Push the Future

Clyde Prestowitz, author of Trading Places, Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, and current member of both the Intel Policy Advisory Board and the U.S. Export-Import Bank Advisory Board closed Monday’s round of speakers. He asked that listeners first focus on the issues that are demanding and will demand change, then problem-solve and decide what needs to be done about changing those issues.

Prestowitz translated his ideas into reality through a colorful story of a recent trip to Mexico City and then to Shanghai, destinations that face significant challenges that are relevant both internally and externally. The crippled Mexican police represent just one example of the failing state that lies just across our border. And with the Gobi Desert growing at a rate of 2km per year and coal power plants popping up weekly, China faces impending environmental devastation that will not remain confined within one country’s borders. In both destinations, the short-term need for basic security and energy, respectively, are pitted against the long-term potential consequences of a failed state and an unlivable natural environment. Accompanying each issue is the potential to do harm at home in the U.S., yet the redeeming possibility of pragmatic decision-making still exists.

Moreover, Thomas Friedman has popularized the notion that globalization will make everyone rich, democratic and thus peaceful. Prestowitz argued that globalization does not make democracy strong; rather, it makes autocracy strong (see the Middle East and China versus relatively weak Western democracies). Rapid economic growth does not commonly occur under democracy; democracy comes about later. We are experiencing globalization in which developing countries question the validity and superiority of democracy. This concept obviously demands our consideration.

And considering democracy, Prestowitz was one of the many speakers today to mention the upcoming election. His view is that the three most important issues facing the next president will be 1) the collapse of the dollar 2) energy and 3) the nature of our democracy in regard to the system of checks and balances that make the system difficult to challenge, especially in relation to global warming legislation. So, how do we use change-agents to make our systems work better and address our problems?  

Posting by Anna Wool

Nate Garvis, Vice President of Government Affairs for Target Corporation, spoke in the political section of PUSH 2008 about leadership in reverse.

He is responsible for political, legislative and regulatory affairs at the international, federal, state and local levels of government. He is recognized as a thought leader in the areas of integrated public engagement strategies and emerging trends in the interrelationships between multi-national corporations, non-governmental advocacy groups and governmental institutions.

Garvis started by asking an unanswerable question, “What is the meaning of life?” No one knows the answer, but finding the meaning of life is the path of humanity, it’s what public policy has always been about.

Public policy is measured in outcomes. Too often things are discussed by inputs, but at the end of the day we experience outcomes.

Our dilemma is mobility- the mobility of information. Right now, we live in an age of storytelling. It has never been easier to get your story out there, and that is what is needed in the consumer world – consumer input to get the outcomes you want.

Garvis gave the example of a toolbox: it isn’t about one tool, it’s important to have the entire box. These tools are how people get what they want. The first tool in the box is being literate, not how well you read, but how you know the authentic qualities of that technology or institution – institutions such as government, business or NGOs/ non-profits.

The next tool in the box is the “how” not the “what.” It is important to know how institutions or technologies do what they do, not what they do. Institutions, such as the Target Corporation, need to listen to the consumer and know what they want, everything they want.

The consumer is in command. Be literate. As the consumer, express what you want and be a conspicuous consumer.

“It used to be, I’m rich and famous and I drive a Ferrari, you can’t,” said Garvis. “Now it is I’m rich and famous and I drive a Hybrid, why don’t you? No one said boycott the Ferrari, it’s that more people want the Hybrid.”

We need to practice a reward culture. Institutions are playing not to lose. We need to live in a world where we want to win, and where as many people as possible win. We need to enable these institutions, be clearer about what we want and reward good behavior.

We should look at the whole tool box of institutional energy that is capable of doing so much good, but also capable of many screw ups.

“As a consumer we owe it to these folks to tell them exactly what we want. Our job [as the institution] is to be better listeners than ever, to provide as much value as possible,” said Garvis.

Doing this is “leadership in reverse.” The consumer is leading the institution to get the right outcome.

Posted by Melissa Turtinen

Heading up the political segment of PUSH 2008, “Leaders in Reverse: Playing Short-Term Gains against Long-Term Needs,” U.N. correspondent for Al Jazeera English Mark Seddon spoke from the platform of personal experience to help elucidate a bigger, hopeful political picture.

Seddon’s off-putting experience with Britain’s Labour Party led him to drop out of politics and into Al Jazeera, a network created to help educate people by closing North-South news divides and erasing existing geo-political and cultural stereotypes. Seddon’s intention today resembled the network’s philosophy as he challenged individual political complacency and asked for proactive thought and action.

Unfortunately, the special, symbiotic relationship between Britain and the United States allows for minimal, diversifying cross pollination of new ideas and therefore an unchanging, unchallenged, and dumbed-down political process in which people believe in the inherent superiority of the Western system of political organization. For example, people seem to think that free market economics is the best and most effective system, since that’s what we’ve been told and are most accustomed to. The decline of representative democracy and of political accountability is something that needs to be challenged and is not specific to government. A place to start would be the media: Al Jazeera is minimally available in the United States, largely as a result of the self-imposed (or ordained) censorship that large media corporations practice.

Seddon’s general advice stems from the belief that change can be seen in both a constructive and a destructive light; it has been a Western luxury to believe that change is stagnant. The current decline in activism must be answered, not necessarily by an involvement in politics. Seddon rallied the audience to take it all on, to get organized and involved again. Today’s climate portends change, especially with the presidential election looming, and we have to start to think again. With the return of the idea and the power to think, so too will return the real power of democracy.

Posted by Anna Wool

There’s been plenty of talk about “change” so far in the 2008 presidential election. Each candidate is pledging to bring some degree of change to government in Washington, D.C. But Americans may have their hearts broken once the winner takes office.

Futurist Cecily Sommers, president of the Push institute in Minneapolis, says Presidents and governments are better equipped to react to changes in society than to actually bring about those changes.

She talked to MPR’s host Tom Crann about why democracy and capitalism don’t necessarily make it easy to create change and why the leaders who do so don’t emerge from government.