Democrats: Let’s Make the Future Delicious
Be forewarned. This is a nerdy blog on the economy. And no, I’m not an economist. But I am — in my DNA— ultimately a business guy. When I was ten, I hung out at my dad’s office. When I was thirteen, I helped him assemble his first prototype products. I worked in his first warehouse. I rebelled for fifteen years and became a dancer, but ultimately gravity pulled me back and I spent the next thirty years in business. I was fortunate enough that my job put me inside all sorts of companies large and small all over the world. It was an MBA program on steroids.
Which brings me to my first point. Everyone who goes to work, at least in the private sector, knows deep in their belly that massive change is afoot. All the political talk about creating jobs, keeping jobs here, punishing companies who stay offshore, supporting unions, creating tariffs, should we be in or out of a global economy, are just symptoms of a tectonic change in our shared economic future.
For example, if you’re a long-haul truck driver, you know that in some industry think-tank they are crunching numbers about how much money they will save by shifting to self-driving trucks and how fast they can get there. Or, why do we need radiologists in this country when we can email an MRI to India and have it read by a radiologist there quickly, accurately and inexpensively?
Or consider this trend, which rarely gets written about because it’s business-nerdy. It’s commoditization of everything. There are few products that can hold their prices and margins in our hyper-competitive global marketplace. One of my last jobs was with a solar panel distributor. In the space of a few years they watched their gross margins drop from healthy to single digits and then to 2–3%. Painful and scary, driven by global competition.
To survive in this marketplace companies need to shed cost, (which often means people) and look for innovative ways to spend money that will help the company save money over time. (Hello, automation and AI: Can work 24/7 and no need for sleep, food, HR or unions.)
Every industry has its examples that lead to the same conclusion: Structural, disruptive change.
We are entering the Post-Industrial Age. Things will still be made, but less and less by human hands.
But politicians don’t like to discuss this level of change. Maybe they think they’ll scare us or maybe they think we’re not smart enough or — and this is my leading candidate — they have no idea what is going on in the real economy.
In my view the political parties are like magicians, madly trying to distract us with tricks and colored lights while they scratch their heads and wonder, WTF is happening?
My old friend and former business partner, Ronn Lehman, was found of saying that the Republicans are the party of bad ideas and the Democrats the party of no ideas. This seems to perfectly frame today’s conversation of how the parties view the economic future.
First, let’s take “Make America Great Again.” (because it’s clearly wrong-headed, as opposed to the Democratic version which is incomprehensible.)
I saw a post recently from a woman who wrote she wanted to go back to a time when only one parent worked and she could stay home with her kids. This is a poignant example of the Trump slogan “Make America Great Again.”
As a product of those times I understand the nostalgia. Unfortunately, nostalgia looks backwards, not forward.
It is akin, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, to driving a car forward while looking in the rearview mirror.
No matter how much we might yearn for it, economies (and organizations) do not move backwards.
Why? Think about all the irreversible change that has happened. For example, you can’t take away the fact that we can communicate all over the world instantaneously. Put up walls and trade barriers, ideas and talent know no boundaries. You can’t rip out the global supply chains that are responsible for nearly every major purchase you make. You can’t turn back the clock on the demographics changes of the last forty years (nor, I hope, would you want too!). You can’t remove the fact the world has become as capitalistic, free-market focused, and competitive as we are. As Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Post American World, we’ve been selling capitalism to the world since WWII and most countries have enthusiastically adopted it. Now we are competing with them in all markets.
Here is a truth: We are moving forward towards an economic future that is essentially unknown. Progress has a ratchet attached that stops us from “going back to basics,” or going back to “the good old days” (and recall the good old days were not good old days for everyone). We are never going back to 1950 or 1970.
Besides, seriously, remember what you looked like in bell-bottom jeans?
One more important point. I often think underneath the chant to “be great again” is this desire for simpler times. Well, that is not going to happen either. The other lesson — from the futurist (and mentor) George Land — is that organizations and economies evolve towards complexity, not simplicity! Another transportation example. We aren’t going back to the time when there were just three American car companies. Instead, we are moving into an era of not only more worldwide manufacturers of cars, but a variety of individual-transportation options; Uber, self-driving cars, shared cars, electric cars, more urban bicycles, and the list goes on. Increasing complexity is baked into our economic future.
So kiss the past good-bye ya’ll. We are moving at light speed towards complexity and the new.
As for the Democrats, sadly, I have no idea what their vision of an economic future looks like. I deeply share and appreciate the value of inclusivity. Besides being morally, ethically, spiritually and existentially the right thing to do, it makes business sense.
If you’re going to sell to the world, you have to know the world which requires that you have the world at your table.
A sidebar: if you are that little bakery in Indiana who doesn’t sell globally and refuses to sell wedding cakes to gay couples, get over yourselves! You will ultimately be crushed, not by laws, but by market forces and demographic changes inside our country.
Back on track: Democrats, give me a hint, a clue of your vision of a future economy! What will we be trying to include everybody in?
The GOP wants to go back to the past. I need a vision from the Democrats about a new economy that is not dystopian but rather gives me hope, that makes me think: I want to be a part of that!
For example, I recently read about an economic idea of regional economies that skips over the morass of Washington D.C. and focuses on combining the strengths of states. (I apologize for not sourcing this, but I read it on a airplane . . .)
Imagine (because I live in New Mexico) a Rocky Mountain economic region that is highly interconnected; via transport (high speed trains) high speed internet, “high speed” cooperation starting in Mexico and running up all the way into Western Canada. Think of the economic and growth opportunities of that kind of cooperation. Imagine a West Coast version, from California (the 6th largest economy in the World ) up through the Northwest states and up into British Columbia.
Regional power houses, experimenting, innovating, sharing ideas and resources.
Democrats! Give us these kinds of exciting economic visions! We can debate and argue them but at least they are substantive instead of the worn out, sleep inducing arguments about tax policy.
Finally, I admit an obsession with John F. Kennedy’s speech at Rice University in 1962 discussing the space program. I’m obsessed by it because of his optimism, and future focus. In his speech, he painted a vision of going to the moon within the decade. The going to the moon part is an example we often use in vision work. But it is Kennedy’s “why” that captures me:
“. . .We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. . . “
Bring us together with something that is hard, that will take the best of our energies and skills. Give us a vision of that future. The GOP wants to take us back. The opportunity for Democrats is to paint a picture of a future that draws us forward.
A few years ago a Fortune 500 company was in the midst of significant and painful change. In a large meeting of employees, a senior VP got up and said this, “The next few years are going to be hard, but I promise you the future will be delicious.”
To the Democratic leadership: Paint the picture! Make it delicious. Help us create it.
