Look to government if you want; the future prosperity of The Bahamas rests more in the corporate boardrooms of this nation than in the Cabinet room.
When entrepreneurs pursue new opportunities to make money, they create jobs and new spinoff business. When existing businesses see opportunities to expand, they create new jobs and new spinoff business. When international investors see new opportunities to make profits in The Bahamas and from within The Bahamas, they create jobs and new spinoff business. New jobs and new spinoff business means economic expansion for our country and prosperity for our people.
Seeing and seizing those opportunities depends on corporate strategy, not government largess. Yes some corporate strategies recognize government facilitation through public projects, policies or laws, but they seldom depend entirely upon it. There is simply no expansion, enhancement or diversification of our economy to come without Bahamian companies having strategies that produce the same in the present and emerging global economic environment.
Strategy is about winning and winning is about a company finding its unique place and space in the market place. Strategy enables a company to determine the competitive environment in which it operates and how best to offer value to customers in that environment. Strategy allows an organization to leverage its core competencies to ensure that it is essentially competing against itself. When a company has strategy, it employs innovation effectively to offer continuously increasing value to its customers. In the boardrooms of effective companies, strategy is the thread that runs through all decisions, from hiring the CEO to training the janitors. If a company does not have a strategy, it is trading on luck and transacting on chance.
The operating environment of the Bahamian economy is fiercely competitive. It is demanding as hell. Our main business is service, provided in forms of tourism and finance. Like it or not, our wholesale and retail trade, agriculture, fisheries and the like, only thrive when our service to our tourism and finance customers thrive. This is our present reality. Even financing our public services depends on the health of our tourism and financial services sectors. With the exception of Grand Bahama's container transshipment, ship repair, oil bunkering and pharmaceutical manufacturing businesses, virtually every other business in our nation goes where our tourism and financial services business goes. So corporate strategy in tourism and financial services is key, and the strategies of those who depend on them, must tie in.
We need to examine our corporate strategy, individually and as a matter of collective economic impact. Over the last 20 years, competitive rivalry in tourism has increased substantially. Practically all countries in the world have taken tourism seriously and are now competing for tourists. In federal states, individual states are competing for the residents of other states and international visitors. There has been an explosion of new entrants into the marketplace and the cost of shifting destinations to visit has decreased under competitive pressures. Operating on no strategy or a strategy not consistent with this reality means losing the game. We are losing the game because we have lost too much in air visitors versus cruise visitors. Our strategy must not be to get one versus the other, but to get more of both. Doing this requires a synchronized strategy in the corporate boardrooms of this nation as well as the Cabinet room.
Financial services has suffered intensely increased competition from individual corporate entities as well as countries seeking to build their centers. In addition, governments in developed countries from where the customers of the offshore financial services sectors come have applied intense pressure to ensure that offshore funds return home, and stop leaving in the first place. Again, the strategy of financial services companies in tandem with the nation's public policy strategy must comport with these realities.
I have no doubt that there are many great strategists in our corporate boardrooms. I believe that, for any number of reasons, effective strategy in our Cabinet room may be less so but possible, especially when it comes to financial, business and economic strategy. I do know this much: Whether it is in the boardroom or in the Cabinet room, if strategy is deficient and strategists not available, we need to purchase the same whenever we can and do so as a matter of urgency. The Bahamas is going downhill economically, and its decline is not a matter of party politics; it's a matter of fundamental economic strategy. If the expertise exists at home to find, develop and execute effective corporate and economic strategies for us, then let's pay the money to obtain it. If we have to go to Timbuktu to get those strategies, let's go online, book our flights and be on our way. The broad platitudes of manifestos and agendas or contracts are not strategy. Strategy is strategy, and no strategy is more critical in this hour than that which prevails in corporate Bahamas.

o Zhivargo Laing is a Bahamian economic consultant and former Cabinet minister who represented the Marco City constituency in the House of Assembly.

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