obama – Looking Forward

This will be my last post of 2014, so I figured I’d pull together a collection of some recent news items that you may not yet have come across. I’m not sure what these all have in common except to remind us that the conventional wisdom we so often hear is also often wrong. (To read the full story for any of these, just click on the embedded links.)

A suburban world: The emerging world is becoming suburban. Its leaders should welcome that, but avoid the West’s mistakes – Despite all the talk about people moving to cities (meaning downtowns), “[in] the emerging world almost every metropolis is growing in size faster than in population.” See, for example, this suburb of Buenos Aires.

America’s New First Screen– “It has finally happened: Mobile has bumped TV as America’s first screen.”

The USPS spends far more on city mail carriers than rural ones – to be precise, “city carriers’ compensation costs averaged 58 cents per delivery point, while rural carriers’ averaged 49 cents”

Jack Ma explains why China’s education system fails to produce innovators – “Ma’s argument is that China’s education system doesn’t give students enough time or encouragement to just mess around, have fun, and experiment.” (Jack Ma is the founder/CEO of Alibaba and now the richest man in Asia.)

Here’s the First Line of Code Ever Written by a US President – “Barack Obama just became the first U.S. president to write a line of computer code” in Javascript.

Estonian e-residency – “E-residency is a state-issued secure digital identity for non-residents that allows digital authentication and the digital signing of documents.” Considering how easy it is to do this kind of thing, we’ll start to see more of this kind of thing and it will really mess up traditional understanding of the nation-state and citizenship.

Everything you think you know about the news is probably wrong – “Around the world, people have a pretty good sense of the life expectancy of their country’s inhabitants. When it comes to most other social statistics, they have no idea.”

Obama Is a Republican – A view in the American Conservative magazine that many conservatives “saw in him a classic conservative temperament: someone who avoided lofty rhetoric, an ambitious agenda, and a Utopian vision that would conflict with human nature, real-world barriers to radical reform, and the American system of government.”

Voters Know Themselves Better Than the Pollsters Do– This fall’s “elections provide further ammunition for the idea that we should pay less attention to polls of voters’ intentions, and more to polls asking them who they think will win.”

How Technology Could Help Fight Income Inequality

Costa Rica is number one – “If you’re looking for a change of scenery and considering moving to a new country, you may want to consider Costa Rica. According to the Happy Planet Index (HPI), it’s the happiest country on Earth.”

42.9 million Americans have unpaid medical bills – “Nearly 20 percent of U.S. consumers have unpaid medical debts, according to a new report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”

The Art of Not Working at Work – “At first, the ability to check email, read ESPN, or browse Zappos while on the job may feel like a luxury. But in time, many crave more meaningful — and more demanding — responsibilities.”

I wish you all happy holidays and a wonderful new year – and fun, fulfillment and more insights 🙂

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/105440573913/some-counter-conventional-news]

President Obama is now in his second term and he seems to realize that his ability to get things done through legislation is limited. So he is very much dependent on his executive powers, including executive orders which can get him partly down the road he wants to go.

As chief executive, he also has at his disposal the formidable executive branch of the Federal government. Every day, millions of Federal employees make decisions affecting the lives of tens of millions of other Americans in countless ways. However, to an outside observer, the President has not adequately mobilized these employees to help him achieve his goals.

Partly this is due to the fact that, like many other Presidents, Governors, Mayors and other public sector chief executives, he has focused on the formal organizational structure of the bureaucracy. But, besides the President’s wishes, Federal employees face pressures from Congress, their own career bosses, the personal agendas of Cabinet secretaries and other political appointees.

This is why in his classic book, Presidential Power, Richard Neustadt starts with the story of President Truman speaking about what his successor, President Eisenhower, would face:

He’ll sit here and he’ll say, “Do this! Do that!” And nothing will happen. Poor Ike. It wont be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.

Many a chief executive in the public sector has heard “yes” many times, only to find out six months later that nothing happened to actually implement that supposed affirmation by staff.

In the election of 2008, many Internet observers were impressed by the Obama campaigns use of Web-based tools and social organization to win a tough primary campaign against the “inevitable”, establishment candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Yet, the lessons of the campaign seem to have been forgotten when the President took office in 2009.

Now the President has another chance and he should consider creating his own “fifth column”. I realize the phrase “fifth column” has negative connotations, since it has designated a group of supporters who are hidden within and undermine the enemy camp.

But that may be exactly what the leader of an entrenched bureaucracy needs – a group of supporters, at all levels, who will help him achieve his goals. The President can mobilize an informal network of the large number of change agents and innovators in Federal service, a network that can exist in parallel to the formal organization. By doing this, he can also provide encouragement to those innovators, who may sometimes feel lonely and could get support from each other.

Of course, there were be those who object to anyone, even the President, trying to sidestep the formal organization chart. That’s nice in theory, but many long time senior executives in Federal service already know that, in practice, its the informal relationships that let them get things done. Why shouldn’t the President learn these same techniques?

Various Internet collaboration tools, like wikis, social media and video chat, make creating this informal network a lot easier than would have been the case decades ago. Indeed, some of this informal network already exists. This week, for example, there is #SocialGov Summit 2013, hosted by the 18-month old Federal Social Media Community of Practice (http://www.howto.gov/communities/federal-web-managers-council/social-media).

Build on that base, expand it to a larger network of innovators and the President may find it easier to get things done – at least in the Executive Branch.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/43591603826/does-the-president-need-a-5th-column]

Tag: obama

Some Counter-Conventional News

Does The President Need A 5th Column?