On Systemic Things

Building systemic things is very hard, and often the beneficiaries are the next leaders, provided they don't manage to destroy everything in a short time. Tactical measures do not deliver significant growth. They can bring a short-term improvement, but no more than that. The same goes for populist decisions, which later lead to even worse consequences, and those too fall to the next leader. We have plenty of examples, both positive and negative, of such lasting effects. Victory has many fathers, while for defeats the culprit is always the previous leader. That is why, when we assess any given leader, it is crucial to understand whose achievements these really are. This applies to every sphere of activity, in business and in government alike.

In business we see many examples of successful companies, but we cannot always tell who stood behind the transformation of a particular company. Only a narrow circle of specialists in the field can assess this accurately.

Take infill construction, for example. It is tempting to blame the current leadership for it, but if a building is already going up, then most likely the project itself and the construction permit were obtained several years ago, certainly under a different akim. Or take the industrial zone in Almaty, which I visited recently. It is now a very large growth point, especially for Almaty, and everyone will now emphasize that the growth happened under his watch. In fact, the idea, the funding and the start of implementation date back about 10 years, I believe to the time of Yesimov, and we most likely have him to thank for the city's large industrial growth. Likewise, we should be grateful to Baibek for the city's new look, with the new Panfilov Street, a city without fences, and so on.

The same is true of problems. There is no point in blaming the current leadership, for example, for the accidents at combined heat and power plants or for the electricity shortage in the country. Most likely, these are the consequences of populist decisions by previous officials aimed at fighting inflation, which points to a problem with the country's decision-making system. For example, construction of the Balkhash Thermal Power Plant began in 2008, and by 2015 the project was ready, with an investor from Korea, and by 2021 it would have been operating at full capacity. In fact, after the devaluation Kazakhstan failed to agree on a tariff with the Koreans and paid huge sums for the broken contract. I read somewhere recently that the President said that abandoning the Balkhash plant had been a mistake. Meanwhile, we are now buying electricity from Russia. We have a monocentric decision-making system, which is good for reacting quickly to certain things but extremely harmful for building systemic things. Often the decisions of top management are not discussed; they are simply accepted for execution. Yet in properly functioning systems, the leader's role is to build a system in which subordinates will make the right decisions, to organize interaction with other units and to act as an arbiter. There are no all-knowing bosses, because that is simply impossible, so it is crucial either to trust experts or to hold a healthy discussion.

Unfortunately, any criticism is taken extremely painfully by any boss, although in normal organizations it is perfectly normal. Truth is born in argument.

I hope we will arrive at a point where decisions are made on the basis of expert opinion and discussion, rather than on a boss's own knowledge and in reaction to the noise made by those who shout the loudest.