Dean Jackson: Time to Hit the Reset Button

Published on Monday, June 15, 2009

[From the Sun]

Time to hit reset button

Ira A. Jackson

We've been barraged with a buck full of bad news for some time now - Bernie Madoff, the GM and Chrysler and Lehman Bros. bankruptcies, the AIG bailout, the California fiscal crisis, menacing noises from North Korea, inflammatory rhetoric from Iran, rising unemployment, shuttered car dealerships, dangerous cutbacks in social services, drug wars in Acapulco, ballooning federal deficits, rapidly rising health-care costs, and plenty more.

There's no denying that we find ourselves with a full plate of problems to deal with and that despite the summer season, this is no day at the beach for us as a region, a state, nation or a global community.

I'm reminded of what President Kennedy said when times looked tough almost 50 years ago: "We will either master change, or change will be our master."

Contrary to what lots of people say and think about the future, I believe that our best days can be ahead of us. I refuse to believe that our kids will be worse off than we were, and that we'll be the first generation of Americans who leave things worse than we found them.

Sure we have problems, but it is showtime for solutions - and creative inventions and adaptations are the stuff that have made us successful as a nation from the very start.

We have a bucket of issues to deal with, from underperforming public schools to deteriorating infrastructure to an unsustainable financing system for Social Security and Medicare, to a record number of fellow citizens out of work, foreclosed upon, and feeling pretty desperate and alone. China is rising, India is on the move, Brazil is coming on strong, and America, some say, is in retreat.

It's precisely at times like these that summon either the basest or the noblest of instincts in a people.

I'm confident that we will again be smart and savvy and ingenious enough to make this a time of renewal for America.

Is this any tougher a time than what we faced during the Depression? Or the Second World War? Or during the Civil War?

Clearly not, but sometimes it seems as though we feel that the burden is too great on our generation and that our issues are unique or overwhelming.

A little historical perspective can sometimes help jar us loose from the complaining and the whining, and give us that little shock or spark that's needed to get us back to basics.

I didn't move here to Southern California from Boston to witness or experience the sunset on the American dream.

I came here to join with others to recreate that dream.

As Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE put it recently, it's time to push the "reset button."

We have a tremendous opportunity - and, yes, it's also our historic obligation - to reinvent the way we do lots of things as a society. In the process and after the pain of adjustment and transition, we can and we should be able to leave things better than we found them.

The Navajo say that we don't inherit the land from our parents; we borrow the land from our children.

It's time to reset the button on how we finance and govern the great state of California. Maybe it doesn't make much sense to leave it to the initiative petition to pass legislation or to think about balancing the budget. We need to rethink whether we need a super majority to enact taxation or pass a budget. Is this any harder a problem to solve than the founders and framers of the U.S. Constitution faced back in Philadelphia more than two centuries ago?

It's time to reset the button on how business leaders behave and how they think and the way they are rewarded. Maybe it doesn't make much sense after all that CEOs of Fortune 500 companies earn 400 times what the average guy or gal on the line or in the cubicle makes each year. Maybe it's time for business leaders to take the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath that every doctor has sworn by for 2,500 years: "First, do no harm."

It's time to push the reset button and start inventing solutions to the environmental crisis and global warming. Maybe it didn't make much sense to think that we could exhaust the supply of oil or water or land in our time and leave it depleted for the future. When the Pilgrims came over and landed at Plymouth Rock, they came with a dream of building a "city on a hill, a beacon for all mankind." They viewed themselves as stewards, feeling an intense obligation and mission to make things better, not just for themselves but also for the future. When and why did we ever think it was OK to be as indulgent and selfish and greedy and short-term as we had become as a people?

I'm going to devote the next couple of articles here to examples of people and institutions that are pushing the reset button and that I find inspiring and instructive.

We need to start to emulate best practice and race to the top, instead of lamenting mistakes or chasing things to their lowest common denominator.

Next month, I'll start sharing little vignettes about companies and organizations that are leading the way and showing us how we can recover and renew and restore our greatness and apply a can-do approach to solving our problems and paving a new path to the future.

Let me leave you this week with just a couple of inspiring thoughts from others.

Here's what Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, once said: "Every social and global problem and issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise - just waiting for the innovation, the pragmatism, and the capacity of great companies to think higher."

What an incredible, game-changing insight that is. What if instead of creating a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots, business applied its creative and innovative capacities to lessening that divide and solving problems at the bottom of the pyramid, where most people live, and became the major source of the solution, rather than being perceived as a major part of the problem? Next month, I'll share some examples of companies that are doing just that.

Here's another of my favorites, one that Bobby Kennedy would repeat in almost every one of his speeches when things looked pretty grim during the civil-rights movement and while our cities were burning in the late '60s: Some people see things as they are and ask, "why?" I dare to dream things as they ought to be and say: "Why not?"

From a little book from Nancy Adler called "Leadership Insight," come a few others of my favorite quotes that help to motivate me to see the possibilities instead of the obstacles:

"Be great ancestors to the generations to come, " says Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

In Swedish, business means "nourishment for life."

From Kofi Annan, when he was secretary-general of the United Nations: "Let us choose to unite the power of markets with the authority of universal ideals. Let us choose to reconcile the creative forces of private entrepreneurship with the needs of the disadvantaged and the requirements of future generations."

And, perhaps most importantly, simple but profound wisdom from Wayne Gretzky: "You miss 100percent of the shots you don't take."

It's our time. Let's start taking shots worth making.

Ira A. Jackson is the dean of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. The Drucker School is the business school of the Claremont Colleges.