Investing and knowing what you are doing

One of the interesting things I have become aware of since I started working in the world of finance is that industry expertise, while undoubtedly necessary and important for anyone working in a single given sector, is not too difficult to acquire. I have only worked in telecom, media and technology ("TMT" in industry lingo) for a year and a half now, but in many respects I am reaching the saturation point in terms of what is necessary for an investor in that industry to invest well. While setting up a mobile network is difficult, technical and complex work, the investor only has to be able to identify who can do that job well and how the fundamental drivers in a business model must perform for the network to yield a sufficient return.

This is interesting to me because it means that investors, to a certain extent, can be very mobile across industries, acquiring expertise in the new sectors they move to in the space of a year or so. The more relevant skill set (understanding business models, market analysis etc.) is something that is continuously developed even as you move across different industries. In fact, it is arguable that it is better to stimulate the development of this skill set by contextualizing it differently in the exploration of various types of businesses. Moreover, exactly what makes someone a good investor seems to become increasingly unidentifiable as one's abilities grow - some would call it investor intuition.

Bureaucracy

Frustrates me. Unbelievably. Well, what on Earth are you working at the World Bank for then, you might ask? It would be a good question.

I would love to spill the beans on the exciting administrative hiccups and hurdles that have confronted my team and I over the course of the last couple of weeks, but it's pretty confidential (and that is as exciting as it will ever sound). In my foggy youth of more than a year ago, I was more than happy, nay, excited, to dive wholeheartedly into the machinations and workings of the great World Bank steamroller. Increasingly, I am realizing the full extent to which bureaucracy can stifle an important organizational mission.

At the same time, it is truly the heart of the development world. Almost all of the "old era" development institutions (you know, the acronym alphabet soup: ADB, IDB, DFID, EBRD, AfDB, USAID...) are hung with an enormous bureaucracy whose legacy seems for the most part inerasable. If I'm going to be stuck with bureaucracy, why not be stuck with the best, right?

The Shackled Continent

This straight forward and honest survey of Africa was a favourite recent read of mine. The Shackled Continent, by Robert Guest, provides an overview of the economic, social and political future of Africa in a very frank and straightforward presentation. Robert Guest, who I had the privilege of meeting when he visited the IFC in late 2006, is currently the Washington correspondent for the Economist (of course, my favourite magazine) and was previously its Africa editor. His analysis of the current state of affairs on that continent is timely given the development community's new and critical focus on Africa as a cornerstone of the push for meeting the millennium development goals. It is also refreshingly blunt in its exposition of what Guest believes to be the principal obstacles to development and sources of ill across the continent.

Most critically, and perhaps controversially, Guest blames poor government for the lagging growth plaguing many sub-Saharan African nations. Although Guest acknowledges that Africa faces many other daunting challenges, including things like geography, climate, and a colonial legacy, he believes that these could be overcome if Africa's leaders could only get their act together, eliminate corruption, focus on aiding the poor rather than on serving personal or tribal interests, open their countries to trade and stop waging war against each other. Unfortunately, there are countless examples across Africa in which the blame for economic underdevelopment can be easily tagged to an unarguably incompetent leader, be it Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (who has managed to implement pretty much every economic policy mistake imaginable) or Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia (for something as callous as refusing food aid during a famine for fear of GM crop "poison".)

Guest's analysis is made most poignant through his story telling; be it his own adventure of following a Guinness truck on its delivery circuit through Cameroon (and 47 separate road blocks), or relayed second-hand experiences of Africans trying to make a day-to-day living. Ultimately, these stories paint a touching, if sometimes depressing, picture of Africa's people and the very real challenges they face.

Burning hearts

I don't buy into hallmark holidays, and so unless I am dating someone on Valentines, I'm the last to do anything out of the ordinary on it. Corporate society has successfully managed to turn any dating man's inactivity on this holiday into an irredeemable relationship faux pas. So, I am indeed guilty of doing the bare minimum (Jin, hope you enjoyed the flowers) but don't believe you should require, or ever need, an occassion to let somebody else know how you feel about them.

On the other hand, I think there are extreme responses. The BBC "in pictures" feature for today had the expected spattering of images from across the globe of human beings displaying romantic affections for each other in a variety of weird and entertaining ways. The final image had me thinking a great deal more than the rest of them (displayed here). What does it say about the tolerance of people for other ideas if they fell they have to torch hearts and love paraphernalia on a harmless (though I will admit, annoying) holiday? There are moral standards worth standing up for, and then there's ridiculousness. I believe this is the latter.

More than just a couple of my friends in DC happen to be Pakistani, and discussing this image with them, they confirmed that while a certain element in Pakistani society could be expected to initiate such demonstrations, it's definitely not the norm; given the other images already on display for this feature on the BBC, I believe it would have been an editorially sound decision to include another, and undoubtedly more representative, Valentines day image in juxtaposition with this one.

The return of the blog

Wow. It's been a while. I was going to try and inaugurate my return to using this wonderful tool with an entirely new blog, but was daunted by the prospect of how much work it would actually take for me to learn to create a sexy webpage. I still intend to do this at some point...but maybe when I don't have so many other more pressing things to do. Whenever that will be.

What have I been busy with? A number of interesting projects have been absorbing most of my time since October last year. Most interesting (and intense) is a large media deal in Russia that is a very exciting opportunity. In between my IFC project work, I have found a fair amount of time to travel; went back to Penn for homecoming, was back in Calgary for Christmas, and last weekend went to Dallas to meet up with Reid and Whan - it was about time. Reid and I were both amazed that it had been more than a year since we had seen each other, which we hope to not let happen again. Once he moves to LA, I'll use it as an excuse to (ashamedly) make my first trip to California. Ever.

This coming Sunday, I should be on a plane to Moscow. It will be my first time in Russia, and it will be cold. I don't think even Canada will have prepared me for the bone chilling week ahead. Vodka may be the only remedy. Does drinking vodka in Russia amount to a cultural experience, or am I just deluding myself?

The only downside to all this travel is the amount of time Jin and I have to spend with each other. Right now Jin is in Brazil, traveling this very moment I believe from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte, where she will be staying in a cabin in the rain forest and looking at a carbon emmission mitigation project in the rainforest there. Awesome, and I'm sure she's having a blast. But she's also leaving to Korea and possibly to China for 6 months at the end of January, so we're trying to make the most of the time we have available in January. As it is we don't have much. She gets back Friday, we have Saturday together to celebrate our one-year anniversary (can't believe it's been that long) and then I leave the next day. Hopefully the couple of weeks at the end of the month won't be too full.

Trance and spreadsheets

A match made in your cerebral cortex.

Intensity of experience

I think that's why my trip to China seemed to go by in a flash. 10 days does not seem like too short a length of time, but the long work hours I had to pull, the late-night social activities with clients and colleagues and the overwhelming explosion of sensory input that I had to take in all make it feel as though I just left.

I can probably claim to be the only person I know to have gone to China and not have visited the Great Wall. I used the short space of personal time I was able to free up over my second weekend to visit Matt, his family, and his new fiance in Xi'an, the old capital during the Tang Dynasty. Well worth it. Aside from finally having an opportunity to meet Linnea, and to personally congratulate her and her husband-to-be soon after the proposal, Xi'an also provided me the opportunity to experience a more rural, less industrialized China than I saw in my visits to Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The terracotta warriors, despite being attacked by an even larger army of tourists, were nonetheless an impressive sight. Xi'an also had a feeling to it that implied it was more the way China used to be.

Friends and tourist attractions aside, Chinese culture was wonderful to take in. One of the most surreal and alien experiences during my trip I enjoyed with Matt, Linnea and Hilary in a bar in Xi'an. After lounging upstairs and absorbing the older dance hits that pulsed from the speakers overhead, we all joined a dancing group fo what could only have been moms, or at least 40+ year-old Chinese women out for a night on the town. Aside from being thrilled, or at least bemused, to have the only foreigners in the bar join in dancing with their circle, they also sang out their own accompaniment to the dance melody in operatic form. Matt danced in their midst wearing his $2 Mao cap purchased from street vendors in Beijing, which only foreigners seem to appreciate. Bizarre, perhaps, but memorable, undoubtedly.