In Dreams Begin Responsibilities*
Like many of us, I am the child of parents born during the Great Depression who came of age in the great upsurge of the post-World War II economy. As a young man entering the workforce, my father, a WWII and Korean War veteran, found his perspective colored by the dramatic, expanding prosperity surrounding him juxtaposed next to strong childhood memories of breadlines for the unemployed. His generation enjoyed the increased spending power of their growing financial success tempered with a cold eye that always put away a little something "for a rainy day."
Tom Brokaw called them "the Greatest Generation," a group of Americans that endured sacrifice and material scarcity but also enjoyed opportunities unheralded on a mass scale. For mid-20th Century government and business leadership, education and industry were the keys to economic prosperity. Investment in these priorities helped create the largest, most vibrant economy in the world. The defining government program for that generation was the "GI Bill" (officially titled Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944), which provided essential support for a massive increase in the number of veterans who could own a home and obtain a college education. As a result, the GI Bill enabled economic mobility for tens of millions of Americans by bringing the attainment of these two pillars of success to many beyond the affluent.
We are now at a similar crossroads as the world economy struggles and as government and business leaders debate the best approaches to moving forward.
For leaders in the early-21st Century, education (again) and technology-enabled businesses and government services offer similar promise for a new era of economic prosperity and personal advancement. The open question is whether we have the imagination and power to dream of a connected future and to then make the requisite investments to meet the opportunity, as an earlier generation did.
Writing in this Sunday’s Mercury News, our Chairman and CEO John Chambers makes the case for broadband investment as one of the key pillars of this future.
As he notes:
“Imagine what the United States could accomplish if our broadband speeds were not just competitive, but leading-edge. Imagine what broadband could do for health care: a medical specialist in Cleveland, Ohio could do a virtual house call via high-definition video to a homebound retiree in Henderson, Nev.â€
The network is both a great enabler of many new industries and a great flattener of barriers to social mobility. In a connected life – one in which rich virtual, Telepresence-enabled experiences are a click away—living in a rural community or a depressed industrial city are not inhibitors to knowledge, expertise or opportunity. The big shift is the ability to work from anywhere, as the very concept of the office, classroom or government department changes – as the service delivery model becomes more virtual and more highly available.
As I wrote in my last blog, if Six Sigma was the management science of the Greatest Generation, then broadband-enabled collaboration, work and educational processes are the promise for the next wave of business competitiveness and the current generation of student, workers and citizens. As the incoming administration contemplates economic stimulus, it is worth addressing the merits of this assertion.
Broadband, video-enabled businesses:
• Supports education and communications on a mass basis,
• Offers reach and capabilities beyond today’s delivery model,
• Is greener than other forms of business or service that demand travel.
It will require courage to make this investment, to embrace the economic change from atoms to bits. But as many have noted lately, a recession is a terrible thing to waste. It can free us from the conceptions of the past and provide us with both the dreams and responsibility to build out a new and even brighter future.
*W.B. Yeats, 1914, Later Poems
Posted by Alan Cohen at 11:33AM PST
Mike Vinegro Jan 12, 2009
Well done!
What do you think the new sacrifice model is, as implied in your reference to WWII generation
Mike