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Innovating American government

The Trump Administration promises a lot from the Office of American Innovation. Can it deliver?

On Monday President Trump signed into existence the White House Office of American Innovation, an agency intended to “bring together the best ideas from Government, the private sector, and other thought leaders to ensure that America is ready to solve today’s most intractable problems.”

While appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to run the office is less than ideal, an agency that brainstorms ideas to transform government isn’t a bad idea.

There are limitations though, former Obama Administration tech official Tom Cochrane warns government is a very different beast from running a campaign.

In the government you say ‘I have a problem’ and it’s ‘let’s write out your requirements, here’s your six month procurement process and you can only use these thirty-three vendors who may be substandard or no good and the only reason they are on the list is because they understand how the contracting process works.’

That is just the tip of the iceberg of the challenges you face when you go into government.

Cochrane was only talking about managing websites and software while Trump and Kushner’s objectives are clearly more ambitious and, dare one suggest, somewhat driven by the neo-Liberal ideology that the private sector and markets hold all the answers to humanity’s’ problems.

How radically reforming government will go under the Trump Administration remains to be seen although the early failure with health insurance changes doesn’t bode well.

While the UK’s Government Digital Service and Australia’s Digital Transformation Office were largely confined to changing the delivery of public sector services, their remit seems somewhat closer to Kushner’s so it’s instructive reading the lessons from Paul Shetler who worked at both agencies.

His view is in the United States there’s a lot of opportunity on the digital transformation front.

They do have a lot of potential there. I do think the new administration is more likely to do something big to fix things than perhaps the Obama Administration was, because they are talking about national infrastructure.

If you to the United States it’s shocking, the physical level infrastructure is falling apart and on a digital level things are pretty much the same, if you look at the government websites many of them look like they are from the 1990s and they all look and act differently.

The US though has its own complexities with government being far more devolved and ‘hands off’ than the UK or Australian Federal governments, not to mention the tricky political environment the Trump Administration is faced with.

Possibly the biggest challenge Kushner’s office will face is the question of leadership. Shetler points out pushing change through government agencies requires decisive action.

In the UK, we didn’t focus on consensus we focused on getting things done. When I first met with Francis Maude he said ‘this is not a change management process – this is transformation.”

One of the major reasons why the UK was a successful as they were was because Francis Maude was the minister for five years. It became clear he was going to see this through and if you were going to fight, you were going to lose. People got into line.

So for the Trump Administration and Jared Kushner, the success of the Office of American Innovation is going to lie on how well they can lead and drive the process.

Given Donald Trump’s temperament and way of doing things, there’s no doubt he’ll take decisive action however bringing along disparate stakeholders and sectors of the community – not to mention deeply embedded interest groups – is going to take more than quickly Executive Orders or 3am tweets.

As Tom Cochrane and Paul Shetler observe, changing the direction of governments is not an easy task and it takes persistence, determination and vision.

History will be watching how well Trump and Kushner succeed.

“This is transformation” – the challenge of leading digital change

Former CEO of Australia’s Digital Transformation Office, Paul Shetler, talks about the challenges of leading change in government and large organisations

To say Paul Shetler’s stay in Australia has been controversial would be an understatement.

After leaving the UK’s Government Digital Service in 2015, Shetler was the founding CEO of the Australian government’s Digital Transformation office. He lasted 16 months before being managed out.

In January I interviewed Shetler where he discussed the relative differences between countries, the challenges facing those trying to digitally transform governments and large organisations along with some scathing observations about the management of the Australian Public Service.

Parts of this interview were the basis for separate articles in Diginomica and the Australian Financial Review however the entire conversations is worthwhile publishing.

Some of Shetler’s answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

How do we compare the digital transformation journey of different countries?

In terms of the UK, the Government Digital Service really has done a great job. If hadn’t been for GDS we wouldn’t be having the conversation we’re having in Australia today, much less in New Zealand, the United States and other countries.

Digital Transformation wouldn’t be on the table and an awful lot of the basic ideas on how you fix government IT by looking at structural reasons for behaviour rather than just saying “let’s make a nicer interface.” they were really good at identifying those things.

Britain was the pioneer. Every country in the naughties had their own digital strategy but the UK led the way. The US right now is a mess, they don’t really have a digital strategy.

How does the US look with the new Trump administration?

They do have a lot of potential there. I do think the new administration is more likely to do something big to fix things than perhaps the Obama Administration was, because they are talking about national infrastructure.

If you to the United States it’s shocking, the physical level infrastructure is falling apart and on a digital level things are pretty much the same, if you look at the government websites many of them look like they are from the 1990s and they all look and act differently.

They are very much like the UK before Britain started the digital transformation and they’ve had several years to fix it but there’s been no concerted effort because no-one really owns it.

They do have the USDS which operates out of the White House that gets really great talent in to do fix something but they don’t have the authority across the government.

They have 18F who operate on a cost recovery basis who act like an internal consultancy… they have some extremely talented people there and we’ve learned quite a bit from them.. and they help agencies with individual things, like looking at contracts or procurement or whether it’s fixing a particular service. But there’s no vision or strategy that guides it all.

If you go to New Zealand you’ll see they’ve been doing a lot of great thinking. It really influenced us in Australia on user journeys across governments, where you want to get something done that goes across agencies.

Let’s look from the standpoint of the end user; the end user wants to send a child to school, to emigrate to New Zealand or to open up a business. What do they need to do and how can we map it out for them.

The problem in New Zealand is that the team has no authority, all they can do is propose and it depends upon other people saying ‘oh, that’s a great idea’ although there’s been a lot of great design thinking coming out of there and it difficult for that being translated into practice.

One of the things I learned here was you can have all the great ideas and talent but if you don’t have the political will and authority to drive it then a recalcitrant bureaucracy will not going along with it because their interests aren’t in alignment with their users.

What did you find on coming to Australia?

There was a lot of excitement and enthusiasm on what we could do with the idea of the DTO, particularly among the public there was a lot of goodwill as well as in large parts of the Canberra bureaucracy, generally speaking the lower you got down the ranks there was more enthusiasm.

In the UK you have two layers of governments; you have the central government and local administration.

You have the split between politics and policy, you have the politicians who just don’t spend time in their departments. When I was with the UK Justice Ministry the Secretary of State, Chris Grayling, and his ministers were in the building every day.

As a consequence they were very aware of what was going on. There were in there everyday and they could see things. It made it easier for the ministers to give direction and cover for the civil servants.

In Australia it’s much easier for public service to capture the minister, direction is spotty and politicians are easily manipulated, partly because of lack of information.

There’s also the gap between policy and delivery, the UK Department of Justice, for example, works on legal and constitutional policy but is also responsible for prisons, courts and other services. So there’s a tight feedback loop where if a policy isn’t working, you find out pretty quick.

How important are people and existing processes?

You can’t fight human nature you have to acknowledge it and live with it and make it work for you.

In Australia we did a terrible job of working with human nature. This idea we could get Australian government to magically transform itself because it was told to, that I could come here and put up some pretty pictures and say some nice words and everyone would say ‘hey we never thought of that.’

That’s not going to happen when you have entrenched interests, habits, structures and groups who are committed to doing things a particular way. It’s not going to happen and it’s vary naïve to think you can do it, it’s just not how people work.

In the UK, we didn’t focus on consensus we focused on getting things done. When I first met with Francis Maude he said ‘this is not a change management process – this is transformation.”

When we talk about change management it’s often about appeasing people who are throwing up obstacles, this isn’t about appeasing them, it’s about them doing their job. Too often here there was too much appeasing bureaucrats which I think comes down to a lack of political will and perhaps cowardice.

One of the major reasons why the UK was a successful as they were was because Francis Maude was the minister for five years. It became clear he was going to see this through and if you were going to fight, you were going to lose. People got into line.

Because they understood people were competitive they created a group called ‘Digital Leaders’, the digital leaders were the Director-Generals from various departments who were future leaders – most likely to become Permanent Secretaries – and said, “you guys will be those driving the transformation from the Civil Service side.” Of course because these people were all competitive they’d try to outdo each other.

How does the Australian political culture compare?

“It’s quite a bad culture. In Canberra you have people who think they are the intellectual elite of the nation who aren’t really, it’s a relatively mediocre elite.”

The idea you have a group of people sitting around thinking their Big Thoughts in a bubble and telling each other how great they are who then hand those thoughts down to proles who do the service delivery. It’s a very weird class system that’s been built up – you have the Big Thinkers and then even the proles you give it to, they pass it on to the states or an NGO to deliver it.

There is no feedback loop, there is none. You don’t know how much these policies cost, you don’t know what they’re delivering you don’t know what’s a success. That probably suits lots of people.

We saw that with digital dashboard where citizens and ministers could monitor public services’ performance. There was so much pushback, there were some agencies that worked with us but getting information directly from the systems was difficult.

What are the lessons from the Australian experience and for those trying to drive digital transformation?

When the DTO was set up, they had to make a series of trade-offs. It wasn’t GDS, it didn’t have the powers of GDS. It didn’t have the powers to mandate or block.

GDS had both, the idea you could kumbaya your way to transformation, no-one there believed it. That’s why they set up GDS the way they did. They could stop you from spending money, even if you had the budget approval or not, so that was a massive stake in the heart for a number of zombie IT projects.

It’s particularly hard for IT managers in departments to admit that a long running project was a failure so GDS was great. That ability to do the right thing and to have it sanctioned by authority was brilliant. The years of ass-covering were over.

Some kind of spending controls are good and some ICT procurement reform is absolutely essential. That’s potentially really, really good.

How important is finding the right people?

People coming into senior digital roles in the UK government were hired by GDS and that was massively important to get the right people in.

I was thoroughly vetted as were all the other hires and it was important because it created a community of people who thought the same way. We were all committed to the same mission and we all came in at the same time. It’s not talked about much, but there was also a general clearing out of the old leadership.

Having a common sense of mission was important, we would work together and collaborate with each other.

You need to have political will to see them through because the departments will kick and scream but if their autonomy was working we wouldn’t have this problem.

Why are Australian governments suffering IT problems?

If all major government projects were failing we’d not be having this conversation. That said, there is an unacceptable rate of failure and it has to be fixed. Again, departmental autonomy is not working.

Departments have chosen to deskill, departments have chosen to become dependent upon vendors and departments have chosen to put their own interests ahead of users – as we in the case with Centrelink. Infrastructure failures like the ATO or the Census were easily preventable. The idea you’re building data centres in 2016 is insane and anyone who tells you that should be fired.

These are all predictable outcomes and as long as you have a public service that’s not really comfortable with 21^st Century technology and which still views as its own departmental in-group as being more important than its end-users then you’ll end up with these problems.

Public servants have to start operating the way a bank or insurance company would – how do I get onto the cloud, not how do I keep workloads off the cloud? How do I build around the user? It’s crazy to be asking these conversations because it’s an incredibly deskilled when it comes to IT. It’s appalling, much more than in the UK.

That’s the problem, when you talk to actual practitioners in the Australian government they acknowledge it. It’s not the guys doing the designs or those trying to use the technologies, it’s those further up the management chain who don’t have the skills or have too close relationships with certain vendors where you see these anti-social behaviours kicking in.

Where next?

I’ve spent sixteen months banging my head against a wall so I’m not in a hurry, I’m looking some opportunities in Australia and a few elsewhere in the world.

Scamming the Jobs Act

JOBS Act equity crowdfunding replaces the ‘fools, family and friends’ that startups relied for seed capital. Hopefully there won’t be too many fools

When the Obama administration approved the US JOBS Act in 2012 it was almost certain the crowdfunding aspects would attract charatans looking to separate gullible investors from their money.

And so it has turned out, with the New York Times reporting how some crowdfunding sites are worried by the poor quality of startups touting for funds on some platforms.

The Times piece follows the story of Ryan Feit, the founder of New York’s Seedinvest who tells how he has rejected substandard proposals only to have seen them embraced by other crowdfunding platforms with often terrible results for investors.

One of the early companies he rejected was shut down by regulators — who labeled it a fraud — after it raised $5 million from investors. And Mr. Feit expects it won’t be the last.

That fraudsters would be attracted to crowdfunding sites is unsurprising and with regulators still working out how to manage investor protection the field is still very much ‘buyer beware.’

High valuations are also an investor warning sign.

Mr. Feit has been particularly worried about companies that have assigned themselves sky-high valuations that will make it hard for investors to ever make their money back. In several cases, companies that he rejected because of their high valuations have shown up on other sites with the same valuations

The unicorn mania of recent years is the cause of this focus on high valuations and is strange for investors as those richly priced stakes are not in their interests or those of employees taking equity in the business. If anything, a ridiculous market valuation should be the biggest warning of all to potential stakeholders.

Ultimately though it may be that crowdfunding equity isn’t about taking a stake in a business but more showing one’s support for a venture suggests, Nick Tommarello, the co-founder of Wefunder.

Mr. Tommarello also noted that many small-time investors so far were viewing their investments more as donations to businesses they like, rather than as investments that will make money.

As JOBS Act equity crowdfunding campaigns are limited to a million dollars each, being the modern equivalent of the ‘friends, families and fools’ may be the future of these capital channels. Hopefully there won’t be too many fools.

Speaking American – learning the language of Silicon Valley

While the business cultures of the US and Silicon Valley may look familiar, they are very different to other communities warn Australian startup founders

This is the last of four stories I did for The Australian on why entrepreneurs are making their way to the United States’ Bay Area.

“It is a very good time to be Australian in America,” says Dr Catriona Wallace , the Sydney based founder of Flamingo Customer Experience. Despite that goodwill she and those who’ve made the move to the US have found the ways of doing business in the two countries can be quite different.

US decision making processes are one trap, Wallace observes. “Americans will say ‘yes, yes, yes then no’, whereas Australians will say ‘no, no, no then yes,’“ she told The Australian. “I had to learn that an enthusiastic “Yes” from an American is an expression of their interest and intention, not necessarily an action that can be followed through.”

Swinging for the fences

Casey Ellis, who relocated his Sydney security startup Bugcrowd to San Francisco in 2013, finds the scale of ambitions are a key difference between the two countries. “Americans are comfortable with those who swing for the fences whereas Australians aren’t.

“I had a million dollars committed already but people weren’t buying my execution because the way I was selling it was that I had it all figured out, which is what I’d been taught what to do in Australia – we’ve figured how to make sausage machine then the key to making more money is to build a bigger handle and crank out more sausages.”

The reality though is different in the United States warns Ellis. “If I’m pitching like that to VCs over here they’re like ‘we like what you’re doing but your vision is too small.’ I always had a big vision for Bugcrowd but I’d been taught not to put that at the front. In the US you put the vision first and the execution follows.”

Figuring out the differences

“I spent some time trying to figure out why it is different,” Ellis reflects. “If you think about it Australia is a country was formed by a bunch of people who were thrown out for stealing stuff, dropped on a rock and told to figure it out, so we’ve got this incredible culture of troubleshooting and innovation but we’ve also got this tall poppy syndrome of ‘don’t stick your head out too far.’ That’s a very strong cultural feature of Australians and how they interact.”

“If you bring that over to America you will fail because this country was formed by entrepreneurs who set out to find a new land,” Casey concludes. “It’s not about saying Aussies are meek, they’re not, but Americans are completely comfortable with swinging for the fences and Australia’s aren’t.”

Peter Grant of Safesite warns not to overplay the Paul Hogan persona. “Coming from Australia is a novelty but you can’t play the dinky di Aussie card, you have display professionalism and represent you are serious about being a US company and serving the US environment,” he told The Australian. “Americans are a lot more accepting of risk and have a fear of missing out on the next big thing.”

“The country is founded upon going out and doing your own thing and being a maverick, so they are a lot more accepting of risk and have a bit more of a fear about missing out on the next big thing, “ Grant explains. “We’ve developed a strategy of saying ‘we’re working on this, this is going to happen and we’re talking to your competitors.’ That seems to work.”

Watching the clock

One respect where Australians’ laid back attitudes come unstuck is in time keeping warns Flamingo’s Wallace, “Americans are super punctual. Conference calls typically start 5 mins before the hour rather than 10 minutes after as it would in Australia. Meetings finish at quarter before the hour so people can get to the next meeting 5 minutes early.”

“If people are delayed and get to a meeting a few minutes late they will apologise profusely for several minutes and then apologise again at the end of the meeting. American’s will warn of the need to finish a meeting at a certain time by saying, “I have a hard stop at quarter before”

Humour lapses

Another difference is the sense of humour, Dr Wallace warns. “Americans typically are not funny in business as we Australians are. There is not much joking in meetings. I once used the enormously funny expression of, ‘That customer experience would have been like having a hot chicken blood enema!’.”

“Instead of this being outrageously funny I was surrounded by a group of 10 executives whose mouths hung open in shock that I had just said something like that. The meeting tanked from there on….”

“All this being said, the American business community love Australians,” Wallace concludes. “They find us hard working, great at relationships, good at navigating politics, honest, authentic and transparent. In some ways they aspire to be more like us. We cut through the bollocks – although they don’t understand that word – or bullshit and get things done. Americans like that. We are generous. They like that too.”

Maintaining the home base – why many startups don’t fully move to Silicon Valley

For all the benefits of moving to the Bay Area, many startups are happy to keep much of their operations in their home states.

This is the third of four stories I did for The Australian on why local entrepreneurs are making their way to the United States’ Bay Area.

For all the benefits of moving to the US, many startup founders want to remain down under. According to last year’s Startup Muster survey of Australia’s tech community, only 18% of local entrepreneurs intend to move overseas, and even those going offshore keep the bulk of their operations Down Under.

The reasoning for keeping operations in Australia vary, but for those focusing on Silicon Valley costs are a key concern. Didier Elzinga of Melbourne’s Cultureamp decided to keep management and the bulk of operations in the company’s home town due to several aspects. “For us there are many great benefits, including lifestyle, but commercial decisions play into it too,” he says.

“Our engineering team is based in Melbourne, and we are happy not to be competing for talent in the bloodbath that is Silicon Valley. In the longer term we also believe the world is moving to the East – and Australia has the opportunity to be the eastern most tip of the West, or the western most tip of the East.”

Needing a US presence

Having a North American presence proved essential for the sentiment measurement company, “for us a US office was an easy decision as most of our clients were tech companies based in the Bay Area” says Elzinger.

“We had someone working in customer success there from fairly early on, and then we officially beefed up our presence when one of our co-founders Jon Williams moved to San Francisco in 2014.” Since establishing a San Francisco base, Cultureamp has raised six million dollars in capital raisings and opened offices in New York and London.

Running a global business from Melbourne can be demanding but Elzinger believes it is worthwhile, “other than timezones we’ve yet to run into any major obstacles,” he says. “For me as CEO, it can mean a lot of travel, I try and get to the States at least once a quarter, most times more. But overall, we feel we’ve made the right decision, and are proud to grow a global company from Melbourne.”

The travel can be demanding for an Australian based business and Temando’s CEO Karl Hartman found the demands of regularly flying across the Pacific left the company at a disadvantage. “Previously when I was flying here once a quarter, things moved gradually,” he recalls. “Being here means we can move much more quickly, some things need to be face-to-face.”

The expense of Silicon Valley

A San Francisco base comes at a cost though, “it’s very expensive here.” Hartman warns, “we have a focused team here in the US that is largely focused around partnerships, project management and go-to-market. But we keep our developers largely in Australia.”

“I’d caution any Australian company looking at coming here to fill engineering jobs that coming here is very expensive, I’d argue you can find very good talent in Australia,” he says. “I’d also argue it’s easier for Aussie companies to raise seed investments in Australia.”

Holding costs down is particularly critical for earlier stage companies points out Affinity Live’s Geoff McQueen. “It’s about a third less to employ a developer in the Illawarra than the Bay Area,” says McQueen who has kept his development team in the company’s home town of Wollongong. “Saving those costs gives a startup with limited funding a lot more time.”

Keeping the skills base

Data analytics startup Instaclustr is another keeping most of its operations in Australia while opening offices in the United States, Europe and Japan. “We established a leadership team and sales office in the US, but all of our engineering and support services are located in Australia, at the University of Canberra,” CEO Peter Nichol explained to The Australian.

Instaclustr, which recently raised $2 million in seed funding for its data analytics service running on the open source Apache Cassandra system, chose to maintain operations in Australia to avoid having to compete with the salaries and expectations for high-tech staff in the US.

A favourable Australian dollar and a relationship with local education institutions were also key factors says Nichol, “the skill sets that we are chasing are rare, so we have decided to built a knowledge base and big data experts through a partnership with the University of Canberra.”

Keeping close to customers

Like most tech companies having a US presence, if only for management and sales, has proved essential for Instaclustr. “The main reason,” Nichol says, “was to be to near our customers and partners from a physical and time zone perspective. Over 60% of our customer base is located in North America and 100% of ecosystem partners.”

Despite the benefits of remaining in Australia, the movement of Australian entrepreneurs overseas is increasing. While only eighteen percent of the 602 startups surveyed for the 2015 Startup Muster report intended to move overseas, it was an increase of fifty percent over the previous year.

That many heading overseas want to keep operations and employment local should be encouraging for those trying to Australia into a global startup centre and has to be a factor in developing a local ecosystem and government policies that support it.

California dreaming – following the startup trail

The flow of startups to Silicon Valley is a modern gold rush. Why are entrepreneurs making their way to the Bay Area?

Earlier this year I did a series of four stories for The Australian on why startups see Silicon Valley’s Bay Area as the best base for their businesses.

From the interviews there were a number of reasons for that migration and it was a fascinating exploration of what drives the development of today’s tech industry along with how a global industrial hub maintains its position.

The stories feature a diverse bunch of founders and businesses which in themselves are interesting tales.

Spreading the tech industry’s footprint

The spread of the US’s tech sector shows the country’s industrial depth and strength, it also shows how other factors affect the spread of technology businesses.

Just how broad is the US tech industry? It’s tempting to think that most of the American tech sector is concentrated in San Francisco Bay Area with some offshoots in Seattle and on the East Coast but as this New York Times piece describes, the country has a range of high-tech industry clusters.

Like Silicon Valley itself many of those clusters exist because of other industries, research facilities or companies – Seattle being home to Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon being an example.

Another example of how other industries have influenced the development of industry clusters is shown in the example of Philadelphia.

I hadn’t thought have Philadelphia as having a tech sector until I spoke with Australian tech company Nuix about one of their key North American offices being in the Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken.

When I observed that Philadelphia wasn’t the obvious place to set up, Nuix’s managers pointed out how the city’s pharmaceutical, medical technology and telecommunications provide a deep talent pool for tech companies along with the city’s location between New York and Washington DC being an advantage as well.

Philadelphia’s civic leaders have contributed to it with their Startup Philly program that offers services and incentives ranging from networking events through to a seed investment program.

VeryApt CEO Ashrit Kamireddi, one of the recipients of a Startup PHL angel round, describes the pros and cons of the city investment program and points out it was the factor in setting up their business there.

Prior to raising a $270,000 angel round led by StartUp PHL, my two cofounders and I had just graduated from our respective grad programs and had placed 3rd in Wharton’s Business Plan Competition. We could have settled our company anywhere, with New York and San Francisco being the obvious choices. For a startup, the initial round of funding is where geography is most critical. Most angels don’t want to invest outside of their backyard, which explains the natural tendency for startups to relocate where there is the most capital.

Kamireddi’s point about capital is critical, for tech startups finding funding is probably the most important factor in where the company is based.

Funding though isn’t the only aspect and for established companies, particularly those in the Bay Area struggling with high costs which is what the New York Times article focuses on in its example of Phoenix, Arizona.

The spread of the US’s tech sector shows the country’s industrial depth and strength, it also shows how other factors affect the spread of technology businesses.

Subverting the house rules

An Arab Spring seems to have come to the US Congress as members occupy the chamber and stream their own video footage.

It seems the Arab Spring has come to the US Congress where Democrat representatives protesting the house’s refusal to vote on gun control legislation have occupied the house.

House speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, ordered the chamber’s TV cameras to be shut off but the occupying members responded by streaming their own media feeds through Facebook and Periscope.

Once again we’re seeing how new media channels are opening up with the internet. While they aren’t perfect, they do challenge the existing power structures and allow the old rules to be subverted.

Cisco President John Chambers on why the US should copy India

The next US President should copy Indian Prime MInister Modi in outlining a tech growth plan says Cisco’s John Chambers.

Politics enters the age of disruption

Modern politics is being disrupted by change as greatly as any business

One of the key features of modern western nations is how stable politics is with very few major parties being less than fifty years old and many boasting a history lasting back a century or more.

Now in the US and Australia we’re seeing the slow motion implosion of the established parties of the reactionary side of politics – it would be misleading to describe the schoolboy ideologies of most American Republicans or Australian Liberals as being ‘right wing’.

Tony Wright in the London School of Economics blog asks What Comes After the Political Party?

Wright’s view is political parties are doomed to extinction as their memberships dwindle and this is an opinion shared by many watching the declining participation in formal politics over the last fifty years.

One result of that declining participation has been the steady increase in power of the machine apparatchiks who’ve increasingly replaced boots on the ground with corporate funding.

The consequence of that increase in power has been a steady disconnect between the concerns of the electorate and the priorities of the party leadership.

In the US that disconnect resulted in the Republicans blindsided by the rise of Donald Trump and the Australian Liberal Prime Minister increasingly looking like Grandpa Simpson as his party shuffles towards what increasingly looks to be a ballot box disaster.

Both parties are likely to rip themselves apart as the contradictions of the modern reactionary movement – dismantling public services while increasing government powers – come home to roost with the ideologues and pragmatists within the organisation fighting bitterly.

The truth is political parties are no more permanent than businesses, or indeed nations, and in a time of economic change it isn’t surprising old parties die and new ones are formed.

While political parties won’t cease to exist, the new political parties that will rise from the wreckage of today’s will be different in both their philosophies, organisation and membership.

Parties that were formed in the horse and carriage days or the early era of newspapers and radios are always going to find the internet era to be a challenge, that they are being run by men whose political theories haven’t moved for fifty years only guarantees their demise.

In many ways, what’s changing politics is exactly what’s changing business. However the politicians and their supporter seems far more oblivious to change than their commercial counterparts.

Gen X and the big economic shift

The costs of the 1970s economic shift are beginning to be recognised.

The single economic event that defines Generation X was the 1973 Oil Shock, the OPEC embargo on the west bought the post World War II era of economic growth to an end.

With stagflation gripping the western world, new solutions were sought and by the end of the decade governments touting ‘business friendly’ economic policies – more accurately ‘corporation friendly’ – were seen as the solution.

As Robert Reich described in the New York Times, these policies were not only a disaster for workers but also for the middle classes and business productivity.

A notable aspect missing in the above graph is US productivity growth has since stalled as corporations have focused on stock buy backs rather than investment. The problem has been compounded by the use of tax shelters that have resulted in huge amounts of American corporate profits being locked away in offshore bank accounts.

While those stock buy backs and arbitraging tax regimes have benefitted executives and a small cabal of fund managers, the diversion of capital from productive investment has weakened the US and global economy.

For the baby boomers, even those of the Lucky Generation who preceded GenX, that lack of investment now threatens their retirement lifestyles as incomes and government spending stagnates.

The ‘big business friendly’ ideologies of Thatcher and Reagan defined the late Twentieth Century and continue to dominate government thinking in much of the western world, it may be though that we a reaching the end of that era as the costs to the broader economy are beginning to be recognised.

For GenX and their kids, the costs are being borne now but their parents may be about to feel the costs too.

The risk of misunderstanding China

The West is underestimating China warns veteran investor Mike Moritz, but the misunderstanding run further than just business

In the early 1990s I was working for a British company in Hong Kong and regularly commuting to Taipei. On a Cathay Pacific flight back from Taiwan one Friday afternoon, I found myself on the same flight as the organisation’s Asia-Pacific director who graciously got me into the lounge for a beer.

Over that beer he told me how earlier in the year he’d been asked by one of the pukka English directors why he was bothering spending so much money in business development for ‘third world countries’ like Taiwan and South Korea.

Jeff, as we’ll call the director, laid down a challenge to his board. “Come out and have a look for yourself,” he told them.

Some of the UK based directors took Jeff up and flew out to Hong Kong, first class on BA of course, and then continued on to Taipei where they suitably amazed to be greeted by a first world city.

“They genuinely believed they were going to fly in a DC-3 and be met by a bunch of rickshaw wallas,” laughed Jeff, a long standing English expat. “The Brits don’t get East Asia.”

It seems things haven’t changed much as veteran venture capital investor Mike Moritz made a similar point at a speech in London yesterday that the West doesn’t understand China, particularly Europe.

“People underestimate China, especially in Europe,” Business Insider quotes Moritz as saying. “They have very little sense of the size, strength, and scale of ambition of the leading Chinese technology companies.

Moritz pointed out the fund he leads, Sequoia Ventures, is now placing over half its money in non-US companies with Chinese businesses being high on the list.

The West’s misunderstanding of China goes beyond business, with The Economist warning that many nations are soon going to have to choose between the PRC and the United States as Beijing sets up its own network of global alliances and trade accords.

So far the United States has responded to this with clumsy efforts like the Trans Pacific Partnership, an attempt to quarantine China’s influence in the Western Pacific that actually gives PRC based businesses a competitive advantage over nations that enter the deal which does little more than strengthen US corporate interests.

Already in Africa, the results of China’s economic efforts are being seen. A good example is the new Ethopian Railway where the Chinese were quick to fund a project that EU and World Bank lenders had dragged their feet on.

Just as English businessmen in the 1990s misunderstood what was going on in East Asia, it seems ignorance of Chinese growth and intentions are even more widespread today. There may be some shocks coming for countries like Australia who assume today’s realities are tomorrow’s.