A business colleague of mine, Richard Koch, along with his fellow author Andrew Campbell, wrote a book called Wake Up and Shake Up Your Company. Later, I co-authored a business book with Richard called, Managing Without Management. It was a plea for stronger leadership, less management layers and the replacement of middle management by IT. One CEO said he liked the title but never read business books. However, he promised to buy it, to place it on his desk, simply to keep his middle management on its toes!
The wake-up book is best summarized as answering the question, “Is your company worth believing in? The most successful companies are those who have a purpose shared by all stakeholders, which motivates everyone involved to greater success.”
Well its high time, we the people of Scotland, the shareholders you might say, ask the same question about the country and conclude whether we have a shared purpose which motivates us.
Why raise this now? Simply because the country is going nowhere economically. If it is going anywhere, it’s becoming even more reliant on Financial Services and on Tourism. Oil is on its way out, slowly but surely, and the tech business is struggling to keep up with the Fintech centres of Old Street London and the so-called golden triangle of Cambridge, Oxford and London.
What to do about it? We believe there are at least six chances for an economic shake-up. The Arctic’s melting ice, commercial reforestation, export renewable energy, investment in financial services, marine, tripling of R&D and healthcare investment. Not to mention the creation of a wood-based economy. In addition, it could benefit from adopting the attitude that Scotland is a medium-sized world city rather than a small country.
The idea is laid out in the new book. Scotland 2070- Healthy, Wealthy and Wise- Without the Politics. This title is more polite than Richard Koch’s book, but perhaps we should have used a similar ‘wake up and shake up’ theme instead.
What about the political direction you may ask? We say, forget that for now and concentrate on what role Scotland can play in the world, irrespective of whether we are in or out of the UK and Europe. See from America how divisive and unhelpful the political stance can be at the moment. Its time to stop using the argument of trying to fix the governance first. Instead, we could benefit from a change of attitude and belief in ourselves. We are not too wee, too small and too stupid, as some seem to think of us. We can and will change. But it does require us to Wake Up and Shake Up before we drift further into the category of a divided ‘has been’ country.