What Works: Success in Stressful Times

I regret not including Singapore, for it is a fascinating experiment and a hugely successful one. Its attributes, however, are well known. There should be success stories from South-East Asia, for example from South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia; my only defence is that you cannot cover everything.

The Middle East and Africa have each fielded a tale. I first visited Dubai at the height of the boom and decided there and then that this was a story demanding to be told. I next visited when it was rolling over towards the downturn and the question was whether to keep it in for by then it was clear that it would hit the buffers. Should the example be broadened more generally to the Gulf states, including Abu Dhabi, which has moved to rescue its fellow United Arab Emirates member, and also neighbouring Oman, which has been extraordinarily successful in creating a harmonious mix of ancient and modern? In the end I kept Dubai, partly because it is such an extreme example of property development but more because, for all its shortcomings, I believe it will maintain its role as a trading hub in the years ahead and succeed at it. Meanwhile, the lessons are obvious.

Africa was difficult because the continent is so diverse and its problems so challenging. Primary education in Ghana was one possibility, an example of public sector success under difficult circumstances. I would have liked to highlight the vibrancy of commerce in Nigeria, a success story against an even more difficult background. But in the end the obvious choice was surely the right one: mobile telephony. That is a great story in its own right but also illustrates some of the most remarkable features of the continent, including the ability of its people to adapt technologies to suit the special circumstances of Africa and the sheer commercial creativity of many societies there.

Australia provided an outstanding example, sports education, and even if it is an obvious one, I am happy with that. The message that it does this better than any place on earth has already transformed sports training in Britain, among other places, and in any case I think the story really should go beyond sport: governments can achieve in education if they are determined, set up and fund the project, and are clear about their objectives.

Finally, there is one non-geographical example, the International Baccalaureate. This is an education movement that is genuinely multinational: its legal headquarters are in Switzerland, it has an administrative base in Wales, its largest market is the USA and its fastest-growing areas of activity are in Asia. Schools all over the world are turning to the IB as a way not just to give their students a global academic credential, but much more to equip them to be good citizens of the world in their own individual way. I gave a talk about the changing world economy to a group of IB people and came away thrilled by what I learnt. Visiting schools in the UK, the USA and, by chance, Estonia totally confirmed this view. It is wonderful to know that the next generation of people who will be running the show is so good.

That brings me to the final point: the sense of a global community that came through strongly when I was researching and writing this book. Some general themes of What Works, together with the more specific takeaway lessons, are set out in the concluding chapter. Here are some thoughts about the global context of this book: how these stories exemplify a world where power is shifting and good ideas come from every quarter.

3. THE POWER OF GOOD IDEAS – AND THE VARIETY OF PLACES THEY COME FROM

The world is at one of those inflection points that historians will look back upon with awe. Economic power is rebalancing away from Europe and, to some extent, North America and principally towards Asia. It is the biggest shift of power since the Industrial Revolution, which enabled Europe and then North America to leap ahead of the more populous Asia. In 1820, by far the largest economies in the world were China and India. Fast forward and, within a generation, China seems set to overtake the USA as the largest-it probably overtook Japan to become the second biggest some time in 2009-while India is likely to move into the number three slot. Other countries, including Brazil and Russia, will not be far behind. Most people in the West are vaguely aware of the rising power of the so-called emerging economies, particularly of China, but have hardly begun to think through the consequences of this.

This shift is not just about economics; it is also about ideas. We are moving from a period when most of the ideas that have driven the world economy have come from the West, to one where many will come from the East-and the rest of the emerging world. For the moment the mixed-economy model of Europe, Japan and, in a slightly different form, the USA remains the one that is being adopted in the rest of the world. On the surface it looks as though a form of Western capitalism is being recreated in China and to some extent in India. In the summer of 2009 the Shanghai Stock Exchange became the second largest in the world after New York, in the sense that the value of the companies traded on it was second only to those traded on Wall Street. But that was in part because Chinese banks had adopted a different set of business practices to those of their US counterparts and it was in part, too, because the Chinese government had followed a totally different fiscal strategy from that of the USA or most European governments.

China and India, together with many other emerging nations, came out of the economic downturn in far better shape than the USA, Europe or Japan. On the face of it, the ideas of the emerging world look rather more effective than those of the West.

The purpose of this book is not to look at the future shape of the world, and the way it is changing, from a macro-economic perspective. That is what I spend much of my day job doing, and it was also the approach of The World in 2020. My aim here, in starting from a series of stories, is to illustrate how there are great ideas and innovations in Western societies but also similarly great ideas and innovations in the emerging world.

That surely is the future. Good ideas will increasingly come from anywhere and everywhere. We need to learn from each other. You cannot, of course, lift one way of doing things, transplant it to the other side of the earth and expect it to flourish. You could not create an Edinburgh Festival in China any more than you could make New York as safe as Tokyo. You could not build as good a university as Harvard even in Bangalore, or at least it would take several generations to do so. And you could not transport Hong Kong’s lean government to the welfare states of Western Europe, though there are some things we could learn from that. Indeed I hope we can all learn a bit from each of these stories, and try to apply some elements of their success. I’ve picked out three key lessons (bulleted) in each example and highlighted some further lessons in the conclusion.

We can also learn from the weaknesses. While every single example here is one of something that has been successful, every single story in some way encompasses threats that must be overcome or flaws that must be fixed. I have tried to highlight these for this is what makes the stories real. One of the great puzzles is the way in which clever, thoughtful and decent people can get things wrong.

What interests me most about these examples is partly the extent to which the baton of success can be passed on from one generation to another but it is also the extent to which an entity has the capacity to correct its course when the winds change.

As noted at the beginning of this introduction, the winds have changed sharply during the writing of this book. That makes for a much more interesting world, a much more challenging one, and one where we should dump ideological explanations and responses and simply build on ‘what works’. I hope you will enjoy the journey.

The UK and Ireland (#u78524d3e-580c-59c4-a61f-88bdcca88ee9)

CHAPTER ONE (#u78524d3e-580c-59c4-a61f-88bdcca88ee9)

I. WHAT IS THE STORY?

A shouted warning for the audience to stand back and a burst of fire from a human flame-thrower surges towards the crowd of onlookers on the Mound. A troupe in silver body-paint hands out leaflets for the night’s performance. Down the High Street, a jazz band bangs out the sounds of New Orleans. It is clamour, clamour-‘come and see us, the most brilliant act ever’-as every group of talent demands your attention. For it is August in Edinburgh and the prim grey capital of Scotland is once again home to the largest arts show in the world.

As the International Festival guide puts it: ‘There is no place on earth like Edinburgh in August.’

Nothing, but nothing, prepares the first-time visitor for the scale of what is on offer. You could in theory set to work every morning at ten, jam-pack the day with visits to shows and go all the way through the wee hours to 4 a.m.-and still see only a tiny fraction of what is available. There are more shows, more world premieres, more tickets, more new talent, more critics, more media moguls, more authors and playwrights-in short more talent on display-than at any other arts festival anywhere. What have Rupert Murdoch, Billy Connolly and J. K. Rowling got in common? They have all, in one way or another, appeared on a stage in Edinburgh in August.

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In fact, so, too, has just about everyone involved in the British arts or media scene. Every student theatre troupe in the land wants to put something on there; a dear friend commissioned a new piano composition that had its world premiere there; other friends have done book readings or shows; one of my cousins puts on or acts in a play there most years. And my own modest contribution was once to go on stage as a panellist for a TV event.

There is a host of other arts festivals around the world but Edinburgh is three times the size of any of them.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is an extraordinary, if improbable achievementxd-and one that many other cities would love to emulate. How has Edinburgh done it?

The short answer is slowly. This is not one festival but-depending what you include-ten. Each reinforces the others, giving the city an artistic critical mass that makes it impossible to topple.

There is the original arts festival,

(#litres_trial_promo) organized like so many others by the city authorities. There is a jazz and blues festival,

(#litres_trial_promo) Europe’s largest, bringing in groups from all over the world. There is the book fair,

(#litres_trial_promo) the largest of its kind on the planet. There is a film festival,

(#litres_trial_promo) the longest continually running one in the world, for Cannes had a break during the Second World War.

(#litres_trial_promo) There is a television festival.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 2003, a video games festival joined the clutch;

(#litres_trial_promo) Scotland is one of the key world centres for creating new video games.

(#litres_trial_promo) There is the Mela,

(#litres_trial_promo) a celebration of life in the Indian sub-continent, run by Edinburgh’s Asian community. In 2004 the city added a visual art festival for the first time,

(#litres_trial_promo) though actually modern visual arts had been celebrated since the early years, with local galleries putting on individual shows. In a slightly different category from all the rest, there is the Edinburgh Tattoo,

(#litres_trial_promo) where military musicians-again from all over the world-put on a show on the forecourt of Edinburgh Castle. The Tattoo is actually the second-largest of all the shows in terms of ticket sales, offering more than 200,000 seats through its three-week run, and military visitors come from all over the world to see how it is done.

And the biggest of all? That honour goes to the Fringe. Edinburgh’s special feature, the thing that distinguishes it from every other celebration of artistic endeavour, is the Fringe-the open access given by the city to the thousands of events that take place in August. Others have tried to copy it. None has really succeeded.

The story, though, offers a lesson for anyone wanting to run an arts event. Back in that drab aftermath of the Second World War, many cities sought to recapture the life and joy of pre-war Europe. Thus Cannes restarted its film festival-it had opened for just one night, on 1 September 1939, before Europe was plunged into war. In 1946 and 1947, respectively, Avignon

(#litres_trial_promo) and Edinburgh both started arts festivals

(#litres_trial_promo)-the pattern being the classic one where a group of civil and artistic leaders invite companies to bring their acts, organize venues-and usually offer subsidies to get them to come. The original Edinburgh International Arts Festival was exactly that. But in the very first year something happened that changed Edinburgh and the arts world for ever.

Eight groups that had not been invited, six from Scotland and two from England, decided to gatecrash the show. They found their own venues, stumped up their own money and put on a performance.

(#litres_trial_promo) That first Fringe has defined the movement ever since: no performers are invited-there is complete open access; they use unconventional theatres; and they carry all the financial risks themselves. More came the following year and an Edinburgh journalist pointed out that interesting things were happening on the fringe of the main festival-and so coined that expression to describe them.

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Since then, the Fringe has gradually acquired a modest infrastructure. The first programme to bring the various independent acts under one loose umbrella, rather than have them compete against each other for spectators,

(#litres_trial_promo) was put together on the initiative of a local printer in 1954. A box office run by Edinburgh students followed in 1955 and the Festival Fringe Society in 1958.

(#litres_trial_promo) One of the key aims of the society was to help would-be performers put on shows, a theme that continues to today. The event became famous across the UK in 1960 after the success of the comedy show Beyond the Fringe

(#litres_trial_promo) (ironically part of the main festival, not the Fringe), but the first full-time paid employee was not appointed until 1969.

The Fringe raced on, getting into the Guinness Book of Records as the globe’s largest arts festival in 1992 and becoming the first arts organization in the world to sell tickets online in real time in 2000. In 2009 an estimated 19,000 performers took part in more than 34,000 performances at more than 2,000 shows in 265 venues. Nearly 1.9 million tickets were sold and the event generated £75 million for the economy. Those figures beat all records by a huge margin. Indeed the Fringe had doubled in size over the previous six years.