Dana Blankenhorn

The Sound of Winning

The success of the U.S. economy in this decade has upset a lot of apple carts. The rush of investment to the U.S. has put everyone else, friend and foe alike, under increasing pressure.

It can be difficult to hear the sound of winning, from the other side of any divide, because it often comes off as whining.

Whether we’re talking about the CEO of Exxon-Mobil dismissing climate change, calling everything an engineering problem, or Vladimir Putin lashing out over the FIFA indictments, whining is what we hear when someone else has a losing hand but can’t admit it.

The leadership challenge lies in how you handle this.

Open Governance in an Open World

Every election represents a conflict, with choices. Some, like the Crisis Election of 2008, are hard. Others, like the Validation Election of 2016, are easy.

They’re made easy by underlying trends in the economy. Technology is now dominant over oil. It’s even replacing oil, solar and wind devices reducing fuel demand. The gating factor in competition among people, companies and even countries has become our ability to build human capital, and deploy it, people becoming the very definition of wealth-generating capacity.

There is also a sense of urgency driving all this change, a mission to which my children, and yours, have been called, one even greater than that faced by our parents, whom we call The Greatest Generation. That is the climate crisis, and “Millennials,” the derogatory nickname stuck on these kids by jealous oldsters, understand this.

Thus trends in technology, and governance, are making the coming political choices easy.

Carter vs. Taft, or The 1976 Game

As I wrote last week we are definitively in the Obama Era. 

This means that Democratic policies, and priorities, are due to dominate your kids’ lives as the policies and priorities of Richard Nixon dominated my lifetime.

But this doesn’t mean that Democrats win all elections. Republicans have won both midterm elections of the Obama Era so far, and decisively. They control most state houses, most state legislatures, and both houses of Congress, standing in ever-firmer opposition to the changes President Obama has brought forward.

What we’re waiting for, politically, is validation of the Obama Thesis. We are waiting to see if Obama-ism can win without Obama on the ballot.

Until that happens, Washington pundits will stupidly insist that everything he’s stood for is a one-man phenomenon, his success a reflection of his unique personality and a political machine that answers only to him.

The Obama Era

There is a curious quiet descending over American politics. The gun has gone off for the 2016 race, most contenders have announced, yet it’s drawing a big yawn from most people.

The reason for that is simple. We have entered the Obama Era.

The crisis of 2008 has passed. The economy is growing. A new course has been set, of social liberalism and economic conservatism, something that seemed impossible to imagine a decade ago. Our foreign policy has been transformed, and our children, our troops, our heroes are no longer the “tip of the spear.”

Oil prices are down, and fossil fuels are gradually being displaced by solar and wind power in the electrical grid, which is also acquiring intelligence and storage, becoming what Al Gore once called the “Electranet.”

Change has happened. Most of the change is irrevocable. The roles of the parties have reversed. It is now the Democratic Party that sets the course, and the job of the Republican Party to lean against it.

The Coming Bio Era

We know now that the Nixon Era was also the Oil Era. The Koch brothers and other oil barons bought the government starting in the 1990s in order to extend that era, but every era has a sell-by date, and by 2008 oil barons had no answers to the financial crisis they helped create.

The Obama Era is also the Tech Era. Computing, and the interests of those involved in computing, are going to dominate our politics. Larry Page and his ilk will be able to buy-and-sell the Kochs’ kids.

The empire of oil has fallen and it’s now where manufacturers were in the 1970s, caught in a never-ending margin squeeze. Renewable energy supplies, led by efficiency, keep dropping demand, while costs for fracking keep going up. Last year was a pre-shock, from which the industry is recovering. Think of it as the 1975 game. The next shock, which I estimate will come in 2019, will devastate the fossil fuels industry. It will remain – GM remains – but it will never again be what it was.

So what comes after the Tech Era? The Oil Era began its political reign in 1968, and the Tech Era began its reign in 2008, as I’ve indicated we’re now playing the 1975 game. We’re 7 years into the new era, and just as the MITS Altair launched the PC, something should be percolating underneath all this technology to define what comes next.