Cities Rewire the Economic Circuitry

 

By Cyndee Miller

It hit me about halfway through the cab ride from Heathrow to my hotel: London really does know how to rock a project. The Tower— still looking good some 946 years after the project closed.

 Granted, projects were on the brain as I was in town for my 21^st (!) PMI congress. But I also had the benefit of a running commentary from a concerned citizen stakeholder, a.k.a., my cabdriver. London’s cycle superhighway project? “It’s a horrible idea. It’s going to cause all sorts of problems.” (We shall see — look for a story on it in the July PM Network.)

The Shard, London’s latest high-rise billed as the “vertical city”? “It’s okay, but it looks like they didn’t finish it.” He was more impressed with the London Eye, and filled us in on the Ferris wheel’s history as a temporary attraction that proved so popular, the city kept it around. Talk about proving project ROI.

The impromptu lecture continued with a chapter on development projects on the East Side as we headed into Canary Wharf. Once one of the world’s busiest ports, it was reborn in recent decades as a major financial hub.

That kind of project vision has helped establish London as one of the world’s most magnetic and prosperous cities. It pulls talent and capital from around the world — and is a premier example of the giant metropolises that will increasingly define the global economy. 

“Cities are becoming so large that they are fusing together into what I call urban archipelagos,” keynoter Parag Khanna, PhD, author of How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, told congress goers. “These urban corridors are so large that they’re like countries unto themselves.”

It’s not just London, either. There’s also Abu-Dubai, Mumbai-Pune and Lagos-Benin City.

As the world economy continues to globalize at a ultra-fast clip, those corridors and the supply chains, migration patterns and markets that drive prosperity are morphing, he said.

That has huge implications for the project portfolios and talent management strategies of organizations competing in an increasingly connected and mobile world.

“We are in a truly unprecedented point in history,” Dr. Khanna said. “As of the last five or six years, most of the world’s population is now clustered in cities.”

So traditional diplomacy is being displaced by “diplomacity.” “The networks and relationships between cities form the circuitry of the economy, much more so than international relations,” he said.

Two things above all will define the countries and companies that thrive in the coming decades: connectedness and competitiveness. And Dr. Khanna predicted the gap between global infrastructure and defense project spending will continue to grow as more countries invest in connectivity — “the foundation of what globalization delivers.” Get ready for the Internet of Everything: 50 billion connected devices by 2020, blurring the line between the physical and digital.

But there’s a big risk in all this for global organizations looking for the right talent. In a hyper-connected and hyper-competitive world, people are on the move. The number of expats jumped from 70 million in 1960 to more than 250 million today, Dr. Khanna noted.

“People are becoming increasingly agnostic about where they live.” That growing rootlessness is part of what’s driving a global talent divide, he said.

In this crazy connected world, employees are going to want to know which organizations will help them see the world, Dr. Khanna said. That poses an interesting proposition for organizations competing on a global scale. “How are you going to find talent, train talent and retain talent in those fast-growing areas where you may not be operating right now?”