{On April 5, 2013, we will celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the First Friday Book Synopsis, and begin our 16th year. During March, I will post a blog post per day remembering key insights from some of the books I have presented over the 15 years of the First Friday Book Synopsis. We have met every first Friday of every month since April, 1998 (except for a couple of weather –related cancellations). These posts will focus only on books I have presented. My colleague, Karl Krayer, also presented his synopses of business books at each of these gatherings. I am going in chronological order, from April, 1998, forward. The fastest way to check on these posts will be at Randy’s blog entries — though there will be some additional blog posts interspersed among these 30.}
Post #22 of 30
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Synopsis presented July, 2008
The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria. (W. W. Norton. 2008).
Let’s start with this:
This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else. It is about the great transformation taking place around the world, a transformation that, although often discussed, remains poorly understood… Though we talk about a new era, the world seems to be one with which we are familiar. But in fact, it is very different.
At the politico-military level, we remain in a single-superpower world. But in every other dimension – industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural – the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. (emphasis added). That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people… What does it mean to live in a post-American world?
The world is moving from anger to indifference, from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.
Fareed Zakaria, born in India, was first educated in his native India, and then received degrees from both Yale and Harvard. He is a writer, host of CNN’s Global Public Square (a program with genuinely substantive interviews), and a general font of knowledge in all sorts of international, international business, and educational issues… among others.
This book is not about the decline of America. It is about the fact (and it is a fact) that the rest of the world is now advancing, thus the United States will no longer be the “one country, unipolar world” leader, with no rivals.
I think it is an important book.
Here’s are some of the “signs” that the world has changed/is changing:
Look around. The tallest building in the world in now in Taipei, and it will soon be overtaken by one being built in Dubai. The world’s richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is under construction in India, and its largest factories are all in China. London is becoming the leading financial center, and the United Arab Emirates is home to the most richly endowed investment fund. Once quintessentially American icons have been appropriated by foreigners. The world’s largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. Its number one casino is not in Las Vegas but in Macao, which has also overtaken Vegas in annual gambling revenues. The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold, is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Even shopping, America’s greatest sporting activity, has gone global. Of the top ten malls in the world, only one is in the United States: the world’s biggest is in Beijing. Such lists are arbitrary, but it is striking that only ten years ago, American was at the top in many, if not most, of these categories.
And, as countries develop growing and advancing economies, it creates a vast new and different world of consumers…
The share of people living on a dollar a day or less plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004, and is estimated to fall to 12 percent by 2015. China’s growth alone has lifted more than 400 million people out of poverty. Poverty is falling in countries housing 80 percent of the world’s population. The 50 countries where the earth’s poorest people live are basket cases that need urgent attention. In the other 142 – which include China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, and South Africa – the poor are slowly being absorbed into productive and growing economies. For the first time ever, we are witnessing genuinely global growth. This is creating an international system in which countries in all parts of the world are no longer objects or observers but players in their own right. It is the birth of a truly global order.
But/and, not just “consumers.” There are now “nonstate actors,” and this is changing all sorts of things.
The “rest” that is rising includes many nonstate actors. Groups and individuals have been empowered, and hierarchy, centralization, and control are being undermined… Power is shifting away from nation-states, up, down and sideways. In such an atmosphere, the traditional applications of national power, both economic and military, have become less effective.
As the rest of the world “grows,” America will be less “big,” and this might be difficult for Americans to accept (or, even acknowledge).
Americans may admire beauty, but they are truly dazzled by bigness… Europeans prefer complexity, the Japanese revere minimalism. But Americans like size, preferably supersize.
Napoleon famously, and probably apocryphally, said “Let China sleep, for when China wakes, she will shake the world.”
In one sense, this is an affirming book. The United States is strong, and flourishing. In another sense, this is a critical book.
The United States had had an extraordinary hand to play in global politics – the best of any country in history. Yet, by almost any measure – problems solved, success achieved, institutions built, reputation enhanced – Washington has played this hand badly. American has had a period of unparalleled influence. What does it have to show for it?
Americans firmly believe in the virtues of competition. We believe that individuals, groups, and corporations perform better when they are in a competitive environment. When it comes to the international arena, we have forgotten this fact. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has walked the world like a colossus, unrivaled, and unchecked. This has had its benefits, but it has also made Washington arrogant, careless, and lazy. Its foreign policy has at times resembled General Motors’ business strategy in the 1970’s – an approach driven by internal factors, with little sense of the broader environment in which it was operating.
It didn’t work so well for GM, and it hasn’t worked for the United States.Over the last fifteen years, the United States has placed sanctions on half the world’s population. We are the only country in the world to issue annual report cards on every other country’s behavior. Washington, D.C. has become a bubble, smug and out of touch with the world outside.
It was not just the substance of American policy that has changed in the unipolar era. So did the style, which has become imperial and imperious. There is much communication with foreign leaders, but it’s a one-way street. Other governments are simply informed on U. S. policy.
To foreigners, American officials seem clueless about the world they are supposed to be running. “There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without,” says Kishore Mahbubani, who was formerly Singapore’s foreign secretary and ambassador to the United Nations. Because Americans live in a “cocoon,” they don’t see the “sea change in attitudes towards America throughout the world.”
And, Zacharia seeks to remind us of this:
Hubert Humphrey reputedly said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of the most important foreign policies of that decade. America the place has often been the great antidote to U. S. foreign policy.
For America to thrive in this new and challenging era, for it to succeed amid the rise of the rest, it need fulfill only one test. It should be a place that is as inviting and exciting to the young student who enters the country today as it was for this awkward eighteen-year-old a generation ago.
At the beginning of my synopsis handout, I included “some numbers” from the book:
1978 – 200 air conditioners sold in China
2005 – 48 million air conditioners sold in China2001 – 400,000 cars sold to first time car buyers in India
2007 – 6 million cars sold to first time car buyers in India2001 – 200,000 cars sold to first time car buyers in China
2007 – 9 million cars sold to first time car buyers in China1978 – total exports from China in one year…
2007 – more total exports from China in one day than in all of 19782007 — 20 fastest growing cities in the world – all in China
2010 – more Starbucks projected in China than in the United States
And here are other key portions of my handout:
• Three tectonic power shifts over the last five hundred years
1) The rise of the Western world, from the fifteenth century through the late eighteenth century.
• it produced modernity as we know it: science & technology; commerce & capitalism; the agricultural and industrial revolutions; the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the West
2) The rise of the United States, in the closing years of the nineteenth century.
• for most of the last century, the U. S. has dominated global economics, politics, science, and culture. For the last twenty years, that dominance has been unrivaled…
3) The rise of the rest – now.
• countries all over the world have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable… the over all trend has been unambiguously upward.
• this is world-wide – far more than just “the rise of Asia”
• The power shift:
• 100 years ago: a multipolar order run by a collection of European governments
• then: the bipolar duopoly of the Cold War
• Since 1991, an American imperium…
• Next: the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance.
and:
1. The United States is not falling – the rest of the world is rising.
(The rest of the world is represented by China and India).
• the new “hubless” world
• And though the United States has a rising GDP, the American percentage of over-all GDP isshrinking because the rest of the world is rising…
2. Some key words to ponder:
• globalization
• nationalism
3. About the United States
• the “formula” that allowed/enabled/emboldened Bush
• Unipolarity + 9/11 + Afghanistan = Unilateralism + Iraq
I seldom include anything in my handouts that does not come directly from the book itself, or my own observations about the book. But in this case, I included a paragraph from the New York Times Review by Michiko Kakitani:
The irony of the “rise of the rest,” Mr. Zakaria notes, is that it is largely a result of American ideas and actions: “For 60 years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. We have urged peoples in distant lands to take up the challenge of competing in the global economy, freeing up their currencies, and developing new industries. We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism.”
Whatever else we need to understand from business books over the last fifteen years, I think we need to understand this: it has become a new world for business, with globalization not some abstract idea but a reality, providing business competition now from every corner of the globe. This book really helps us understand this new and oh-so-challenging world.
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You can purchase many of our synopses, with our comprehensive handouts, and audio recordings of our presentations, at our companion site 15minutebusinessbooks.com. The recordings may not be studio quality, but they are understandable, usable recordings, to help you learn.
(And though the handouts are simple Word documents, in the last couple of years we have “upgraded” the look of our handouts to a graphically designed format).
We have clients who play these recordings for small groups. They distribute the handouts, listen to the recordings together, and then have a discussion that is always some form of a “what do we have to learn, what can we do with this?” conversation. Give it a try.
First Friday Book Synopsis 