A SHORT, SHARP global recession, driven by the coronavirus is a real risk according to the CEO of one of the world’s largest financial advisory organisations. He is urging investors "to take steps now to build and protect their wealth".

The warning from Nigel Green, the chief executive and founder of deVere Group, comes as confirmed cases rise and governments and central banks around the world are taking increasingly aggressive measures to try and combat the economic impact of the outbreak.

Among the steps being taken on Tuesday, the US Federal Reserve announced that it would slash interest rates by half a percentage point. Meanwhile, the Bank of England is drafting an action plan to deliver a “powerful and timely” response to the coronavirus outbreak, and Australia signals it may resort to Quantitative Easing.

“The outbreak is developing and evolving quickly and no-one accurately can predict what will be the economic fallout," Mr Green said.

“However, I believe that based on what we currently know, the risk of a coronavirus-driven short, sharp global recession this year is significantly growing. 

“The epidemic has already dented anaemic global economic growth this year and it can be expected to slow further, then contract, as the fear of the virus takes hold.”

“The outbreak has already sent the stock market into bouts of volatility not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, severely disrupted global supply chains, shuttered factories, grounded flights, closed attractions and cancelled major events. Entire powerhouse cities in Asia and Europe are nearly shut down.

"Multinational companies have warned that coronavirus will severely hit profits. Workers are being evacuated and forced to work from home and to avoid travelling," Mr Green said.

“We can see both supply and consumer demand are already being impacted in key sectors, such as travel and tourism, hospitality, manufacturing and retail, and it is going to extend to others.  

“This scenario is then likely to feed on itself: a lack of consumer confidence and spending, lack of business investment, more job cuts, which means even less spending and demand, which leads to further job cuts.

“Unfortunately, companies already on the edge are likely to fold as we have seen this week.

“Against this backdrop, we should prepare for a short-term but severe global recession," Mr Green said.

“However, the world economy is likely to bounce back strongly. We could even see revived global growth as economies rebuild and adapt; and especially so if central banks and governments step in to actively kick-start growth.

“The short-term economic impact of coronavirus is likely to affect capital markets, which in turn affects investor returns.  

“Coronavirus has shifted the landscape. Investors are urged to review their portfolios to ensure that they are still on track to create, build and generate wealth.”

The deVere Group is one of the world’s largest independent advisors of specialist global financial solutions to international, local mass affluent, and its high-net-worth clients. It has a network of more than 70 offices across the world, over 80,000 clients and $12 billion under advisement.

ends

By James Brett and Angus Dorney >>

THE CORPORATE WORLD is littered with buzzwords. From ‘agile omni-channel gamechangers’ to ‘disruptive synergies’. These words might have meant something once, but now they’re just empty syllables – the junk food of enterprise vocabulary.

But there’s one phrase fast approaching buzzword status —and we shouldn’t let it because it’s far too important: customer centricity.

Customer centricity is deceptively simple. It basically means genuinely caring about your customers and their needs. It denotes a belief that nurturing a customer will nurture your business. 

Importantly, it’s about more than just creating flashy experiences that look great but are ultimately shallow. True customer centricity is about providing solutions that solve real problems and improve your customer’s quality of life.  

When done well, it drives the kind of fierce customer loyalty and goodwill that can insulate an organisation from a thousand shocks and drive profits that others envy.

LARGE ENTERPRISES CHALLENGED

Despite its apparent simplicity, customer centricity is particularly difficult to achieve in large enterprises.

In many of these organisations, cultures, processes and legacy technologies designed with a transactional – or even exploitational – view of the customer have dominated.

In these cases, the problem is usually compounded by executive leadership – who drive and maintain the entirely wrong types of corporate culture. 

Consider the fallout from the recent Royal Commissions into Aged Care, Financial Services, and Disability. Many of the organisations delivering mea culpas now, delivered media releases in the past trumpeting their ‘customer-obsession’ and ‘customer-centricity’.  

At its core, customer centricity in an enterprise requires innovation. When your key considerations are shareholders and financial metrics, it’s impossible to innovate. This is because true transformation and customer-centricity are long-term strategies, they are an unwinding of bad habits and a nurturing of good ones.

This is particularly challenging for large organisations where it’s difficult to determine what to fix first and how to do it fast enough to keep pace with the rapidly changing needs of the customer and increasing competition. 

BADLY LEADERSHIP INCENTIVISED

So how have these institutions been able to last so long if serving the needs of their customers hasn’t been their core reason for being?

Historically, the reason enterprises have ignored the needs of the customer is because executive leadership has been incentivised to do so.

With their remuneration tied solely to financial metrics and, by extension, short-term financial goals, customer needs have been a distant second to investor returns.

Suncorp is a perfect case of the short-term aims of shareholders trumping the long-term strategy of improving the customer experience.

Former chief Michael Cameron, and Microsoft Australia’s one-time managing director Pip Marlow, wanted to make Suncorp more customer-centric and turn the bank into the ‘Amazon of Financial Services’.

Disgruntled investors killed the plan off when it didn’t immediately generate revenue and now Suncorp will return to its core business of banking and insurance.

DRIVING CUSTOMERS TO DISLOYALTY

We’re currently facing an age of customer disloyalty, and so we should be. What looks like ‘disloyalty’ to a business, is actually the customer searching for products and services that offer them real value.

There is now more choice than ever before and finding the alternatives has never been easier.

Despite this, most incumbents seem to think they’re too big to fail – if their lack of action on serious customer-centric innovation is any indication.

True innovation has to be tied to the needs and desires of the customer. It isn’t easy. Sometimes it involves turning your back on the historical sacred cows of your business – such as when Netflix jettisoned its mail order DVD business to pursue video streaming.  

Simply increasing the efficiency of existing business lines isn’t customer centric. Offshoring thousands of roles to Bangalore or the Philippines isn’t innovation. All it does is squeeze more revenue from an existing offering, so to call it anything other than ‘shareholder centric’ is a sham.

Business leaders need to bring their investors on board and champion an embrace of true customer-centricity – and they need to do it now.

Start-ups are already disrupting previously untouchable industries like financial services and insurance (FSI), telecommunications and energy.

They’re succeeding because, for them, customer-centricity is not just a buzzword.

About the authors

James Brett is a leading CTO, digital strategist and author, having led digital transformations for some of Australia's largest and best-known brands. Angus Dorney is co-CEO of digital product engineering firm, Kablamo, a team of Australian specialists who led the digital transformations of Australia's largest media organisations, and are now bringing that expertise to enterprise IT. 

By John Sheridan >>

A FEW DAYS AGO, former Treasury boss Ken Henry said, "Something is desperately wrong" with Australia's economy, which is beset by "structural deficiencies" that cannot be fixed by interest rate cuts or government largesse.

"I fear that it's more than cyclical, that we need to find a way of getting ourselves out of this hole ... when labour productivity is falling, it not only hurts economic growth, but ... fully offsets the increase in workforce participation," Dr Henry said.

Dr Henry argued the main reason productivity was declining was a lack of business investment in new technology and equipment that increased the efficiency of their workforce. 

"Business investment today as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) is almost as low as it was in the depths of the early-90s recession," he said.

"The reason why Australia celebrates a current account surplus today is because business investment is so weak. We should not be celebrating this, this is sending us a signal that there is something desperately wrong in Australia." 

SO WHAT IS PRODUCTIVITY? 

'Productivity is a measure of the efficiency of a person, machine, factory, system etc., in converting inputs into useful outputs.'

For businesses, productivity growth is important because providing more goods and services to consumers translates to higher profits. As productivity increases, an organisation can turn resources into revenues, paying stakeholders and retaining cash flows for future growth and expansion.

So productivity is important. 

But productivity in different industry sectors offers different opportunities. 

We have productive industries: agriculture, creative industries, defence, education, ICT, manufacturing, medical and health, METS, smart trades and tourism.

New technology, equipment, design, branding and advertising can help create new products and services and open up new markets through export.

WHAT ABOUT SUPPORT INDUSTRIES?

Productive industries are productive. But our support industries don’t offer the same opportunities.

The support industries – public administration, retail, accommodation and food, administrative services, transport, wholesale, personal services, finance, rental and real estate and utilities.

They are there to support productive industry. New technology and equipment can increase efficiency and profit, and help support industries deliver even better support to the wealth generators in the economy – the productive industry sectors. 

We need efficiency in both.

But increasing productivity in our productive industries offers the biggest economic benefit. 

And…

Increasing productivity in productive industries can help in other ways.

It will lead to greater diversification in our economy and steadily diminish our over-reliance on mining, food, education and tourism. 

These sectors are very important and will remain important for a long time. But we can’t afford to have all our eggs in one basket. We need more baskets (markets) and more eggs (products and services).

At the moment, we are too reliant on one basket (China) and two big eggs (mining and education). Diversification diminishes risk.

The support industries are there to support the productive industries.

GROWING THE GROWTH AREAS

But our productive industries need to grow. And that won’t happen on its own.

At the moment mining is the backbone of the Australian economy and has been for years. Mining produces royalties. Mining encourages development of new technology. Mining leads the way in robotics development and artificial intelligence (AI).

But we now need to leverage the intellectual horsepower of CSIRO, Data61 and our 38 research-based universities and apply that creative energy of ideas and experimentation across the whole spectrum of our productive industries.

Not just to support the miners and mining related manufacturers, but to generate new productive industries of our own. OEMs.

For our productive industries are where we can generate opportunity with new products and services, diversify our economy, expand our overseas markets and create a more resilient foundation for Australia’s future. For our kids and grandkids.

We have generated deep knowledge from the mining industry, which can be applied elsewhere – water, pollution control, safety, waste management, space, recycling, robotics, off road vehicle automation, energy, remote control systems, AI and drones.

Much of this knowledge is valuable in countries facing similar issues to us. Especially issues with energy, water, pollution, environment, safety and remote control systems = Export.

And we can apply that same intellectual horsepower to other industries – assistive technology, disability services, aged care, energy, waste management, soil health, aquaculture, housing, preventative medicine, manufacturing, sport and recreation = More Export.

CONNECT KNOWLEDGE TO BUSINESS

But we need to connect our universities to business in a more effective and impactful way.

The lack of synchronisation between business and academia in Australia is criminal. 

Universities are funded, measured and rewarded for teaching and publishing, but not for engagement with industry. The funding model for industry engagement is clumsy and frugal.

Government has made it hard, not easy, for universities to engage. Universities should be rewarded for helping to create a more diversified economy.

Some universities have made a point of engaging with local business anyway. 

And the benefits are obvious. Students gain experience of engaging with real business problems and possible job offers. Business owners gain new insight, perspectives and ideas.

Applied systematically and universally, this approach could turbo charge the whole spectrum of productive industries in Australia. Not just in the capital cities, but in areas surrounding regional universities, and in rural and remote areas through online webinars and conferencing.

We have all the pieces to the big picture. They have just never been assembled in the right order. 

We can create and support a wide spectrum of healthy and resilient productive industries.

Agriculture, creative industries, defence, education, ICT, manufacturing, medical and health, METS, smart trades and tourism.

Connected to CSIRO, Data61, universities, TAFEs and high schools, with a focus on innovation, investment, export, sustainability and the future of work and jobs.

That is the big picture. And the pieces all exist. Today.

So…

By John Sheridan >>

TERRY MCCRANN made some interesting comments in The Australian this Saturday about the ineffectiveness of the RBA’s response to the ailing economy. We now live in a different world...

“A world made different by the dynamics of globalisation, the pervasive 24/7 real-time digital economy, robotisation and the unique dynamic of China both removed from and the central influence in the conventional global economy. All disruption aplenty, and not just to business and consumer lives.”

And, “Frankly, central bankers haven’t a clue what to do, other than to keep pushing on their policy strings.”

But the policy strings and interest rate levers aren’t working. And of course they won’t work. Because they are not connected to the real world any more.

The world is very different from the MARTIN model that sits in Martin Place in Sydney. [MARTIN is the Reserve Bank's new full-system macroeconomic model used in policy analysis and forecasting. The RBA began using MARTIN in late 2018].  

Play with interest rates all you want, it will achieve nothing.

And as with all models, 'garbage in garbage out' applies. So, feed in incorrect employment figures and MARTIN has a problem.

Roy Morgan Research suggests that 8.7 percent of Australians were unemployed in August -- not 5.3 percent with an additional 7.1 percent underemployed.

And, about 97 percent of net jobs growth in the past year has been in the public sector. 

Not jobs in productive industries. 

Jobs in productive industries generate profit, exports, new opportunities and more jobs. Jobs in the public sector do none of this.

DIGITAL DISRUPTION DENIAL

The impacts of digital disruption through AI, robotics, BIM, AR, VR, Blockchain, IoT, 3D printing, drones, Facebook, Google, Amazon, airbnb, Uber, 'fake news' and others are wide ranging, multi-dimensional and not easy to factor into MARTIN either. 

We can’t afford to be passive in our response to this latest challenge. It is not enough to sit in Martin Place, feeding garbage into MARTIN and pulling strings and levers.

Trump and Johnson sneeze and we catch a cold. China sneezes and we are in the mortuary.

We have to take control of our own destiny. And diversify our industries and export markets.

That requires building on our existing productive industry sectors and applying all the 'smarts' and 'innovations' that sit in CSIRO, Data61 and the 38 research based universities across the country.

It requires supporting the 7,000 scaleups and startups in our productive industry sectors: agriculture, creative industries, defence, education, ICT, medical and health, manufacturing, METS, smart trades and tourism.

And not creating more and more jobs in the public sector. Not sustainable.

But creating more and more jobs in productive industry sectors.

Stop responding to change.

And make change happen. 

On our terms.

In directions that suit our strengths, that maintain and create jobs for our children and grandchildren, and make Australia the innovative powerhouse that it could and should be.