As promised these are the slides from this afternoon’s talk about telling negative stories with a positive, business development spin.
This article from USA TODAY should be on its front page in all red letters.
A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money.Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.
The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.
Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.
It is not possible to overestimate this disruptive nature of this trend.
This has nothing to do with a drycleaner exchanging his services for some computer repair. This is about the nation-state shifting in importance back to the city-state, or at most the regional economy. The economic vitality that normally comes from nations is being choked by the decadence of bankrupt financiers and the inaction of feckless bureaucrats. In response, the people who actually provide the wealth of nations are walking away.
This is a statement to Messieurs Obama, Sarkozy, Brown, Hu et al. that if you can’t make a functioning international currency system, we will not take part. The printing of local currency is the sign of a revolution brewing – a bloodless revolution that is far more radical.
Watch this trend very closely. If it continues, it will change the logic of globalization for the next decade or more.
At a luncheon meeting for the International Association of Corporate and Professional Recruiters, we had a stimulating dialogue about future trends and their implications on the next generation of leaders. We discussed the bursting of the current bubble in some depth, leading to one participant asking, “Will we ever see growth again?”
It’s not whether we’ll see growth – it’s whether you’ll recognize it as growth. For more, tune in to today’s episode of the Competitive Futures Podcast:
The United States Government is taking great pains to prop up gigantic financial companies that made catastrophic decisions. One Harvard Business School professor thinks that small, local businesses will be the economic engine of the future.
That is how innovation works: small companies competing like crazy and trying out new things. Across cities, there is a strong connection between an abundance of small firms and local growth. The last thing that the government should be doing is propping up big declining firms. Real innovations are far more likely to come from someone’s garage, which is where Chester Carlson came up with the Xerox machine during the Great Depression.
The Big Three automakers pose real policy problems. The government is already on the hook for their huge pension liabilities. Vast layoffs will make the recession worse. I am not arguing for complete laissez-faire, but an open-ended commitment to this industry, or any other, is pure folly. Growth requires change, not binding our country to declining industries.
I’m not certain that the current knowledge economy, often depending on broad partnerships, will be just about one guy in his garage, but this would be a radically different approach to economic development policy.
The national pastime is now watching financial indicators reach the lows of the decade. It’s getting boring.
FAR BETTER is to see what IS going to create the next economy – entrepreneurialism. The next economy won’t be stimulated into existence, it will be built by entrepreneurs. Yes, that intrepid spirit of putting your money and time into businesses that do little but eat money and time, in the hopes that one day you will change the world – or at least turn a profit.
My colleague, the intelligence thoughtleader and Enterprise 2.0 guru August Jackson dragged me out to a mixer for group I didn’t know – Tech Cocktail. You might think that an event dedicated to technology startups would be morose in this supposedly capital-scarce, depressed economy. Surprisingly, the mood was gleeful, far more reminiscent of Monica-Lewinsky-era Washington, when cell phones were novel, Napster brought you the world’s music guilt-and-compensation free, and people were just SURE that www.e-spatulas.com was going to set the world on fire.
Wait, haven’t we learned ANYTHING since 1998? Shouldn’t we have figured out to not trust the flowing drinks, the meeting of new people, the launching of strange sounding, internet-based services, since this irrational exuberance brought us Enron and Global Crossing? Isn’t getting excited about tech companies better suited to an era of high profits, financial trickery, cheap illusions?
No, this is still where the future’s at. Sure, nobody was trying to deal with clean water, climate change or healthcare, the likely shapers of our destiny, but it’s the attitude here that is so important. Check out a few of the players:
What struck me was that this time around, all of the entrepreneurs were prepared to discuss viable business models. They knew where the money would come from, and were even realistic about their projections. Today, it’s OK to base a business off traffic and revenue from ads, even if it means you won’t be ultimately buying a Gulfstream 5 from your income. The rest generally knew who their target markets would be. These details seem to be all the difference between this round of innovation and 1999, when sites like www.goatclick.com went for $127.50 a share, and the CEO said “We’re still looking for a business model.”
I don’t care whether any of these specific businesses rescues the economy. What strikes me as important is that America is still hosting these types of events, where people come together excited to talk about building new services, manufacturing new goods, solving real problems and hopefully creating jobs. This is the only spirit that EVER builds economies.
We’re spending so much time examining the collapse, it’s time we get excited about the recovery. I know I am.
