All hail Singapore!
Hail, too, Steve's great post today about Singapore's resilience! He describes Singapore's success strategy which, in some ways, is more of a meta-strategy: when returns start to diminish, recreate yourself. At first, it was connections throughout the SE Asian economy, especially in finance, electronics, and trade, that helped them spread their tendrils around the globe. Singapore's latest role is biotech incubator. They're girding for the long haul, but already seeing ROI.
On top of all of this, Steve and (editor) Bradd craft a stylistic tour de force that's just plain fun to read: Kevin Bacon, Hungary, [could slip Will Smith in there ;-)], Rod Steiger, and Francis Fukuyama!
Just to add to the list, Steve's paean reminds me of some of the stuff Kevin Kelly wrote back in the late 90s about the New Economy and how one of the things you have to do is recreate while you're still at the top of your game
Check it out!
Tom's note:
Bradd and I developed a "Kevin Bacon Game" for our New Rule Sets workshop atop the World Trade Center on the future of foreign direct investment in Asia. Naturally, Singapore emerged in our polling as the most Kevin Bacony state in the region--as in, put your money here and it's the fewest steps from there to anywhere else in the region.For a look at that report/exercise, see the slide package.
[Editor's note: the slides about Kevin Bacon/Christopher Lee/Singapore are about 80% of the way down.]
In the exercise we played, we asked participants at the exercise (a lot of them being FDI experts, Wall Street types, and regional development experts) to build the perfect free trade area from three different perspectives: that of Japan, the EU and the U.S. Then we averaged the votes and found that Singapore was the most prized member. Not surprisingly, Singapore has the highest rates of FDI flows (both inward and outward) as a percent of GDP in the region, so perceptions matched reality.
If you look at the slide package, you'll see that we identified Christopher Lee as the true "Kevin Bacon" of Hollywood. As Steve points out in the post, that position was held for many years by Rod Steiger (meaning you could connect him to anyone in Hollywood, on average, in the fewest steps). Rod held the title because he acted in all sorts of films over many years. When he died a while back, Christopher Lee surpassed him by doing things like starring in all Lord of the Rings and Star Wars films, plus all those Tim Burton films. So while Bradd and I used Rod in the workshop as our example, by the time I wrote the final report, Lee had ascended to the throne, so to speak.