An insightful post of Umair Haque titled "Why Dubai Defaulted - And What America Should Learn From It" in the Harvard Business blog. The post is a guide for recognizing bubble economies build on megalomaniac real estate or financial services (Dubai combined both) and ignoring the real fundamentals of growth. Haque argues that next to this combination of bubble ingredients things got even worst for Dubai because of a rampant pursuit of "Dump Growth" focused (among other things) on the 20th century growth model (trying to attract the IBMs and the Dells) and ignoring the 21st century realities of “Smart Growth” suggesting investment in the Enterprise 2.0 and attracting innovative players like Google and Apple.
Time for new approach to benchmarking in general and a new view on growth fundamentals ? I think so.
