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Sharing
Values and Respecting Differences
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"Leadership
in Fragile Times: A Vision for a Shared Future": World
Economic Forum Annual
Meeting 2002
Annual
Meeting Faculty were invited to contribute essays on the Annual Meeting theme
"Leadership in Fragile Times: A Vision for a Shared Future". The six
core themes of the Annual Meeting were:
Here
the perspective from Moisés Naím, editor in Chief. Foreign Policy Magazine.
Read
the essay:
[Redefining
Business Challenges]
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The
combination of the terrorist attacks and the
 steep economic downturn has greatly
heightened the world's awareness of its economic and political fragility. Also
of its social fragility. While poverty is not the cause of terrorism (otherwise
most Brazilians or Chinese would be terrorists and no Irish or Basque terrorism
would exist) the attacks have also focused the rich world’s attention on the
desperate poverty that afflicts billions of people. Opinion leaders in wealthier
countries are also more focused on inequality and on the sociopolitical
fragility created by the many divides among peoples and regions.
Yet, there is another fragility, an intellectual fragility, that while less
visible is as dangerous. Decision-makers have always been vulnerable to the
seduction of bad ideas that become popular and are embraced by influential
elites. Now, new technologies, globalization and the pressure to respond boldly
and quickly to unprecedented threats have increased this vulnerability. Bad
ideas have become more virulent as they can now spread faster and farther before
their flaws are exposed. Moreover, the blank checks, political, military and
economic that have been granted to those in charge of responding to the crisis
make bad ideas even more dangerous as massive resources can be devoted to
implement them.
History is full of examples of ideas that become fashionable and influence
policy only to subsequently fall into disrepute or to be replaced by other ideas
with more elite appeal. Some, like Communism or Fascism are big,
all-encompassing visions of society, indeed of the world. Others are narrower
and more specialized. The “Dependency Theory” of underdevelopment, the
effect of Asian values on the economic success of the East Asian Tigers, the
Laffer Curve, the “indisputable” superiority of Japanese management, the
“Limits to Growth” or investing in Internet companies with no foreseeable
profits, are ideas that enchanted decision-makers and commentators for a while
and then faded out of fashion. Others, like “Star Wars” are making a
comeback. Supplying the mujahedin with Stinger missiles during their war against
the Soviet Union seemed a much better idea in the 1980s than now. But then even
good ideas are sometimes quickly displaced as other emergencies drive them out
of favour. In the 1990s, financial crashes made the need for a new “Global
Financial Architecture” a popular idea. Today, only a few experts talk about
it. In 2001 crashing jetliners in the NY twin towers has made the “war on
terrorism” an even more popular idea. Will it remain as popular a few years
hence?
While the cycle of emergence-adoption-rejection (and some times re-emergence) of
ideas with policy consequences is an historical constant, its speed is
accelerating. This acceleration contributes to a policy volatility that may
retard the adoption of more stable and effective solutions or, worse, it
increases the probability that influential individuals and institutions embrace
bad ideas. Proven policies that take too long to have an effect are also more
vulnerable to being replaced by new untested initiatives which bear the promise
of rapid results.
Thus intellectual fragility has been boosted by the cheaper, instant electronic
communication that facilitates the global diffusion and discussion of new ideas.
At the same time, cheaper communication and information also makes the scrutiny
of new ideas quicker and broader as the analysis and debate of new ideas have
become truly global. Nonetheless, speed of communication and the volume of
information make this scrutiny shallower as the time to learn, ponder and react
to the massive inflow of new ideas is compressed and as the exponential growth
of the “noise” in the system makes it harder to filter such noise out.
Moreover, bad ideas can also get a pass thanks to the surging demand for
solutions to new, pressing problems. Corporate leaders pressured by
hyper-competition, politicians facing impatient electorates with high
expectations that are also boosted by increased access to information or
government officials needing to respond to unprecedented emergencies fuel the
demand for new and quick “magic bullet” solutions to important problems.
While sooner or later bad ideas are caught and discarded, some do find their way
into public policies. As these bad ideas are more likely to be shorter lived
than some of their predecessors in the pantheon of misguided policies, this
accelerated cycle has become an added source of volatility to an already
unstable environment.
There are no failsafe, simple
solutions to the heightened vulnerability of decision-makers to embrace
counterproductive intellectual fads and bad ideas. But as the terrorist attacks
have shown, knowing that one is vulnerable is a good first step to find ways to
become less so. We need to be as alert about our augmented intellectual
fragility as we are about the terrorist menace.
February
18, 2001
Revista INTER-FORUM is affiliated with (ICCAP) Any reproduction in part or whole is strictly forbidden without the authors written authorization
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