In the business world, company turnaround success can usually be boiled down to answering four fundamental questions directly and bluntly.
- Who is the leader and what is their depth and breadth of leadership?
- Why is this turnaround really necessary?
- What is it they are seeking to do and in what timeframe? Their vision and strategy.
- How are they going to achieve the turnaround? Their plan!
In glorious times, these questions can usually be much less clear. Buoyant markets forgive failure and paper over many cracks.
This business principle is the same for country turnarounds. Since European countries are certainly not living in glorious times, we should apply the same principle. Scotland no exception.
Although all four questions are important, we have chosen to treat these in a different order in Scotland’s case than the sequence above. Why? Because we have a big fear that the fundamental Why and What questions will be drowned out in the heated political climate of the moment. We have therefore avoided the question of Who, which is politically charged, and to some extent How, which often involves financing and governance, and therefore also risks loud political noise and distraction.
Instead, we have concentrated on the Why and What. The Why is fairly obvious we think, although it’s still very important to make sure we start with a common understanding. In our view Scotland is suffering from a post- industrial depression, facing a post-oil future, wrestling with a post Brexit dilemma and a post Covid economic crisis. It has failed to position itself over four decades for the new world order and the fourth industrial revolution.
The real trouble is that the What is hardly getting any attention at all at the moment. It is buried in a sea of pessimistic debate about who is to blame for everything, how to reform social issues, how to recover post-Covid and whether and how to demerge with England. At the same time, the What is often trapped in small scale, short term economic fix-its or the current balance sheet of the country and a vague hope of sustainable energy being its only saviour. So we have written a book about what we see Scotland could be doing positively in 50-years time that will lead to its future health and wealth. Six big trends in the world that we can latch on to and use to our advantage.
The How raises all sorts of questions and debates. Our belief is that one of the biggest questions is funding. How to fund a re-investment in the six big opportunities above. Are they naturally self-funding or will they require largescale innovative sources of finance?
In case you think we are ducking the Who and the How, we can assure you that our next publications will focus on the crucial matters of leadership and funding as further pillars of a turnaround. At this stage we are simply keen to get the debate much more focused on the substance of Scotland’s turnaround, the What.