Chapter Seven: Avoid Paternalism
Summary from the book page 117-118

Two choices: Breakfast with the Minister or Reshaping the Industry

In Bolivia, we once gave a presentation to several hundred business and government leaders in a grand hall, darkened except for the raised stage on which we were speaking. After relating some preliminary analysis about the country's export performance, some survey results about patterns of decision making, and some hypotheses concerning the future of the country, we stated that the business people in the audience had two choices going forward. The first choice was that they could simply wake up tomorrow and take to breakfast whichever Minister had an interest in their particular industry.

"You know the Minister," we said, "your wife knows the Minister's wife, your children baby-sit for the children of the Minister, and on weekends you give a friendly nod to the Minister from across the tennis court at the club or on the golf course. You can take the Minister to breakfast and ask him for a favor. That's one choice."

"But there's another choice," we continued. And we asked that someone in the audience articulate what was that choice. From the back of the room, a man raised his hand timidly and addressed us from deep within the anonymity of the darkened hall.

"We can take the Minister to lunch." And the audience laughed in a sublime moment of self-recognition.

Choice number two is not that business people can have one meal or another with a Minister, but that they can try to reframe their perspective so they do not interpret events from a paternalistic frame. Specifically, they can learn how to judge the attractiveness of industry structures, they can work on developing their competitive environment to improve their relative position inside those industry structures, they can focus on learning about competitor behavior and customer preferences. In a phrase, they can learn how to reshape the industry structure around themselves. And once they have accomplished that, maybe they will represent a new model of a relationship between the government and the private sector.

Return to Table of Contents