Of particular interest is the treatment for a disease that was bad enough to put me in hospital for a couple of days and prevented me working very well for some time after that. In line with a previous blog by Michelle, the medical staff applied a couple of immediate treatments to control the symptoms experienced when the disease was at its most acute.

Following that, the treatment was to do nothing. This was something outside of my control and outside of medical control. If the symptoms didn’t resolve themselves over a few weeks, then there may have been further work required.

So we went from immediate treatment for acute symptoms, to doing nothing unless an ongoing issue became apparent, and only at that point instituting a long-term treatment plan if required. Fortunately, I was one of the lucky ones whose symptoms resolved themselves without any further work.

In my work, I have often seen times when we jump in too quickly with actions to resolve problems that really could have resolved themselves if given time. More recently in my new role, I have been doing some of this myself – one of the differences between consultancy and being in-house is that it is difficult to withdraw yourself from the day to day action focus of the in-house environment.

Sometimes after settling the immediate, visible and major symptoms, we need to sit back and see if the situation will evolve and resolve itself rather than trying to exercise a control which we often don’t have. It’s amazing how many times that advice has been ignored in my working career!

As an added bonus, the testing I went through as a result of this experience uncovered an issue that had occurred some time ago and was completely unrelated to the vestibular neuronitis. This hidden issue can now be addressed because the medical staff undertook extensive tests and didn’t just focus in on what they thought was the disease to be treated at the time.

The more things like this happen in life, the more convinced I become that our models for leadership, business and management need to be based on living organisms (even viruses!) and not on the “machine-based” and mechanistic models we tend to use that focus on rules, policies and efficiencies.

I’m well now, thanks to the help of a couple of strangers at Rockdale Bizzo’s Club and the associated Yum Cha Restaurant, a couple of friends and the medical staff at St George Hospital in Sydney.

Whether it was the ambiance of the surrounding vineyards, or the zen of kangaroos and joeys enjoying the sunshine while munching morning grass shoots, I have returned with a more peaceful and accepting view of the world.

It had been too long between real breaks.  Since finishing my Executive MBA in early December, I started a change management contract with a client which has kept me on the road almost constantly between Moranbah, Qld and Singleton, NSW.

In the last few weeks I had found myself more inclined to react rather than respond, and more prone to the negative impacts of frustration (a mainstay of change management).  It was pure happenstance that created the opportunity for a short break, yet I reflect that it was precisely what was needed if I am to give my best to the assignment.

Caught in the machinations of change I was blinded to my building stress.  A roadblock that I had removed kept reappearing, sometimes in a different guise, and the repeated removal process wore me down.  My heart was discouraged.  Others,  although enabled to, weren’t acting.  Processes which had been challenged and changed were reverting to prior position.  White-anting was winning out by eroding a shared vision.  And my ability to model the way was waning.

Today’s blog, long awaited by at least me and Geoff if not you too, is simply to remind each of us to check our own well-being regularly and make sure we do actually take some time out and away from the day-to-day for a while.  It refreshes our soul, our attitudes, our bodies and minds.

And if you’re going to take a break, make it at Blackwattle Retreat.

More on the interesting stories of change at another time.

It is the first time for quite a few years that I have gone through the world of organisations as entities v process, communication as transmission v meaning, and the various approaches relating to discourse, metaphor, cultural analysis, critical analysis and change management.

The more that I reflect on my experiences and these approaches, the more I am forced to agree with Peter Drucker’s very direct start to Management Challenges for the 21st Century (2002). He made it clear that leaders, managers, academics and researchers in the fields of organisations, management, communication and change need to challenge the very foundations and assumptions of their work.

For what it is worth, here are some of my own thoughts:

• The starting point is Anita Roddick’s fantastic observation in Business as Unusual (2000) that “we went searching for employees, but people turned up instead.”
• People gather together because it is natural. Long before “organisations” ever existed, people gathered in tribes, communities, villages and groups. Many of the theoretical approaches seem to ignore the extensive evidence that legislation, regulation and “scientific management” have tried to take this naturally occurring phenomenon and turn it into artificial attempts to manipulate individuals for one purpose or another.
• A fundamental aspect of leadership is that it is a human activity undertaken to benefit others.
• Leadership is a far more important concept than “management” or “organisation” for the success of any group put together for a purpose. This includes encouraging and creating the environment for leadership at all levels and establishing the values that have brought the group/s together.
• Too much of traditional management is undertaken to benefit ourselves instead of others, even if dressed up in the guise of “maximising shareholder value.”
• Speaking of which, Drucker, Roger Martin, Steve Denning and even, at a stretch, Jack Welch are right when they describe “maximising shareholder value” as the dumbest idea in the world, at least when it comes to describing the purpose of an organisation. It may not actually be the “dumbest” as I’ve read some pretty out there theories over the years, but it is certainly a poorly phrased and faulty approach to business to isolate shareholders as the only beneficiaries, especially to the exclusion of customers and clients.
• The value proposition for an organisation, central to organisational survival, is not about shareholders and maximising their value.
• Unfortunately, those who control the very foundations of our ability to do business, such as governments, financial institutions, insurance companies and stock exchanges among others, all gain great power and money through enforcing external frameworks that seem purpose-built to ensure the only way you can run an organisation is to maximise shareholder value.
• Many Asian cultures have long accepted a holistic approach to life, including business, that places leadership and organisations within external concepts and environments, created and shaped from the outside. At a fundamental level, before recorded history individuals gathered together as tribes often to create mutual protection from the next tribe along or to maximise the ability to harness scarce food resources. The major reason behind the creation of the tribe was this external influence.
• We have a lot to learn from Asian and other cultural approaches and it is time we did. The domination of North American thinking, sometimes combined with thinking from the UK, does not create an environment where diversity of thought can lead to significant innovation and success.
• Most particularly, the concept of the outside-in organisation, where customers/clients/members define the shared values that create the organisation is now a concept being defined by the western world, while in Asia it has been a standard operating procedure that has been diminished through western influence. This concept includes a lot more than great customer service.

There may be no “one right answer” but there have been too many poor and bad ideas because of:

• Our desire to make life easy for ourselves by dealing with the amorphous blob that is employees and management, instead of recognising that people make organisations, individually and not just collectively (just as we try and communicate through mass means because of the need for efficiency)
• Our failure to base businesses and organisations on defined sets of values shared by those who make up the organisation, external and internal
• The lack of focus on leadership at the heart of organisations, in favour of focus on command, control, structures and processes

So what do you think, are any of these concepts ringing alarm bells for you and do we need to follow the advice of Drucker to re-examine our assumptions and foundations?

I have been strongly focused on what I need to learn about the organisation I am in and the people who make it up. I have been identifying the characteristics of these people, and trying to isolate the shared values that have created the organisation. I have been learning about their approaches to their own work and the work of the organisation. And I have spent a long time listening.

It has been brought to my attention in a few ways recently, that a missing element in what I have been doing is changing myself. In focusing on others, I have missed adapting to the new circumstances I find myself in as I take the next steps of my life.

Okay, so I’ve started swimming as regularly as I can, but I am still very much in “take away food” mode because of my lack of comfort in my surroundings and the time I am spending elsewhere, so that comes out as a nil-all draw (though in reality my ever-expanding waistline may be suggesting the result isn’t that positive!). And my hair is now cut exceptionally short.

But there are many things that we need to think about when we take on major changes in our lives. In my case, a couple of recent events have highlighted some changes I’ve missed.

I attended a meeting of a number of representatives of organisations similar to mine. These representatives are working on a project that is unified across our organisations. The meeting was immensely enjoyable to me, and I was surprised by the level of care and attention, the ability to consider and analyse the viewpoints expressed, and the ability to make appropriate decisions, even identifying when decisions should not be made.

It was only later that another participant pointed out to me that I was sitting in a room with a lot of very quick and intelligent people whose jobs entail the use of those abilities on a daily basis. The organisation I have become a part of has 600 members, all of whom work in extremely demanding areas of medical practice requiring extensive academic and clinical experience and qualifications. I work in an office with people who have a great deal of experience in their fields. Working predominately by myself the last couple of years, and prior to that in situations where much of the work was process orientated rather than creative, has left me ill-prepared to adapt my own actions and thought processes to this environment.

In addition, I have re-entered an academic environment, this time as a student rather than as a teacher. My first assignment came back last week and I recognised the feedback immediately … strong opinions without appropriate grounding, poor application of academic writing … words I have written myself to students over the years (well maybe not the second bit – I rarely taught those types of subjects). When I re-read my assignment, I was able to identify each of the gaps the marker highlighted. I had failed to change my thought processes to suit that environment also (for those interested, the mark was a credit, so not exactly high quality work).

There are many aspects to our evolutionary journey through our lives. We often see and expect development and change from those around us. Before we lead, we need to identify the gaps in our approaches and examine  our objectives, so we can make the required adjustments to create the environment for success.

And in Week 6 of your new role, an external internet hosting provider has a major crash that results in the loss of five months of critical business records, including membership, education and training databases, a formal register of the profession, communications and website updates, among other things.

When a crisis of this magnitude occurs, it can have dramatic impacts. In my case at ACPSEM, as well as the obvious work that had to be done to recover the business records, we were faced with a senior person who is only available part-time having to put all work on hold for two weeks, other staff members doing similarly while the remaining few picked up the usual work that had to be completed during this time, the employment of casual assistance, calls to members for assistance … and even the team that was already instituting radical management had to stop and spend inordinate time providing recovery information.

Then there are the questions that are being asked: Why weren’t we following the manual back-up procedure that had been designed and approved two years ago (and hadn’t been followed for about a year)? Why weren’t we getting any assistance from the service provider? What about projects A, B and C that are being delayed? What was I, as new General Manager, going to do about this and why didn’t I know procedures weren’t being followed?

I have identified another barrier to introducing radical management to an organisation. A crisis of this magnitude will have an impact on the way we lead, the way people react, the confidence and trust they feel, the workload that can be carried. In my last post, I mentioned that foundations had to be laid for radical management, but an incident like this tends to lead to retreat rather than additional evolution – it is unlikely that we will get quick approvals to change any policies!

On the other hand, the way that the problems were addressed were very much in the manner of radical management, because we didn’t have much choice. Each person knew their own area and used their own expertise with minimal management, lots of communication, task leadership,  lots of responsibility for completing work on time and with minimal supervision. They also utilised User Stories to identify missing information that they wouldn’t know about because they weren’t responsible for its production. I couldn’t help much, other than by taking standard tasks off their hands, because I don’t have the knowledge or expertise.

Unfortunately, many may view this as a reaction to an abnormal situation, reasonable in a crisis situation, but not the way to operate generally when rigid adherence to traditional management command and control may have prevented much of the damage.

One other impact – I found myself retreating into a traditional management style. When a staff member came to me with a proposal not connected to the crisis, I stopped listening and reacted with concerns about budgets and why such a plan was required. I started to question this proposal because I was still reacting to the crisis, instead of acknowledging the expertise of the staff member and trying to add value to their plan.

I raised this at the next stand-up meeting and put everyone on notice – I can retreat from my words, and my actions won’t always align with them – they should pull me up on it when it happens.

So, interesting times. The journey will continue. And there was one other impact … it kept me busy and away from writing posts for quite some time!

I have accepted the position of General Manager for the Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine (ACPSEM). The College has been going through its own corporate growing pains over the last few years as they have moved from a fully voluntary membership organisation to a professional member-based College responsible for the standards and growth of their professions.

Those of you reading my blogs on this site (and elsewhere) will know that I am a fan of what Steve Denning has chosen to call Radical Management and I will be looking to introduce this way of working to ACPSEM. I hope to blog about my experiences as I go, as well as continuing some of my broader work on leadership, management, communication and corporate growing pains.

I was taken by the description to come out of the Stoos gathering, that:

organisations can become learning networks of individuals creating value and that the role of leaders should include the stewardship of the living rather than the management of the machine

This suits my own preferred style of leadership, and was part of the driving force behind The Leader’s Beacon. However, I have already found that there are going to be hurdles and pitfalls along the way.

I introduced the ACPSEM office team to the notion of radical management this week, and tried to do it in an interesting and exciting way, especially through the use of stories. While I used some springboard stories, I found myself moving into abstract details because I was trying to lead a quantum leap instead of allowing the process to emerge organically.

At the moment, we are lacking some of the foundations required to introduce radical management. However a new team was starting this week, providing the opportunity to demonstrate how the system could work with one team while the rest of us work on creating the foundations we need for our own work. I decided to introduce the whole team to the principles, not just the newcomers and this led to me providing too much abstract detail.

I am also new to the team. One of the principles Steve Denning has written about is the way that stories emerge from the team during discussions on radical management. I started this way, inviting stories from the team, but they were reluctant to commit themselves in front of a new General Manager. I haven’t had the time to build up trust or for them to experience that my actions meet my words.

I have also found myself being pushed to make decisions which will have an impact on how the office and College operates. If I make these decisions, I will interfere with the self-organisation of the teams. If I don’t make these decisions, I can be seen as a cause of delay or as indecisive. Either way, I could become a success barrier or passion bleeder.

Most of our members work in fields like oncology, radiation therapy, diagnostic imaging, nuclear medicine and biomedical engineering. These are all high risk fields, dealing with human health and treatments, where patients demand the highest and most rigid of standards. As a result, our members usually work in controlled environments and with very strict procedures and checks. This is vastly different to the world of radical management and these are the people who we are aiming to delight, and who make up the councils and committees guiding these professions in Australasia. It is not just acceptance within the office that will be difficult.

One thing that I have achieved so far – at least everybody I have spoken to understands that we are in the business of delighting our members, not just providing services or products. The concept of member delight has been embraced and already others are starting to use this language – which is a great starting point.

Helping existing teams and structures, as we have done on our consultancy, is relatively easy compared to joining an existing team with some set ways of working, especially when they have been going through difficult transitions over the last few years. This was a challenge I felt I had to accept, and I intend to see it through to the benefit of the members of ACPSEM.

The importance of ensuring greater diversity in economic development through the APEC region, in particular with the increased involvement of women, was summarised in this way:

Evidence from both developed and developing economies has shown that increased participation of women will generate faster and more equitable income growth, create greater business opportunities, and enhance competitiveness for firms and economies by facilitating innovative thinking and fuller use of a significant resource.

There is a fantastic summary of a number of these studies (which keeps getting updated) by Dana Theus on the Magus Consulting site, called Why you need women leading in your organisation: A summary of the data, which is not only worth reading but starts off with a great observation, which we won’t spoil by repeating here.

The APEC leaders’ declaration goes on to discuss why women are not as involved in business leadership as common sense would seem to dictate:

Studies have identified four major barriers preventing women from rising to leadership positions: organisational obstacles, including a lack of role models and exclusion from informal networks; work-life balance challenges, including travel requirements and long work schedules; institutional mindsets, meaning women are evaluated differently for positions from men; and finally, individual mindsets, due to a lack of positive reinforcement, and peer and senior-level support. We agree that these barriers are problematic not only for women looking to take on more responsibility, but also to the growth and success of the business or organisation.

This list has been kept short and simple, but there are a couple of issues that are worth highlighting more deeply. One of those is the hijacking of the conversation, which might come under Institutional Mindset. Every time the under-representation of women at senior levels of organisations is highlighted, certain issues are sure to be raised, especially in the mainstream media (which likes nothing better than reporting opinions that fly in the face of scientific evidence, whether or not those opinions are actually worth debating – witness the climate change debate) and online leadership/management discussions. So the imposition of quotas or the prospect of “positive discrimination” are raised as a matter of course, with the underlying assumption that government intervention in these ways is patronising to women and bad for governance.

The evidence demonstrates that increasing the involvement of women has markedly beneficial effects on business, both short and long-term. Therefore you would think that Boards and senior management teams striving to do the best possible thing in the interests of the company and shareholders would be clamoring for much greater participation on Boards and in senior management for women. If Boards continue to do the wrong thing by their shareholders, perhaps government should get involved, but it would be much better if business people stopped raising these “issues” and instead took the actions required to improve their business.

Then comes the argument that the situation is changing, that it takes time and that there aren’t enough qualified women yet. We’re fairly sure this argument recently celebrated its golden anniversary, 50 years of being pulled out of the bottom of the barrel. If you look at who is actually on Boards, you’ll find plenty of younger, often non-tertiary qualified,  Board representatives out there, as well as the usual “family representatives”. Examine senior management teams and you’ll find plenty of apparently unqualified or under-qualified male senior managers who somehow got past the qualification requirements.

Even more ridiculous in this context is the failure to consider those thousands of women who, as part of work-life balance, have left the full-time workforce and who would be ideal for Board positions, given the greater time they can devote to their responsibilities and lack of conflicts they may have. Apparently you only consider the non full-time worker when they’re retired from the workforce to look for opportunities in the “Boys Clubs” of the world to supplement their already ample corporate pensions and superannuation.

Finally, we should raise the deeply disturbing report by the founder of Guardian Angel Executives, Dr Terry Sheridan, Voicing Women Managers, which covers the impacts of bullying within organisations and identifies the far more detrimental consequences to women. As far as organisational barriers go, it is difficult to think of one that is more disturbing or that should attract greater attention.

Organisations are created by the shared values and visions of people. Diversity in all of its forms, including greater opportunities for women, helps organisations to identify these shared values and visions more precisely. Diversity generally results in establishing greater ability for an organisation to adapt to community expectations and changes, creating better prospects for long-term success.

It is time for business leaders and managers to stop debating issues and finding excuses, and to start taking actions that have been proved to result in better value for shareholders and stakeholders. Find more opportunities for women to be your business leaders.

Mostly though, we choose people we admire and would like to hear in a real discussion around the table. We love discussions that explore our topics of interest, that provide fresh viewpoints or new ideas, that provide avenues for respectful discussion as well as friendly debate. And the reality is that one dinner party wouldn’t satisfy, we would like them to gather monthly because we know there’s always more value available.

Steve Denning

I was thinking about this when a call went out on twitter for a debate between Gary Hamel and Steve Denning on the issue of “employee first” v “customer delight” approaches to business. My first reaction was that I don’t want a debate. I would prefer to listen to these two talk and discuss business issues. I think I’d get something wonderful out of it. I don’t want the entertainment of a debate but the stimulation and information of a discussion. I want to be able to absorb what they are saying and form my own questions and ideas.

I would love to set up the modern equivalent of an ancient concept – a space for dialogues that allow us to challenge our own concepts, create and define our real values and philosophies, and better understand the power of diversity.

I would love to set up a Google+ circle that allows a number of excellent business thinkers and leaders to ask each other questions and respectfully listen to each other over months and years as we take the voyage of exploration through this complex world (Please note: this is not an endorsement for Google+, I have only just joined and have no idea how/if it works, I just wanted to borrow the circle concept for this post).

Georgia van Cuylenburg

I would invite Gary Hamel, Steve Denning, Kate Sweetman, Umair Haque, Drew Gilpin Faust and Vineet Nayar into the circle initially (If I repeat this list later, I will probably change some of these names again, this choosing thing is hard!). I would like to add a couple of younger leaders working in some modern fields to insert fresh challenges, so I will nominate Twitter’s Katie Jacobs Stanton and Georgia van Cuylenburg. I also need a couple of channelers (perhaps bringing in the ancient art of Dialogues of the Dead) to stand-in for Peter Drucker and Anita Roddick.

I gather Google+ circles are recommended to be 12 people and I have nominated only ten. You didn’t seriously think I would set up a circle like this and not have Michelle and I join in, did you? Like all good hosts, our job is to keep the conversation moving, bring it back from sidetracks and ensure that tempers don’t get frayed!

The group I have nominated are constantly asked to provide sound bites on the media, to engage in “entertaining” business debates on business TV shows, to give orations at conferences, to write books and blog posts, and to deliver all of the other arcane content that old-style controllers of the media world are firmly convinced we want.

Then there is the volume issue. Too many people identified as business leaders see business leadership as a competition they can win rather than a social benefit they can help to create, often proclaiming the next big idea and the one right way. Even acknowledging that, there are many great business minds and leaders out there.

Listening to real business leaders over the years (often by reading but it is still listening), it is clear to me that they all respect the work of others, they are willing to learn, they have some strong views and they have much more in common than they have differences, including approaches based on underlying values and leadership. They focus on bringing benefits to others rather than fulfilling personal ambition.

Many people are out there trying to help businesses understand the power of conversations and storytelling, the benefits of listening and learning, the essential importance of innovation and evolution. I would love to see a number of real business leaders put this into practice by visibly engaging in a long term dialogue.

The Management Innovation Exchange (Twitter: @HackManagement) is a place where people can put forward ideas and have others provide analysis, comments and discussion, and this is a very valuable tool. However, it is crowdsourcing to a large extent and I think many potentially great statements of values, philosophy and business innovation are lost or diluted in the sheer volume of ideas and discussion.

Many dialogues may take place within business schools, and certainly there are business publications aplenty. I believe what we are missing is the long-term, open, public dialogues among the great.

I hope the next time someone sees two competing ideas, they don’t call for a debate but for a reasonable, respectful, fruitful dialogue.

So who would you invite to your monthly dinner party and have you experienced dialogues of this nature? We’d love to hear your stories.

The Leader's Beacon by Geoff Barbaro, Verb Publishing

So when is a vacuum not useful, possibly even destructive?  In team communications, particularly geographically distributed or virtual teams.

This has come into my focus this week as I work with a group on an assignment.  While most of the time we live within a 30 minute drive of each other, our various responsibilities prevent us meeting face-to-face except on rare occasions, and there are some technological issues that impact effective Skype-ing.  Much of our communication consequently occurs via email yet this method is often like communicating into a vacuum where matter (ideas, actions, etc) zoom their way to group members at the push of ‘Send’ and that is the end of that.  Nothing comes back out because it’s a vacuum.

It takes personal leadership excellence to be a successful member of a virtual team.  Every single member of the team has a higher obligation to model the way particularly in effective communication, which often can only occur most regularly via email.

One of the most important elements of communication is to listen and to show that you are listening.  Participants in the communication need to take turns at doing this to create a dialogue.  As social beings, we’re pretty good at doing this face to face.  As our world’s barriers diminish through the power of technology, we humans still need to actively engage in communication.

When emailing, chatting, tweeting or any other media involving a keyboard or characters, ‘listening’ becomes a more abstract concept.  It begins to describe the act of reading, absorbing, thinking and engaging.  And it is absolutely critical to remember that the other person cannot see you doing any of this – ‘so what’ you say?  The lack of visible non-verbal cues requires substitution or the quality of communication immediately begins to erode.

Sure, of course you can have an automated acknowledgement.  Really, though, that’s no better than an ‘arrival receipt’.  It neither shows you listened nor heard.

What methods do you use in virtual teams to ensure you are ‘listening and seen to be listening’?  What has been most successful for you, or what has been a total failure?  What peeves or delights you about virtual communications?

Share your experience with us here (you don’t have to use your real name if to do so would have a negative impact).

For other ideas on leadership communication, checkout Geoff’s book The leader’s beacon:  the 55-minute guide to leadership communication.

The Prime Minister took the opportunity to announce the commissioning of a white paper on Australia in the Asian Century. This somewhat dull announcement actually starts the government’s strategy to create the frameworks and foundations for Australian economic success in the new global environment.

This is an encouraging development, though we feel there is at least one weakness. Every major global economic and political shift has also resulted in major changes in values and cultures. These changes have been fundamental to the the economic changes that have occurred, in our view often driving them for better or worse. Over time, these changes have usually evolved to establish better, more prosperous and healthier communities, so they are changes to be embraced though there can be rocky roads along the way.

The Prime Minister did acknowledge this reality, when she discussed the impact of the industrialisation of Britain, noting:

It remade private life, changing everything from the shape of the family home and the layout of cities to the experience of childhood and what it meant to be a woman.

We are not just moving to an Asian century, but actually returning to another Asian era. Long before the rise of the USA, Japan, Europe and the notion of a western world, the civilisations and economies of Asia were phenomenally influential.

Each of the changes in economic influence throughout history has required fundamental changes in values and culture before long-term economic success and social stability has been established. Examples of current values and cultures in the Asia that will need to be strongly considered include:

• The focus on building thriving communities, which includes protecting jobs ahead of protecting profit
• The strong influence of family and community involvement in business, recruitment and management which assists in maintaining values but can result in bureaucratic, skills and innovation weaknesses
• The higher levels of government willingness to protect their economies from “free market” and investment manipulations which provide immediate returns to external investors but can damage local economies

We can’t pretend that Asian values and cultures are in any way unified, and we will be dealing with a time of great diversity as the new Asian Century grows.

Apart from this weakness on values and culture, the announcement is both encouraging and important. Here are some of the key extracts from the speech which illustrate why it is an important development (some words have been omitted and the order changed to maintain the overall sense of the speech):

For all the strength and resilience of Japan and the US, we are now seeing the most profound rebalancing of global wealth and power in the period since the United States emerged as a major power in the world. This rapid growth in much of Asia will change the social and economic, strategic and environmental order of our world. …

As recently as 1990, the Australian economy was larger than the ten economies of ASEAN combined. Today, we’re about two-thirds the size of ASEAN’s economies in market exchange rate terms. …

I summarise our new strategic environment as simply as this. Australia hasn’t been here before.

Here, with our largest export market and largest trading partner neither a democracy nor part of our alliance system, a nation whose economic transformation is in turn transforming the economic and strategic balance of our world. A new China.

Here, with an English-speaking democracy with 1.2 billion citizens, rising to find its place in the world and our region and on an ocean whose shores we share. A new India.

Here, with the world’s largest Islamic population living in the world’s third largest democracy, one remarkable and too little remarked-upon country, every day disproving the millions of words spent arguing that Islam and democracy are incompatible. A new Indonesia. …

Just one illustration of that shift: the emerging and developing world could well be a net foreign investor, while developed countries become net foreign borrowers, as early as 2025. …

In the Asian century, what used to be considered our traditional disadvantages – our reliance on natural resources, our location in the world – become great new strengths. …

In the Asian century, business as usual is not enough. Because what we know clearly is there isn’t a single aspect of government policies and national planning that won’t be touched by the great changes to come. Food security and foreign investment, immigration and education, stock market structures and financial regulation, energy policy and environmental standards.

It is pleasing to see this focus on Asia from the Australian government. We can only hope that the project team developing the white paper understand that real, sustainable success will also require a review and statement of the values and cultural requirements, as well as the economic challenges, if Australia is to play a key role in the continuing development of this region and the global environment.