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Earlier this week I attended a 25 years anniversary reception of a company which specialises in body beauty and care. I have known the company and its owner since the beginning and I am impressed by the growth it has gone through since its infancy. Mingling with other guests for a while I was looking forward to the official part as I was eager to hear what was going to be shared during the congratulatory speeches. After the kind words of the Master of Ceremonies, it was the owner of the company who took to the microphone first and she was glowing of happiness and pride while appreciating her staff and supporters. Some of the outstanding employees were also invited to the stage and it was clear to me that CEO and staff alike shared a feeling of pride and ownership, seldom witnessed in Ethiopia. In fact, they referred to each other as a family, supporting and encouraging each other to do the best they can for the company. So, what are some of the factors that contributed to this success story? Without pretending to be exhaustive, I’ll try to highlight some.
Not taking “No” for an answer. When the business owner came up with the idea of bodily wellbeing and a spa, all she heard from others was that this was a foreign concept and would not work in Ethiopia. Isn’t this the kind of response people often give to somebody with a new idea? In Ethiopia, things are done the Ethiopian way and new concepts from elsewhere will not work, is the consensus. New ideas are only picked up after somebody has proved that it works and becomes successful with it. By then the idea is copied by everybody else. This woman however, with the full and consistent support of her husband didn’t allow herself to be discouraged though and went ahead anyway, cashing her first payments not too long after that. The company has grown ever since and inspired many others to follow.
Having a vision and remaining focused. She came with an idea that developed into a vision and that vision became his dream. Next, she made sure that all she did was to make that dream come through and she didn’t allow herself to be distracted from that. There were plenty distractions and discouraging moments on the way of course but the vision stood out and the entrepreneur continued to pursue it.
Taking time out for strategic reflection. After the first few successful years there was a moment that the upward curve naturally began to flatten out. The business owner realised she needed to look into finding ways to expand and came up with the idea to begin a training centre. This turned out to be an important strategic decision indeed. Today there are few companies in the sector that have not been influenced by the training program and that have no workers that were trained there. The company jolted into 5th gear, never to stop again. Strategic planning is something that every business should do regularly, lest it will lose its competitive advantage and niche.
Taking responsibility. Such decisions show that the business owner took real management responsibility resulting into action that turned the situation into new directions. No being satisfied with the status quo and looking at what others will do, she looked at a bigger picture and went for it., taking charge of a new bolt move. Not doing so, will let the business grow smaller instead of bigger.
Involving the staff. However, in doing so she also listened to what staff had to say and the business is a success because employees are a part of it, feel recognised and thus became all the more creative in their thinking. This attitude of involving employees remained a lasting management strategy, resulting in them feeling part of the company, having a sense of ownership and taking responsibility.
Not settling for less. Having said that, the company also made sure it recruited employees that had the potential and the motivation to be what may be referred to “Team A players”.
Delegation. Recognizing potential in employees is a very important skill of a good manager, followed by the ability to unleash that potential, facilitate its further development, gradually giving away more responsibility and letting go, while providing effective coaching support on the way. Some workers will pick up the opportunity and develop into managers and leaders themselves.
Appreciation. In her own charming way, the business owner manages to encourage her staff and make them enthusiastic for the work they do, followed by generous appreciation for their effort. PPPP is an important principle here: Praise in public, punish in private. There was plenty of praise in public during this reception and I trust there will be effective feed back behind closed doors as regards matters that need improvement.
Globalisation. The business owner had connections abroad since early days of her life. She indeed took the opportunity to learn as much as possible from the ways things are done there. Coming back to Ethiopia she brought along this wealth of knowledge and skills, while realising all too well that applying blueprints wasn’t going to work indeed, adapting them to the Ethiopian context instead.
And so, a rather simple business idea developed into a mature company providing effective services to a growing number of clients and the sector at large. Well done Mulu. Keep standing out Byogenic.

Ton Haverkort
ton.haverkort@gmail.com

The Day Globalization Begins

Business & Economy

October 29, 2018

Many historians asserted that the beginning of Globalization goes back to the outcomes of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus that brought him, on October 1492, to the shore of an island in the Caribbean sea. It was the starting point of a brutal and bloody intervention of European sea powers in the history of American peoples, a region of the world that had, unto then, remained insulated from regular relationships with Europe, Africa and Asia.
True, for thousands of years before that year, there were intermittent contacts between distant parts of the world. But continuous, rather than very occasional, direct human interaction across continents began with the European exploration of the oceans from the 1400s onward. That’s not a Eurocentric world view. That’s a historic fact.
The arrival of Columbus in America thus provides the decisive punctuation mark in that evolving process. It is the day when globalization actually began. The event was really remarkable. All human progress and mutual knowledge accumulated since that time is largely due to this journey. This process involved marvellous things, the merely good ones, the bad and the real evil ones.
Ira Straus, Chairman of Center for War/Peace Studies and United States Coordinator, Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO stated that there is a tendency today to focus on the evils, along with plenty of moralizing against explorers and, yes, colonizers. But throughout the developing world, the downsides of the interchange with the West are, in the aggregate, far outweighed by the benefits. According to Ira Straus, the only thing that could reverse this would be the self-destruction of humanity, wilful or not, by means of new technologies. Such self-destruction is unfortunately a realistic prospect.
Everything that has happened with globalization in the half millennium since 1492 can be summed up in one sentence: Global interchange has continued at an ever-accelerating pace, despite intermittent setbacks. Oceanic exploration and trade soon covered all regions of the globe, while starting out strongest in the transatlantic dimension connecting Europe and the Americas. The global trade routes out of Europe passed through the Atlantic as the home area, dwarfing the old trade routes of the Mediterranean and the Silk Road, turning the Atlantic into the center of the emerging world economy for the coming centuries.
Global interchange accelerated with every advance in science and technology, from the steamship and industrial revolution onward to the present. It continued in the 1900s, despite some long-lasting setbacks such as communism, fascism and world wars. Interchange was renewed and buttressed after 1945, in response to these setbacks, by international institutions. The UN system, the Bretton Woods system, and the Euro-Atlantic system all served to rebuild, stabilize and increase the interchange. True as well that the deregulation of financial flows which commenced in the 1980s increased the interchange greatly, while engendering risks of another major setback. This seems to have been the starting point of the popular use of the term “globalization.”
Interchange was further accelerated by the abandonment of the largest protectionist and socialist barriers to it in the 1990s in China, India and the former Soviet space. China and India lifted themselves out of their self-imposed stagnation and began a phase of remarkable progress. Jack Turner, a Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Foundation Junior Research Fellow stated that the flip side of that has been that Western workers are no longer shielded from the competition from Chinese workers in goods production and Indian workers in services. In addition, Western workers have suffered a reduction in the wage gains they would have otherwise been enjoying.
According to Jack Turner, the resulting risk of social destabilization has triggered an understandable reaction against globalization. At the same time, when one looks at a global balance sheet, there is no denying that hundreds of millions of truly poor workers in the world have gained dramatically in income and welfare, thanks to the intensification of globalization. All of this has finally brought some wage equalization on the global level, after several centuries in which the West had rushed ahead thanks to its science and technology.
The internet has added yet another dimension of globalization. It has meant an acceleration of interchange that is explosive in more than one sense of the word. It has accelerated the spread of information at a geometrical, even exponential, pace. Discussion and organizing have mushroomed across borders for all purposes – love and culture, scholarship and science, telecommuting and outsourcing, money laundering and terrorism.
Ira Straus noted that the question of how humanity can organize itself to better manage the consequences of this explosion of interchange – to better, to buttress, to channel, to regulate and to restrain it – will involve more globalization. With the benefit of hindsight, we will see that social media are but a crude interim step in that evolving process.
As Jack Turner argued, the future cannot be predicted in detail. What can be predicted is that the central developments of the future, whichever way they go, will go global. The train of globalization left the station when Columbus reached the Americas. It will never go back.

LESSONS FROM LIBYA

Editorial

October 29, 2018

Seven years ago, at the height of the ‘Arab Spring’, Libya was bombarded to smithereens by the combined forces of NATO. The UN Security Council gave permission for intervention in Libya, allegedly to save civilians (humanitarian intervention). But that directive was cynically and callously stretched by the power that be (TPTB), resulting in untold destruction of lives and properties. If truth be told, the UNSC resolution was used as a pretext to dismember Libya and murder its strongman, Muammar Gaddafi. Amongst the NATO nations, France and of course the US, stand out as the main protagonists in the obliteration project. Nonetheless, behind the whole so-called humanitarian campaign, it was the imperial policy of regime change that was actually in play!
To be sure, Gaddafi was no saint, but he was neither anti-Africans nor anti-Africa! If anything, it is his attempts to consolidate Africa on a more independent trajectory that brought his demise. Since then, those who professed democracy to the Libyan sheeple (human mass) have been very quiet. In fact, they are nowhere to be seen, except perhaps nearby the Libyan oilfields. The whole notion of bringing democracy to a nation from abroad, besides being extremely condescending, is also rife with a lot of hidden agenda. For instance, France has a lot of stake in the Sahel region. French speaking West Africa uses the French backed common currency (CFA). As a result, all significant credit creation as well as currency printing, for the whole of French speaking West Africa, is done, not overseen, by France from Paris! Moreover, the uranium to power France’s numerous electricity generating nuclear reactors is increasingly coming from Niger. Gold is also mined in Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea, to say nothing about other natural resource of the CFA nations. On the other hand, the US has increased its non-stop military operations on the African continent, under the aegis US Africa Command. The US Africa Command is empire’s preferred weapon of choice to control and secure the whole of Africa’s commodity chain. Propaganda aside, it is still the old ‘resource curse’ that keeps on fueling the various conflicts on our continent!
One can say Libya is now a de facto two states, east and west. The various tribes and groupings are still angling for the control of all of Libya’s oil fields, but no clear winner has emerged so far. What is now threatening in Libya is a protracted instability that might engulf other countries of the Sahel region. Without a cohesive aspiration and attendant road map to guide the Libyan sheeple, the future of the country remains precarious, to say the least. There are lessons many African countries can and should learn from the experiences in Libya and to a lesser extent Egypt. One can observe the following from the Libyan experience; phony democratization (intent as well as enactment) can easily lead to destabilization and fragmentation. Democracy is only a tool used to bring about a desired objective, be it in the sphere of political governance, or otherwise. By and large, democracy is not an end on its own!
There need be shared objectives, not always explicitly stated (mostly assumed, not needing explications) that underlie the whole society on which the desired democracy (as a tool or as a rule) can act upon! For example all citizens, without exception, can vote to commit suicide or homicide; but because this decision is reached by legitimate democratic process doesn’t necessarily mean it is always valid and must be pursued! In all civilized collective existence, it is preferred the shared values/objectives of a society are stated clearly, first and foremost, before we can employ democracy to achieve this or that. If there is no cohesive objective to be achieved, the use of democracy might well end up fuelling utter chaos. Therefore, blind worshipping of the means (democracy as a tool and not as ‘rule of the majority’) can easily lead Africans astray. This is an important lesson we can take from the current situation both in Libya and Egypt!
The other issue is; if the propped up/imported democratization fails, what will most likely follow, particularly if the interest of TPTB is still to preserve the nation-state? The first option is outright dictatorship, camouflaged as a ‘democracy’. In this case the word ‘democracy’ is meant to express the ‘majority rule’. But this gimmick is what has been tried all over without much success. Phony democracy entailing phony elections, phony participations, phony justice, etc., etc. ultimately collapses as its shelf life is very short. Ethiopia needs to study the experiences of MENA, particularly the cases of Egypt and Libya. The two trajectories, we believe, are very instructive. With an impeccable democratization process, a nation without firmly shared values can promptly disintegrate! To reiterate, if there exists no raison d’être for a particular society/nation galvanizing the collective, the mere application of democracy, rather mechanically, will not be very useful. Unless grounded by deeply shared values, say like justice & equity, democracy as a tool can also lead to undesirable outcome. There is a very good example from recent history. Nazi Germany and Hitler were voted to power by democratic means. Does that mean what they did was justifiable? Mere obsession with processes, democratic or otherwise, without other guiding human values can be futile!
‘The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.’ Edward Dowling [1941]. “A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.” Aldous Huxley. Good Day!

Great Anticipation

Local News

October 29, 2018

Sahle-Work Zewde is the new President of Ethiopia. She was appointed by the Parliament to serve as the fourth Head of State. An experienced diplomat, she is now one of the few female heads of state in the world. Her appointment is a boost for gender equality. Although a largely ceremonial post, Sahle-Work Zewde as president is expected to blend style with moral authority and represent the country well internationally. Ethiopians expect her to act as a moderating influence at home.