She can't see that this isn't personal. It's not about her and Barack at a personal level. It's about much larger sociological forces... forces that have been working here in America towards this shift from domination to collaboration since World War II.
Yes, World War II. That's when the need to build lots of weapons quickly and with very high quality helped give birth to the team-oriented management principles of organizational development leaders such as Peter Drucker, Joseph Juran, W. Edwards Deming, and Russell Ackoff.
Strange but true, "working together" is not some "Hippie concept" from the 1960's. It developed from efforts by our own government to figure out how to win WWII. We even exported this knowledge to the Japanese starting in the 1950's, which is why their products ultimately had the best quality in the world.
And to show you how far away from "Hippie-dom" this leadership approach is, the largest American program to teach this way of thinking in existence today was started by President Ronald Reagan: The Baldrige National Quality Program, run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and named after Malcolm Baldrige, President Reagan's Secretary of Commerce. That's right. Ronald Reagan thought this way of thinking deserved to be advocated and taught by the federal government. The Baldrige Program was launched in 1987.
As I've written before, Bill Clinton was a huge fan of Dr. Deming's team-based approach when he was governor of Arkansas. Unfortunately, Hillary never learned these lessons from Bill. If she had, she would have absorbed the related core principles of collaboration and innovation - including societal innovation - which is what the public is demanding now.
Barack Obama is offering voters a vision of collaboration and innovation in politics. Voters - who are familiar with innovations in the kinds of products and services the private sector delivers - have been thrilled at the prospect that a President Obama will bring that kind of thinking to the world of politics. To many (myself included, truth to tell given my organizational development background), this is a dream come true.
And that's why Hillary is losing.
Her inability to realize that we are in a transition time... that we are in a point of history where we are transforming to a much more interdependent world (one piece of evidence: China is financing a huge portion of our federal budget)... and that her world is rapidly becoming "the world of the past"... is why I'm calling her "stupid". Like Forrest Gump, she is a well meaning person who can only see what's in front of her from the perspective of the past. She cannot see the big picture of the transformation that is taking place.
Proof she cannot see this transformation is her talk of Barack Obama as being naive. Remember her sarcastic "The heavens will open up..." speech?) When people don't understand the significance of something new, they make fun of it... laugh it off as meaningless.
The inability to see something new as having real significance is a fatal flaw in a leader. Business school students study case histories of corporate leaders who failed to recognize a change in what customers were looking to buy... or who failed to recognize when a new technology was about to put them out of business... and whose companies suffer the consequences as a result.
We are now in a period in which innovation is finally coming to politics. And, given the Perfect Storm of problems we face, this is happening in the nick of time.
I just wish people like Charlie, George, Tim... and Hillary... were smart enough to recognize this period for what it is. Because then they would see the benefits this transformation will bring. And they would become "early adopters" of this way of solving our problems at a societal level, joining the ranks of those of us who are working to give birth to this new world.
We who are doing so know we have to watch our backs, because there's plenty of resistance by the old system to this transformational change. In the political world, people have become very rich and powerful from demonizing their opponents. (Hello. Can you say "Karl Rove"?)
But the time has come - no matter what the risks - to help society boldly go where it has never gone before.
I wish I could say that I think Hillary has the intelligence - and I'm speaking of emotional intelligence here - to break free of her past and be a constructive force to create this change. But from what I see, she just doesn't know how to stop fighting. She can't see that politics as "all fight all the time" is coming to an end.
Steve Brant is an independent researcher, theorist, and Corporate Social Responsibility brand-building consultant. His mission is to help the Corporate Social Responsibility movement transform the global sociopolitical economic system so that sustainable peace and prosperity for all becomes a reality. Through Trimtab Management Systems, Steve offers an innovation-based synthesis of the systemic redesign principles developed by Drs. Russell L. Ackoff, W. Edwards Deming, and R. Buckminster Fuller as the most powerful approach for achieving that global transformation. Key innovation leverage points for Steve are the CSR movement's potential capability to make war obsolete by advocating a "one world/one human family" political reality, and the entertainment industry's ability to communicate a hopeful vision of the future to the public at large. Such a vision is essential if humanity is to live together in peace. Steve has participated in The UN Global Compact since 2001 and is currently writing his first book, entitled "A World Beyond War In Our Lifetime".
of comparing Americans to women in an abusive relationship. It is time to leave. It is time to walk away from politics as usual. Obama gets it, I just hope enough Americans will realize it too.
by
Judy Ramsey (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 80 comments)
on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 8:42:53 AM
