Max Lambie, Contributor
EDUCATION IS not the answer.
There is an aspect of the high-tech revolution from which emerging countries can learn many lessons.
Have they noted how many of the Silicon Valley gurus are from the developing countries? On any given day, the experts that are featured on the popular financial programmes are Asian immigrants.
Yahoo, Computer Associates and Network Associates are owned by Asian high-tech immigrants. On a recent CNBC programme the camera swooped over a large floor of high-tech employees in Silicon Valley. Just about three-quarters were Asian nationals.
There are two points that the emerging countries should ponder if they are willing to climb down from their platform of blaming the developed countries for their impoverished status.
Firstly is the fact that the developing countries have the raw talent. Secondly, the United States has been able to release the energies and brainpower of these nationals once they migrate to that country. The question is, why cannot developing countries motivate their own nationals?
Without a doubt, the most unrecognised aspect of the high-tech revolution is the human relations side. For instance, though the four Harvard economic professors who influenced the Justice Department on the Microsoft case are advocates of the new-found theory that innovation is a resource, why haven't they nor the academic community addressed what drives innovation? Why has this era spawned so many inventions?
Previously, business schools classified the human relations model of corporations using Douglas McGregor's models called Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X epitomizes authoritative hierarchies based on precise definition and control of tasks as used by the large manufacturing companies of the 1930s.
Theory Y, on the other hand, suggests that a work scenario which is conducive to the self-satisfaction of the employee motivates them to achieve high performance - solely for the benefit of the company or institution.
Although Westinghouse's experiments are most used in case books those of the General Electric Company are the more pervasive in bringing about changes in corporate employee work output. The Japanese consultative group and quality circle methods are an extension of the Theory Y concept.
No company reflected the Theory Y culture more than IBM of the 1970s to 1990s. The company promoted the image wherein it was deemed to be an honour to be working for big blue as the company is affectionately called. Similarly, employees of AT&T, nicknamed Ma Bell, were indoctrinated to see themselves as fortunate members of an elite group.
The organisational culture of smokestack companies had structures that are some permutation of Theory X and Theory Y. These flagship companies paid the highest salaries, invested heavily in educating its employees, almost guaranteed lifetime employment, promoted executives from the ranks to levels that enjoyed handsome stock ownerships and had golden parachutes on their departures. But note that the engineers who created the inventions received no more than their participatory pension benefits on retirement or being made redundant.
Patents were registered and wholly-owned by the company.
Who can recall the inventor of IBM's software coding language 'Report Programme Generator' (RPG) or Report Data Management System (RDMS) which together now earn the company more revenue than comes from mainframe and places it behind Oracle as the third largest software vendor?
Neither Theory X nor Theory Y, however, are applicable to the Silicon Valley corporate culture. Let the Silicon Valley culture be christened Theory Z and anoint Bill Gates as the author. What drives the inventive culture is that employees now share the monetary benefits of their inventions. The inventors are also the entrepreneurs of their own companies. Billionaires Bill Gates, Larry Elison, Michael Dell and Paul Allen are all high-tech specialists that decided to head their own ventures rather than work for the blue chip companies.
Even the most profitable spin-off of venerable AT&T is high-tech leader Lucent Technologies which has created a billionaire out of the Turkish immigrant who is the chairman. The lesson for the emerging countries is to determine how their talent can be trained and retained and remunerated to prevent them from emigrating to Silicon Valley.
The answers can only be derived from dialogue with the global high-tech community. It is a topic that economists will do more harm than good, by intervention, as has occurred in the Microsoft scenario.
