Enough is enough

Every once in awhile, I'll reach my saturation point with the media. Whether it's business writing or news reportage, the content can become too much of the same and I find I can no longer absorb any more. I reached that point today. One too many articles detailing the sad shape of these times, with too many recycled business axioms. Perhaps we're meant to take comfort in hearing familiar themes, and to feel reassured that we will be just fine if we follow a few simple rules or make a few small changes. Well, I beg to differ. I don't need to be lulled by oft-told tales. Is it nap time?

I think what most businesses and citizens need is quite the opposite: not to be lulled but rather jolted by the urgency of clear analysis and a call to action. In an opinion piece in yesterday's NY Times, Gordon Stewart wrote of the speech President Jimmy Carter gave 30 years ago addressing the urgent need for a forward-thinking energy policy.

On July 15 — 30 years ago today — at 10 p.m., President Carter and 100 million people finally faced each other across that familiar Oval Office desk. What they saw and heard was unlike any moment they had experienced from their 39th president. Speaking with rare force, with inflections flowing from meanings he felt deeply, Jimmy Carter called for the “most massive peacetime commitment” in our history to develop alternative fuels.

Although highly popular with the nation's citizens at the time, the speech was characterized by the media as 'The Malaise Speech' - too much of a downer. Despite the fact that the speech did not contain the word 'malaise,' the word has been associated so closely with this speech that collective memory now insists he used the word. Thirty years later, however, Carter seems amazingly prescient.

We actually had all the facts we needed 30 years ago to know what we had to do: the need for a change in policy was stunningly clear to anyone who waited in those long lines that summer hoping to fill up the family car's gas tank. But more than a policy change was needed. We needed to change. Some sacrifice was necessary: we could not reasonably continue to consume mindlessly without peril. Few could doubt Carter's credibility on factual data, analysis, and his personal integrity: the opinion-makers could therefore not complain that he was dim, didn't have a command of the facts, or that he was lying. Instead, they chose to marginalize his speech and therefore ignore his call to action, based solely on their assertions of how the speech supposedly made people feel. And the country did ignore him, to disastrous consequences, all of which were predictable.

When President Obama took office this year, he repeated the point he had made in his campaign that the country didn't have the luxury of working on only one problem: we have at least five major crises to address simultaneously: Iraq & Afghanistan, the economy, health care, education, the environment. None of these will tolerate incremental improvement: real change is needed that requires radically different policies.

In any business, the same is true on a smaller scale. There is no one thing to fix, and incremental improvement can only end in failure. But to achieve more than incremental gains, you must choose fundamentally to ignore the familiar and embrace the discomfort of challenging assumptions and your own leadership. There's something in the mind that doesn't want to go there, unless the status quo is just too painful to bear.

Here's a thought: Make it new. It will be fun.