Its strategic season at the high tech company for which I work.
This period of several months is used for the purpose of creating a
strategic plan for the five-year, three-year and one-year time
frames that will theoretically guide the company over those
intervals.
Its strategic season at the high tech company for which I work. This period of several months is used for the purpose of creating a strategic plan for the five-year, three-year and one-year time frames that will theoretically guide the company over those intervals.
Once the big pictures is in place, it is a relatively easier task to put in place the directives and tactical initiatives that implement the overall strategic plan.
What if the United States had a strategic plan?
Our industry is periodically besieged by business-school generated “revivals” that blow like the Santa Ana winds across the American corporate landscape.
In the 1970s there was something called “value engineering.” This was followed in the 1980s by the ISO9000 certification storm. Then in the late ’80s it was the Malcolm Baldridge award frenzy.
In the early 1990s something labeled “leading change” came to our company. One of the high points of that wave of behavioral teachings featured the writing of mission statements. Everybody and every department had a mission statement. At our company you could not swing a dead cat around by the tail without hitting a mission statement.
In recent years the popular trend in fixing strategy across corporate America is about “envisioning the future.”
In other words, we’re supposed to describe what the company or venture will look like in five years.
There is merit in this approach, in my opinion. If it is clear what ultimate success would make the company look like after five years, it becomes an easier task to install the individual tactics and programs that will cause the company to succeed in reaching the five-year goal.
One of our vice presidents dropped into my cubicle one day and commented, “You know, if we don’t know where we are going, it doesn’t matter which way we go.”
Can we envision the future for the U.S.? What would success look like for an entire nation, some five or 10 years from now?
How much easier it would be if we arrived at a common vision of what an ideal United States looked like.
Who among our elected officials has articulated such a comprehensive vision?
Our current President George W. Bush has not done so. Neither have Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
At best these luminaries give us a few isolated pieces of a picture. But we are wanting for a bigger vision of what the United States should become.
Our Founding Fathers articulated a lofty vision of the nation they would proceed to build. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence became the instruments of this shared vision. It has served us exceptionally well for more than 200 years.
But once in a while we are blessed to have leaders with a firm vision of the future. John Kennedy had a vision for reaching the moon. Martin Luther King Jr. had a color-blind dream. Ronald Reagan had a vision of for the triumph of Western freedom over Soviet communism.
Each of these visions made a difference.
The leadership of the Democratic party is enamored of Europe as a model for the U.S. in the future.
From my viewpoint, the timing of this vision makes it stillborn, since as we have discussed in recent columns, Europe as a concept and as a practical influence in the world is clearly in decline.
The elites and the press in this country seem preoccupied with the concept of “tolerance” as the basic vision for America in the future. This is reflected in the stifling political correctness that we see today.
Tolerance is a partial, even negative vision, focused on what we shouldn’t do as a people (intolerance), rather than on what we should do for the future. G.K. Chesterton summed up the idea thusly: “Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”
Tragically, a group that evidently does have a clear vision for the future, and a group with a growing sense of self-confidence in the world, is the Muslims. Their actions point us daily to the reality that they really do have a five-year, 10-year, 50-year plan.
My vision for the future has the concept of liberty as its central theme.
“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end,” as Lord Acton said in 1877. But that is subject for development in a future column. For now suffice to say that the visioning of a future for America is a task to which we all vigilant citizens need to be dedicated.
Al Kelsch is a Hollister resident who writes a weekly column for the Free Lance.
