Photo by fdecomite
In his book The Post-American World Fareed Zakaria argues that there have been ‘three tectonic power shifts over the last five hundred years’. Each of these shifts profoundly reshaped culture and economy on a global scale.
According to Zakaria the first shift was the rise of the Western World, starting in the fifteenth century. The second was the rise of the United States as an industrial world power. And the third shift – the one we are going through now – could be called ‘the rise of the rest’.
If I were an entrepreneur today in India, Brazil or China I would probably not identify with the term ‘rest of the world’. But my question is: How will we cope with the new reality that the economic logic of the Western world is just one of many world-views?
As the co-founder of www.shapeshifters.net – a crosscultural resource exchange for professional creatives – I spent almost two years travelling the world in order to get to know our future users personally. I wanted to have more than just ‘digital relationships’ with the people who joined our network. I wanted to learn what it means to run an architect’s studio with 30 employees in Johannesburg. I wanted to see through the eyes of a graphic designer who operates out of a rural garage in New Zealand. Or just simply hear for myself that for some Chinese it is incomprehensible how one can have a decent conversation with just 26 letters in the alphabet! It made me smile – and think.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
My first lesson was simple. Getting information about a far away business is one thing, but understanding a business as part of a different culture is a totally different animal.
My belief system was so different from the one of a Brazilian music label owner that it took more than an interpreter for us to understand each other. Even though we had been using the same expressions, the meaning of such words as ‘money’, ‘strategy’, ‘plan’ and ‘time’ had got nothing to do with each other. I´m not saying that one culture is better than the other. I´m just stating that we need to understand our own framework of understanding in order to build and sustain trustful business relationships within the global creative economy. This is what our work at Shapeshifters is all about.
The tricky thing about world-views is that we can´t see them. But we experience the consequences when our own world-views collide with others. Thus my second lesson being on the road to cross-cultural understanding was a bit harder:
I needed to give up my belief that Westeners are perceived as the ‘good guys’, bringing in smart solutions to the so-called ’emerging markets’.
Over the centuries Europe did not only export products and services, but also imposed its own logic onto other cultures. And not always for the mutual benefit – as we know. The ‘rest of the world’ is totally aware of this. But I´m not so sure whether we in the Western industrialized world are as well.
Just the simple fact that Europe is prominently placed in the very center of most world maps has had a long-lasting impact on the mental maps of those people located on the rim of the very same map. Almost every Kiwi whom we met along our Shapeshifters World Seeding Tour claimed that New Zealand as a market is ‘really far away’. But far away from what? The Zero Meridian? I guess we need new world maps, too. Who will create them?
Sure, we have social networks that transcend time and space. But there are other global grids and co-ordinates, too. Older ones. More persistent ones.
The Rise of Diversity
Recently I talked to a successful Indian interior designer. Anjalee has offices in New Delhi and Tokyo. She told me over the phone that so many of her Indian clients want to have office designs from her that look exactly like offices they have seen in London. The interesting thing is that she refuses to accept these jobs.
These days she spends plenty time reminding her customers that India has a precious design tradition of its own – its own values, its own shapes, its own materials. There is a cultural richness that goes far beyond the glass-and-steel office cubes that we all know from movie screens and design magazines.
This change of perception alone is not yet a tectonic power shift but definitely a sign that things are changing in this world. The rise of the rest will no longer allow one culture to teach another culture what it ‘really’ means to run a sucessful busines or what it has to look like. There is not just one truth anymore. There are many. This makes things more complicated, but it will definitely make us all richer if we talk business on an even playing field. Tolerance of ambiguity is definitely a key competence for the times we are in.
Now What?
Try to give up the belief that your own culture is ‘normal’. This is not just another new business skill, this is a change of attitude. There is an abundance of possibilities – but to realise them we will need to step outside our own cultural comfort zones.
The biggest shift is the one in your mind. It can create a whole new world.
What Do You Think?
Do you agree that Westerners are too quick to assume that they are the ‘leaders’ of the creative economy?
Have you ever had your own assumptions challenged by an encounter with another culture? What did you learn from it?
Do you think collaboration on a level playing field is the way forward for creative entrepreneurs across the globe?
About the Author: Eric Poettschacher is the co-founder of Shapeshifters – a crosscultural resource exchange for professional creatives worldwide.
Lots of creative and innovative things come from the West and there is no dispute about that. Even people from India perform better when they are in a western country simply because there are very few hurdles, the environment is quite conducive for new thought, and facilities that are luxury in India are taken for granted in the Western world: electricity, conveyance, connectivity, infrastructure and communications for instance.
Other than that there are lots of innovations and original thoughts that have come from “the rest of the world”. Take for instance the decimal system. People use it for making fun but even zero came from India :-). I think more awareness is required for the world to become more accepting and ready to work together.
I most certainly agree “that Westerners are too quick to assume that they are the ‘leaders’ of the creative economy.” AAMOF, it seems that Westerners pretty much think we have the inside track on just about everything “important”. Of course we are not alone in this type of delusion.
I see this form of parochialism as a barrier not just to the “creative economy” but to relations from international on through the spectrum.
To the extent that my ‘superiority’ remains an unexamined foundational principle, I am incapable of benefit from or assistance to – in ANY interaction.
Thanks for a great article Eric. Did you see this piece in the latest Fast Company?
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/133/as-the-world-turns.html
I’d be interested to hear how closely you think the Fast Company article matches your own perspective on global innovation.
Mark,
I believe that this article fits perfectly into this discusssion.
When it comes to reducing costs (McKinsey is really famous
for this one) Western economic logic is of course eager to
harvest the best ideas from all over the planet. Not because
we really want to understand why it is so extremely cheap to run an Indian bank in its own context – that might be far too irritating – but rather because the figures are so intriguing.
The motivation is obvious: Help me to cut costs and then we speak the same language. Pharmaceutical corporations have been using emerging markets for the longest time because these places are the cheapest human test lab on the planet. Now we are applying the same principle to other sectors, too.
Let me ask you a question: Will the guys from McKinsey pay the people they had been learning from in the Third World pay a commission for the revenue they make on those ideas in the West? I doubt. It´s a free trial innovation lab. The profit margin for McKinsey could not be any better.
The one thing that I find really interesting, though, is the fact that we in the West might soon face the same life circumstances like people in emerging markets. Maybe it is a good idea to learn from them. We do not have a free ticket to be the First World forever.
One last thing that came to my mind. Does the term “trickle-up innovation” point towards a level playing field? Sounds more like “we up here get fresh ideas from them down there”. Before that our products and services would trickle-down.
It is still the same paradigm. Just the words have changed.
Thanks Eric, I knew I could rely on you to deconstruct the pseudo-collaborative rhetoric. 😉
Over the last few months I have been growing aware that the UK/English notion of the Creative Industries and subsequently the Creative Economy is rapidly reaching the end of its useful life as a way to focus policy effort and resources from central government. I think that the decade long emphasis on creative cultural life as a way to support economic development is pretty much over. It will be interesting to see if Mark Whallinger’s White Horse will be the last epic piece of Public Art for a long time
In England there is a drive away from exceptionalism of the creative act and the businesses that depend on it.
Time for another paradigm shift.
Hundreds of years ago (but not too many) here in England it was solemnly held that our King was God’s representative on Earth. This was an article of faith. When the King spoke it was God telling us what to do. This was no more than conceit, and when it got overdone in the 1600s it led to the downfall of the ruling monarchy and the beginning of the cosmetic monarchy we have today. People got fed up with it, basically.
The relevant word there is conceit. Our king, and our king alone, spoke with the authority of God. Not just any God, mind you, not some piffling local deity; ours was the Lord of all, the one true God.
Nonsense and an obvious conceit.
So is any idea at all that the Western way of doing business is the right or proper way to be doing it. A risible conceit and nothing more. Collectively we’ll be better off for putting such arrogance behind us.
BB
I’ve just finished reading Fareed Zakaria’s The Post American World, and I found it interesting. I came across this post, so I thought I will share a comment here. Given that today, China and India are on the forefront of economic growth, fast becoming economic “powerhouses”, what we are entering is indeed a period of the “rise of the rest”.
Given this strong economic growth, there countries are boosting their national pride and political confidence – and are playing an increasingly important role in global trade.
These countries will be leading polluters, given the vast coal-fire power plants and massive manufacturing bases they are building. They will be leading producers and consumers, with devastating effects on the environment.
Today, the largest infrastructure and construction projects are being built outside the USA, reflecting that indeed, other countries are on the rise. This changes the dynamics of the world today – unlike in the past, the US is not the one on the rise of all fronts.