I’m in Kiev on a business trip. Kiev is great, actually. It’s sunny, it’s green, it’s full of beautiful women. It may actually have more beautiful women here than Moscow, and Moscow has a lot of beautiful women.Yesterday I went to a conference by Concorde Capital, a local brokerage. In the day-time, fund managers ran around from meeting to meeting with local managers who want their capital.
Then in the night-time we were all taken to a club called Tsar, where we were greeted by ten women wearing only body-paint and a few feathers. They winked and gave us shots of evil-smelling liquor. Then we went into the main room, where more scantily-clad women were dancing on podiums.
This is usual fare for investment conferences in this part of the world. There are various reasons given to western investors to invest in the former Soviet Union: large populations, close to Europe, lots of oil. But one of the main reasons, which you’ll never find on any brochure, is the girls!
They get wheeled out at the end of the investment conference. Local ‘models’ are hired to mingle with the hedge fund managers and the Belgian dentists. ‘Hey, maybe I invest in this place’ haw-haws a fund-manager, as his shiny pate is rubbed by a lady dressed like a pea-cock.
The conference made a big thing of how Ukrainian business is getting civilized as it opens up to western investors. It even had a cartoon of the evolutionary line, showing Ukrainian business emerging from a monkey to a cave-man to a businessman.
One sign of ‘how far you were down the Darwin scale’, they said, was how comfortably you could cope with foreign investors’ questions. This takes me back to my idea that social anxiety gets more severe as civilizations become more complex.
Why so? Because you have to take into account more and more people’s opinions of you, which you can see in business, for example, as a company goes from being private-owned, to having a few investors, to having a large pool of investors all of whose opinions should be considered.
And you end up at civilized occasions like this conference, where managers looking for capital have to network, have to try and sell themselves, try to cope with the questions being fired at them from all sides.
And you’d be surprised how bad some of them are at it. I spoke to one fund manager and she said ‘most of my meetings were bad. The managers were rude, they seemed to take me for granted, or just seemed to want me out of the room’.
I saw one company manager who she complained was particularly offensive earlier in the day, he was the head of a local publishing firm, and I can tell you, he was just seriously stressed! He was knackered from a day of high-pressure interrogation, and his ability to appear charming and polite had worn out. He had conference burn-out, that feeling of being numbed by too many conversations with strangers.
But my second point is this – civilization is spread by those trying to escape it. For Ukrainians, becoming closer to the ‘civilized world’, ie the West, comes about mainly by integrating with western economic standards, by ‘good corporate governance’ and all that jazz.
But half of what brings the western investors to Ukraine is the desire to ESCAPE civilized values, to shag some wild east European girls, to get really drunk, to take more economic and moral risks than they would in their home countries.
The pioneer investors, the ones who really first connect new markets to western markets, are invariably escaping from the west because they find it too boring, bureaucratic, puritan, tepid etc. So they’re spreading civilized values – being more predictable, bureaucratic, responsible etc – while they themselves are trying to escape these very values. It’s the civilizing paradox.
