I
Immortalist
Guest
....Rasiej believes that 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Howard
Dean accidentally discovered the power of the network when he started
online fund-raising in his failed bid for the White House, but never
had a chance to follow it up. "Dean did not realize that the money
that was flowing into his campaign, via the Internet, was actually the
by-product of the vibrant community of Democratic and angry anti-Bush
and anti-war voters who were talking to each other and propelling, his
candidacy," said Rasiej. Neither did any other candidate; no one tried
to run a flat campaign in 2004. But trust me, in the near future
candidates will figure this out.
There is an iron law in American politics:
The party that most quickly absorbs
and adopts the latest technology
dominates politics.
FDR dominated the radio through the fireside chat; JFK triumphed over
Nixon in televised debates; Republicans rose to power on talk radio;
and Karl Rove mastered the use of direct mail and computerized
databases. The next technological political model will revolve around
the power of community and individual uploading. In this model, the
public officeholder will no longer be the one who promises to solve
the problems of the many. Rather, he or she will become a hub of
connectivity for the many to work with the many, creating networks of
public advocates to identify problems, solve them, and get behind
candidates who are ready to mobilize the government and the people in
the right direction.
"One elected official [alone] cannot solve the problems of eight
million people," said Rasiej, "but eight million people networked
together can solve one city's problems. They can spot and offer
solutions better and faster than any bureaucrat.
"The party that stakes out this new frontier is the party that will be
the majority party in the twenty-first century," Rasiej argues. "And
the Democrats had better understand something: Their base right now is
the most disconnected from the network."
Democracy in America is changing, and it was with this change in mind
that Rasiej joined with former Nation editor Micah Sifry to form
www.personaldemocracy.com. They write: "A new force, rooted in new
tools and practices built on and around the Internet, is rising
alongside the old system of capital-intensive broadcast politics. . .
Networked voices are reviving the civic conversation. More people,
every day, are discovering this new power. After years of being
treated like passive subjects of marketing and manipulation, they want
to be heard. Members expect a say in the decision-making process of
the organizations they join. Readers want to talk back to the news-
makers. Citizens are insisting on more openness and transparency from
government. All the old institutions and players-big money, top-down
parties, big-foot journalism, cloistered organizations- must adapt or
face losing status and power. Personal democracy, where everyone is a
full participant, is coming."
Just look at how Virginia's Senator George Allen was caught on video
using the term "macaca" to dismiss a young critic-an insult that was
uploaded to the Internet, where it fatally wounded his reelection
campaign. Future elections, note Rasiej and Sifry, are sure to be even
further affected by the scope and reach of the Internet, "with all
kinds of voter-generated content, citizen activism, social networks,
and the power of the technology to force transparency in the electoral
process and in government."...
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century
by Thomas L. Friedman pg 504-506
http://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884
LEADERSHIP
The job of the politician in America, whether at the local, state, or
national level, should be, in good part, to help educate and explain
to people what world they are living in and what they need to do if
they want to thrive within it. One problem we have today, though, is
that so many American politicians don't seem to have a clue about the
flat world. [What Friedman means by "flat" is "connected": the
lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical
advances of the digital revolution have made it possible to do
business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of
other people across the planet.]
As venture capitalist John Doerr once remarked to me, "You talk to the
leadership in China, and they are all the engineers, and they get what
is going on immediately. The Americans don't, because they're all
lawyers." Added Bill Gates, "The Chinese have risk-taking down, hard
work down, education, and when you meet with Chinese politicians, they
are all scientists and engineers. You can have a numeric discussion
with them-you are never discussing 'give me a one-liner to embarrass
[my political rivals] with.' You are meeting with an intelligent
bureaucracy."
When China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, visited India for the first
time in April 2005, he didn't fly into the capital, New Delhi-as
foreign leaders usually do. He flew directly from Beijing to Bangalore-
for a tech-tour-and then went on to New Delhi. No U.S. president or
vice president has ever visited Bangalore. I am not saying we should
require all politicians to hold engineering degrees, but it would be
helpful if they had a basic understanding of the forces that are
flattening the world, were able to educate constituents about them and
galvanize a response. We have way too many politicians in America
today who seem to do the opposite. They seem to go out of their way
actually to make their constituents stupid-encouraging them to believe
that certain jobs are "American jobs" and can be protected from
foreign competition, or that because America has always dominated
economically in our lifetimes it always will, or that compassion
should he equated with protectionism. It is hard to have an American
national strategy lor dealing with flatism if people won't even
acknowledge that there is an education gap emerging and that there is
an ambition gap emerging and that we are in a quiet crisis. For
instance, of all the policy choices that the Republican-led Congress
could have made in forging the FY 2005 budget, how in the world could
it have decided to cut the funding of the National Science Foundation
by more than $100 million?
We need politicians who are able and willing to both explain and
inspire. And what they most need to explain to Americans is pretty
much what Lou Gerstner explained to the workforce of IBM when he took
over as chairman in 1993, when the company was losing billions of
dollars. At the time, IBM was facing a near-death experience owing to
its failure to adapt to and capitalize on the business computing
market that it invented. IBM got arrogant. It had built its whole
franchise around helping customers solve problems. But after a while
it stopped listening to its customers. It thought it didn't have to.
And when IBM stopped listening to its customers, it stopped creating
value that mattered for its customers, and that had been the whole
strength of its business. A friend of mine who worked at IBM back then
told me that when he was in his first year at the company and was
taking an internal course, his IBM instructor boasted to him that IBM
was such a great company, it could do "extraordinary things with just
average people." As the world started to flatten, though, IBM found
that it could not continue thriving with an overabundance of average
people working for a company that had stopped being a good listener.
But when a company is the pioneer, the vanguard, the top dog, the
crown jewel, it is hard to look in the mirror and tell itself it is in
a not-so-quiet crisis and better start to make a new history or become
history. Gerstner decided that he would be that mirror. He told IBM it
was ugly and that a strategy built largely around designing and
selling computers-rather than the services and strategies to get the
most out of those computers for each customer-didn't make sense.
Needless to say, this was a shock for IBMers.
"Transformation of an enterprise begins with a sense of crisis or
urgency," Gershner told students at Harvard Business School, in a
December 9, 2002, talk. "No institution will go through lundanieiilal
change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do
something different to survive." It is impossible to ignore the
parallel with America as a whole in the early twenty-first century.
When Lou Gerstner came in, one of the first things he did was replace
the notion of lifetime employment with the notion of lifetime em-
ployability. A friend of mine, Alex Attal, a French-born software
engineer who was working for IBM at the time, described the shift this
way: "Instead of IBM giving you a guarantee that you will be employed,
you had to guarantee that you could stay employable. The company would
give you the framework, but you had to build it yourself. It's all
about adapting. I was head of sales for IBM France at the time. It was
the mid-nineties. I told my people that in the old days [the concept
of] lifetime employment was only a company's responsibility, not a
personal responsibility. But once we move to a model of employability,
that becomes a shared responsibility. The company will give you access
to knowledge, but you have to take advantage of it... You have to
build the skills because it will be you against a lot of other
people."
When Gerstner started to change the paradigm at IBM, he kept stressing
the issue of individual empowerment. Said Attal, "He understood that
an extraordinary company could only be built on a critical mass of
extraordinary people."
As at IBM, so in America. Average Joe has to become special,
specialized, synthesizing, or adaptable Joe. The job of government and
business is not to guarantee anyone a lifetime job-those days are
over. That social contract has been ripped up with the flattening of
the world. What government can and must guarantee people is the chance
to make themselves more employable. We don't want America to be to the
world what IBM was becoming to the computer industry in the 1980s: the
people who opened the field and then became too timid, arrogant, and
ordinary to play on it. We want America to be the born-again IBM.
Explaining a new challenge, though, is not just diagnosing the problem
for people and telling them the truth about how we are falling behind.
It is also opening their minds to...
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century
by Thomas L. Friedman pg 379-381
http://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884
Dean accidentally discovered the power of the network when he started
online fund-raising in his failed bid for the White House, but never
had a chance to follow it up. "Dean did not realize that the money
that was flowing into his campaign, via the Internet, was actually the
by-product of the vibrant community of Democratic and angry anti-Bush
and anti-war voters who were talking to each other and propelling, his
candidacy," said Rasiej. Neither did any other candidate; no one tried
to run a flat campaign in 2004. But trust me, in the near future
candidates will figure this out.
There is an iron law in American politics:
The party that most quickly absorbs
and adopts the latest technology
dominates politics.
FDR dominated the radio through the fireside chat; JFK triumphed over
Nixon in televised debates; Republicans rose to power on talk radio;
and Karl Rove mastered the use of direct mail and computerized
databases. The next technological political model will revolve around
the power of community and individual uploading. In this model, the
public officeholder will no longer be the one who promises to solve
the problems of the many. Rather, he or she will become a hub of
connectivity for the many to work with the many, creating networks of
public advocates to identify problems, solve them, and get behind
candidates who are ready to mobilize the government and the people in
the right direction.
"One elected official [alone] cannot solve the problems of eight
million people," said Rasiej, "but eight million people networked
together can solve one city's problems. They can spot and offer
solutions better and faster than any bureaucrat.
"The party that stakes out this new frontier is the party that will be
the majority party in the twenty-first century," Rasiej argues. "And
the Democrats had better understand something: Their base right now is
the most disconnected from the network."
Democracy in America is changing, and it was with this change in mind
that Rasiej joined with former Nation editor Micah Sifry to form
www.personaldemocracy.com. They write: "A new force, rooted in new
tools and practices built on and around the Internet, is rising
alongside the old system of capital-intensive broadcast politics. . .
Networked voices are reviving the civic conversation. More people,
every day, are discovering this new power. After years of being
treated like passive subjects of marketing and manipulation, they want
to be heard. Members expect a say in the decision-making process of
the organizations they join. Readers want to talk back to the news-
makers. Citizens are insisting on more openness and transparency from
government. All the old institutions and players-big money, top-down
parties, big-foot journalism, cloistered organizations- must adapt or
face losing status and power. Personal democracy, where everyone is a
full participant, is coming."
Just look at how Virginia's Senator George Allen was caught on video
using the term "macaca" to dismiss a young critic-an insult that was
uploaded to the Internet, where it fatally wounded his reelection
campaign. Future elections, note Rasiej and Sifry, are sure to be even
further affected by the scope and reach of the Internet, "with all
kinds of voter-generated content, citizen activism, social networks,
and the power of the technology to force transparency in the electoral
process and in government."...
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century
by Thomas L. Friedman pg 504-506
http://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884
LEADERSHIP
The job of the politician in America, whether at the local, state, or
national level, should be, in good part, to help educate and explain
to people what world they are living in and what they need to do if
they want to thrive within it. One problem we have today, though, is
that so many American politicians don't seem to have a clue about the
flat world. [What Friedman means by "flat" is "connected": the
lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical
advances of the digital revolution have made it possible to do
business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of
other people across the planet.]
As venture capitalist John Doerr once remarked to me, "You talk to the
leadership in China, and they are all the engineers, and they get what
is going on immediately. The Americans don't, because they're all
lawyers." Added Bill Gates, "The Chinese have risk-taking down, hard
work down, education, and when you meet with Chinese politicians, they
are all scientists and engineers. You can have a numeric discussion
with them-you are never discussing 'give me a one-liner to embarrass
[my political rivals] with.' You are meeting with an intelligent
bureaucracy."
When China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, visited India for the first
time in April 2005, he didn't fly into the capital, New Delhi-as
foreign leaders usually do. He flew directly from Beijing to Bangalore-
for a tech-tour-and then went on to New Delhi. No U.S. president or
vice president has ever visited Bangalore. I am not saying we should
require all politicians to hold engineering degrees, but it would be
helpful if they had a basic understanding of the forces that are
flattening the world, were able to educate constituents about them and
galvanize a response. We have way too many politicians in America
today who seem to do the opposite. They seem to go out of their way
actually to make their constituents stupid-encouraging them to believe
that certain jobs are "American jobs" and can be protected from
foreign competition, or that because America has always dominated
economically in our lifetimes it always will, or that compassion
should he equated with protectionism. It is hard to have an American
national strategy lor dealing with flatism if people won't even
acknowledge that there is an education gap emerging and that there is
an ambition gap emerging and that we are in a quiet crisis. For
instance, of all the policy choices that the Republican-led Congress
could have made in forging the FY 2005 budget, how in the world could
it have decided to cut the funding of the National Science Foundation
by more than $100 million?
We need politicians who are able and willing to both explain and
inspire. And what they most need to explain to Americans is pretty
much what Lou Gerstner explained to the workforce of IBM when he took
over as chairman in 1993, when the company was losing billions of
dollars. At the time, IBM was facing a near-death experience owing to
its failure to adapt to and capitalize on the business computing
market that it invented. IBM got arrogant. It had built its whole
franchise around helping customers solve problems. But after a while
it stopped listening to its customers. It thought it didn't have to.
And when IBM stopped listening to its customers, it stopped creating
value that mattered for its customers, and that had been the whole
strength of its business. A friend of mine who worked at IBM back then
told me that when he was in his first year at the company and was
taking an internal course, his IBM instructor boasted to him that IBM
was such a great company, it could do "extraordinary things with just
average people." As the world started to flatten, though, IBM found
that it could not continue thriving with an overabundance of average
people working for a company that had stopped being a good listener.
But when a company is the pioneer, the vanguard, the top dog, the
crown jewel, it is hard to look in the mirror and tell itself it is in
a not-so-quiet crisis and better start to make a new history or become
history. Gerstner decided that he would be that mirror. He told IBM it
was ugly and that a strategy built largely around designing and
selling computers-rather than the services and strategies to get the
most out of those computers for each customer-didn't make sense.
Needless to say, this was a shock for IBMers.
"Transformation of an enterprise begins with a sense of crisis or
urgency," Gershner told students at Harvard Business School, in a
December 9, 2002, talk. "No institution will go through lundanieiilal
change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do
something different to survive." It is impossible to ignore the
parallel with America as a whole in the early twenty-first century.
When Lou Gerstner came in, one of the first things he did was replace
the notion of lifetime employment with the notion of lifetime em-
ployability. A friend of mine, Alex Attal, a French-born software
engineer who was working for IBM at the time, described the shift this
way: "Instead of IBM giving you a guarantee that you will be employed,
you had to guarantee that you could stay employable. The company would
give you the framework, but you had to build it yourself. It's all
about adapting. I was head of sales for IBM France at the time. It was
the mid-nineties. I told my people that in the old days [the concept
of] lifetime employment was only a company's responsibility, not a
personal responsibility. But once we move to a model of employability,
that becomes a shared responsibility. The company will give you access
to knowledge, but you have to take advantage of it... You have to
build the skills because it will be you against a lot of other
people."
When Gerstner started to change the paradigm at IBM, he kept stressing
the issue of individual empowerment. Said Attal, "He understood that
an extraordinary company could only be built on a critical mass of
extraordinary people."
As at IBM, so in America. Average Joe has to become special,
specialized, synthesizing, or adaptable Joe. The job of government and
business is not to guarantee anyone a lifetime job-those days are
over. That social contract has been ripped up with the flattening of
the world. What government can and must guarantee people is the chance
to make themselves more employable. We don't want America to be to the
world what IBM was becoming to the computer industry in the 1980s: the
people who opened the field and then became too timid, arrogant, and
ordinary to play on it. We want America to be the born-again IBM.
Explaining a new challenge, though, is not just diagnosing the problem
for people and telling them the truth about how we are falling behind.
It is also opening their minds to...
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century
by Thomas L. Friedman pg 379-381
http://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884