Hard is soft. Soft is hard.

Hard factors. Measure, anticipate, control. Two dimensional. Man adapts to and harnesses the physical world. Atom bomb. Moon-landing. Life‘s genetic instructions. Objects, however. Coal can’t think. Cows can‘t revolt.

Mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics. The scientfic method. All have brought us wonders. Progress. I climb into a hunk of steel. It transports me to another continent. Scientific man. He‘s been at it for thousands of years. Wonders.

Soft factors. The opposite. Not measurable, controllable, fed into a method, process or structure. Deeply three dimensional. Ways of thinking. Hopes. Desires. Fears. Perceptions. Inclinations. Action. Reaction. Reactions to reaction. The human person. Subject, not object.

But not in a vacuum. Commonalities, yes. Eat, sleep, drink, shelter, physical intimacy. All primal. But beyond that? What influences us? What forms our thinking, therefore acting? Family, faith, education, ethnic group, economic system, geography, history, our historical consciousness, work colleagues. All of the above and more. My umbrella term: national culture.

Soft factors all of them? On the contrary. Perhaps the true hard factors. The hardest of the hard factors in the global economy. How the Chinese negotiate. How Germans define quality. How Americans establish, maintain and deepen collaborative business relationships. How the Japanese balance the needs of the group with those of the individual. How the Koreans see the Japanese. The Indians the Chinese. The French the Germans. Muslims the Christians. Christians the Jews. Jews the Muslims. The world the Americans.

Soft factors? Hardly. In fact, very hard. Hard in the sense of difficult, not quantifiable, not controllable via methods, tools, processes. Hard in the sense of deeply-rooted, believed in strongly, shared commonly, tested and proven over time, centuries. Hard, not easily changed.

Do we have it backwards? Are the hard factors of the world economy soft, precisely because they‘re measurable? Numbers can be manipulated. The soft factors hard, precisely because they are complex, not easily penetrated, even less so measured, modified, manipulated?


Hard is soft. Soft is hard. Could this be? Do we have it backwards?