A NATIONAL STRATEGY

Today, September 17, 2014, No Labels - a national movement of Democrats, Republicans and Independents dedicated to a new politics of problem solving - is holding a one day meeting of politicians, business- and civic leaders and interested citizens about the need for a National Strategic Agenda, which is one thing I advocated for in my book NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism, published by Create Space in August. The book is available as e-book and paperback on http://amazon.com/dp/0692209778 

As we are heading towards another national election, the grumblings about the dysfunction in Washington D.C. intensify and – believe it or not - there are even some initiatives of bipartisan nature that try to do something about it: 

• ·         The Bipartisan Policy Center published, on June 24, 2014 the report by its Commission on Political Reform titled “Governing in a polarized America: A Bipartisan Blueprint to Strengthen our Democracy.”
• ·         No Labels offered earlier in the year a “Shared Vision for a Stronger America” with contributions from politicians from both sides of the aisle, led by former governor Jon Huntsman and Senator Joe Manchin.

We should all applaud and encourage initiatives like these. They represent real efforts to move the dial. Particularly the No Labels pamphlet, because it zooms in on what I think is a structural flaw in the American governance model: America is lacking a national strategy policy.

American governance has no tradition or statute for the creation of a binding strategic plan that is built on broad consensus and transcends the shifting balance of power between the Republican and Democratic parties. How much sense would it make if there was a constitutional requirement on the president and the leadership in Congress to establish a national strategy, much like companies develop a strategic plan for their business that then becomes the compass by which investment decisions and other resource allocations are made? Such national plan should have a long time horizon, transcend the term limits imposed on politicians, and be formally reviewed from year to year to adjust for changes in the external environment.

What’s required is a clear articulation of some overarching bi-partisan national objectives and a popular buy-in of these objectives. America has not had a clearly articulated national objective since John F. Kennedy decided that America was to be the first nation to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely to earth. We can borrow a chapter out of the book of the Netherlands, my country of origin, which—after the flood of 1953—made it a national objective to protect its low laying areas from a 500 year flood.

Public policy in the USA is too much influenced by the perpetual election cycle. Big strategies take a long time to be developed and implemented and don’t fit in with the election-driven decision making practices of our politicians. In this respect a major difference comes to light between the public and the private sector in America. In business nothing survives without a solid strategic plan and careful, methodical implementation. In public life, politicians get slaughtered if they don’t cater to the immediate needs and fancies of their constituents.

But, without a long term plan there is no expected outcome and it is, therefore, not surprising that we are beginning to hear voices calling for an overarching national strategy. The articulation of such strategy is the role and responsibility of the federal government. Note that recent administrations have declared “war” on a number of national challenges—like the war on poverty, the war on drugs and the war on terror—but they have not bothered to rally the nation behind any particular national objective. Can we think of any highly worthwhile broad national objectives? I would suggest that the following would make a good place to start:

1.       Wellness and productivity: Creating the conditions and environment whereby most, if not all, of our residents can lead healthy lives for at least 95 percent of a lengthening lifespan and productive lives for at least 75 percent of the same lifespan.

2.       Response to climate change: Determine the positives of climate change and take steps to capitalize on them like with a comprehensive Arctic strategy; and defense against the negatives of climate change by protecting people and property from its adverse consequences.

Having a clearly defined national strategy would not be a panacea for all that ails our governance model, but it would break through the logjam of partisan stalemate by forcing bipartisan support for and popular unity behind an ambitious and meaningful path forward for the nation that is now drifting without a clear sense of direction.

HIGH EXPECTATIONS

My book, NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism, was only out and on the market for a few days when Foreign Affairs Magazine wrote in an editorial for its September/October 2014 edition:

“For such a strong, rich, free, and favorably situated country, the United States is remarkably testy and out of sorts these days — and falling far short of its enormous potential.”

That is exactly the conclusion I arrived at and voiced in my book. The way I worded it is: America is like the smart kid that is so convinced of its superior talent that it is no longer interested in applying himself to get straight A’s. Like this kid, America is grossly underperforming to its capabilities. It is performing like an A+ student that turns in F grades. It should not be that way. As Bill Gates reminded the 2007 graduating class of Harvard: “From Those To Whom Much Is Given, Much Is Expected.”

My critics are quick to point out that America is still the greatest nation in the world. They point out that everyone wants to come here and that no people are leaving to go elsewhere. They are mostly right, but beside the point. They should have higher expectations of a country that is blessed with the best of the most vital resources any nation could ever wish for: People, location, space, nature, water, minerals, and hydrocarbons. America has, unlike most of its rivals, enviable traditions in democracy, tolerance, freedom of thought and pursuit, entrepreneurial spirit, and self-reliance. With all of these assets, there is no question that America should be the top performer among nations. But it has allowed others to come a lot closer and it has proven incapable of addressing the big challenges of the 21^st century.

There is a broad consensus that the generation now growing up in America may be the first since the Second World War to be worse off than their parents and grandparents. It happens at a time of relative peace and prosperity in the world. If that is not an indictment of America’s performance, I don’t know what is.

Surveying the field today, the question keeps coming up: are the best times behind us? Is America going the way of the Roman and the British Empires? We all see tell-tale signs of trouble around us: from persistently high unemployment, increasing income inequality, lost or unfinished wars, a skyrocketing national debt, a sub-par infrastructure, an ideologically divided voting public and—resulting from it—a dysfunctional political system. We see the unraveling of family structures and values, the proliferation of guns and drugs, the (relatively) poor academic performance of our youngsters, and the prevalence of obesity.

It does not have to be that way. It is in no way an inevitability that America will be the next great power to lose its dominance. The American spirit has a natural capacity to step back from the brink and find another, safer, way ahead. It is quintessentially American to believe that, when it comes down to brass tacks, America will do what it has to do to avoid hitting the slippery slope.

America is not facing a challenge it cannot meet. But it will have to be galvanized into action. It is engaged in a world championship relay race that, by all accounts, it should win convincingly. But look what’s happening: the first two legs are easily won, establishing what looked like an insurmountable lead; the third leg consolidates the lead, but does not add to it and the baton is nearly dropped in the hand-off; now in the fourth and final leg it is struggling to regain the pace and the competitors are nipping at its heels. It needs to pick up the pace and finish with a flurry. It will have to dig deep and find in itself the championship talent it has been bestowed with.

We can be grateful to be living in the greatest nation on earth, but as the French say: noblesse oblige (with the privilege comes responsibility). That is what Bill Gates reminded us in his 2007 Harvard commencement speech (at the brink if the great recession). We can’t rest on our laurels. As Will Rogers so famously said: “Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

The resources are there. America has it all. But having it all does not mean anything unless these resources are all brought to bear. What is needed is leadership and engagement. Leadership on the part of our top public officials and engagement on the part of the American people. We need to rally behind a cause and the cause should be the enhancement of our leadership position in the world in terms of wellness, productivity, social justice, moral superiority and creativity. We need to have high expectations of ourselves and our nation if we want to win the relay race.

NOW OUT IN PAPERBACK

For the last two years I have been working on writing a book about my experience as a first generation (Dutch) immigrant to the United States. After multiple edits, with the help of some of the best minds I have encountered during my journey through life, I have published my book through CreateSpace, a division of amazon.com.

It can be ordered online in the USA and Europe, using the appropriate link shown below:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0692209778
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0692209778
http://www.amazon.de/dp/0692209778
http://www.amazon.es/dp/0692209778
http://www.amazon.fr/dp/0692209778
http://www.amazon.it/dp/0692209778

The book is titled NEITHER HERE NOR THERE and sub-titled A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism.

I wrote the book, because I like to write and I had freed up my time by retiring from the corporate world where I had spent all of my professional career. But there is more to this story. For the more than 30 years that I have been working and living in the United States, I have kept wondering if I had made the right decision when, in 1983, I turned from being a Dutch ex-patriate living in the U.S. to an immigrant. I never quit looking for a validation of that decision. And, because of that mind-set, I became a keen observer of American lifestyles and politics.

I knew that America had been exceptional at the time of the creation of the Republic, in the struggle to hold the Republic together through the War Between the States, and in the conquering of fascism first and then communism. I was looking for evidence that America had the capacity and vitality to remain exceptional at times that it was not seriously challenged by contenders.

In my book, I lean upon not only my own observations, but substantially also on the writings of other analysts of the great American experiment. The book is different from other social and political commentary in that it deals not just with specific individual shortcomings but, comprehensively, with all the major flaws in the American system as it operates today and in that it actually offers solutions for the many predicaments the nation is facing. It is also different in that it is written from the perspective of someone, not born in this country, but who made a conscious choice to make America his country and now wants to validate that decision.

NEITHER HERE NOR THERE delivers five key messages:

1. I made a deliberate decision, in the early eighties, to transplant my family from the Netherlands to the USA, based on my evaluation—at the time—of the future of America versus the future of Western Europe. It seemed an easy choice. But the world has changed dramatically in the intervening 30 years and it seems appropriate to revalidate that choice.

2. There is a broad consensus that the generation now growing up in America may be the first since the Second World War to be worse off than their parents and grandparents. If that is indeed the case, then we need to get at the cause of that decline. And come up with ways to turn it around.

3. A huge gap exists in America between the performances of the public sector versus the private sector. The private sector embraces change and accelerates the pace of change by constant innovation, driven by competition and a passion for continuous improvement and breakthrough technology. None of this exists in the public domain.

4. America has too many people standing at the sidelines rather than playing the field. Nations are successful when they engage the whole population—with hardly anybody left out—behind a clearly articulated vision for the future place of the nation in the global environment.

5. A vision is merely that—a fata morgana—if it is not accompanied by a solid strategy outlining how to reach the desired outcome. America is lacking a national strategy. American governance has no tradition or statute for the creation of a binding strategic plan that is built on broad consensus and transcends the succession of White House occupants and the shifting balance of power between the Republican and Democratic parties. That may have to change.

My intent with the book is to create a badly needed discourse about what’s ailing America and what cures should be considered to bring it back to optimum health.

Follow me on Twitter @FransJager1 for updates on the publication of NEITHER HERE NOR THERE.

FROM THIRTY-THOUSAND FEET

Thirty-thousand feet is the cruising altitude for most long distance commercial flights and, until a band of Russian/Ukrainian thugs decided to shoot flight MH17 out of the air, it was considered a safe environment for civil aviation, which contributes so much to global commerce and inter-cultural contact and understanding between people of different origin.

Thirty-thousand feet is also a good distance to observe when looking at a problem that needs to be resolved or an action that needs to be taken. A solid strategic planning process for a business starts at thirty-thousand feet, looking at the world in which the enterprise is, or will be, operating.

Business operators are constantly reminded to “keep their noses to the grindstone” and that is certainly good advice when it comes to executing the business plan and running the business on a day to day basis. But too often business operators do not come up for air at all, ever. They feel they cannot take their eyes off the ball and they will not lift their noses from the grindstone. That is when many businesses run into the proverbial brick wall!

Businesses need to plan for success. Success does not come automatically with working hard and long hours. If it did, we would not see that many small privately owned businesses fail every year. And planning for success starts at thirty-thousand feet. At the start of any new enterprise, and with some regularity thereafter, the leadership team of a business needs to take a good distance from the day-today and look at the direction of and the prospects for the business with an eagle eye that covers all the ground beneath, the big picture.

Owning and operating a business is an awesome responsibility. Particularly when the business employs people. It represents a calling of the highest order. And—because of that—business needs to be conducted with all due regard for the social impact the business actions have on its stakeholders and the community in which it operates. Owning and operating a business is not an egocentric activity, or it should not be. Small, privately owned, business is a formidable engine of innovation and economic growth. It is also a powerful path to personal wealth creation. America’s economy would not be what it is if it were not for the multitude of privately owned businesses that scatter the landscape. America is the champion of free enterprise and it finds economic strength in the scope and dynamism of entrepreneurial activity. It finds comfort in numbers. There are so many small enterprises that it can afford to lose a good percentage of them every year, clearing the field for new upstarts. In the realm of small business there is constant churning, replacing the ill-conceived or poorly resourced endeavors with better upstarts. This process lends strength to the economy and creates the right conditions for innovation and growth.

From thirty-thousand feet it is easy to see what the key critical success factors are for a small privately owned business to succeed. To make it in the competitive rat race an enterprise just has to follow a few simple, basic, rules. Given enough distance of observation, like thirty-thousand feet, the ingredients for success in business are clearly identifiable (in no particular order):

• A strong balance sheet
• A lean, knowledgeable, and motivated organization, top to bottom
•  A fanatic desire to be in business, combined with a clear sense of direction
• A fanatic dedication to the success and satisfaction of the customer
• A capacity to keep business simple and predictable
• Alignment with the best supply chain partners in the business
• Forward thinking ownership and executive leadership
• The ability to trust yourself, your organization, and your key people

None of this comes without proper planning. So, I’m asking the business leaders among my readership: Does your business meet all of these critical success factors? What is missing?

These are the type of questions that need to be asked from time to time. And that is why, with some regularity, business leaders need to lift their noses from the grindstone and put distance between themselves and the business they are responsible for. The right answers for any individual business can only be found when looking at the business from thirty-thousand feet. Trust me, it is safe out there in the rarified air. What is not safe for the business is for the leadership not, with some regularity, to spend time at high altitude, review the landscape with an eagle eye, and ponder the strategic decisions that need to be taken for the continuity and growth of the business.

ISLANDS

Paul Theroux, the celebrated travel writer and author, wrote this about islands: “My love for traveling to ISLANDS amounts to a pathological condition…This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.”

I have that same fascination with islands and have been wondering if that is a universally human condition.

In my case it has definitely been stimulated by Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Treasure Island, but it predates the time of that reading. Growing up in the utmost Northern part of the Netherlands, I was frequently visiting on foot and by bike the Waddenzee, the body of water that separates the Dutch Northern coast from a series of buffer islands, protecting the coast from the fierce onslaught by the North Sea. These buffer islands, called Wadden Islands or Frisian Islands, extend across the German border. On the Dutch side of the border there are five inhabited and two uninhabited islands and all of them are wondrous worlds of tranquility, dunes, surf and mud-flats. They are sanctuaries for all kinds of seals and sea birds. One of these islands, Ameland, is situated no more than 6-7 miles off shore and can (for aficionado of mud-flats) be reached, on low tide, by foot. Islands like these are a boy’s dream of unexplored shores and inland mysteries. Beach combing in these places is fun and full of surprises.

Islands that can be reached by a bridge or a causeway don’t have the same intrigue that attracts me to islands that can only be reached by boat or by plane and small islands are much more appealing than large islands. There is something to finding the high spot of an island, a hill, a dune or a light tower, from where you can see the whole expanse of the island.

Islands attract tourism. In our own backyard we see that in the popularity of the Lake Erie islands with boaters and weekend revelers. Top global tourist attractions include the Caribbean Islands, the Seychelles, the Maldives, Hawaii, Tahiti and the Greek Isles. Not to forget about the isle of Manhattan.

Islands, because of their isolation, have the capacity to develop their unique biosphere. This is why Darwin went all the way to the Galapagos Islands to find confirmation of his theories about evolution. It is no coincidence that the first thing I did upon my retirement was flying to New Zealand to get the island experience there. The country is far removed from other land masses and has numerous species of plant and animal life that are unique to New Zealand. There is something to Island countries, because they are so naturally contained and you can see the whole contour of them by following the coastline. No doubt this makes New Zealand, Ireland and the Hawaiian Island such popular travel destinations.

On our Atlantic coast, we have jewels of island getaways like Isle au Haut, ME; Nantucket, MA; Assateague Island, MD; Tangier Island, VA; Bald Head Island, NC; Daufuskie Island, SC; and Cumberland Island, GA. I am particularly fond of Daufuskie Island, SC where we have spent numerous family vacations in splendid isolation from the hustle and bustle of the daily working life. While living in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, we enjoyed weekend time on Anna Maria Island, Caladesi Island and Honeymoon Island.

There is something special about being on an island as opposed to being on the main land. It creates the feeling of “being away from it all”. It is like arriving on foreign shores even if the destination is safely state side. It has the connotation of adventure like in Gulliver’s Island or in Robinson Crusoe’s Island of Despair.

Thank God for islands. I wish I had spent more time in my life exploring more islands. The more remote the better. I don’t know how many I will still get too. But I can dream of the Aleutians, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, the Hebrides, the Svalbard Archipelago, Nova Zembla or the uninhabited parts of Iceland and Greenland. I’m never more at peace than when I’m in my own insular paradise, surrounded by nature, where I can oversee my world. I agree with Paul Theroux that to understand the world at large you may have to start looking at the small self-contained world of an island.

UNDER COVER

I am an occasional viewer of the CBS reality show “Undercover Boss”, because I like the concept of the owner of a business genuinely interested in verifying if, in the trenches, his/her vision for the business lives, if the culture he/she wants to espouse pervades the organization and if the employees are all engaged in fulfilling the mission of the enterprise.

CBS has not made me a fan of this series, for several reasons. First, I do not think that you can honestly and successfully do this investigative work with the cameras on the scene. In real life, there are no professional cameras and camera-men around to record what’s going on. Or, if there are, a completely different and interfering element comes into play. Second, I believe that singling out a few employees, addressing their issues and concerns and then lavishly throwing money at their hardships, in public and with the cameras rolling, is the wrong way of dealing with the findings of the investigation. It is unfair to the many others in the company who did not get singled out for the cameras and are likely dealing with similar hardships and unfulfilled ambitions.

But the concept is laudable. If you have a vision for your business, that is, if you can visualize and articulate where you want to go with your business and what you would like to achieve with it, you want to have metrics established that tell you if your operations are on track, on target to get you to your desired state, your destination. Your employees, their performance, their attitude and behavior should provide you with some of these metrics, but to your face and in your presence will they tell you like it is, or simply play lip-service to what they think you want to hear?

If you are an owner of a business that has a vision for its future, you want to be building and maintaining a purpose driven organization of people who chase a dream, all aligned behind a clearly articulated mission, who are competent and accountable for their function within the business and are thriving in the corporate culture established for the business by its owner. Following in the footsteps of Aileron (www.aileron.org), I call a company that meets all of these criteria, a professionally managed business.

A professionally managed business would not have to have its leader go undercover to verify if the business is on track to achieve its mission and if it operates in a manner that is true to the culture it wants to exude. The metrics that the leader of a professionally managed business has at his/her disposal are tangible and easily discovered: They include high customer satisfaction, low employee turnover, public recognition, predictable financial performance, above average growth, high employee engagement and a palpable “esprit de corps”.

I will admit that not a lot of businesses operate as the professionally managed business described here. The reality, for the owner of the business and for the employees is, more often than not, a lot less glamorous and Utopian than professed in mission statements, value statements and public announcements about the business. But the remedy for this is not for the leader of the pack to go under cover and—one time— find a few culprits and victims, but to start from scratch and organize and manage the business in accordance with the tenets of professional management.

Too often do I hear that “my business is not sexy enough to live by these lofty ideals expressed in visions, missions and values.” But, to that I say: “Every business has customers and has a product or service to sell and what is sexier, or more satisfying, than solving customers’ problems, all the time and every time and meeting or exceeding customers’ expectations?” How few businesses truly succeed in doing just that? You don’t have to be a Dreamworks, Patagonia or Tesla to have high ambitions for your business and to offer your employees an outlook on a participative and fulfilling career.

“Serving the customer” is often propagated but only rarely accomplished. Any business that is totally dedicated to getting that simple mission right has a good outlook on being around for a while and being profitable. Your customers will let you know unambiguously if in your business you say one thing and do another. You don’t have to go undercover to find out if your business is running on all cylinders. Just ask the people who interact with your business on a daily basis, your customers, your suppliers and your stakeholders and they will tell you quickly if your self-promotion is all bogus or the confirmation of a business that is professionally managed.

COMING IN AUGUST

For the last two years I have been working on writing a book about my experience as a first generation (Dutch) immigrant to the United States. After multiple edits, with the help of some of the best minds I have encountered during my journey through life, I have sent my manuscript off to CreateSpace, an Amazon company, to do the formatting and publishing. I expect the book to be released late July, early August of 2014.

The book is titled NEITHER HERE NOR THERE and sub-titled A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism.

I wrote the book, because I like to write and I had freed up my time by retiring from the corporate world where I had spent all of my professional career. But there is more to this story. For the more than 30 years that I have been working and living in the United States, I have kept wondering if I had made the right decision when, in 1983, I turned from being a Dutch expatriate living in the U.S. to an immigrant. I never quit looking for a validation of that decision. And, because of that mind-set, I became a keen observer of American lifestyles and politics.

I knew that America had been exceptional at the time of the creation of the Republic, in the struggle to hold the Republic together through the War Between the States, and in the conquering of fascism first and then communism. I was looking for evidence that America had the capacity and vitality to remain exceptional at times that it was not seriously challenged by contenders.

In my book, I lean upon not only my own observations, but substantially also on the writings of other analysts of the great American experiment. The book is different from other social and political commentary in that it deals not just with specific individual shortcomings but, comprehensively, with all the major flaws in the American system as it operates today and in that it actually offers solutions for the many predicaments the nation is facing. It is also different in that it is written from the perspective of someone, not born in this country, but who made a conscious choice to make America his country and now wants to validate that decision.

NEITHER HERE NOR THERE delivers five key messages:

1. I made a deliberate decision, in the early eighties, to transplant my family from the Netherlands to the USA, based on my evaluation—at the time—of the future of America versus the future of Western Europe. It seemed an easy choice. But the world has changed dramatically in the intervening 30 years and it seems appropriate to revalidate that choice.

2. There is a broad consensus that the generation now growing up in America may be the first since the Second World War to be worse off than their parents and grandparents. If that is indeed the case, then we need to get at the cause of that decline. And come up with ways to turn it around.

3. A huge gap exists in America between the performances of the public sector versus the private sector. The private sector embraces change and accelerates the pace of change by constant innovation, driven by competition and a passion for continuous improvement and breakthrough technology. None of this exists in the public domain.

4. America has too many people standing at the sidelines rather than playing the field. Nations are successful when they engage the whole population—with hardly anybody left out—behind a clearly articulated vision for the future place of the nation in the global environment.

5. A vision is merely that—a fata morgana—if it is not accompanied by a solid strategy outlining how to reach the desired outcome. America is lacking a national strategy. American governance has no tradition or statute for the creation of a binding strategic plan that is built on broad consensus and transcends the succession of White House occupants and the shifting balance of power between the Republican and Democratic parties. That may have to change.

My intent with the book is to create a badly needed discourse about what’s ailing America and what cures should be considered to bring it back to optimum health.

Follow me on Twitter @FransJager1 for updates on the publication of NEITHER HERE NOR THERE.