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2. Alastair Newton
49 Plays2 years ago
Welcome to the second episode of The Hippo Question, a podcast by Country Navigator!
In this episode, Nikki and Matthew host the first guest to have ACTUAL hippos at the end of his garden, Alastair Newton. Alastair is a former career diplomat who served in sub-Saharan Africa, Paris and the United States, meeting Presidents and Prime Ministers. He’s now one of the private sector’s top political risk analysts globally, and has advised Lehman Brothers and Nomura International among others.
Tune in to find out more about the behind the scene of the diplomatic services and how CQ can help mitigate political and geopolitical risk.
Please note: this episode was recorded in August 2023 and doesn't touch upon more recent global events.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction on Cultural Intelligence
00:00:04
Speaker
A podcast all about cultural intelligence and inclusion. We're asking loads of people the important questions to find out what makes them tick and how culture has impacted their lives. We're going to look at their cultural hippo and find out what we can learn from the people who've made a career out of leveraging culture and inclusion.
Guest Introduction: Alistair Newton's Background
00:00:27
Speaker
We're joined today from Zambia by Alistair Newton, our first guest to have actual hippos at the end of his garden. Alistair's a former career diplomat who served in Sub-Saharan Africa, France and the United States. He's met presidents and prime ministers.
00:00:44
Speaker
He's now one of the private sector's top political risk analysts globally and has advised Lehman Brothers and Nomura International, among others. Aleister authors a signature periodical, issues which keep me awake at night, on political and geopolitical risk. He's also co-authored major studies on China, India, Indonesia, North Korea, Iran and Israel.
00:01:09
Speaker
Alastair, you are as incredible as your bio. That's one of the longest intros we've ever had to record. So let's jump straight in with my obvious question.
Implications of the Current Geopolitical Cycle
00:01:20
Speaker
What are the issues currently keeping you awake at night?
00:01:24
Speaker
Well, actually, mainly trying to get my 11-year-old daughter through her important exams to go on to secondary school, to be quite honest with you. But as far as the more serious side of your question is concerned, for me personally as a political analyst, this is an absolutely fascinating time because we are at the end of a geopolitical cycle.
00:01:48
Speaker
which a lot of people haven't heard of for the very simple reason that they outlast most people's lifetimes. So for a political analyst it's a real privilege to be living at a time when we have fundamental tectonic shifts going on in the geopolitics of the planet and to be able to
00:02:06
Speaker
spent a lot of time looking at that, experiencing all this firsthand, trying to explain it to other people, in particular to explain its implications to potential investors, in my case. But just utterly fascinating, albeit somewhat unnerving as well. So there's a whole load of stuff out there to keep one awake at night. But there's also a certain degree of
00:02:32
Speaker
satisfaction in what Hillary Clinton described on the name of her autobiography is living history because it is really an historical time we're living in and
00:02:45
Speaker
even more rewarding the fact that I'm actually managing to make a living out of it. That's a curse, which some people say is a Chinese curse. Was it God forbid that I should live in interesting times? May you live in interesting times? Yeah, precisely. And these are interesting times in many respects.
Living in Zambia: Diversity and Challenges
00:03:03
Speaker
And even sort of viewing them semi-detached from having moved my domicile from
00:03:12
Speaker
England to Zambia eight years ago. I'm guessing that many of the people listening to the podcast know very little about Zambia. It's not a country that comes up in news reports very often. Unless Disney decides to film their next film, it's not a country we talk about very often.
00:03:31
Speaker
What are some of the cultural challenges you faced? What are some of the interesting or exciting cultural elements that you've come across in your eight years so far? I suppose the question is, why Zambia? Okay, well, there's any number of reasons why Zambia, historical cultural lifestyle, I found a house here which I really liked on the Zambezi River. Things like that do matter. When I first moved here, one of the reasons I moved here was that
00:04:00
Speaker
the internet connection was pretty good by Sub-Saharan African standards. Strangely enough, we had an upgrade recently, and it's gone down since then. So let's hope this link actually holds. Lots of very good reasons. But to go to how you started your question, Matthew, just before I moved here, I took my then deputy to meet an old friend, Richard Dowden, who at that time was the Secretary General of the Royal African Society in London. And she said to Richard,
00:04:29
Speaker
Is Zambia safe? And Richard said, do you ever read about it in the news? And she said, no. And he said, we'll draw your own conclusions. That's because there's no trouble there. Zambia is a fascinating country in many respects. But one of its more interesting characteristics is that among roughly 24 million people, there are 72 different tribes.
00:04:53
Speaker
So in contrast to some African countries, which will remain nameless for the sake of diplomacy, you don't have a single dominant tribe or two or three tribes which are scrabbling for dominance. What you have is a whole load of people who have got on together because none of them has a majority or even a large plurality. So this is a really, really friendly country.
00:05:21
Speaker
No matter what your particular cultural hippos may be, the fact is that it is an extremely welcoming country where people will make you feel at home. And in the end, I would have to say that that is one of the really big reasons why Zambia, the answer to your question. It's somewhere which is relatively easy for foreigners to move to.
00:05:45
Speaker
It's not without its complications, but I hardly dare say compared to trying to move to the UK, because the UK is kind of at the other end of the spectrum these days. It is a relatively easy country to buy property, to own property, to do business, and just to settle in and get on with people. Obviously, it helps enormously that I have a Zambian wife.
00:06:08
Speaker
I wondered if they were doing Nomad visas. It sounds absolutely idyllic and perfect, particularly given that I know you have hippos down the border of your garden just roaming around Bath. You've obviously travelled a lot throughout your career. Do you still experience culture shock when you came
Culture Shock and Routine Maintenance Issues
00:06:25
Speaker
to Zambia? Was there that element of culture shock?
00:06:28
Speaker
There's always a difference between a big difference in my view between visiting a country and deciding to live there. The immersion makes a difference and it's when you get immersed that you discover all the tripwires of course.
00:06:43
Speaker
and you begin to discover a bit more about yourself relative to where you are living as against when you're a visitor somewhere, you can kind of get away with stuff or ignore stuff or not even be aware of stuff. When you move somewhere, you have to make a much, much bigger adjustment to fit in, to be a responsible guest in a country, if you like. Is there anything particular that you've come across that you particularly struggled with?
00:07:11
Speaker
don't want to do any routine maintenance until something breaks down. We've spent a lot of time getting our team here to understand that checking the water pumps, checking the electric fans and so on and so forth
00:07:25
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is absolutely necessary. Don't just leave it until it stops working. And actually, to a certain extent, the developed world has itself to blame for that. It's no coincidence that the author, in my view, the author of the somewhat scathing book, Dead Aid, is a Zambian. There is too much aid in this country, and aid dependency is deeply dangerous, in my view. If something breaks down, you just go to a donor and ask for a new one.
00:07:53
Speaker
The textile industry in this country did not get wiped out by the Chinese, contrary to what some people claim. It actually got wiped out by well-meaning people in countries like the UK who gave their secondhand clothes to Oxfam. And believe me, a secondhand Manchester United shirt is a lot more appreciated here than a Zambian-made cotton shirt. End of textile industry. So aid is problem.
00:08:21
Speaker
I think there is a huge grain of truth in what you're just saying that it can have such a detrimental impact to sustainability and self-sufficiency.
Adapting to Cultural Norms vs. Personal Standards
00:08:32
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And we saw it, you know, I grew up in Goa, the Goa sounds a lot like Zambia in many ways, you know, don't fix anything till it's broken. Just let it tick along. Don't turn up on time because we have a saint called Susaigat, I think it's a Portuguese word, which means we'll get there when we do. So yeah, I could see quite a few similarities in having to adapt my personal style working in the Western Hemisphere.
00:08:55
Speaker
has been quite a challenge. Do you find that you've had to adapt in certain situations or do you hold fast on your cultural, you know, ways of doing things? The trick, I think, is to make the adjustment without lowering your personal standards. As long as your personal standards are the valid standards. Now, we're sort of getting into your cultural hippo territory here because, you know, we have all these norms which we got used to.
00:09:24
Speaker
And you do have to make some adjustments at the end of the day. After all, as I said earlier, I'm a guest in this country, even though I'm now a permanent resident. And as a guest, I feel that I have a responsibility to adjust to life here to a great extent.
00:09:42
Speaker
Thank you, Alisa. That does help understand when people travel to different countries, whether as an assignee and an expatriate, et cetera, how do they then assimilate into the local culture?
Understanding Geopolitical Dynamics through Cultural Intelligence
00:09:53
Speaker
I want to take that on a bit of a larger scale. You know, geopolitics is your thing. And there's a huge focus on Asia. You've co-authored papers on China, India, South Korea.
00:10:03
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Do you think over your long span of career and traveling to these places and having a focus on Asia and the in-depth knowledge that you have of the geopolitical situation there, do you think cultural intelligence plays a role in geopolitics? I think it's absolutely essential. Absolutely essential. Depending on exactly how you define cultural intelligence, because in the end, if you
00:10:32
Speaker
Let me give you two anecdotes from the time when I was actually working, well, time when I was working with you actually, Nikiya Lehman Brothers. There was a very smart FX trader, emerging market trader called Rob Gibbons, who asked me one day, what makes a good political analyst? And I thought about it for a bit and I said,
00:11:01
Speaker
It's the same as what makes a good for an exchange trader. It's your gut instinct. And he said to me, okay, but what's your gut instinct? And I had to think about that for a bit. And I came up with this, which I've used a great many times since your gut instinct is the conscious manifestation of your subconscious grinding over your collected knowledge. And
00:11:26
Speaker
I think it is fundamentally the case that the more you learn with an open mind, the more you go and see things for yourself, the more you think about it, the more likely you are to come up with at least fairly sensible conclusions. And I do think that that is really, really fundamental to not just
00:11:51
Speaker
political analysis, but actually understanding other people. And that takes me to the second anecdote, which is at the time of the the Greek debt crisis, when I would wander across the trading floor and the traders would be saying to me, surely Angela Merkel must understand that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:12:11
Speaker
In other words, markets are going to trash it. I mean, let's take a more up to date example. Surely Liz Trust must have understood that. But she didn't. And the reason she didn't was because she wasn't prepared to listen to people who were saying, actually, markets don't think that way. And to me on the trading floor, it was saying, well, actually, politicians don't think that way.
00:12:34
Speaker
Politicians see this in a different light. And we could say the same about the debt crisis in the US at the moment. You know, there's lots of people out there whom I deal with on a regular basis saying, surely the Republicans aren't going to be mad enough to let America default on its debt. Well, actually, for the hardliners on the right wing of the Republican Party, their priorities are different.
00:12:55
Speaker
And they see things in a different way. They have a different worldview. They have what one might call, in British terms, a re-smog perspective. I mean, everybody said surely the British won't be stupid enough to leave the European Union. Well,
00:13:11
Speaker
history does have a habit of rhyming as they say and people view things in different ways, they have different priorities, they come to different conclusions.
Insights from Immersing in Foreign Cultures
00:13:20
Speaker
So the single most important thing from a perspective of a geopolitical analyst in my view is trying to get yourself into the mind of a decision maker who comes from a very, very different culture. Sometimes
00:13:35
Speaker
That can be pretty uncomfortable. I had the privilege a few years ago of visiting North Korea, which was really useful. As I said earlier, you can't learn as much from visiting as you can from living in a place. But I certainly have a better understanding for having visited there. At least I like to think I have a better understanding of how Kim Jong Un's mind works. It actually tells you a huge amount.
00:14:01
Speaker
getting out there, meeting people, visiting people and so on. Very valuable. I think that might bring me on to my next question. You mentioned that it's really important to try and get into the minds of the people you're working with and that's at the heart of cultural intelligence. It's trying to understand other people's perspectives.
00:14:22
Speaker
What would you say, can you give any advice to someone who's trying to get into the mind of another person? What would you advise them to do or to look out for? How would you in your career get into the mind of someone that you're working with? I'm going to give you another little story, but this isn't from my lifetime in particular. Back in the 1960s, there was a famous South African golfer called Gary Player.
00:14:51
Speaker
And he was interviewed by a journalist who asked him what the secret was of his success. And his answer went something like this. He said, you know, I've always considered myself to be a very lucky golfer. But the strange thing is the harder I practice, the luckier I get. And the bottom line is this, it's just hard work. Now you guys know this because you're working very hard at what you're doing.
00:15:18
Speaker
and you're giving it a lot of thought and you go into things hopefully with an open mind. I'm sure you do. But in the end, it's the hard yards which count. It's being prepared to do what Rob Givens did before
Diversity in Recruitment: Avoiding Homogeneity
00:15:33
Speaker
he made a trade. He would just read everything he possibly could. He'd listen to people. He would maybe talk to 20 analysts.
00:15:42
Speaker
But then he would come to his own view. But he had to do that hard work first. He had to get that collected knowledge, which I referred to earlier. So bottom line is, you've got to work at it. Fantastic. Thank you. I certainly agree that hard work is, particularly when you're coming to understand people, you do need to invest time in understanding them. You need to be able to understand and sort of
00:16:11
Speaker
look at how they're reacting to you, how they're reacting to other people. And you mentioned collective intelligence for other people. We have this concept of cognitive diversity, that the more people who are inputting into your fund of knowledge, the wider perspective you have. Yeah, absolutely. It's certainly something, Matthew, that we see all the time.
00:16:36
Speaker
in business, you know, when we talk to organizations, you know, it's almost like your geopolitical situations, right, but these organizations are trying to do exactly the same, right, influence, attract talent, retain talent, get into new markets, capture territory, you know, do all sorts of things that people want to do to be considered successful. And I think it's
00:17:00
Speaker
probably a daunting task asking an organization to start doing the work, you know, and look at helping every individual do the work. Are there any quick tips, Alisa, that you could share, you know, your toolkit of experience and expertise? What are a couple of things that people could just use today listening to this podcast and go, I know I can try that.
00:17:23
Speaker
Well, I think for any organization, one of the biggest pitfalls, this is going to be a cliche, Nicky, I'm sorry, but one of the biggest pitfalls is the propensity for hiring people like us, close quotes. And if I think about your operating principally in the UK, if I think about
00:17:48
Speaker
the trading floor at the equities trading floor at Lehman Brothers just before we went bust in 2008, which was the biggest equity trading floor in London at that time. And there were what, maybe 45 or 50 nationalities sitting there. Now, obviously that helps. But the question I would ask is just how diverse were those people when it came down to it?
00:18:15
Speaker
because they'd all been to British universities and so on. And it was telling when we were recruiting because you would go through these CVs and every one of them had got 10 star GCSEs and four star A levels and had spent their gap year helping Romanian orphans or whatever.
00:18:39
Speaker
And they all had pretty much identical CVs. And the arguments I used to have with HR when we'd been doing all these interviews for hours on end, and I'd be saying, I really like this candidate because I'd found something different in there. I'd found something which said to me, this person is not from the same mold as
00:19:02
Speaker
I don't know, 95% of the people we're interviewing. And I would say, above all, look for people who are going to offer something different, not in the sense of what they've done, but in the sense of who they are. Try and find out the person who stands a bit apart from the mould and then
00:19:24
Speaker
Find a way of getting them to Maximize that to your benefit in your existing systems because that's the second thing you get these people and then you try to mold them To work with what you are familiar with when actually what you should be trying to do is To get what you're familiar with to work with them So that's my second point don't be too rigid in the way you operate or recruit
00:19:53
Speaker
Excellent. So, yeah, we had a really, really great conversation last
The 'Hippo Question': Cultural Depth Exploration
00:19:58
Speaker
time. I've really enjoyed some of the points you're making, but it's now time for the highlight of our podcast today, the hippo question. So first, I want to explain what the hippo question is. And obviously, we are amazed, and Nikki's mentioned it earlier on, that you're the first guest and probably the only guest we're ever going to talk to who has hippos in their back garden.
00:20:21
Speaker
or I hope they're outside and not inside the garden at least. But the point is that a hippo is very much like an iceberg in that most of the weight, the danger is below the surface. Hippos spend a lot of their time with just their nose poking through the water. And for us, we see in that a great analogy for culture.
00:20:46
Speaker
that culture, what we see is really easy to take account of, is really easy to be aware of, but the dangerous bit is the bit below the surface. So I was wondering if you could give us an example as to of a time maybe when you or someone you've been around has really been tripped up by culture, when they've been caught out by that invisible bit.
Anecdote on Cultural Missteps and Skills
00:21:13
Speaker
Well, it kind of happens to me all the time, actually, simply because there are so many tripwires out there, but most of them, fortunately, are fairly minor. I guess one example of somebody else who was deliberately actually going against the cultural grain, which I remember very well, this takes me back to a banquet in Hong Kong in
00:21:41
Speaker
1993. And I happened to be sitting at the same table as the consul of a very well known large country on the edge of Europe, which I will not name again in the interest of diplomacy, who had actually been consul in Hong Kong for that country for 20 years, and who categorically refused to use chopsticks.
00:22:05
Speaker
And it was very interesting to see that how, even though everybody knew where he was going to be sitting, the waiting staff had not put out a knife and fork for him. He had to ask for a knife and fork. And the knife and fork, Julie, arrived with the sort of resonance on the table, which these days we would equate with Xi Jinping's wolf warriors. Bang! And he was quite unashamed of it. But if you consider
00:22:34
Speaker
the cultural damage which you inflict on your host, the damage which you inflict on your own country by doing that. And as a consequence of that, with all three of my daughters, the two that have long been grown up and Sui Lanji today, I have insisted that at a very early age, they learn to use chopsticks. And I believe that that sort of basic skill can hold you in good stead all your life.
Reflections on Cultural Intelligence and Learning
00:23:02
Speaker
It's such an easy thing to do. Sui actually practices quite regularly. I've even called her using chopsticks to eat. Would you believe potato chips? That's such an amazing piece of wisdom and insight to finish on. Thank you. You summed up cultural intelligence and our work really, really well in just a couple of minutes. So thank you a huge amount for your time. I reckon we could probably film for another three hours.
00:23:31
Speaker
talking about your experience and your insights. So thank you very much for the time you've given us. And yeah, thank you again. I've actually found this a very interesting exercise simply because by asking me the question, it caused me to start thinking again about many of the things we've been discussing today. And I guess I would say to your prospective clientele out there, do this.
00:24:02
Speaker
do this as a means of getting yourself into thinking about these things properly. So, if you want to use me in a commercial, feel free because I do think that this is a very, very valuable exercise indeed. Oh, I think you can leave that with us, Alistair. I'm signed up. And I think, same goes for our listeners. I mean, Alistair, I've known you for a little while and I think, you know, that growth mindset that is with you has been there forever.
00:24:28
Speaker
for the longest period of time that I've known you. And I'm so in awe of it. And I think our listeners are going to want to hear more from you. So I'm hoping we can do a repeat and pick up where we leave off today soon. Happy to. Thank you very much. Thank you, guys.
00:24:48
Speaker
The Hippo Question with Country Navigator, the number one platform for cultural intelligence and inclusion training. Tune in for more interviews with global business leaders and find us at countrynavigator.com.