the BondHolder

From my Chicago office window I was looking at the rain as I was re-reading the final version of a report we had prepared three months ago on Greece( for one of our clients, a major investment fund )when I decided to publish some of its findings. I have grandparents that immigrated from a village in Arcadia in the early 1900 which makes me feel part Greek.

I’m also a partner in one of the major firms in the fields of managing change and knowledge management. We gather data from interviews and publications and we analyze social trends and tendencies. The work has taken over three months to complete.

The next day I asked permission from our client to publish it on the internet. Having served its purpose for them they allowed us to publish excerpts from the executive summary of the report under the condition of anonymity.

Executive Summary

The findings

The citizens of Greece have no faith or trust in their political system as a whole including the current government and the opposition.

We have collected the statements that different ministers and the prime minister have made in the last 8 months and use a measure of “credibility” that indirectly highly correlates to trust.

• • The credibility gap

There is money     Cutting salaries

Take care of the old     Cutting pensions

We are on the side of the weak   €43 billion to the banks

Retirement criteria will not change   All retirement criteria changed

Take care of the young    Lower the minimum salary

We can do it on our own    Brought in the IMF

Will control costs     Hospital debt ballooned

We will promote growth    Nothing done

We believe that the current Greek Government has no credibility with its citizens and therefore it is likely that it is not trusted.- in essence it has and continues to mislead the citizens..

This lack of trust will lead to absence of hope and this in turn will lead to a country that will literally stop functioning. We are already seeing signs of stagnation in a number of sectors and the social unrest of increased unemployment is already starting to show its ugly head.

Thus Greece is faced with two major issues: it has to drastically change and at the same time its entire political leadership is mistrusted (the opposition has also no credibility given its recent performance as a government).This vacuum will have -unless it is filled with a credible alternative- social, political and economic consequences that are non predictable.

The model of change  upon which we have based our findings is outlined below.

The Model of Change

When change is imposed clearly the most important determinant of getting through is the ability of leadership to…well, lead. The literature on the subject indicates that the nature of the change is secondary to the perceptions that citizens have regarding the ability, competence, and credibility of its leaders.

During drastic change times, citizens will expect effective and sensible planning, confident and effective decision-making, and regular, complete communication that is timely and honest. Also during these times of change, citizens will perceive leadership as supportive, concerned and committed to their welfare, while at the same time recognizing that tough decisions need to be made. The best way to summarize is that there is a climate of trust between leader and the citizens. The existence of this trust, brings hope for better times in the future, and that makes coping with drastic change much easier.

In cases characterized by poor leadership, citizens expect nothing positive. In a climate of distrust, they learn that leaders will act in indecipherable ways and in ways that do not seem to be in anyone’s best interests. Poor leadership means an absence of hope, which, if allowed to go on for too long, results in a country becoming completely non-functioning. The country must deal with the practical impact of unpleasant change, but more importantly, must labour under the weight of citizens who have given up, have no faith in the system or in the ability of leaders to turn the country around.

In essence the existence of trust in the leadership is the key ingredient to successfully going through. Πρωτοσελιδα – Ειδήσεις