Friday, March 6, 2009

Obama Break Out Groups

There's a lot of ink being used talking about Obama's inexperience and numerous small mistakes, like bad karma with Britain's Prime Minister, his Price/profit earnings ratio naivety.

Some talk about his inexperience and youth, actually Obama is 47, not actually qualified as YOUTHFUL and no-one is really qualified to be president. Obama's real problem is that he is too rooted in academia. Presentations such as summit groups and break out groups are an exercise of academia that simulates problem solving. Academia's obsession with IDEAS creates an ultimate atmosphere to generate ideas. They then list them, sort them, categorize, rate and rank them. The academia and the elite progressive is consumed with the premise that ideas drive the world, if you just had the BEST idea the solution would slip effortlessly into place.

I spent 5 years on advisory board to A branch of the University of Wisconsin. It was always about accumulating Ideas and rating and ranking them, seldom about ACTION. An academic told me (dripping with sarcasm) that the difference between business people and academics were that the business community tended to be too impetuous.

This obsession with ideas tends to ignore what works. Some optimum distribution of wealth between achievers and non achievers may very well exist. There may actually be a real fairness issue and somewhere on the "CHART" maybe the scales are in perfect balance.

What academics and and ideologues in general tend to miss is that some final vision isn't in reality an "IDEA". A world where everyone exists at a standard of living equal to $250,000 annual income is not an IDEA. A world where everyone shares wealth equally isn't an IDEA, These are OUTCOMES.

Outcomes are useful for some long range target to focus efforts and designs, as a yardstick to judge effort and progress but they are not actionable ideas.

Some outcomes are not obtainable. There are 5 billion people on the Earth, everyone cannot have 5 acres on the ocean with servants and cabanas etc.

However, defining an outcome isn't necessarily the best approach to problem solving. Defining a process that produces as much wealth as possible may obtain a result across a large range of outcomes, variable by community, organization and individual. Non human variables such as climate can impact outcome greatly.

Defining a method or process is invariably actionable by definition and is a model that can be tweaked and improved Thu normal model building techniques. Not being confined to a single rigid outcome is an advantage in this system. Defining an outcome is rigid, inflexible and requires extraordinary amount of control.

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