Melbourne, July 2007

Here to do some research on knowledge management at a couple of firms. It's the middle of winter, cold, wet and miserable. The project goes well; fascinating to see how two very different firms approach the challenge of managing knowledge. It should generate an interesting paper or two. The Sunday before flying back home, my hosts drive me to the Yarra Valley where we visit a number of wineries. That's what Aussies do around here weekends. Check out the wineries, sample the wines, and that way you know exactly what you're buying. Not to mention you're cutting out the middle man. I got a bottle but nearly lost it to the customs. After checking in at the airport, I only remembered the bottle was in my hand carry case as I was getting into customs. Liquids not allowed on board. Rather than confiscate my wine, they were kind enough to let me return to check the bag in. Phew!

London, May-June 2007

I came here for the conference on African business. The conference goes well; the hotel is nothing special. The morning I arrived I misread the directions and ended up walking a long way to the venue. Later realized it's better to take the tube. But I didn't mind the walk; It was a nice day, though it started to rain before I got there - typical. Met up with some people I haven't seen for years. The social programme was fabulous. There was a great dinner at the South African High Commission, and the following night a fantastic reception at the new Arsenal Emirates Stadium. You could just about imagine Henry and the boys doing their thing. Got a few pictures by people who were smart enough to bring their cameras, but as expected they never sent me copies. So the following day I went back (it's just across the road from the conference venue), and took pictures of the stadium; couldn't get in, of course, so there's no evidence I was actually right there in the stands.  Also did an  interview at the BBC Radio 3 for my book, A Fragile Hope, and did readings at Whitechapel Gallery and the Poetry Cafe. Spent a few days in Manchester (university) after the conference. I was last in  Manchester in the late 80s with some college mates. Didn't really remember it at all; on that occasion we went to visit a friend at Stockport which is not too far from Manchester. Seemed like a fun place. Spoke on globalization at the conference and in Manchester. All in all, a busy but rewarding and fun-filled trip.

Chongqing city, China, March 2007

I travelled to this city in the middle of China to attend a student recruitment exhibition. Never been there before. After merging with three other municipalities, it became China's largest municipality with over 30 million people, certainly one of the largest in the world, although the main city itself is just 4.8 million. It was cold and wet. The first thing that strikes you is how overcast it is. Apparently it's like that pretty much throughout the year. The dull grayness made me think of a mining or dull industrial city whose natural beauty is being sacrificed for so-called development. In fact as it turns out there's a lot of mining going on here, from coal and natural gas to iron and aluminium. You don't quite get the modernity of Shanghai for example, or the stately ordered structure of Beijing. It sort of reminded me of Guangzhou, with its haphazard architecture and a sense that it's growing too fast for its own good, and like everywhere else in China there seems to be an urgency to knock down old buildings and replace them with characterless glass and concrete monstrosities. From my hotel room I had an excellent view of the river. The exhibition hall was in a very scenic neighbourhood, but it was freezing inside. I liked the food, had a taste of the famous Sichuan hotpot in the style they call the couple: a mild pot in the middle of a hot, boiling one. You had to dip your food in oil to lessen the effect of the chilli, which was to me quite a novelty. I was impressed by what seemed like an energy-saving practice of switching lights off in empty buildings. It looked strange at first. At the university I visited one morning we had to ask the attendant to switch the lights on at the university museum; the lights in the corridors were off. It's very different from Hong Kong where they leave lights on in buildings through the night, contributing to light pollution and an increase of more than five degrees, apparently in the urban areas. There was a bar street near the hotel where they had a wide variety of bands coming and going, offering everything from mando-pop and Tibetan folk to Whitney Houston and Santana. 

Ireland, February 2007

I was visiting Trinity College and decided to stop in Belfast for a bit of sightseeing. I had always wanted to see this city years ago when a college mate invited me go check it out. Back then I was scared of the 'troubles' and opted to wait till things got better. Apart from the cold, which was to be expected in the winter, I liked the city.

One thing that struck me was the vast number of car parks in the city. They were everywhere you looked. Someone explained that it goes back to the time of the 'troubles' (I don't know why they use this euphemism; from what I remember in the news, the bombs and gunfire more than just a little trouble.); anyhow, back then you couldn't park on the side of the road. You'd come back and find the British army's blown up your car, fearing it might be booby-trapped. As I only had a day and a half, I did one of those hop on - hop off bus tours and virtually saw the whole city, which didn't seem all that big; the Titanic Quarter where they built the, well, Titanic. There's a lot of construction work going on, especially around the Isle of Man Ferry Terminal.  The highlight was of course Shankill, the epicentre of the troubles; the wall murals reminded me of Nairobi's Eastlands estates. Even though I thought I knew the history and had on one or two occasions found an underground station or street in London in the late 80s closed following a bomb alert, seeing the place and hearing about it first hand from people who lived through the sectarian violence and mayhem, and visiting places like the Peace Garden and Garden of Remembrance was quite a moving experience. It's amazing what peace can achieve. Onwards to Dublin. Felt like a much bigger city, and the sightseeing tour took much longer. There was a lot of history here, including literary history, you kind of thought living here for a while would inspire you no end; there are constant reminders of W.B Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, George Barnard Shaw, Jonathan Swift. So much literary talent in one place. Could it be something in the water? Other places of interest: the Guinness Storehouse - (Arthur Guinness and his wife had 21children; when did he find the time to brew?); St Patrick's Cathedral, Phoenix Park which houses the Dublin Zoo, the Irish President's residence, and the remains of the Duke of Wellington, who brought Napoleon's adventures to an end. The tour agent said that one of the lions filmed for a mascot in the MGM movies once lived in Dublin Zoo.

Bangkok, Thailand, December 2006

I attended the Southeast Asian Academy of International Business Conference in Bangkok in December 2006. Interesting conference, a lot of talk about the challenges of managing business in this ‘global era’. There’s a tendency for people at these sorts of conferences to devote a lot of time talking about big business, the problems that big businesses face as they negotiate political, cultural and technological barriers, and also, of course, how they deal with problems created by human resources, ie people. My own paper was on the need for a more theoretically sound approach to researching modifications to management innovations. My co-author Aminu persuaded me that there’s a real gap here, and we went about creating a theoretical framework which covers everything from institutional theory to Giddens’ views on structuration. But I don’t want to go into all that here. I want to talk about a couple of presentations which I found really interesting. The first one was a keynote speech about a charity, I suppose it’s a charity, that operates under the ‘patronage of the King of Thailand’ which is committed to helping poor villagers who currently make a living from producing drugs to transform their lifestyles and engage in a more sustainable and I guess, more legally acceptable forms of economic activities. They started almost twenty years ago in northern Thailand where people grew poppies (the raw material for cocaine, heroin etc, I’m told) as a way of life. Then they moved across to a neighbouring country, Myanmar, I believe, then on to Afghanistan, and are now laying the foundation a similar project in Indonesia. The speaker made a very persuasive argument for introducing a gradual shift where these people are allowed to continue growing their poppies or whatever, rather than being bull-dozed off their land, and are assisted to cultivate other crops, undertake basic and advanced processing, and lo and behold, they end up transforming their lives, improving their diet, building schools and health centres, and exporting their produce. They take charge of their businesses, so it’s not a question of some so-called expatriate and clueless ‘peace-corps’ aid worker straight from college telling them what to do. This model stands in start contrast to the American big guns, bombs, throw-money-at-the-problem and let’s-fund-the-rebels approach that has taken them nowhere, from Colombia to Afghanistan. And all this is coming at a time when micro-finance is assuming the respectability it deserves when seen vis-à-vis the IMF/World Bank model with Mohammad Yunus and Grameen Bank winning the Nobel Prize just a couple of months ago. Lesson? If the world is to eradicate poverty, don’t expect any meaningful solutions from Washington, New York, London and places like that.

There was one more presentation which struck a chord. Indian author argued that monopoly powers do not facilitate innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. You have drug manufacturers preventing poor countries from accessing drugs all in the name of protection of intellectual property, raising, or rather ignoring profound ethical issues. He cited the example of WTO negotiations in which developing countries are denied a fair hearing and end up negotiation from a position of weakness. I wrote about this problem in a G21 article following the WTO talks here in Hong Kong in 2005. Anyway, one guy in the seminar claimed that pharmaceutical firms were being ‘targeted unfairly’, and went on and on about how it’s unreasonable to try to stop these firms from making profits; I weighed in and lamented that we were going round and round in circles, and felt compelled to remind the speaker that no was stopping anyone from making profits. Anyway, he made a valid point, that the task of crafting a new legal framework within which firms can reap profits is one that needs to be considered by everyone, perhaps even involving tax-payers having to invest in, ie pay for pharmaceutical innovations.

On the political front, the big question was whether the ousted president’s offspring should pay tax on the billions they made selling shares in that controversial deal that finally saw Thaksin driven from office. Apart from that, it was business as usual; you wouldn’t have guessed there’d been a coup, and the country was being steered by a group of guys in military fatigues.

Seoul, South Korea, November 2006

I was in Seoul to conduct research on knowledge management, or more specifically how organizations seek to appropriate knowledge from employees in a cultural context in which employees are, I hypothesized, less inclined to see themselves as part and parcel of the organization. I was struck by just how much confidence has returned to the country since the dark days of the economic crisis which saw an IMF bail-out in 2001 that both humbled and reinvigorated South Korea. IMF (and World Bank) interventions are a dirty word in Africa which has seen a series of failed so-called structural adjustment progammes. In Korea it’s a slightly different story. Korea didn’t need the money; they had enough. Only problem, it was in the wrong hands.

What they needed, and got, was a complete overhaul of the societal values and the way society worked. Korea was being milked dry by corrupt politicians and under-regulated businessmen, choking on hubris fashioned on a conquer-the-world mentality, crippled by industrial inefficiency and an insipid bureaucracy. Some of these business leaders were the guys that my strategic management professor at Oxford spoke of in glowing terms, citing Harvard Business school case studies; guys who emerged from the stifling dark days of military dictatorship in the 1980s, anxious to take the nascent Japanese hegemony head-on and establish themselves as the Asian economic heavyweight. A number of these business leaders ended up in jail.

The $57 billion bail-out wasn’t just any old economic intervention. The effects of its conditionalities forced an unprecedented climate of change and socio-economic liberalization, touching a wide spectrum of Korean society, bringing about a sense of modernity that even challenged ancient Confucian beliefs. They needed shaking up.  

But some things never change. One manager I spoke to compared his family business to the fingers on his hands. If one gets hurt, they all suffer; he cannot treat one better than the rest. This paternalism is now being challenged by the more ambitious younger generation that has absorbed the freer post-IMF bail out ideals of individualism and a willingness to reject conformity. Who wants to be thought of as a finger? Do these guys contribute their knowledge to the organization? 

The competitiveness in Korean society was epitomized in the university entrance exams which brought the country to a virtual standstill the week I was there. For the half hour in the morning and another half hour in the afternoon when 600,000 students took the language audio test, there was complete silence. Cars were banned from honking near schools, planes were banned from taking off and landing. In a strictly stratified educational system that has been in place for 600 years since the Joseon Dynasty, an oppressive one-day ‘facts only’ exam determines whether you enter a prestigious university or not, how your career turns out, pretty much how your life ends up, from that moment on. Tragically, suicides always follow the release of results.

Prato, Italy, June 2006

I flew into Rome, and figured I would wander into the Vatican to see what goes on there. The queue stretched for miles around the walls, and it was barely moving. I sat to have lunch at a café and watch the queue. A plate of spaghetti and a couple of glasses of chianti later, and the queue hadn’t moved very much. Anyway, I resigned myself to visiting the Santa Maggiore cathedral. The following day I was off to Prato, to the conference that took me there. There was a bit of a problem with the public transport in the aptly named Termini station in Roma. I got onto a train to Firenze at about 1pm, had some difficulty locating my seat – you couldn’t just sit anywhere you liked. You had to find the right compartment, and the right seat; it was spelt out rather nicely on the ticket. So, after walking up and down the narrow aisle for what seemed like hours, I finally located my seat. Then I waited. And waited. The train didn’t move. I got my laptop out and started to do some writing. I was so engrossed in my paper I didn’t realize we weren’t moving. About an hour and fifteen minutes later (by which time I figured we should already have pulled into Firenze, or at least, should have been pretty close, there’s this announcement and everyone starts filing out. No problem, I think; the queue at the Vatican doesn’t move; the trains don’t move. Perfect. Anyway, we got to Firenze eventually and on to Prato. Lovely little city, walled, quiet, narrow cobbled streets. Conference went well. I spoke about boundaryless careers and knowledge appropriation. Conference dinner was miles out in the country, at Medici Villa in the middle of vineyards. I got to see a couple of little lovely cities like Sienna and Pisa. I liked Italy for the weather, the red wine, and the beauty of the architecture, ancient, low buildings, the walls, narrow streets. It’s so medieval. It was good to be away from the glass and concrete monstrosities of Hong Kong. Only problem, you couldn’t find decent pubs to watch the world cup; only little pizzerias with a little TV stuck up on a drinks machine in the corner. Either that, or the drab hotel bar. Also I didn’t see a lot of tall trees. I like to see trees. I just like to see trees, lots of them.

Watched the world cup final not far from London. Italy won, but you know that already.

Aberdeen, Scotland, May, 2006.

I visited Robert Gordon University for a week; doing some work with my friend Ashly. I couldn’t believe how cold it was the day I arrived. It was freezing, the wind had gone mad. The airport was small, but very busy; apparently it’s all the oil people. Gave a paper on knowledge and discourses, and met a number of interesting people. After the first day it got a bit warm, and we got to do a fair bit of hiking in the lovely Scottish countryside. Aberdeen city has some fantastic buildings, but what I really liked were the castles, the ones in ruins. There was Tolquhon castle for example. I had a sense of déjà vu; I was sure I’ve been here before; many years ago. I visited a few northern Scottish cities in the early 90s and this could well have been one of them. One good thing going for this place, ie Scotland as a whole: you can’t smoke in public places. Brilliant! There’ll probably come a time when people will be saying, ‘I can’t believe you could smoke in the pubs back then.’ Well, in Scotland you can’t, now. In Hong Kong they’re still dragging their feet, afraid to upset the catering industry.

Australia, November 2005. 

I’m on sabbatical this semestre. I have an invite to spend a few days at Monash. The schedule is tight. I arrive in Melbourne at 7am, and give my talk at 3pm. Then go away to nurse the jetlag. The hotel is right in the middle of the city. Very convenient. It’s spring here, not particularly warm but acceptable. Last time I was here, two years ago, it was autumn, but in a day you could easily go from hot to cold, then wet. This time it’s only cold at night. There are a lots of tiny little flies everywhere; you feel like you’re in a developing country. Managed to establish some good contacts for possible future projects. One evening we check out a very avant garde jazz club.  

Off to Perth. Never been here before. The city centre reminds you of Birmingham. It’s hot here; there’s an even bigger infestation of little flies. My host says something about birds that eat the lavae being late this year; was it birds? Can’t remember. Anyway, the city is rather pleasant, not crowded at all. I take a tour on the free city us, the blue and red CATS. UWA is a beautiful campus, leafy, expansive. There’s an Oxbridge feel to it. Across the road is an estuary, lovely sea view. Interesting discussions on knowledge and HRM. Walked round King’s Park. Very posh neighbourhood. Property prices have been going through the roof in this city; something to do with the vibrant economy cos of the huge mining industry that feeds the Chinese economy. Graduates have no problem getting jobs here. On my last day I got on the train to Freemantle. Everyone’s been saying you’ve got to go to Freemantle. Nothing really special. Found a little place that did mousaka; hadn’t had it for years.

Back to HK via Singapore, spent half a day wandering around Sentosa island, it’s my favourite  place in Singapore.

Beijing. November, 2005.

I’ve had a standing invitation to Beijing for some time but this is the only time I’m able to travel. My hotel is in the Chaoyang area, the embassy/foreigners district. At the airport, someone advises me to get on a shuttle to Beijing South Railway Station, claiming it’s central; from there I can get a cab to my hotel, Landmark Towers. Turns out not be such a smart thing – the traffic is horrendous, and in fact although the station is ‘central’, I realize I need to get back to the north-east. Chaoyang is actually not too far from the airport. Should simply have taken a taxi the first time round. But I don’t mind. I’m not in a rush, and I get to see more of the city. I’ve never seen such a big, flat city before. 

The timing of my visit isn’t great. It’s cold, very cold, especially at night. It’s quite nice and sunny during the day, and it doesn’t seem all that polluted. I’ve been put off in the past from coming here by scare stories about horribly grey skies and heavy smog and poor visibility, but there’s nothing like that the three days I spend here. It’s clear skies, sunny days and rather good air, actually. I think I like it here; except for the traffic jam. They need to invest in an extensive underground train system. I hate to imagine what it will be like when they hold the Olympics here in 2008. You won’t be able to move.

After meeting my hosts at Peking University I decide to see the Forbidden City. It doesn’t seem too forbidden, or forbidding for that matter. For a fee you can wander around the home of the emperors of the 15^th century, see how the high and mighty lived, protected from the prying eyes of peasants and trouble-makers. Tiananmen Square is massive. So I finally get to see where students camped for months in 1989, demanding democracy and other nice dreams.  

Manila, October 2005. 

I’ve been in touch with some very interesting people here who’re working on entrepreneurship before coming here. We have some very fruitful meetings. There are great opportunities to fuse entrepreneurship with my expertise on knowledge management and look for example at the thriving media industry. I attend a talk by some major media player. The talk is preceded by prayers and the national anthem. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s a very strong American feel to this city, even the food, and the architecture. When you talk to the waiters and shop assistants they talk about wanting to leave the country, saying there are no jobs here. It’s not surprising he economy depends so critically on remittances from workers abroad, from the 200,000 working in Hong Kong to 3 million in the States. These people in Diaspora are fortunate enough to be able to vote, something Kenya, a fellow developing country consistently refuses to allow, they’re obviously scared about the Diaspora vote swinging the vote. Sometimes it makes you wonder what’s the point of voting. In the Philippines they consistently vote in the wrong people, and the country is a bit of a sorry mess. There’s widespread poverty, high unemployment and the little evidence of industrialization. Wages here are low, the people are well educated; they should be able to attract foreign investments the way Thailand did (especially from Japan) in the 1980s and China is currently doing. Unfortunately, because jobs aren’t coming to the people, the people have to go abroad to find them. 

I find the people here generally polite and easy-going, and they have a sense of humour, even the guys in military uniform. Walking past my hotel I saw a contingent of heavily armed guys guarding a shipment of money into a bank. I stopped to watch and jokingly asked one of them if the guns were real. We had a good laugh about it. Later, after a meal at a Korean restaurant, I see that the guard outside is armed. There are lots of guns here, just like the US. I ask the guy why they need an armed man outside a restaurant. He says there are frequent robberies here. I wouldn’t have thought you could get a whole lot of cash in a restaurant, where almost everyone pays by credit card; maybe it’s to protect the Korean owners from kidnappers. He was happy to show me the gun, which he said was a 38. Had he ever shot anyone with it? He laughed and refused to answer. One morning we get a cab to take us to a golf course. The sun is shining and it’s nice and warm. Suddenly the skies darken and it starts to rain. I point out to the driver that this is such bad luck. It’s the weather, he says, it happens all the time in the Philippines; it’s raining because of the weather. Excuse me? Why did you say it’s raining? Because of the weather, sir. I’ll make sure I remember that. The golf doesn’t go very well for the first five holes or so. It’s chucking down like mad. You’d have to be a tiger in the Philippine woods to enjoy this. 

September, 2005. Macau  

Visit to Macau University to talk to people working on knowledge and innovation. Thing that strikes you about Macau is all the dust everywhere, and the noises from jackhammers. Construction is booming; casinos and hotels sprouting everywhere like mushrooms. It’s very different from when I was last here probably a year ago. The whole place looks like a giant construction site. Not terribly attractive.

July, 2005. Cape Town, South Africa.

I’ve heard a lot about this city. I’ve heard it’s ‘European’ in character. That’s true. If your only contact with African cities is limited to Nairobi, Dar, Mogadishu, Kampala etc, then Cape Town is something of a culture shock. It’s a city that ‘works’; it’s organized, well-planned, clean and in contrast to everything I’ve heard, safe. Now I know what Kenyans mean when they say South African cities are a bit like European cities. When they see the smooth roads, impressive architecture, street lights that actually work and so forth, it’s easy to get impressed. There’s this huge mall near my hotel; pretty trendy place, reminds you of the Festival Walk in Hong Kong. They know something about urban planning.  

The Eastern Academy of Management conference is very well organized. The sessions start very early in the morning and end after lunch. The afternoons are devoted to visits. The first day I join a corporate visit to the Monkeybiz Association: women taking charge of their lives by making and selling works of art. The following afternoon, it’s a trip to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and many others were incarcerated. It’s a moving experience. Some of the tour guides are former prisoners here. The tales they tell are harrowing, shocking. They lived to tell the tale(s). Years ago I read Mandela’s ‘Long walk to freedom’. Now I can get a sense of what it was like, this long walk, the jail house, the limestone quarry, the mainland and freedom out there, inaccessible. How do you retain your sanity for 27 years? And then come out and forgive the bastards who robbed you of your youth? The following day I do my presentation. My paper is on organizational surprises: why do managers fail to see the signs and then go into panic mode when things get out of hand? A failure of strategic planning? Myopia? Ignorance? Complacency, or what? I offer the example of 911; a fair deal of research shows that the signs were all there. An attack on American soil was imminent; the ill-fated twin towers had even been bombed once, in 1993. So was this a failure of intelligence, or failure of intelligence bodies to talk to each other? What lessons for organizations? Later that afternoon, we head out to a vineyard, Britenverwaschting Wine Farm or something. Fine wines. Great dinner at Cape Town Castle. Welcome speech by the Mayor. When the conference ends, three of us pay a taxi driver to take us to the Cape of Good Hope. It’s about a two-hour drive or so. We’re driving round the southernmost tip of Africa, along the coastline, past craggy cliffs and sleepy fishing villages. Fascinating to see the spot where the Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean. We come back a different direction, to the east, so we’ve basically driven round the entire southern bits of Africa. We stop to see penguins, and an hour later we’re cruising past Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s rather posh neighbourhood.

The following day I’m off to Kenya to see my people, and to give a talk on knowledge management at the United States International University. It’s full house; MBA students and their lecturers anxious to know what is this knowledge management thing all about anyway.  

Jan, 2005. London.

The thing about London is that even in the middle of winter, it never gets too cold. I don’t know what it is, but it just kind of feels okay even when the rest of the country is buried in snow. Then it’s off to Leeds for a day. Never been to Leeds before, but as it happens, I set ‘True warriors’ partly in Leeds and based my whole knowledge of Leeds on research. Coming here was a very weird experience. I’ve written about a character living here, going to university here, but I’ve never been here. It felt strange walking round the campus, taking note of the ambience, the buildings, imagining my character wandering around here. I rather enjoyed it, actually. The union building was pretty much what I expected, but with more amenities than Chege would have had in the late 80s. I had a couple of drinks at the Union bar, sat on the roof and watched the city skyline. I could just imagine Chege doing the same, his heart aching for Peggy, who could be one of those young things drinking and smoking their essay troubles away.