Taking performance cues from East Asian markets

Description

As the ‘Asian century’ becomes ever more prevalent and the Fourth Industrial revolution gathers speed, marketers are having to surf a tidal wave of creative destruction. The choice is stark: Embrace change, or resign yourself to a Darwinian fate.

 

With this in mind, we spent the last couple of years writing a book about Confucianism, Discipline and Competitiveness (CDC). Here is a summary of our findings and conclusions.

 

[xhead] The ‘Confucian Orbit’ performance leaders

For the sake of convenience, let’s divide the world into six groupings:

 

*Confucian Orbit countries

*Anglo-Saxon countries

*Western European countries

*Eastern European countries

*Latin American countries

*Middle Eastern and North African countries

 

To cut a long book chapter short, we discovered the evidence confirmed what many people in five of the groupings intuit: The Confucian Orbit bloc – made up of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam – is outperforming them. The one bit of good news for those in Anglo-Saxon countries such as Australia, as well as Western European ones, is they are not (yet) being as comprehensively outcompeted as those in Eastern European, Latin American, Middle Eastern and North African nations.   

    

There’s lots of data to support this contention but let’s confine ourselves to competitiveness as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and World Economic Forum (WEF). PISA shows school students in the Confucian Orbit have been outperforming their peers in Anglo-Saxon and Western European countries for the last two decades. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), Confucian Orbit economies have been the most globally competitive since at least 2008.