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My background
My father was a schoolmaster, and was a believer in the value of education. My parents skimped and saved and I was able to go to Blundell's School, a good boarding school in England, and then, in 1958, I went to Cambridge.
At Cambridge, I did what might now be called a “double major” in engineering and economics. My engineering had a lot of metrics and calculation in an era before computerized calculations. We used the sliderule and, I maintain, learned very well the fundamentals of the calculations. My economics education had a Keynesian slant at the hands of Joan Robinson and a fine tutor, Andy Roy.
A short time later I got a professional training in accountancy as an Articled Clerk with Cooper Brothers in London ... that joined with Lybrand Ross Bros and Montgomery to form the international accounting firm of Coopers and Lybrand and eventually merged again to form PriceWaterhouseCoopers. the global accounting colossus. I became a Chartered Accountant in 1966.
During the first phase of my career I worked in heavy engineering construction in the steel industry, the pulp and paper industry and civil engineering. Later I worked on corporate expansion and profit performance improvement in consumer products, high tech products and the implementation of best practice management systems for planning and control. In the mid 1970s I was the Chief Financial Officer for a US based international fishing company operating around the world in 26 separate jurisdictions. I was part of an international team in a complex industry that did the analysis well and solved problems creatively.
I am unusual in that I have practical experience in the corporate world making companies more profitable and have done my fair share of assignments associated with relief and development. I think of myself as being practical, constrained by what is technically possible, and a believer in solutions that are derived from not only understanding qualitative information but also the dynamic of technology, of economics and the accountancy of financial numbers.
In 1978 I started a consulting firm to specialize in international business and development. Since I started doing international work I have traveled to more than 60 countries on consulting assignments for the World Bank, for the UN and many of its specialized agencies and private organizations for sector planning, national planning, refugee planning, famine and drought emergency planning, national reconstruction planning, aid coordination, information technology planning and implementation, privatization, management training, etc. I have had the opportunity to do planning and analysis work at the national level, the sector level and for regions and communities. My work has been done largely in collaboration with local local staff, consultants and professional firms.
This has made it possible for me to see development in ways not normally seen by most international experts.
My consulting experience also includes work with private sector companies based in or doing business in developing countries. These assignments included work on management, marketing, international trade, management and accounting systems, strategic planning, training, computerization, privatization and arrangement of financing.
I have been associated with many planning assignments in post war and post famine situations. I did work on Afghanistan rebuilding after the Soviet withdrawal in 1990 and worked on Namibia's (formerly South West Africa) first development plan after its independence in 1991. I worked in Kazakhstan as part of the post cold war reform effort and in Africa and the Caribbean on government financial reform. I have done planning work in connection with refugee emergencies in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia. Malawi and Zambia. I have done AID coordination work in several African countries as well as in South Asia.
Early in my career I found myself exposed to World Bank work.
As a young accountant I did a review of the costing of the Kariba Dam project while I was working with Coopers and Lybrand. I was young and naive enough to want to get it right no matter what, and rocked the boat when I concluded that the World Bank estimate was only about half what it needed to be. The World Bank engineers had made good cost estimates based on the static information about costs as they were now ... but nobody seemed to have adjusted anything for the changes that surely would take place when a project of the magnitude of the Kariba dam was in progress. My calculations suggested that the actual cost would be twice what the World Bank was planning. Because I was part of Coopers and Lybrand, the firm's name carried weight and substantial changes to the estimates were made at the Bank, and the project was eventually a considerable success. Even though I was very young, within Coopers and Lybrand I had credibility because I had already worked as an engineer in the factory environment and done production costing work prior to joining the firm, and understood economics from my academic work at Cambridge.
During my career, I have worked for more than 30 years in developing countries. In 1974 I became the CFO of an international shrimp fishing company that operated in 26 very interesting parts of the world. This was the time of the first big oil shocks and business was being challenged as energy based cost structures changed dramatically. Markets adjusted, sometimes quite violently. Shrimp prices dropped by 75% while costs doubled. I became CFO when the company was almost bankrupt, but we managed ourselves through the crisis and eventually the company became very profitable. I learned a lot about other international companies and how they operated. I did not like what I saw. Nor did I like the enormous gap between the wealth of a few and the poverty of everyone else.
My interest in relief and development performance goes back a long time. The defining moment was probably in Nigeria in late 1974.
I had a meeting scheduled in the center of Lagos at Western House, at the time one of the most prestigious buildings in Lagos. Two kids were dead just outside the building. Poverty and death in what was now a very rich oil producing nation. The juxtaposition of these things was something I had never expected. Up to then, in my youthful naiveté, I thought that money solved problems. This was a wake up call. Money is not enough.
As a young student in engineering I learned some thermodynamics ... and especially the concept of efficiency. The idea of small resources doing big things was essentially a thermodynamic concept applied more universally. I bumped into this in India more than 30 years ago.
I started doing World Bank consultancy in 1978. One of my memories of this work is being driven in a Mercedes Benz through the center of a city in Kerala in South India. The streets were crowded. We were stuck in traffic and pedestrian throngs. I could feel hate from the people surrounding the car. They were well justified in their emotions. It was very uncomfortable. Next day ... because I was a “World Bank Consultant” ... I was asked to make a brief presentation at a local Rotary meeting and was on a panel with a local Catholic priest. Our World Bank project was a multi-hundred million dollar project ... which my analysis suggested would do almost no sustainable good ... and the priest had almost no money and was doing quite incredible work that was saving lives and mitigating misery. I was embarrassed ... but did my best “cover up”!
I have not been impressed with relief and development performance from very early on in my relief and development experience. The sort of rigorous technical, economic and financial analysis that had been so effective when I had used it in the corporate world to help improve profit performance was not being used in the relief and development world.
During the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, one of my consulting colleagues became very upset about my criticism of the development process and the results it was achieving. As consultants, we were doing very well. The more that development failed, the more consultants earned. However, after working with me several weeks, and seeing the financial analysis and economic value analysis that I was doing, he understood why I was so very critical.
I bring to the analysis of development a unique combination of technical, economic and accounting knowledge, but also a deep respect for human factors. I have an appreciation of both the limits and amazing possibilities of technology. I respect traditional values and culture that are so important in a family's quality of life. I respect other people's knowledge.
After spending a lot of time in African rural communities I commented that 'the fact that I do not know something, does not mean it is not known.”
I concluded a long time ago that the capacity of the international community to achieve relief and development progress required a new development paradigm.
When I read Professor Jeffrey Sach’s book “The End of Poverty – Economic Possibilities for our Time” in May 2005, as I was in what I thought would be the the final rewrite of the manuscript for this book. I realized how well qualified I am to write this book. Compared to Professor Sachs I have a broader education and training, a longer and wider experience, and a very different perspective of the problems.
I have been working in “relief and development” for about thirty years. So while I am pleased with the work I have done, the real results of my work have been inconsequential. The needed paradigm change has not happened. Up to now I have been totally ineffective, just as much of the other work done in the name of development.
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