Category Archives: Economics

Another Reason Why China Will be #1 in GDP by 2021

As part of the 158B in infrastructure spend China recently unleashed, “China’s NRDC approved 25 urban rail transit project plans and feasibility studies in 1 day”. That’s a whole lotta transit. And they’re doing this at a time when the economy slows and growth stabilization becomes the top priority.

They may have spent much of the 20th century hiding behind a red curtain, but they have learned that if they want to again become the dominant economy (which they were uncontested from the beginning of the second millennia to about 1800, although the economy of Europe as a whole was about the same size as China from 1500 to 1800, which was still known as the Age of Chinese Dominance), they have to not only play in the global market, but invest at home to give themselves an edge. While we will spend decades bickering about the need for high-speed rail, they will identify the need and approve a feasibility study within the next five year plan at the latest. And if the feasibility study comes back positive, they’ll get it done. In comparison, California started talking about high-speed rail at least as early as 1996, when the California High Speed Rail Authority was established, did not decide to go for it until 2008, and did not approve the first phase until July of this year.

China realizes that if it is going to go head-to-head with the United States, it has to at least match the United States, if not exceed the United States, it in all of the metrics that matter, including education, R&D investment (to the tune of 2.2% of GDP), and infrastructure. And it’s doing that. It plans to meet its goals of 45,000 km of high-speed railway and 83,000 km of highway networks. The infrastructure will be able to move people and goods as efficiently in the interior as on the coasts, making most of China suitable for new factories and office parks. This will allow China to continue to dominate in global manufacturing and take on more back-office functions.

So when are we going to realize that if we want to maintain our lead a little longer, and push forward the date when India knocks down the USA to #3, that we are going to have to stop wasting money on ineffective broad-based buy-American stimulus programs and invest in infrastructure and R&D in an effort to at least keep pace with China?

To Solve the Talent Crisis, Think Different!

We have a talent crisis across the board in Supply Management and Supply Chain. We shouldn’t have a talent crisis, but because of continual short-sightedness in industry and government, we do.

And at this point I should probably end the post because by now the average person who stumbles upon this post is probably screaming that it’s not our fault, because we value talent, we have great education systems, and we’re trying hard to fix it, etc. etc., but it is our fault. Why?

Every year we rank talent in the top 3 issues. And every year, as our hopes and dreams that strong growth and stability will return get slashed by reality, the first thing we do is cut the training budget. And then, when we realize that there’s too much to do with too little people, we cut professional development time and ask people to work overtime on tactical tasks that add nothing to their skill set. And the cycle continues. So, in the corporate world, we cause our own chaos.

And then, when we have millions of people out of work, with thousands willing to retrain for better jobs, we limit unemployment benefits and make it almost impossible to get money for professional and degree programs. And I’m not just talking scholarships or sponsored training, I’m talking loans that many of these people would be willing to take, and carry for years, just for the opportunity to acquire a skill set that will see them working again. So the government is doing nothing to actually fix the situation. Governments have to guarantee loans for education and they have to subsidize living costs for workers who need retraining if their future earning benefits will limit the ability to repay very high loans. But that’s another issue for another post.

The point that needs to be harped on is that, as an industry, we’ve created our own mess, and we perpetuate it every day. As the job of Supply Manager gets more and more demanding, the response I’m seeing is “We need a talented, educated, skilled individual with a Masters Degree in Supply Management, who speaks three languages, has experience with MRP, ERP, and best-of-breed technologies, has sourcing expertise in three categories across five verticals, has managed 100 Million dollar projects, is trained in negotiation, etc. etc. etc.”. And, in the end, we have a set of requirements that maybe 6 people in the world can fill because ( a) it’s way too much for one person and ( b) the company has never bothered to train anyone internally with even half the skills it wants.

If a company instead took care to appropriately define a set of reasonable job descriptions that would cover all the necessary skills, and then identified internal candidates and trained them for those positions, they would have half the battle solved. Then, if instead of looking for someone for the role who had all of the skills, looked for someone who has the education and experience to quickly learn all of the skills with the mentorship of the people trained internally and a few focussed professional development courses, I’m convinced half of our talent crunch issues would magically disappear over night. (The logistics half would still be an issue because we have the image problem associated with warehouse and trucking jobs in this economy. Because we don’t view those jobs as highly important and an honour to hold, as the Mexicans do [which is why I’m okay with giving them our trucking jobs], convincing people to even consider those jobs will continue to be difficult.)

And then, as this recent article over on the HBR network on how workers with disabilities solved Gitanjali Gems’ talent problem, we never take the time to realize that someone else’s island of misfit toys might actually be filled with the resources we need to do the job. Now, I agree with Charles’ that Supply Management has traditionally been the island of misfit toys in an organization, and that is a big problem, but the reality is that if someone is skilled in X when organization Z needs Y, that person will be a misfit toy in organization Z. The best candidates for a Supply Management job are often people in engineering, high tech, medicine, (bio) chemistry, etc. who know the details of the category that need to be sourced, and the challenges that are involved, but who are not necessarily the best people to be building the projects or doing research. Just like some of the best sales and marketing people in high tech are people with CS degrees who learned to code, figured out that they weren’t very good at it and/or didn’t like it very much, but that they understand inherently what could and could not be done and the relative amounts of effort different commitments to a customer would carry. In IT, many R&D misfits became marketing marvels.

In the case of Gitanjali Gems’, they needed cutters. This is a skill that takes training and time to acquire, and a big money commitment from an employer. So they need to find people with interest, aptitude, and loyalty, as they’d lose big financially if they lost people to the competition as soon as they reached their productive potential. So they looked to people with real disabilities, and found that the attrition rate was 10 times lower, the productivity was 30% higher, and the overall working atmosphere became one where people “felt good” when they went to work, making them want to work even more. In my book, this far outshadows the additional benefits they received from the government (which ends up paying about 15% of the salaries), and the good press they get for the initiative. Because the company found people who wanted to work, and gave those people the training and tools they needed to be successful, the people enjoyed working for the company, worked 30% more productively, and stayed around a lot longer. Which shows that the talent crunch is solvable, if you just get up and actually do something about it.

There’s Sugar Indices. There’s Steel Indices. Where’s the Exuberance Index?

According to this very interesting article in The Sacramento Bee, the “Global Economy [is] in Worst Shape Since 2009”. Noting that six of the seventeen countries that use the Euro are in recession [including Spain, where protesters are pretending to be V], that the U.S. economy is struggling [yet again], and that the economic superstars of the developing world (namely, the BIC) are in no position to come to the rescue — since they are struggling too, the article claims that this crisis is knocking at all our doors.

But the reality is that crisis, while coming, will not occur until the world accepts it. Economies no longer follow GDP and growth, they follow market exuberance — the kind where housing prices double, where billions are made on junk bonds and collateralized debt obligations, and companies with zero sales get 100 Million valuations, and then go public with massive debt for no apparent logical reason. And it’s not the economic exuberance measured by CERES last year in their “Index of Economic Exuberance” where they tried to measure what’s been happening to whom since the financial crisis of 2008. (In this one-shot analysis, CERES developed a metric to measure whether a country’s macroeconomic performance is stronger or weaker relative to the prevailing performance prior to the advent of the global financial crisis in 2007 using output, unemployment, domestic demand, bank credit, inflation, and the real exchange rate.)

As long as markets are trending up, investment money flows freely. As long as investment money flows, people keep borrowing. As long as people keep borrowing, they keep spending. And as long as they keep spending, the economy goes up, even if production is falling, unemployment is high, and the cost of living is skyrocketing. And if the feds keep pumping money into the economy, the press keeps painting a rosy picture, and corporations take efforts to keep prices down, the economy can keep chugging along at an upward pace for months, and in the past, even a year or two, after everything should come crashing down. (The Zeroes proved that!)

Robert J. Shiller tried to capture the underpinnings of this phenomenon in his book, Irrational Exuberance, first published in 2000, and then revised in 2006, but even behavioural economics, in its current state, can’t capture the absurdity of what drives today’s market-driven economies.

But a technology may be near at hand. In the marketing domain, we have a new technology called sentiment analysis which uses NLP (natural language processing), CL (computational linguistics), and text analytics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials. Enabled by technologies such as the AlchemyAPI, which attempt to identify positive or negative sentiment within any block of text, the goal of sentiment analysis is to determine the attitude and tone of a document.

If we could apply such technology to all market analysis and market sentiments from investors, media, and influential self-publishers (journalists, analysts, and bloggers), it might be possible to see how the markets are moving and detect not only exuberance, but irrational exuberance. This is not as far fetched as it seems. As per an article in the MIT Technology Review in late 2010, the (gasp!) “Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market” (and since stock markets are among the primary drivers of economies, it’s a great start). According to the article, research conducted by Johan Bollen and colleagues determined, with an analysis of almost 10 Million Tweets from 2008 on, that stock market movements could be predicted with this data up to 6 days in advance! (Using a calmness index, they found an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. That’s a success ratio that will make your average trader blush!)

Twitter data alone would not be enough, but as we are better able to harness distributed computing power and the limits of Big Data approach the realms where even Chess becomes a solvable problem, analyzing all market related data for a day will become possible, and maybe we will be able to create an exuberance index and get a better grip on when a recession, even if overdue, will be upon us. (And then, as Supply Managers, determine the best times to sign contracts, lock in prices, and guarantee supply.)

We Need More Corporate Ethics – Bring on the No-Maximum Mega Fines!

As noted in a recent article on Fine and Punishment, it has been a bumper summer for corporate fines and settlements. With firms in Britain and America agreeing to pay over 10 Billion in the past three months alone, there’s too much corporate wrong-doing these days. But the current fines are not enough. For example, a mere 5K for violating 10+2 is a CEO’s lunch money these days in most Global 3000’s. The only act close to defining a fine that will take a real chunk out of the corporate coffers of the guilty that the doctor knows of is the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which allows 15 Million Dollar fines for first offenses and 30 Million Dollar fines for second offenses.

The reality is that a fine is only a deterrent if getting caught would mean a loss. Let’s say the fine for stock-fixing is 1 Million but an investor group could make 10 Million on the fix. Guess what’s going to happen? The stock is going to get fixed if the investor group has anything to do about it because, worst case, they only make 9 Million. The fine HAS to outweigh the reward, or corporate wrongdoing is going to continue to permeate both the financial sector, and the supply chain practices in industries where unlicensed knock-offs (especially in pharmaceuticals or electronics) can save a middle-man millions of dollars and push profits through the roof. As the Economist article stakes, given a risk-free opportunity to mis-sell a product, or form a cartel executives will grab it. To them, it’s all about the almighty dollar — and earning more than their peers to earn Wall Street’s favour and have something to boast about at the next charity dinner. (For a great Wall Street Perspective, you have to check out Randall Lane‘s The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane [now at a bargain price for the hardcover edition on Amazon.com — you can’t go wrong]. Audiobook also available).

Unless the potential fines are crippling, wrong-doing will persist*, and so will cheapening out. And this is the biggest problem. Right now, we need sustainability in supply management, but initial investment in sustainability always costs more, so not only are executives not going to green light sustainable efforts, but if the organization has to look green or socially responsible, they are going to fund the lowest-cost “accredited” third parties that they can find to be “socially responsible”, and, in particular, likely fund those that use shady practices and cut corners everywhere possible. Because when the dollar rules, as long as you can buy the image, why create the real thing?

But if we force ethics back into the corporate world, then maybe we can force sustainability in as well. And when the only choice for gains is again long-term strategy, which is precisely where the economics of sustainability really make sense, maybe we’ll see improvement in ethics and corporate responsibility across the board. Or maybe it’s a pipe-dream. Either way, heftier fines would be a great start!


After all, remember what Randall Lane discovered when he did a Trader Monthly survey in the zeroes:
  If you received an illegal insider tip, a sure thing, and had a 50% chance of getting busted, would you use it? Only 7% would. What about only a 10% chance of getting caught? The numbers spiked to 28%. And what if you had a 0% chance of getting discovered? Suddenly, the number surged to 58%! To the majority of our readers, cheating wasn’t an ethical issue, it was simply a matter of whether they’d get caught.

Markets are Unpredictable – Is It Time For Old Fashioned Futures?

Recently, the Economist published a piece about the broken record that the markets have been following for the past five years. In particular, it has been skipping between two tracks – total chaos (as we experience one crisis after another) and a rhythmic predictability (as investors flee to the safest investment vehicles around, a sharp contrast to the early noughts when risk was everything and traders made millions on the press of a button).

According to the article, an ideal portfolio in 2007 would have been stuffed with gold, white sugar, Swiss francs and German bunds, anyone holding that mixture of assets when the crisis began would have seemed either eccentric or confused. However, over the past five years, a new kind of risk aversion has seen gold hit record values on almost 10% of trading days. So has the Swiss franc, white sugar, and government bonds.

At the same time, many other currencies and commodities have hit record lows as well as highs. Hedging, the standard trick of attempting to offset potential losses/gains that may be incurred by locking in a price too high (or low) for a desired commodity by also taking a position in another commodity that has traditionally followed a mathematically defined relation with the desired commodity, has become almost impossible as one crisis after another derails any and all attempts to find predictable trends.

However, before hedges, we had good old fashioned futures. Initially designed to allow a farmer to sell his crop for a fixed price before it was even planted, a future provided a farmer with an assurance that he would be able to sell his crop without losing the farm if markets went south. This not only benefited the farmer, but also benefited the buying company as they would be assured of a product at the time of harvest. Or, if they didn’t want it, the buying company could sell the contract to someone else.

In today’s volatile market, hedging is not the best idea. If you can’t lock a contract in at a fixed price, which should be your Supply Management organization’s number one goal, you should look to a futures exchange. While it won’t offer either party as much security as a good old fashioned contract, a futures contract may prevent either party from losing their shirt.

Any differing thoughts?