Turning the Traditional

I have taught a class on emerging markets for many years now.  I have used a certain text that was brand new five years ago.  A lot has changed in some “emerging markets” like China during that time.  And I’ve been thinking recently about how to update the way I frame things.  A friend invited me to Duke Kunshan University to give a lecture and I was thrilled to have the chance.   But I did need to organize something I would actually say to these young scholars. 

What I wanted to say was instinctively pretty clear:  The traditional idea of emerging markets as defined by Khana and Palepu in their book “Winning in Emerging Markets” defines“emerging markets” as those “transactional arena where buyers and sellers are not easily or efficiently able to come together.”  “Institutional voids” are inefficiencies that mark an economy as “developing” because it is harder for buyers and sellers to engage in the manner they might otherwise do in a developed economy.  Emerging economies played catch-up to the developed economies of North America, Western Europe and Japan. 

My thesis is that developments in mobile payment, high-speed rail and the “sharing economy” have now rendered China as a new benchmark of ease of buyer and seller transactions.  The U.S. by comparison in these specific criteria is still emerging.  So is Japan.  Chinese tech start ups like Mobike and Ofo as well as state owned enterprise like the CRCC who built china’s rail ways are all over in the United States these days, exploiting our institutional voids, turning the traditional paradigm on its head.

Fine to say, but still had to write it out in a deck.  I sat on the plane sifting through some articles I’d sourced and trying to capture data and make it available.  An academic setting, I tried to get my presentation straight and anchor my assertions with citations.  I stuffed reams of information into power point for future editing.  I spent most of the ninety-minutes delayed on the tarmac reckoning with the fact that the “future” was now and then most of the flight trying to winnow this down into something presentable. 

Sometimes I behave wisely and the brief visit to the Ctrip website sitting there on the runway in order to buy a later ticket from Shanghai to Kunshan than the one I already had, was one of he brightest things I did all day.  As expected I arrived with enough time to physically get to the station before the train left, but would have gotten bogged down with the ticket purchase.  No way around that. There’s always a long queue to contend with.  But the ticket is only a few bucks and grabbing second one was absolutely the-move.

The Shanghai rail station must have a thousand seats but there were twelve hundred people looking for a place to sit so I couldn’t sit and eat my chicken wrap and tidy my power point as I imagined I would have.  I got back to work on the train itself moments later and by the time I arrived, twenty-two high-speed rail minutes later, I was getting close.

One last ride was the twenty minutes out to the campus in a cab.  I’ll catch the scenery next time.  I got rid of all the extraneous slides and made sure what I’d written was grammatically accurate.  “I think I’m here.” I texted and my friend appeared at the door and led me straight to the lecture hall where I dropped my things.  “Where’s the men’s room?  He pointed to the door and then pointed to my fly.  Did the needful, tucked in my shirt, splashed my face with water, returned and faced the room to say “hello.” 

Wednesday, 12/06/17