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Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

I was completely unprepared for the way government and large bureaucratic organizations actually function, and remain concerned about this deficit.

I was totally unprepared for the impact deregulation had on business in the 1980s, especially in the United States. I understand the concept of “laissez faire” but in my book it does not translate into “anything goes”. The fact of fraud and misbehavior on the part of many people and organizations was a great disappointment … and the fact that similar behavior is still tolerated in the higher levels of corporate and economic power.

There is much evidence that there has been significant manipulation and fraud in achieving high profits in the deregulated environment of the past thirty years … but getting high socio-economic performance for society in this setting has been difficult. The problem is not people … the problem is a system that has metrics that ignore everything except profit and data that moves capital markets higher … the problem is a system that ignores every single aspect of investment in society.

Though my financial success has been limited … I have had the opportunity to do assignments in more than fifty countries round the world … I have worked at different levels of the economy from refugee camps and rural communities to national level planning and oversight. Some of my work has been very practical … some quite academic!

From my background and experience, I am clear that something different is needed that will help to improve the management of resources. What is needed is a combination of “system” and “movement” so that the power of management information can be available not only to a small rich powerful elite, but to everyone who is interested in an improving society and doing the best right thing!

I also read economics at Cambridge … and subsequently trained with Coopers and Lybrand in London and was articled to Brian Maynard. Subsequently I became a Chartered Accountant. It was a “wake up call” to see separately the power of engineering and the power of accountancy and to understand what a waste because of the almost non-existent coordination or collaboration between the different “silos” of professional development.

Subsequently I worked with Aerosol Techniques Inc. of Milford Connectivity, Gulton Industries of Metuchen New Jersey and Continental Seafoods Inc. of Secaucus, New Jersey and their subsidiaries. These companies could not have been more different in both industry sector … consumer products, high tech electronics and international fisheries … and in the character of the companies.

After more than 15 years of professional and corporate management, I became an independent consultant based in the USA with a focus on management and international initiatives. This led to some long term associations with some interesting companies, and with the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) … and eventually to a lot of work associated with the official relief and development assistance (ORDA) sector.

My journey with information technology (IT) and management development has been long. During my work with Coopers and Lybrand I worked on the audit of one of the first commercial computers built to do business computing … at EMI just outside London. EMI, a leading electronics company had built the computer itself, and used it in one of their subsidiaries … EMI Records, that was involved with the distribution of Beatles records. The audit was impossible … but there were enormous lessons learned. At this time almost all accounting was done manually with the assistance of “bookkeeping” machines. There was a premium on being organized, and with “organization it was possible to do amazingly fast reporting of financial performance, even though the business was very, very large.

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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.