I have been a subscriber to The Future of Work newsletter for a year or so, and Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham are definitely two of the most astute observers of what is happening in this rapidly changing world. The most recent newsletter has a couple of articles that bear further review, and I will share some of that with you this week.

As we move into the new year, many of us in the Social Media field have been making some predictions about the marketplace. Ware and Grantham have gone a step further and made some predictions about the global economy and political landscape. See The Virtues of Near Death for some remarkable observations:

In our very humble opinion, the next several years will bring a number of near-death experiences to many businesses, public agencies, and, yes, even sovereign nations. And we’re sorry to say that some of those near-deaths will result in actual extinctions. Not every corporate dinosaur is going to survive the global cataclysm that we’re facing today.

Being futurists at heart, then, we’d like to close with a few predictions.

We’ve already seen the meltdown in financial services. Look for similar events and patterns in:

* Health care (in the United States)
* Higher education – both public and private
* Transportation – both local and long-distance
* Local municipal governments

Some industries and organizations will survive, some will go away. Just think about it. How many businesses enterprises “lived” even 100 years? How many governments have lasted more than 500 years?

For us this time in history means opportunity (there’s that optimism shining through again). Finally, maybe firms will be in a state where they are willing to suffer the pain of change – a change toward agility, increased performance, and community responsibility. And a few firms and individuals – those with a clear vision and at least a little capital – will invest in the future and come out of this mess as the new captains of industry.

Failure can be a good thing

Should some big, old, hidebound companies be allowed to fail? Companies like GM that, even though they have embraced Social Media and participate in conversations with their market are still failing because other practices remain mired in the 50′s. Consider:

• An out-dated distribution model with too many fingers in the pie
• A sales model with a history of corruption and dishonesty
• Management and payroll practices dictated by the desires of the Labor Unions, rather than economic realities in the marketplace
• R&D and production models that spend too much, take too long, and produce products that people don’t really want

Momentum is the Enemy of Change

Once again Ware and Grantham hit the nail on the head:

We can’t resist observing that one of the reasons for size and scale of the current meltdown may just be that we as a nation have been too willing to keep too many dying organizations on artificial life support for way too long.

This condition affects governments as well as corporations. Consider the disaster of “Urban Planning”, apparently designed to maximize profits for developers and real-estate taxes for the municipalities. No longer is it possible to walk to a school, church, or grocery store in most of suburban America. The citizens are forced to drive everywhere while even downtown areas, once bustling centers of human interaction, roll up the sidewalks and turn out the lights at 5:00. Orson Scott Card discusses “Walking Neighborhoods” at length:

It’s as if government looked at the beloved old neighborhoods that people drive through with yearning and nostalgia, and banned them.

The result is that the poor are shunted off into isolated islands, where crime thrives, employment is remote, and the poor have to own cars just to get a job. Meanwhile, most people can’t walk or bike to any useful destination, because the law has forbidden retail or office buildings anywhere near where people live.

…our city should be ashamed of intersections like North Elm and Pisgah Church [in Greensboro, NC, ed.], where sidewalks are only intermittent, and two directions across the street have no crosswalks, and there are no crossing signals.

And yet this intersection has been worked on twice at great expense to “improve” the way it handles cars. Nothing for the pedestrian, everything for the automobile. This mindset in government has got to go.

And provides specific recommendations for change:

Local transit inside the city. Buses will be frequent, regular, clean, comfortable, safe, and quick. They go everywhere, from everywhere, and if a hub system is used, there are many hubs, not just one, so that each trip doesn’t take half the day.

Telecommuting. Businesses should get substantial tax breaks for every day that fulltime employees stay at home, working by computer. Control-freak managers hate telecommuting, but in professions where working on a home computer is possible, the best employees thrive best when they are not constantly supervised (especially since they are often supervised by people who know less than they do about their jobs).

…we could have grocery stores every few blocks — competing on quality of tailored service as well as price and selection. Those regular-customer cards could become memberships or subscriptions that bring the privilege of having the things you buy regularly always in stock for you.

Regular customers could easily be rewarded for letting the store know when they’ll be out of town so they won’t be making their regular purchases. They would come to think of it as their grocery store, with far higher loyalty.

Grocery stores are the foundation of neighborhood retail. Once they’re in place, you have a neighborhood; until then, you don’t. But the corner grocery model, with just-enough stock management, would quickly be adopted by other stores.

Keep development in context

Is there a best solution? I think so, and it has everything to do with intelligent development. Personal development, corporate development, and urban development. Everyone has to work smarter, leaner, and become more agile in thinking and doing. These are tough times, make no mistake. Many on the right and left think that it will get worse before it gets better, yet I suspect we will see much more finger-pointing and blame-fixing than real solutions, at least in the short-term.

The long-term will bring a convergence of best practices from the business world, the personal development sphere, and massive changes on how government works.

What say you?

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