Three Decades of Competitiveness-The New Rules Have Arrived.

• Author: Swiercz, Paul

INTRODUCTION

Annual conferences serve as a time clock, both a marker of time and stimulus to reflection and aspiration. When the number of yearly gatherings with colleagues and friends has matured into decades, there is both more to reflect upon, and more to aspire to. In this brief essay, I offer a few summary reflections and an equally brief set of research aspirations. For purposes of brevity and practicality, I have chosen to imagine 2019 as the mid-point of a hypothetical timeline beginning at the start of the new millennium and ending two decades into the future.

In 1999, at the start of the new Millennium, online business was in its infancy and everyone was talking about and placing speculative investments in the "new economy." That speculative bubble burst in April 2000 to be quickly overshadowed by the September 2001 attack on the Twin Towers, the collapse of Enron, the so-called War on Terror, major weather events like Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the Sub-Prime Housing Crisis culminating in the Great Recession. The decade 2000 to 2009 came to be known as the "lost decade" for stock investors.

The second decade was much better. Global warming continued to fuel major weather events and security spending continued to rise, but the economy avoided recession. Instead it averaged a modest 2.2% real GDP growth per annum. As of the third quarter of 2019, real GDP reached $19.1 trillion, or $58,000 per person in the US. The unemployment rate was 3.5% in November, a 50-year low. Other measures of employment, such as the number of involuntarily part-time workers, also recorded their lowest levels in over a decade.

And while these historical events and economic indicators are informative, they mask the greater macro forces that drive Competitiveness. Competitiveness is poorly captured and understood at the macro-level. Nonetheless, as we enter the third and fourth decades of the millennium it has become increasingly necessary to recognize that the "rules-of-game" have changed in such a significant of fundamental way that it's become a new, yet unnamed, game.

As an analogy, consider the game of football. It is an 11-player team enjoyed by millions of fans around the globe. In the United States and Canada, it is a brutal all body mashup played with an oval ball on a field known as a grid iron. For the rest of the world football is an 11-player game played with a spherical ball and strict limits on body contact. Both are played with equal passion.

Now imagine that you are in stadium filled to capacity with 100,000 fans there to watch the first "new economy football" game of 2021. All eyes are focused on the entry tunnels. High anticipation fans are rockin' the stands with cheers and shouts. The band strikes up song, a cloud of fog begins to flow out of the tunnel, players explode out onto the field.

It takes a moment, the fog clears, the cheers subside, the band stops playing people, and coaches Solskjaer and Belichick appear on jumbotron looking a bit stunned.

It is the moment when everyone for the first time realizes that today's football match is a competition between Manchester City vs. the New England Patriots.

Sport has long served as a metaphor for business--expressions like, the ball's in their court, down for the count, hail...