I like the columns Hamish McRae writes for The Independent, so I am worried that he is involved in dangerous work. No, he’s not transitioned from being a financial journalist to becoming a war correspondent. He is engaged in the perilous exercise of identifying and extracting lessons from extraordinarily successful organisations and communities in a fast-changing world which is intent on proving such choices wrong. He is not the first one to have embarked on such a hazardous venture. What has stacked the pack against him is the extreme turbulence of the economic environment during the writing of the book. McRae’s idiosyncratic methodology, his obvious lack of specialist expertise and the limitations of space inevitable in a single book, have further taken away the possibility of doing justice to domains ranging in scale from the transformation of an entire continent to running a business.
McRae picked his 20 outstanding success stories before the financial tsunami hit the globe. When it did, the miracles of the Irish economy, the Dubai property boom and the financial service businesses in London must have seemed a little less than apposite for being included in a collection of success stories. Authors faced with such a challenge have two choices. The timid, industrious ones go back to their short-list, drop the examples that have been trashed by actual events and pray that their replacements don’t go the same way. Hamish McRae is built of more brazen stuff. He decided to append a section called “What Could Go Wrong?” to “What Is The Story?” and “What Are The Lessons” for each example, even if the future tense is clearly misplaced in some of these cases. The fancy footwork that the retention of such counter-examples involves is exemplified by the diversionary and irrelevant reference to rising inequality in China and India in the chapter on London’s financial service businesses. McRae seems to be under the impression that his approach is unique because he started by finding successful instances and then drawing lessons from them. Actually, many researchers have taken this route and have been far more rigorous in the manner in which they have chosen the examples from which to tease out conclusions. Jim Collins put together a team of researchers who looked through 1,435 Fortune 500 companies before coming to the conclusions published in Good to Great. Hamish McRae finds 20 cases sufficient to draw his conclusions and these 20 seem to have been chosen based on his attachment to the subject (Ireland, where he was born; the City of London, which is his journalistic beat; Whistler, his skiing holiday destination...) rather than any objective criteria.
An international readership may find the Anglo-centric smugness that pervades both McRae’s choice of examples and his treatment of them a trifle jarring. There is not a single example from France on the flimsy pretext that what happens there is difficult to replicate elsewhere. France’s health-care system is considered and then discarded because “it failed in the heatwave of August 2003”.
India is favoured with two case studies but they smack of the modern-day equivalent of the opulent maharajas and emaciated fakirs that western observers associated with the country in the past. Today’s India continues to be stereotyped as tearing itself between extremes of prosperity and poverty which are captured, in this book, through the success stories of Bangalore’s IT industry and Dharavi’s slums. Somehow, I can’t bring myself to see Dharavi as a success story for anyone other than Danny Boyle and the slumlords who operate there.
Admittedly, the book has a global sweep but when the cases are not from Britain, Ireland or Canada, praise is doled out with one hand while being taken away by the other. For instance, the Yakuza shares credit with the police for the low crime rate in Tokyo: “...it may well be that overall crime is low because some of the policing is done by the gangs”. The great sporting success of Australia is whittled away with Bryson’s quote that “Australians would rather win a gold medal than a Nobel prize” and comments on the severe problem of physical fitness the country faces, making it “the fattest nation on earth”. Harvard’s standing as a leading university is undermined by aspersions on its student entry process where “family connections and donations probably skew the admissions in a way that would not happen at Oxford or Cambridge”.
Hamish McRae writes well, he has an eye for interesting detail and his heart is in the right place. Moreover, he has had the imagination to look at social structures as diverse as managing a legalised gambling operation (the Hong Kong Jockey Club), a school-passing qualification (the International Baccalaureate) and the common cultural denominator pervading medium-sized towns throughout the US (Main Street America). But this ingenuity, which slices collective human endeavour in so many different ways, proves to be a false friend because, with so many different levels of aggregation jostling with each other, it is difficult to figure out the intended readership for this book. Each case averages about twelve pages of attention and, while McRae is an able journalist, he is clearly not expert enough to provide insights that could be useful to specialists in any of the fields he has essayed. He is, therefore, reduced to drawing profound conclusions like “Build the best — don’t compromise”, “Move quickly” and “Spend wisely”. The two earth-shattering generalisations McRae extracts about successful organisations and communities from the entire exercise are that “they had to have a deep-seated sense of mission” and “they had to be acutely sensitive to the market”. This is not the first time McRae has flirted with danger. In 1996, he wrote The World in 2020: Power, Culture and Prosperity — A Vision of the Future, which deserves high marks for bravery if not prescience. Hamish McRae has obviously internalised the advice he gives in the final chapter of What Works: “Keep learning, keep making mistakes”.
The reviewer is CEO, Banner Global Consulting
WHAT WORKS
SUCCESS IN STRESSFUL TIMES
Hamish McRae
Harper Press 2010
328 pages; Rs 499