IBO's new leadership

This is in response to Gautam's post on The IB and US Cultural Politics. Gautam raises several points that were difficult to respond to in the comment format, so I'm making a fuller commentary on his post here (and later).

First, about what happened in Pittsburg, I promise to write about that soon.

Second, about the new DG for IBO. I’m another one who gasped a little when I saw Mr Beard’s CV: head of Novartis’ corn division, chief operations officer for Syngenta. I mean, organizations like those practically wrote the book on how to flatten the world through the green revolution, GMOs and the eradication of land races. (If you need a rant, see ETC Group; I’m moving on to my next point.)

However, IBO needs to get a grip on their growth, and they need someone with serious management credentials. Considering that IBO is nearing 2000 institutional clients, has more than 200,000 individual clients, thousands of independent contractors working as examiners, moderators and trainers, in addition to staff in numerous offices spread around the world trying to deal with schools, governments and other stakeholders; effective management is an urgent need.

When you have a huge IT system that is fragmented and breaks down at peak times, an accounting system that can’t tell that you've paid your bills, requirements for training and consulting that IBO cannot help you fulfill; in summary, when you’re long on philosophy but short on delivery, you put the whole enterprise at risk. Somebody has to step in and put things right. As you say, “even” George W Bush is giving a big boost to IB; so just being blue doesn’t mean you’re more fit for the job any more than if you were red. Besides, I’d rather Mr Baird used his expertise for IB than for bionic corn.

Third, I think Friedmanitis is another manifestation of the desire for people to oversimply when they are too uncomfortable with complexity. In the 90s (long before 9/11) we had The Clash of Civilizations  and Jihad versus McWorld. More recently we’ve had reds versus blues, and now worlds flat and spiky (If you haven’t yet, please read The World is Spiky by Richard Florida (caution: the link is to a large pdf file).

The flat world hypothesis somehow struck a chord in the blogosphere, and I think the cache of Friedman’s name and the catchiness of the phrase resulted in usage that far exceeds an understanding of the underlying reality. Sort of like “globalization”, another catchy, pointless term used to oversimplify just about anything.  Click on the image to see the relative distribution of these terms:

 

I’ve been to lots of places in the world, and have yet to find a country, a city, or even a mountain village in Guatemala that was not simultaneously global and local, and simultaneously jihadist (reactionist) and mcworldly (assimilationist). Somebody ought to just ban dichotomies outright so we can try looking at reality instead of black and white caracatures of it.

As for IBO, I’d say that Mr Beard will soon learn that the organization itself is pretty spiky. I hope he has a good pair of work gloves.