cities now crumbling into ruins. Sure, you’d probably still choose to use Google on your iPhone to surf the web — but that’s about far as it’d go.

How did we get here?

Umair Haque: The New Capitalist Manifesto

an absolutely esssential book (hfk)

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed that capitalism had emerged triumphant after the long drawn out Cold War. But, over two decades later, more questions are being asked about the nature of capitalism than ever before.

Among those leading the debate about the best type of capitalism needed for the twenty-first century is Umair Haque.

Haque is a London-based consultant. He is director of Havas Media Lab and founder of Bubblegeneration, a consulting firm which began life in 2006.

Haque’s initial training was in neuroscience. He studied at McGill University in Canada. He went on to do an MBA at London Business School and then began a PhD at Oxford University in 2004.

America’s Lost Decade(s)

Umair Haque

10:49 AM Friday August 20, 2010  

Is America headed for a lost decade? And is that why I relentlessly propose that the days of industrial age business as usual are numbered? Yes — and no. In this short video post, here’s what I advance: America just had a lost decade (I’ve also compiled four troubling charts, available here, that lend credence to my conjecture).

In many ways, what we’re experiencing is less a great recession that started in 2008, and more a Great Stagnation, that began a decade or more before that. The real crisis isn’t about bankers, bonuses, and bailouts — it’s about an economy that’s geared to create thin value; value that’s artificial, meaningless, and often, actually worth little, in human terms. So the real challenge isn’t about eking out another penny of profit by laying off more another hundred people, offshoring with an even greater ferocity, crushing your fiercest rival more savagely, or churning out more lowest-common-denominator “product.” It’s about learning to create thicker value: authentic value, that endures, resonates, and multiplies. Unless, of course, you think you can survive another lost decade.

Watch the Video:
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/08/americas_lost_decade.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29