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Naisbitt's paradox: A world code for self-rule, new tribes?

--------------------------------------------------------------- Global Paradox, The Bigger the World Economy, the More Powerful Its Smallest Players By John Naisbitt Published by William Morrow and Co., Inc., New York Hardcover, 24 x 16 cm; 304 pages; Rp 44,550 ------------------------------------------------------------------

JAKARTA (JP): The mere counting of changes that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s is arduous enough, let alone putting them together in a comprehensive wholeness.

Having entertained an enormous number of readers with his Megatrends, John Naisbitt has attempted in his recently published Global Paradox to search for a unifying code for all the major changes in recent years which constitute a blessing to some parts of the human race, but work as a punch to others.

This book is more than a just a compendium of the paradoxes which currently afflict governments and corporate management in many places.

Having discussed Global Paradox in the first chapter, Naisbitt moves consecutively to The Telecommunication Revolution, Travel Industry, A Universal Code of Conduct for the 21st Century, The Chinese Commonwealth and Asia and Latin America.

One of the most interesting opinions expressed in Global Paradox is the one related to the death of the nation state and the institutions in its service because of their insistence on their nature as "mainframe" rather than "PC" organizations.

The absence of great statesmen of the caliber of Winston Churchill in recent times is understood as reflection of the disappearing need for such "a mainframe statesman."

Political parties are also said to have died. People do not have to have representative democracy anymore.

It will have to give way to direct democracy or "free-market democracy" in Naisbitt's terms, in which all people that count are in control of the same information and the telecommunication revolution makes it possible to seek decision by way of referendum.

The Swiss model of democracy is cited to show that direct democracy is not a mere dream. The keyword here is self-rule. On its behalf, the number of United Nation members had increased by 25 in less than three years by the middle of 1993.

And Naisbitt expects many more to come. Not only Hawaii and Quebec are said to have been preparing their respective independence, at the outbreak of the 21st century there would be 300 sovereign countries populating the small globe.

Code

The paradox here is that Europe is painstakingly crafting a gigantic union. The UN is being endowed with greater authority along the line of a "new interventionism."

What is more, Naisbitt himself anticipates the formation of a "Universal Code of Conduct" in respect of human rights and environment and agrees that "We are all our brother's keepers," unlike Cain who stabbed his brother to death.

Wouldn't such a code require a global police as is being tried lately by the United States and Europe when they condition access to their capital and other resources on progress made in human rights and similar fundamental issues?

If so, how should one judge the value of self-rule which is so central to this newest book of Naisbitt?

In my view Naisbitt has made a mistake in that he sees the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of tiny states as evidence that the nation state is dead.

Small or big, a state is a state, though great philosophers from Plato to Alexander Hamilton said different things about it.

Over time, the nature of the state has certainly changed a great deal, occasionally by way of revolution, since its birth in the 17th century, and will continue to change in view of the constant redefinition of what is deemed to be important in public life.

It is not clear which of the variants of the state Naisbitt had in mind when he proclaimed its death.

Besides, most of the states that exist today were founded in the last five decades as a product of decolonization.

In the case of Africa, it is a narrow-minded tribalism rather than an excessively strong state that seems to have made governance ineffective.

However, these young states must have been trivialized, if not ignored, when Naisbitt talks about the death of the state.

New ties

Discussion of the "dragon century" and the "Chinese Commonwealth" was also confined to the realm of economics and business, leaving readers in the dark as to what might happen to the largest communist state on earth.

New forms of tribal affiliation, cultural and professional, are said to be much more important than political parties.

In a way, Naisbitt sees them as the modes of how public life is going to be organized in the future.

The tribes Naisbitt is talking about are not primarily the ones living in remote places such as Irian.

What matters more is the sort of tribe that emerged out of a sophisticated blending of information technology and telecommunication such as the "Internet Tribe" which currently comprises 15 million users and is theoretically capable of hooking the world's 5.5 billion people with each other.

But within this new tribe, too, there is something that smells of bureaucracy which is often called "Cyberaucracy."

The other important message of Global Paradox is of great relevance to business.

Large corporations have reorganized. This type of change, however, is as old as the history of the human being as a tool- making animal.

What distinguishes the present change from its predecessors is twofold: (1) The "American System" of large-scale manufacturing which is known as "Fordism" among historians of the labor process, is nearing its end thanks to a successful catching up by Japan with its preference for "softnomics" or demassified ways of doing things;

(2) Diffusion of what the French call telematique into the world of production has made "flexible manufacturing" much nearer to reality that it was a decade ago, when computer was an inflexible giant, with little possibility to be inserted into tiny things.

With a rapid rate of diffusion, information technologies have made redundant more and more positions in the old, hierarchical organization.

This is one of the fundamental reasons behind "downsizing" and the mushrooming of "flat organizations" or "post-modernist organizations" as some gurus prefer to call them.

Waste

Herein lies an important question that any leader, in government or corporation, is liable to have to answer: "Have I moved from a hierarchical, command model of organization to a flat, commitment model while investing in information technologies?"

If the answer is no, that investment in information technologies must constitute a great deal of waste.

Such an organizational inflexibility ornamented with the latest gadgets is bound to end up in extinction, giving way to more flexible competitors which according to Naisbitt are going to consist of small and medium companies.

Reading Global Paradox is a kind of a required course for executives. It is going to be part of the standard etiquette in business gatherings.

However, it is basically a book of "whats" rather than of "hows", with a heavy reliance on quotations from papers, magazines and reports, and is, as such, anecdotal rather than conclusive in nature.

Searching for a code, especially a universal one, from such limited information appears to be too farfetched.

This is not to belittle the messages conveyed in this book.

The inability of the "mainframe state" to deliver what people expect, and the high frequency in which failure occurs in large corporations are of existential importance to politicians and chief executive officers respectively.

While Naisbitt is not the first to draw attention to these symptoms, repetition is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it is performed with a unique style.

--Djisman Simandjuntak