[Vnbiz] Future Leaders for Vietnam

[Thu Huong]

Dear anh Hoanh & CACC,

Wow, it takes me a long time to finish reading your
deep analysis, and certainly many more years to fully
understand what you have just written. Thank you, anh
Hoanh! :). My previous email was mainly centered
around managing an enterprise and the need for
centralized decision-making. As you said,
circumstances differ from case to case and in each
case there would be one best solution. I'm very
interested in analyzing business cases & I have learnt
a great deal from your analysis, anh Hoanh. Please
continue to touch upon competition analysis. I look
forward to your next post! Specifically, you mentioned
that there needs to be "enough" competition in order
to produce good. But how do we know how much is
enough? Supposedly in a free market economy,
competition is brought about by natural market forces
(is it true?). 

Thank you once again! 

Best Regards,

Thu Huong

--- Tran Dinh Hoanh <tdhoanh at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> [Vietnam Business Forum]
> 
> 
> 
> Dear Thu Huong & CACC,
> 
> Thu Huong's thoughtful message touches upon some
> very important
> concepts in economic and political analyses, and
> raises a concern
> about developing youth leaders for youth inside
> Vietnam.  I would like
> to address those issues.
> 
> First, the important concepts:  Thu Huong mentions
> of efficiency and
> democracy in this sentence: "It seems that there is
> a price to pay for
> democracy. After all, there is nothing that is
> absolutely free and the
> price democracy ought to pay is inefficiency."
> 
> **  Yes and no.  Many people throughout the world
> think the same way
> and the idea has also been expressed by another
> expression: "Democracy
> is the least imperfect among imperfect human
> systems."
> 
> I used to use these expressions myself.  But after
> many years of
> thinking about these issues, I have realized that
> all these
> expressions, though may sound reasonable on their
> face, are actually
> not very helpful and may be confusing to our mind.
> 
> The reason is that they use what I have been calling
> "the label
> thinking" like this:  "There is this thing called
> "democracy" and it
> is the best among the imperfect, or it is the least
> inefficient among
> other inefficient systems."  And of course,
> statements of the same
> style may be spoken of other non-democratic systems,
> i.e., monarchy,
> one-man dictatorship, one-family dictatorship,
> one-party dictatorship,
> whatever dictatorship, etc.   Meaning, we simply
> talk about different
> labels and give a different value to each label.
> 
> This kind of thinking, first, creates a lot of
> unnecessary argument,
> because people often disagree on what label (what
> system) is better
> than what label and, second, it is just wrong.  In
> real life, we NEVER
> can say that what system, what method, what tactic,
> what strategy is
> better.  Every method, every system, every strategy
> is EQUALLY good.
> Each works best in a particular set of
> circumstances, and doesn't work
> well in other sets of circumstances.  That's all.
> 
> Same thing with management.  No management method is
> better than
> others.  Each set of circumstances, each company,
> each group of people
> requires a different method of management to work
> well.
> 
> **  So we just have to do away with label thinking
> (although we will
> have to use these label terms once in a while in our
> writing, to
> simplify the way we talk). The real important
> concept (that Thu Huong
> mentioned) is EFFICIENCY.
> 
> What system, what method is efficient when and
> where?  I loosely
> define "efficient" as "what works."  If this system
> A works better
> than system B in my company, then system A is more
> efficient FOR MY
> COMPANY, NOW  (meaning, it may not be efficient for
> my company 5 years
> from now, or may not be efficient for another
> company now).
> 
> **  Our next step in the analysis is what makes a
> system efficient?
> In this context, let me focus on one major concept:
> Competition.
> 
> Competition makes a system efficient.  This is easy
> to understand:  If
> you compete in a sport, you will be come more
> efficient than without
> competition.  This is true from soccer and volley
> ball, to economics
> and politics.
> 
> But for competition to work well,  just like
> everything else in the
> world, it has to be at the right place, at the right
> time, at the
> right dose.  Too much competition or too little
> competition is bad.
> Competition at the wrong time or wrong place can
> also be bad.  Every
> thing has to be JUST RIGHT for a particular set of
> CIRCUMSTANCES.
> 
> Say, when we are at war with another country, a
> one-party system can
> be extremely strong and effective, because the
> life-and-death
> competition from the enemy country is good enough to
> make us
> efficient. Indeed, when a country faces external
> war, internal
> competition among its political parties can weaken
> its war efforts
> (Say, the quarrel between the Republican and the
> Democrat in the US on
> the War on Terror weakens the US administration's
> position on this
> war).  In this case, we have too much competition,
> i.e, not very good.
> 
> Another example, we often see that a country may
> call itself
> "democracy" with a number of political parties, but
> all these
> political parties are in fact just a group of
> privileged people who
> collude to share power and corruption spoils among
> themselves.  There
> is no real competition among them.  This is similar
> to situation when
> a number of companies collude to fix prices in a
> market.  We have
> multi-companies but no competition.  That explains
> why many
> multi-party "democracies" are full of corruption and
> inefficiencies--there is no real competition among
> these parties.  The
> parties very much BS on little things while
> colluding on things that
> really matter.
> 








TH 




 










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