By Michael Baxter 13 May 2010 [0 Comments | 1,030 views]
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There are those who are surprised, nay shocked, by the coming together of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives to form the UK government. But in fact they should not have been surprised at all. The writing was on the wall, in big bold letters.
During the debates between the three parties, you may recall those worm diagrams that supposedly indicated what the studio audience were thinking as the three men spoke. The worm rose to its highest levels whenever Nick Clegg talked about cooperating with the other parties, and fell whenever they started slagging each other off.
Of course, some people hate the new alliance. That is fine, and they have a right to their own opinion. But if they were among those who felt good during the debates when Clegg talked about cooperation, then they are being hypocritical to themselves.
But there is more to this cooperation thing than Tories and Lib Dems enjoying one great big love-in.
Cooperation was perhaps the word of the credit crunch. During the peak of the crisis, this ‘c’ word seemed to gush forth from politicians’ lips more often than requests for payment of expenses. Another word related to this is corporatism.
Now cooperation is not all good. Sometimes you can cooperate too much, with the result that failure is squeezed out of the economy and economic evolution ceases. The great economist Joseph Stiglitz, the man who came up with the phrase “great gales of creative destruction” to describe the process of economic evolution, warned against corporatism.
Cooperation is not always planned in advance. It seems, strangely, that cooperative behaviour can evolve out of capitalism. Certainly, the Internet seems to be perhaps the greatest tool ever invented for aiding cooperation, and as a result we have ended up with Wikipedia and Linux. Thirty or so years ago, Bill Gates’ idea of an open standard for software was radical. But now his idea seems a throwback to a past era, as cooperation throws up free software and applications.
It is like that in nature, too. Did you ever see David Attenborough’s wonderful TV series, Nature’s Great Events? If you did, you may remember one programme featuring the great sardine run. The sardines had learnt to fend off predators cooperatively by swimming together in tight balls. But the predators themselves seemed to have developed a cooperative strategy by a kind of tacit consent, and sharks, dolphins and gannets worked together to break up the shoals of sardines. It was not deliberate cooperation. There was no meeting held every first Thursday of the month between the leaders of the dolphin, gannet and shark communities, discussing the minutes of the previous meeting and planning the next sardine run The cooperative behaviour had evolved, but it was highly effective nonetheless.
In business, and in particular in business areas related to innovation, which after all is perhaps the core way in which business creates wealth, we often think of a super confidential world, of scientists beavering away in secret. In practice, the reality is often the precise opposite. Those who are at the cutting edge of innovation and R&D require input from similarly qualified people working for competitor companies. At conferences they huddle together and swap ideas. In his book ‘Sex Business and Profits’, Terence Kealey argued that technology is complicated, and that for a company to incorporate new technology into its products it needs experts. But these experts can only acquire their expertise if they work closely with other people from competitor companies. And for that to happen they must first have kudos. He gave as an example the interchanges at conferences, where so much swapping of ideas takes place, but where you have to be respected in order for your peers to engage with you. So, in order to be at the cutting edge of incorporating new technology, companies need to be innovators. Not because the innovations themselves give them an edge, but because the innovations buy their researchers credibility and enable them to acquire the expertise necessary for companies to work with all the latest technologies, including technologies they didn’t originate.
And so cooperation is the modern way. And that’s why the Tories and Liberal Democrats are bang on the mark.
But as ever with these things, the balance has to be right. Cooperation is good, but unfettered cooperation or corporatism can suck change out of a system and leave us with bland homogeneity.
