Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present
How do societies identify and promote merit? Enabling all people to fulfill their potential, and ensuring the selection of competent and capable leaders are central challenges for any society. These are not new concerns. Scholars, educators, and political and economic elites in China and India have been pondering them for centuries and continue to do so today, with enormously high stakes.
In Making Meritocracy, Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi have gathered over a dozen experts from a range of intellectual perspectives--political science, history, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and applied mathematics--to discuss how the two most populous societies in the world have addressed the issue of building meritocracy historically, philosophically, and in practice. They focus on how contemporary policy makers, educators, and private-sector practitioners seek to promote it today. Importantly, they also discuss Singapore, which is home to large Chinese and Indian populations and the most successful meritocracy in recent times. Both China and India look to it for lessons. Though the past, present, and future of meritocracy building in China and India have distinctive local inflections, their attempts to enhance their power, influence, and social well-being by prioritizing merit-based advancement offers rich lessons both for one another and for the rest of the world--including rich countries like the United States, which are currently witnessing broad-based attacks on the very idea of meritocracy.
In Making Meritocracy, Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi have gathered over a dozen experts from a range of intellectual perspectives--political science, history, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and applied mathematics--to discuss how the two most populous societies in the world have addressed the issue of building meritocracy historically, philosophically, and in practice. They focus on how contemporary policy makers, educators, and private-sector practitioners seek to promote it today. Importantly, they also discuss Singapore, which is home to large Chinese and Indian populations and the most successful meritocracy in recent times. Both China and India look to it for lessons. Though the past, present, and future of meritocracy building in China and India have distinctive local inflections, their attempts to enhance their power, influence, and social well-being by prioritizing merit-based advancement offers rich lessons both for one another and for the rest of the world--including rich countries like the United States, which are currently witnessing broad-based attacks on the very idea of meritocracy.
I have come to a conclusion that may surprise you: trying to apply management practices uniformly across geographies is a fool's errand. Best practices simply don't travel well across borders. That's because conditions not just of economic development but of institutional maturity, educational norms, language, and culture vary enormously from place to place. Students of managerial practice once thought that their technical knowledge of best manufacturing practices (to take one example) was sufficiently developed that processes simply needed to be tweaked to fit local conditions. More often, it turns out, they have to be reworked quite radically—not because the technology is wrong but because everything around it changes how it will work. There's nothing wrong with the tools we have at our disposal, but their application requires contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to a context different from the one in which it was acquired. Until we can better develop and apply contextual intelligence, failure rates for cross-border businesses will remain high, what we learn from experiments unfolding around the world will remain limited, and the promise of healthy growth in all parts of the world will remain unfulfilled.