Like so many Americans the events of this past week have been cause for reflection and generated hope.  Election night took me back to the fall of 1968.

Seeing Barack Obama in Grant Park brought back memories that honestly have always been troubling.  In 1968, I was working for then Vice President Hubert Humphrey and a very different event was taking place in that park.  It was a strange event that at the time I did not understand and did not know how to process.  The event this past week I do know how to process and I find that like so many other Americans has lifted my spirits unlike 1968.

Remembering 1968 also brings back memories of hope.  At the time I was completing my MBA in business-government relations at the American University.  I was fortunate enough to have a Whirlpool Fellowship which allowed me access to working with the National Alliance of Business (NAB.)  The organization came to being partially because of the riots in our cities, the unemployment situation and the realization by leading businesspeople that the problems in the country would only be solved if business and government work together.  The buzzword at the time was social responsibility.  As it turned out the concept was more of a fad than a trend but that’s another discussion.

Nonetheless the spirit of cooperation was certainly not a waste because for even a brief period business and government at least attempted to work together to solve the country’s problems.  What they may have learned from each other is a whole other story.  This reflection on 1968 gives me the hope that organizations like the National Alliance of Business will resurface.  In his Chicago acceptance speech President-elect Obama spoke of each and every American being part of the solution.  The question will be who will take the initiative to make that happen.  Could the Chamber of Commerce put its partisan perspective aside to lead the charge?  Is there a role for universities and their students who clearly got involved this year to take that energy to the next step?

My career has been built on a simple premise that everything is a reinvention.  (One simple example of reinvention would be cave drawings led to illustrations which led to pictures on film which led to digital pictures.  e.g., how to capture and save an image.)  Could the basic intent behind social responsibility be reinvented?  Could the principles and processes of quality decision-making be brought to bear?  Could business and government actually work together?  We are facing real life-threatening problems, social problems, business problems they are not just government’s problems to solve.  If workers are worried about where they are going to be living or how they are going to feed their families, and how can they be productive.

Successful businesspeople from the one-person entrepreneur to the giant corporation have a common goal.  They must be overachievers when it comes to identifying what is the real problem and how to solve it.  Larger organizations have bigger problems so they require more sophisticated techniques to analyzing them and ensure that in the end they are making quality decisions.  They cannot rely on conventional wisdom (i.e., emotional or political solutions).  Those that collect the most facts, broaden the potential for solutions and weigh the alternatives in an objective fashion will win.

Is this not what we need right now?  Saying that we have a problem with the economy or the housing market or the financial markets is far too broad.  We need to map out what are all of the symptoms in each of the trouble areas and determine where there are common touch points.  I think of the game at the arcade where the mole sticks his head up and you try to hit it with a hammer only to have him go away and come up someplace else.  A business manager would separate out what are causes from the effects to determine the solution with the highest probability of success.  This is what our new government can do, must do.  Yes we can!

It is important that collectively, all of our institutions from business to academics to government, work together to map out all of the issues because solving just one will most certainly have some positive impact but would also have a negative impact on those problems which were not addressed.  Nothing should be addressed in isolation.  As the cliché goes, we must measure twice and cut once.  We can learn a lot from Obama’s campaign.  In the words of David Axelrod many people had a voice but there was one decision-maker, Barack Obama.  He also ensured that there was never any drama.  Things were looked at on a very factual basis and that once a decision was made everyone marched forward together never looking back.  Can we learn from this?  Yes we can!

There many things about the last eight years which in hindsight have had less than positive impact on we the people.  One that comes to mind is the exclusion of different points of view.  Some would call it a loss of freedom, transparency, but mostly we the people abdicated our responsibility to participate and we had a government that was happy to exclude us.  This cannot continue if we are to succeed.  We the people must be part of the solution.  The business community has the tools and the skills to be part of the solution.  We cannot, they cannot, continue to abdicate responsibility and then sit back and see what’s going to happen.  Finding the right solution is far too important.  Can we reinvent the NAB and the concept of social responsibility?  Can we find the right solutions together? Yes we can!