2009: The Status Quo versus The Long Emergency
Again, stop whatever elese you were doing, like reading things I wrote about 2009, and read Jim Kunstler’s forecasts about 2009. The author of The Long Emergency is experiencing the unenviable task of seeing dire structural change ahead, change that won’t be mollified by new gadgets, and being right about its consequences.
Some highlights:
He’s not a fan of techno-solutions. (not unlike yours truly)
The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another.
He sees Dow 4000:
A consensus in the blogoshpere says that the stock markets will rebound strongly during the first Obama months. This is possible just on the basis of pure “animal spirits,” but the Obama Bounce will occur against a background of continued dismal business and financial news. It will appear to defy that news. By May of 2009, the stock markets will resume crashing with the ultimate destination of a Dow 4000 before the end of the year.
He believes that you’ll actually need positive cash flow to make a business run (old-fashioned, but radical!):
We’ll turn around early in 2009 and discover that we are a much poorer nation than we thought because from now on credit will be extremely hard to get for anyone for anything. The businesses that survive will have to keep going on the basis of accounts receivable…Giant enterprises requiring giant loans to get from quarter to quarter will tend to not make it. Borrowing from the future will become a practical impossibility as past bad debts from previous borrowings continue to unwind, cease performing, and get written off.
Real change. Not new technologies for old philosophies. Nobody will save the day. We’ll need to make workable solutions for many different types of people.
And still - people will need things. Goods and services will be required, perhaps just different types.
Business development will need to be on its toes! Are you ready?
Future Trends 2025: We need better foresight from our government
The following is a response to “Future Trends 2025″ from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf.)
Despite its goal of looking incisively at the next 17 years, its total inability to provide insight on the future is a danger to all of us. With our institutions failing at around one per week (!) it seems it’s time for a real discussion.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The meltdown of the financial system; the collapse of the automotive industry; the impending bankruptcy of several American cities — these events tell even the casual observer that our institutions are weak when it comes to the ability to perceive and act on future trends. Most people might say that this is part of the human condition, the result of our natural short-term thinking in a complex, rapidly changing world. But this shortcoming of foresight is reaching a dangerous level that can no longer be considered acceptable. We must develop an institutional capability in the public and private sector to have frank, courageous discussions about the implications of strategic trends - and the actions they require - if we are to guide our society safely and prosperously into the years ahead.
A recent release by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shows how pervasive the lack of a professional method of foresight has become, even in the places where we expect it and need it most. The ODNI just published a report entitled “Global Trends 2025,” a major effort of the nation’s sixteen intelligence agencies and several think tanks, supposedly intended to inform the new presidential administration. Given the resources committed to such an endeavor, one would expect the project to be a tour de force of professional foresight, a foil for stimulating discussion among leaders everywhere. Instead it is a cautionary tale of group think, narrowness of scope, and faulty methodology.
The content of the work offers little insight for those would guide our institutions in uncertain times. The summary of these global trends is: “By 2025, the accelerating pace of globalization and the emergence of new powers will produce a world order vastly different from the system in place for most of the post-World War II era.” In other words, the next seventeen years are unlikely to be like the last sixty years. This is not exactly “actionable intelligence.”
The individual trends detailed in the report are just as weak, combining unexamined assumptions and sclerotic analysis. Other projections in “Global Trends 2025″: include:
• “Russia’s emergence as a world power is clouded by lagging investment in its energy sector and the persistence of crime and government corruption.” Poverty, lack of investment and corruption in Russia has been going on for about 1000 years. What’s new?
• “A worldwide shift to a new technology that replaces oil will be under way or accomplished by 2025.” This is wishful thinking at best. The International Energy Agency’s recent forecast sees fossil fuels continuing to supply the vast majority of the world’s energy through 2030. This report offers vague hopes for biofuels, and assumes oil will be on the way out – a canyon-jumping leap of faith.
• “The likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used will increase with expanded access to technology and a widening range of options for limited strikes.” This forecast has been written repeatedly, on a regular basis, for the past 50 years. What should we do differently?
• “The impact of climate change will be uneven, with some Northern economies, notably Russia and Canada, profiting from longer growing seasons and improved access to resource reserves.” This is a landmark entry in the annals of positive spin, and one that ignores that the most important part of global climate change will be the actions we take in response.
The bland, inaccurate and un-provocative content, shows that while these agencies go through the motions of a foresight methodology, they have lost the spirit of the exercise entirely. It was the threat of thermonuclear holocaust that led these very organizations in the 1960s to invent futures research in the first place. The tools of forecasting and scenarios were designed not for their capacity for prophecy, but to provoke an examination of our cherished - and potentially harmful - unexamined assumptions. To become lost in groupthink in 1960 was to perhaps lead our country aimlessly into nuclear annihilation. Foresight was intended to make us think while there was still time.
The DNI’s latest report seems to show that our intelligence agencies no longer study the future with rigor and intellectual stimulation as the goal. Instead, we see a view of the future that was agreed upon by committee: unoffensive, ambigious, and of minimal utility to leaders attempting to think deeply about the challenges to come.
A rigorous, courageous approach to foresight is no longer a luxury, reserved to times of plenty or relegated to philosophers. Leaders of all organizations - everywhere - must commit themselves to developing an organizational capacity to understand future trends, examine their impact completely, and to motivate others to action. To fail in this challenge is to continue to suffer the fate we see in our critical institutions today.
American Society for Training and Development: “Future Leaders Now!”
This Thursday at 6:00 pm I’ll be speaking at the American Society for Training and Development’s local chapter meeting here in the Washington DC area. This influential group asked me to put together a program on the specifics of training leaders to think about the future, especially given all the new stuff happening at this moment in history. I’m quite looking forward to the discussion!
Are you in the DC area? If you want to come, just click here to sign up for the event. More info below.
Future Leaders Now!
November 13, 2008
6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Hyatt Bethesda
One Bethesda Metro Center / 7400 Wisconsin Avenue
Bethesda, 20814 / ph: 301.657.1234
Unprecedented social trends on the horizon will make the profession of training and development more important than ever. Our institutions are faced with challenges with no parallel in history: shrinking water tables, global immigration, climate change, skyrocketing healthcare costs. The world needs leaders now, to do that which has never been done.
These leaders won’t just appear - the must be trained and developed. The need for education of new skills and mindsets is staggering. Even the needs are changing every day as the global economic system shifts before our very eyes. Join Eric Garland, a futurist and consultant to leaders around the globe, in a dialogue about how the training industry has the opportunity to shape our common future - and what you can do today!
As a result of participating in this engaging presentation you will:
- Understand the worldwide professional demographic challenge
- See the latest in global economic changes and their influence on the workplace performance industry
- Preview the critical role that the workplace performance industry will play in shaping the future workforce
John F. Kennedy reads the Declaration of Independence
God bless YouTube, this is very cool.
In case you want a taste of the logic behind major change, this is JFK reading the Declaration of Independence, in its entirety.
Words written by fallible human beings, but powerful, and remembered.
Does leadership matter? (We think yes.)
This post comes from the fabulous Caribou Coffee on East-West Highway in Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s a calm, gray day here across from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration building as people mill dreamily about, trying desperately to adjust to the time change as the morning’s caffeine sets in.
Tomorrow we will have a national election. My district’s voting will be right here, at NOAA. My neighbors and I will gather, likely to sit in line for what we will perceive to be an absurd amount of time. Out of pure faith, we assume that these votes will be accurately counted, and that the policy direction of this nation will be changed.
Does any of this matter? Aren’t we the prisoners of demographic and economic shifts? Don’t the entrenched and powerful cancel out any change we might try to engender? Can a leader really get anything done in just a few years?
Yes, it matters deeply. Leadership is still critically important in these complex, confusing times - perhaps 
moreso. I think that people in Western countries have been in stable political and economic systems for so long, that we are sometimes skeptical about the ability to change for good or for bad. That change is made possible - or impossible - by individual leaders, their mindsets, their skills, and the actions they take. The world is a different place because of them.
I am currently reading about Caesar Augustus, a man who said on his deathbed, “I found Rome made of clay; I give it to you made of marble.” His actions, in a few short decades, likely led to the establishment of Europe as a coherent cultural and political entity for two millennia after his death.
OK, so he’s probably credited as the most effective leader ever - how can we match up to historical standards on a daily basis?
By using the same process of long-term vision, tempered by modern management techniques. How do you do that?
We’re working on it. In fact, today, a group of like-minded managerial philosophers are meeting today for a project we call the “Next Generation Leadership Institute.” Over the next year, we’ll be exploring these questions in great detail. The moment is too important to let pass.
More to come.
A bleak future for authority figures
At a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, working with executives on future trends and their relationship 
to risk management. It’s an exciting time to be discussing global change and potential scenarios, especially in the wake of the financial debacle where real things are changing at a breakneck pace.
One woman put a fine point on our predicament. “The worst part of this is that our leaders are being revealed as the emperors who have no clothes. We require a certain degree of strength and trustworthiness in our authority figures. But a lot of these guys are looking ignorant, fraudulent, or worse.”
I think the answer here is not anarchy. Our economic system is far too complex to ever revert to operating our countries and industries without some degree of hierarchical leadership.
Trust in leadership is already shaken by the terrifying sudden meltdown of the world credit market. Thinking in terms of scenarios, if we have one or two or crises to follow up the financial catastrophe, how much less power will our institutions carry? Why listen to the news? Why pay attention to cabinet ministers? What does the boss know? He might be out of a job tomorrow too.
The fact remains, we will need leadership to guide institutions through the many challenges on the horizon. Reputation will be an important part of maintaining influence.
Why Greenspan’s admission of error matters
We live in a rapidly changing world, yet it often seems that our leaders are more terrified than ever in 
admitting mistakes. Think of the standard Washington political non-denial-denial, the expert blame deflection, the passive-voice “mistakes were made” begrudging semi-admission of responsibility.
Imagine how rarely we hear the words, “I got it wrong. I thought the world was one way, but it turned out to be more complex than that. Now I know better.” It’s as if authority figures are afraid that anybody who admits error will never be trusted again.
Yesterday, I expressed shock that Greenspan did not see the broader picture of the United States financial system, new kinds of risk, and the complex interaction with world markets. For somebody with so many advisors and access to information at any price, I am still a bit surprised.
Still, I don’t want to let the moment pass without simply expressing gratitude to a man big enough to admit his assumptions did not match the moment. More than ever I believe that we are on the verge of a new paradigm in leadership, in management, in economics, and in society. Paradigm has been overused and badly used, but I think it’s finally appropriate. If there is change this significant on the horizon, many people will make mistakes.
For our institutions to survive and thrive we must possess the ability to admit mistakes, take responsibility, seek new perspectives, and move forward. I read people who are surprised that Greenspan was willing to “take abuse” and “take part of the blame” in his testimony to Congress. Yes, it’s that rare. But far more important is the example of a man of the highest position in society willing to admit that his assumptions were invalid.
I remain critical, but I am impressed and grateful.
Be social