I too have been impressed by the commitment and passion of South African businessmen (and others) in spite of their traumatic past and troublesome present.

It a contrast to the shameless and deplorable greed of American financial executives -- even now demanding and getting millions of dollars a year for "adding value," even after they were bailed out by the government they regularly excoriate as incompetent and intrusive.

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us.

I know many young financial people have dedicated themselves to improving society though the Peace Corps and NGOs. More power to them.

Yes, horizontal, fragmented idea sharing is a great idea. I suspect it is how all surviving big organizations get work done. We just don't do it very efficiently. Hence my interest in your ideas and eagerness to try out your methods at our Asia meeting -- which will probably be held some time in the first half of next year.

Mark

My experience of such is that often novel ideas pass around companies that way - and those on teh ground would like to copy them - if the ideas don't require management involvement then they work, if they do require management involvement then they often don't because the managers are too removed from the context.

Working on new governance ideas for horizontal sharing ....

I've heard that the Grameen bank concept didn't work at first when it was tried in Africa. I'm curious to know which aspects turned out to be culturally sensitive and had to be changed before it would work. Can anyone please elaborate? Thanks!

Horizontal thinking in the South African context is very good thinking. Our economic space is dominated by large, heriarchical organisations that often reap oligopololistic benefits to the cost of society. The public sector is similarly organised. Unless you're in the feeding chain of those systems, you face huge formal and informal barriers to organise economically. So I would expect horizontal thinking (and action) to expose reservoirs of ideas and talent for the benefit of society, and not just the elites. But of course, it's also tricky, because this "shape" of our economy shapes all our thinking too; we believe that things have to be done this way, and that it's just too hard to fight it.

For example Eskom, which is our power utility company (SOE and a monopoly), recently hit the wall. This massive and well-resourced organisation simply failed to make plans to meet the increasing power needs of a (slow) growing economy. The unexpected and sudden nature of the power-shortages, and the speed with which the effects cascaded through the economic system, should surely have been a cautionary tale about the design of the system. Horizontal communication and organisation at all levels in the system would have helped constituents re-organise their power, and commercial relationships, and we might have redesigned the larger system to be more resilient and reflexive in an increasingly complex environment. Unfortunately, we've handed the redesign back to the monopoly that created the mess, and all signals are that they will absorb any initiative or innovation into their vertical hierarchies.

We let a good crisis go to waste. But not to worry, we've got more, including dismal education outcomes, Great-depression-level unemployment, massively skewed incomes, and ubiquitous and often violent crime. My fear is that we'll continue to rely on the old ways of trying to "engineer" solutions to these inter-related and intractable issues. Horizontal thinking is an important way to help us build pathways away from the inevitable consequences.

Grameen has had a problem in Africa and Australia. I think the reason is that the social structure (and issues of shame) are different. I understand that when the ideas were modified by a Torres Islander without Development assistance then they worked (a good example of horizontal knowledge sharing). If any one has the reference on that I would be interested.