James Amoah – The Pascal Editions Interview: January 2022

 

 

Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Mr. Amoah.

A: It’s my pleasure.

Q: For readers not aware of your multinational background, you were originally born in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, was raised in England, educated with distinction in British institutions, and then embarked on a highly successful career as a supply chain consultant and educator, principally in Europe, serving major Fortune 500 companies.

A: Yes.

You have been an Executive Director for Johnson & Johnson, served on numerous Boards, and are currently CEO and Founder of Kaleidoscope International Sarl, a supply chain consultancy. Its Supply Chain Mastery Academy division offers supply chain training and development, and you reside in Switzerland.

A: All true. Visit JamesAmoah.com for details!

Q: You also seem to be the only supply chain expert in the industry that has written international thrillers putting supply chain professionals front and center. What made you decide to write a novel involving that subject?

A: Oh, that’s rather a long story. All the books advise you to write about what you know, and I’m rather familiar with my profession. There’s an inherent drama and narrative drive to it that is utterly ignored in the dry texts usually written about the subject. As an international supply chain consultant, my job is to examine the process by which a company’s product moves from being unmanned raw material to its final arrival on store shelves, and improve that process, with an eye on enhancing company profit. It’s a very numbers-driven analysis and reports can make it appear quite abstract.

But when you follow that process by step through its evolution, and in particular the efforts of the people involved, their teamwork and the challenges they face, what you often find is a fascinating story, simply filled with surprises, mysteries, deceptions, cliffhanger deadlines, high emotions. I found that one of the best ways to understand actually existing supply chains was to think of them as narratives. I eventually started a company that trains supply chain professionals, and what I found was that while presenting the abstract principles of supply chain analysis tended to put people to sleep, having experienced professionals tell the story of what happened as they personally applied the same principles was riveting.  Giving the process a human dimension—a dimension that, after all, is inseparable from it in practice—engaged students in a way that helped them advance their skills immensely.

Q: So you decided to write a novel for your students?

A: [Laughs] No no. For my children! One day one of them asked me what I did for a living. I brought out my Powerpoint charts and Excel spreadsheets, and they immediately slipped into a coma! I thought that perhaps I could explain it better to them as well in terms of a story, and wondered about possibly writing a children’s book that traced the steps by which a product is made. I actually had an artist sketch a cover for the book—an absolute horror with three children with eyepatches and swords over a treasure chest with a smiling octopus in the background. I suppose the supply chain was about gold doubloons or whatnot. God knows what I was thinking.

Well. I played with the idea for a while and approached a publisher. He was kind enough to say that he was intrigued somewhat by the supply chain angle, but was more interested in adult fiction. Would I consider writing something in a more sophisticated form? I gave it some thought, and—why not? Perhaps a mystery or a thriller…

Q: Why a thriller?

A: I’m British! Or, at least, I was raised in Great Britain. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, James Bond—they’re simply mother’s milk in the UK. One is as saturated in mysteries as one is in fish and chips. Besides, analyzing a supply chain, interviewing the people involved and poring over the clues to its hidden weaknesses and inefficiencies—it can be quite Sherlockian at moments. I didn’t want to do a ‘cozy’ mystery, though. You know, one of those English village things with belladonna in the clergyman’s Earl Grey? My job takes me all over Europe, and I wanted to use those settings, put in something of my reflections about them. I also wanted to write about Accra, the city in Ghana where I was born. The international settings suggested a thriller. I decided to give it a shot! An international thriller it would be.

Q: How was the writing process?

A: Agony! Torture! Dante’s Inferno incarnate! But perhaps I understate.

Q: Seriously?

A: Well, yes and no. There’s certainly nothing worse than staring at a blank page and asking something to magically appear. When I’m hired to analyze and improve the profitability of a firm’s supply chain, at least I have a supply chain to analyze. One starts at a starting point. But a blank page of water with nothing on it? You wait and wait for words to magically appear, beads of perspiration appear on your forehead, and when nothing does, you convince yourself you have no more talent and imagination than an amoeba and should be taken out and shot. Then there’s the guilt over all the time it takes away from family, from work, from clients. I don’t know how I managed to persevere. I did, however, and wrote down some abysmal drivel, which was even more humbling. Ernest Hemingway, I am told, said that writing looked easy but in fact it’s the hardest job in the world. How right you are, Ernest.

Anyway, I shouldered on, and eventually I began to settle on certain elements. Accra, for instance. And England. A novel about supply chains had to have a supply chain. What sort? Why not chocolates and chocolate production? It’s one of the key national products in Ghana. And of course where there’s a supply chain, there’s a company, and a company CEO, and disagreements about the direction of the company, and workers, and—well, item by item the picture began to fill out somewhat. I needed a crime. A mystery.  A truly daunting Bad Guy.

Q: Kwaku!

A: Good old Kwaku, yes. There’s nothing so wonderful as a truly horrible villain, is there? He’s an absolute delight. The lines almost write themselves. Though following his thinking did give me pause now and again.

Q: How so?

A: Kwaku’s great dilemma is that he wants to be flamboyantly evil, but finds that successfully running an international criminal enterprise requires prosaic managerial competence. He wants to be Count Dracula but successful execution of his profession requires the qualities of a service manager at McDonalds. The disparity grates. Getting into Kwaku’s mind, however, forced me to think of criminal supply chains—of crime as a set of unique business processes, and how to improve it. From the technical perspective of a supply chain analyst, the differences are quite fascinating! But every now and then you catch yourself planning how to saturate a given area more thoroughly with drugs, however, or how to eliminate your competition not by marketing but by descending on them with grenades and machine guns.

There’s a certain moral discomfort involved in slipping into a criminal’s mind and skin. And yet certain intellectual benefits too. I certainly began looking at supply chains in ways I never had before.

Q: And the Anan family? Where did they come from?

A: Initially, from my own family. At least, their names did. Various Anans are named after my children.

Q: Your daughter Johanna must be a real spitfire!

A: [Laughter] No, no, only the names are shared. And, I have to admit, the general decency, and also something of the affection which I feel for my real family. The characters in the book are quite different from my children. But I suppose they were the starting point, and once you have characters, the story begins to unroll of itself. You know that this character has certain goals and ways of thinking and acting and will move in such-and-such a direction, and that that character has different goals and will move in another. You know that the heroes have to be challenged and threatened, the villain foiled. Slowly things take shape.

Q: Are you a great reader of mysteries? Of literature?

A: I’m afraid I spend all my time poring over Profit & Loss Statements.

Q: But your prose has moments of elegance. You’re quite articulate in person.

A: Oh, give all the credit there to my British upbringing and the Queen’s English. When you’re raised as a Briton, good English comes as second nature. It’s a beautiful language, and you simply have to walk down the street to be immersed in it.

Q: You make your craft sound rather easy.

A: It isn’t easy. It wasn’t easy. I honestly did not know the ending of the book till I was literally ten pages away from completing it. I sweat bullets that the whole thing would end on a flat note. There are peculiar difficulties in writing a business thriller. I genuinely wanted lay readers—and fellow professionals, too—to come away with a better understanding of the supply chain. I like to think I succeeded. But there’s a tendency to in business fiction to let characters drone on about certain business subjects and stop the action as they pontificate. Such writers tear ten pages out of a dry, dull business text, and then add “he said” or “she said” at the end. It’s cheating. In a good novel the characters have to be real and the actions dramatic. You can’t put the story on hold for ten pages while the characters discuss cocoa shipping logistics. I had other criteria too. I didn’t want to pad the story with gore or erotica, or cover it in obscenity. I wanted to hold it, and myself, to a certain standard. A higher standard.

Q; And so Devil In The Chain was published.

A: Indeed. In passing, I must give a word of special thanks to my publisher. Many a publisher, I understand, will absolutely savage a manuscript. My input on everything from content to the cover design to choice of font was politely solicited and thoughtfully advised and considered. Writing is a lonely craft. I found our conversations among the most pleasant parts of the writing process.

A: And now we have a sister volume: Chaotic Butterfly!

A: Yes.

Q: What inspired you to write a sequel? Did you plan it that way from the start?

A: Not at all. Reaction to the first book was positive, and my publisher did nudge me for another volume. Trilogies are all the rage nowadays, I was told. But I really did not imagine when starting the first novel that I would write a second novel after it.

Q: Why did you continue the story?

A: [Thoughtful pause] That’s a good question. One reason is that I simply found myself taken with the characters. It’s hard to put, but after a while your characters come alive. They become like people—friends, almost. I found myself wondering about how Jacob would turn out, and what Michael would do next, and how Johanna would manage the company as CEO. What would happen to them all next? It’s very strange, but when characters take on that level of reality, they begin to act independently. They want to go where they want to go, not where you want to maneuver them. They had more of their story to tell, and nagged at me to tell it. Yes, I know it sounds silly, but there’s an element of magic to the process. Where do all the words and the characters and the ideas come from? They pop into one’s head, and something drives us to write them down.

Another reason was that I wanted to explore the supply chain in more depth. In Devil In The Chain, I traced a rather prosaic process from cocoa seed to pod gathering to bagging and shipping to factory processing to distribution. It served to structure the book. But that’s not what’s on the horizon for the supply industry. Blockchain is changing how supply chain is being done. Artificial intelligence promises to change it even further. Then there are all the other things affecting supply chains that I barely touched on in the first book—politics, finance, computerization, social disruption. My understanding of the characters had grown deeper, and my appreciation of what was happening in the world of supply chains had grown wider. I wanted to express all that.

And I’d found that I gotten to like writing. Really, it’s quite fascinating to seed a book with ideas and imagination and watch the story grow. I had become a better writer, and I wanted to spread my wings and fly farther and higher.

Q: You certainly did. The sheer size of the book must have come as something of a surprise to your fans.

A: Not just to my fans. To me! I read a review that said that in Chaotic Butterfly I had passed from the shallows of mystery writing and had begun to enter the depths of literary fiction proper. I wouldn’t quite say that. I most definitely kept my eye on action and suspense. But it’s true that there’s a—I don’t know what to call it—a moral seriousness to Chaotic Butterfly what wasn’t there in the earlier book. Writing engages your unconscious depths, and I suppose that in the course of writing I had begun to access and somewhat more deeply digest my experience as a Ghanaian expat, as an European, as an international business professional, as the father of a growing and wonderful family.

In the first book I had wondered about where Johanna and Nicola were going, and in the second I was still wondering. But now I was also wondering where Ghana and China and the EU were going. Where the supply chain industry and supply chains as such were going. Where the world was going. I wrote the book during the many crises of the pandemic year of 2020, after all.

Q: It amazes me that you could write over 800 pages through the middle of all that.

A: It amazes me! Disruption is too inadequate a word for 2020. Good grief, the sheer damage done to global supply chains. The impact on markets! On clients! Sometimes I think I dove into the book at such length purely to escape. Or better yet: to try to understand what was happening using fictional characters because the real damage to real people was just too much and too painful.

Q: You definitely covered a wider range of material. Why such an emphasis of China, may I ask?

A: China is the key player in the global supply chain. There are stronger economic powers—the United States, arguably the EU—but in terms of the overall trends, and in terms of supplying components for critical items across the span of the world economy, such as computer components, China leads the world. Its future moves are a matter of great interest. The Western media present a shallow picture of a Chinese economic behemoth that is monolithic, unstoppable, moving from triumph to triumph. It’s quite false. China has monumental strengths but monumental challenges as well, and their future is anything but predictable.

Improved predictions rest on improving one’s present-day understanding, however, so while I keep current on their supply chain situation in the industry news, I also use my fiction to try to think myself into their mental perspectives. My novelistic ‘gut’ tells me that inside the calm facade and the tremendous national ambition, there’s considerable turmoil, overreaching and internal dissent.

Q: That is expressed in the character of Robert Clark.

A: And Mao Song, yes.

Q: Could you expand?

A: Well, for one thing, most people fail to realize that the people in charge of China today spent their childhood during the worst, most repressive years of the Cultural Revolution, when mass starvation was all but universal and rule was massively brutal. Both Clark and Song have passed from those depths to the heights of Party power; but that earlier shadow never leaves them. In many respects China is a traumatized country. For another, the Chinese interest in biotechnology is all but ignored by the press. In some ways China reminds me of Israel: under the mask of focus and national determination and newfound prosperity is a good deal of PTSD.

Q: You raise the issue of China’s biological research. Do you consider China to be the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic?

A: There’s no proof of that, and, even if there were, it wouldn’t prove any malevolent intention on the part of China. Lab accidents happen. More concerning to me are China’s rather reckless forays into human genetic manipulation and eugenics. Those, I am sure, are matters of deep controversy within the Party. Internal debates within the ruling Party are rarely covered in the Western press, but they are severe and deep. One day they may well prove destabilizing.

Q: So your characters Clark and Mao Song have one foot in the past, but are images of the future too.

A: I find the Chinese, as a global player and as people, to be far more complex than they are generally portrayed. I tried to convey something of that complexity.

Clark and Mao Song are individuals shaped by political trends, not representatives of those trends. To me, all my characters are real, not mouthpieces. So they’re also—how can I put it?—quirky. Clark and Mao Song have an interesting relationship. In some ways they’re almost like father and son, yet Mao Song is the chess master and Clark is the chess piece he moves. Mao is absolutely fascinated by the West, but has never visited it, while Clark is very familiar with the West, but sees it as fragile and shares with it a rather soul-draining loss of faith. He’s a good person—they both are—but greatly conflicted. Mao is far more optimistic, owing to his furtive Christianity. God’s in His Heaven, so all’s right with the world, even that part containing the Chinese Communist hierarchy.

Q: You mentioned Christianity. Religion appears to play a significant part in Chaotic Butterfly.

A: I wouldn’t put it quite that way. The religious perspectives of certain characters in Chaotic Butterfly is more apparent in the new book, but I think that happened naturally because the characters themselves have greater depth. A living personality—real or fictional—automatically stands in a relationship to a living God, whether that relationship is one of worship or anger or denial or even indifference. I touch on that more in the new book than in the earlier one, but I don’t want anyone to imagine that it’s because I’m preaching or trying to push my personal views. If a character of mine has a position on religion, it’s their position, not mine.

Q: Still, the whole Cult of Kwaku sub-plot—

A: —is part of the story, not a case of me intruding into the story to give a sermon. In Devil In The Chain, Kwaku played on popular superstition to enhance his ‘market share’ in the world of organized crime. In Butterfly, that development is getting out of hand, but it isn’t a matter of theology. Kwaku isn’t a deity: he believes in nothing, not even Kwaku. Kevin, his ‘Apostle,’ is rather a tragic figure, a product of child trafficking and the trauma of war. He’s a seeker, groping for meaning, but what he found—and, sadly, gave himself up to—is a sorry caricature of faith.

They aren’t mouthpieces for my views. They’re images of what moral indifference, in the case of Kwaku, and superstitious irrationalism, in the case of Kevin, can lead to. I find superstition to be a terrible thing, something both religion and science oppose, Edward Cioran is another such case. Lacking a God, he imagines he’s created his own—Sif. All these home-made Gods end badly.

Q: Speaking of Edward, may we talk a bit about your portfolio of players?

A: Certainly. Interesting fellow, Edward. “Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide,” as Dryden said.

Q: Was he inspired by some of the more colorful denizens of Silicon Valley?

A: Edward gave me the chance to think a bit about the blockchain and its growing impact on supply chains. That impact will be tremendous, but not, I think, as tremendous as the hype that’s been built around it. Edward is an example of that: he’s flamboyant, but his world-shaking creation is really little more than an advanced Google price search app plus a Second Life interface. (There’s the AI component too, but I don’t want to give away too much more of the plot.)

As an aside, one of the more entertaining things about writing business fiction is that the more you elaborate your character’s ventures, the more you start to toy with the idea of launching such ventures yourself. I was more than half inclined to get involved in the chocolate business when working on Devil In The Chain. Chococoa has such a nice business model! It was also more than a little tempting to assemble a few geeks and some venture capitalists and make the Warp protocol a reality. Mary Cloutie’s notion about a string of Fair Trade chocolate cafes to replace Starbucks—you know, that’s not a bad idea! Ah, but one can’t pursue them all.

Q: Anything you’d like to rewrite, if you could go over the book again?

A: A few. It pains me to say this, but Butterfly is just a little too short.

Q: Too short?

Q: Just a little. That blockchain section, for instance. I would have liked to have followed Kofi around Chococoa in Ghana, watching him trace out each stage of the supply chain in the fields and the facilities and getting everyone at each stage to input the data into their dedicated iPads rather than putting it down on paper. But I’d already described the Chococoa supply chain in some detail earlier in Devil In The Chain, and the new book was already past the 500-page mark, so I erred on the side of brevity. Still, presenting a business making the transition to blockchain-based recording in detail would have given a fuller and more informative picture.

On one level, Chaotic Butterfly is simply the story of a business with a rather traditional supply chain adopting a new tracking technology. In Devil In The Chain, the company seeds, grows and harvests cocoa, ships it to its plant in the UK where the cocoa is processed and packaged, then delivers the end product to a French firm that distributes it to the European market. In Chaotic Butterfly, the firm commits to recording the data involved in that process on an immutable digital ledger called a blockchain. Nothing remarkable there!

But the new technology is forced on the company by a company officer, Benjamin, who is doing so partly to enhance the profitably of the AI-driven blockchain in which he is an investor. The blockchain itself contains potential dangers placed there deliberately by by the unstable developer, who eventually has a breakdown, A third party concerned about the AI component of the project attempts to sabotage it, as a criminal undertakes a hostile takeover of the company by threatening its CEO. Despite all this, the blockchain proves functional and continues in operation at the book’s close. There’s nothing about all this that is especially thrilling. You can elicit a certain amount tension and drama by explaining what’s at stake for business and the world in general, but what’s gripping, what’s insightful about it, however, is seeing the deeper psychological drivers underlying the people as individuals, individuals striving to achieve something.

Q: Would you say that writing the novel has deepened your own understanding of supply chain operations?

A: Most definitely. What the book—and the pandemic—have taught me is the need for resilience in a firm’s supply chain. There is a strong tendency in the field to try to create a sort of abstract image of supply chain operations, and then try to posit some flawless optimal ideal and move operations in that direction. Far more important is to create a supply chain operation capable of rapid adaptation and reorientation to a real world marked by rapid and relentless change. The years 2020 and 2021 have been disasters for supply chains across the globe because in 2019 everyone assumed the world would look like the world of 2019. No one anticipated pandemic infection or lockdowns or closed borders, and so no one was prepared for them.

There is no character in Chaotic Butterfly I like more than Johanna, the ‘supply chain obsessive’ turned CEO, but the fact remains that while she brings her firm’s supply chain operations to Swiss watch perfection, she loses the company to Benjamin, allows Edward to use it as a tool to further his own massively destructive AI agenda, and in the end sees Kwaku seize effective control. She is focused on the one thing before her and fails to see what is happening around her. That is every nearly the epitaph for what has happened to global supply chain operations since Wuhan. I sometimes think that when I am done with the novel trilogy I’ll sit down and write a book called The Resilient Supply Chain. In a world of whirlwind change and continual disruptive upheaval, rapid adaptability is the master key to business survival.

Q: You mentioned Johanna Anan. Can we speak a bit about your other characters?

A: Please do.

Q: Rott-Charlus, in Chaotic Butterfly, is rather ominous. I see him as something of a globalist Mandarin of the EU, pulling the world’s strings from behind the curtain.

A: Like the Wizard of Oz? Nothing so amiable. Rott-Charlus is a strange figure. He has a very inflated opinion of himself and his influence, yet, despite holding no office and carrying virtually no public profile, his soft influence is genuinely profound. He’s much stronger yet formally much weaker than he appears. I’ve met a number of highly placed European figures like that. He has a genuine sense of global responsibility, and genuine power, while at the same time he is rooted nowhere and is accountable to no one. He inhabits that strange world where the social elite overlaps with the managerial elite, and consciously stands outside both democracy and even law. What do national laws even mean to such transnational figures? Yet he doesn’t see himself as an outlaw or a villain. Unlike Kwaku, who craves to cut a Satanic figure.

Q: Benjamin Anan? Michael?

A: Ah, poor Benjamin. There’s no character more innocent of heart at the start of Chaotic Butterfly than Benjamin. He wants financial success the way a boy wants a bright red fire truck for Christmas. Yet by the end, even though he’s at the point of becoming a billionaire, he’s lost his wife and child and his heart is breaking, turning cold and hard as stone in his thirst for vengeance. He’s gained tremendously in dramatic force, but I’m sorry for him.

Michael? I have great admiration for Michael. He’s suffered. Greatly. But he has the strength of character to get past his suffering and use it productively. When he loses his loved ones to a slipshod company’s fire, he builds a new and better company where things like that no longer happen. When he loses his mentor and the woman he loves to a member of the criminal class in his country, he elects to run for office to build a new and better company where those things can no longer happen. He’s a man of good character, a father figure, a builder, a healer. A protector. He’d make Ghana a fine President.

Q: Do you have any political ambitions yourself?

A: [Laughs.] None.

Q: What can readers expect from the next volume in the series, The Storytellers?

A: Thrills, chills, and a sprinkle of quantum cryptography!

Q: Really?

A: As you know, I concluded Chaotic Butterfly on several unresolved notes. So in the next book I have to keep my author’s promise, and provide that resolution. It won’t be hard, because there are several cataclysmic clashes waiting to take place. Benjamin wants revenge on Rott-Charlus. Will he get it, or destroy himself in the process? Why isn’t Clark dead, and if he’s alive, w

hat’s he going to do now? Will Nicola and Johanna bring Kwaku down? Will that slumbering AI wake up? Will Johanna be corrupted by serving as Kwaku’s handmaiden? Will Kwaku subvert all Ghana, and possibly even the EU? Or will he let the Cult play out, and go ahead and become a God? Or both?

Q: Well, will he?

A: I don’t know. I haven’t written it yet.

But all that, as T. S. Eliot said of plots in mystery fiction, is the meat the burglar puts out to distract the dog of the house. More seriously I want to give attention to the subject of resilience—to the operations of supply chains in a perhaps irretrievably unstable global environment. I also want to get more deeply into the matter of cybersecurity. Local wars and uprisings fill the news each day, but the battle between quantum encryption and the blockchain may be the real battle of our time.  But needless to say, I don’t plan on using the book to make speeches. Kwaku and Popeye and the Anans will all be dashing from cliffhanger to cliffhanger. The IMF, the Kremlin, Brussels, even the Vatican may make a few guest appearances. And then there’s Jacob. As The Storytellers opens, he has six kids!

Q: You’re joking.

A: Not at all. Now if tha

t’s not hair-raising terror, what is?

Q: One last question.

A: Ask away.

Q: Why do you write?

A: [Laughs] Why think? Why imagine? Why dream? I write because it helps me grow, professionally and personally. Professionally, my writing has enabled me to see the supply chain process in more psychological depth, in the context of social change, historical accident, sudden technological innovation. It’s helped me better grasp the factor of the unexpected and the importance of responding to it creatively. A novel is a thought experiment on a tremendous scale—the ultimate form of simulation modeling, involving not just numbers but intuition and imagination: the whole person. It stretches my thinking and helps give me insight into human beings and human society and myself. Isn’t that enough?