Ch 23 and 24 funny faces, exports and great visionaries

Wow, time files when your having fun!

Anyway my final blog entry includes both 23 and 24.  There were a few points in the chapters that caught my eye.

Chapter 23 dealt with decolonization and the chapter have major sections devoted to both India and Africa.  What I noticed was that in both places there was a great visionary leader who helped and was really in their moment.  Of course I'm referring to Mandela in Africa and Gandhi in India.  Both brought unity, spirituality and suffered very difficult battles in their struggles.  They also didn't seem to want to take the helm, but rather became the helm because the people knew they were the right leaders.  I have huge leadership discussions at work.  One faction feels that militaristic hierarchy is leadership where I feel that when an employee says "if you ever leave, will you take me with you, I'll go anywhere with you around" the person has demonstrated leadership.  Both Gandhi and Mandela demonstrated this type of leadership.  How many people do you know that you'd like to follow into a new career?  These are the greats....

My favorite part of chapter 24 was the picture of the Indian call center voice training course where they all were pulling their mouths with fingers creating huge smiles.  Another and more important part of the chapter dealt with trade surplus and deficit countries.  While most feel that if you import more than you export you are in bad shape, but might it not actually work in reverse?  Don't the export surplus countries depend on our economies much more than we depend on their products.  If a huge nationalism revolt strikes and we decide to buy American, a very large part of the world could be in trouble.  It also feels like there is a huge upside, sort of like a PE ratio, when it is low one may be looking at opportunity.  This relates directly to the topic of the American Empire.  Where we haven't so much dominated via take over we have inserted friendlies in politics and pushed massive economic control in many places which may lead to a more sustained control as compared to stripping a country of resources.

Anyway, ciao, it was a please being in class with you all!