Sound and cloud

"Opportunity" and "risk" share a common word in some Eastern languages. How about "opportunity" and "oppression"? For: Kenichi Ohmae, business consultant and globalisation guru, thinks of the nation-state as one of the "most oppressive" notions forged in recent centuries that the world is better off without.

The Ohmaean world is one large theatre, though with a soundtrack by the subtle Bill Whelan rather than the hiphop Black Eyed Peas, and none of the dramatic irony of a Hamlet cigar ad that has a ship going blissfully over the world's edge. Nation-states? History. So the question to ask is not whether the nation-state of Japan will stage a comeback, but which "economic units" will prosper.

If Ohmae gives his land of origin away, it's through his intense scepticism of any tools of economic stimulation that can be traced to the Keynesian framework of logic (none of it worked for Japan in the 1990s). The ideas of economists, he writes in "The End of Economics" chapter , are but products of their historical environments, and governments are far less in control of their economies than they think.

Dramatic stuff. But he would've acquitted himself of charges of a forced cymbal-clash had he gone easier on his dismissal of Adam Smith's pin factory: the man's observations from 1776 may now be fuddy-duddy, but that in itself does not discredit any idea stimulated by them. While doubt surely has its value, the elegance of the Invisible Hand""which puts individual self-interest to work for everyone""lies in its very lack of economic tools that may easily be shown to be no good.

But what really stretches one's confidence is the suggestion that America's high-interest-rate policy of the Clinton era was part of some cunning plot to vacuum up the world's cash for itself. By most credible accounts, the US Fed was genuinely surprised by how informational and trade efficiencies had granted space for faster growth without hitting the inflationary "overheat" zone, an issue of structural dynamics that has exercised minds even in India.

Anyhow, Ohmae's confidence restorer is his use of quantum physics as an analogy: lots is going on with the global economy that doesn't seem consistent with theories framed earlier, but may still explain oddities. His disdain for metrics such as GDP growth comes through loud and clear. To him, they're mostly sound and fury in little goblets of globalisation, signifying little. "India as a nation has not yet woken up to the global economy," he observes, "So 8 per cent growth is a result of certain regions doing extremely well, while..." the rest suffer dire poverty.

Governments, "impotent" to Ohmae's mind, still have a role. They must manage the emergence of region-states, and the implications of the separatist instincts such zones of prosperity may develop. This is where his trend analysis begins to seem a trifle Ishiguroesque, and one begins to wonder what he makes of the relevance of intellectual resources to this particular model of globalisation.

Perhaps the Postscript contains a clue. Ohmae recalls his 1975 book The Mind of The Strategist, which calls for a strategy crafted to meet consumer needs by using the company's edge over competitors. But definitions of the consumer, company and competitors are all subject to change""and in real time""now. So you need "kosoryoku", a Japanese word that blends "vision" with "imagination". It's a sort of cloud that's both there and not there: for you to sense.

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THE NEXT GLOBAL STAGE
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN OUR BORDERLESS WORLD

Kenichi Ohmae
Wharton School Publishing
Price: Rs 499; Pages: xxvi+282