necessity.3 The consequences of being inflexible to change can be severe. Organizations that stand still may be swept aside: corporate history is littered with the wreckage of companies, and whole industries, that were resistant to change. They became stuck in old habits and missed the wave of change that carried more innovative companies forward. It’s not only companies that risk decline.
Few would dispute that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europe, and especially Great Britain, dominated the world culturally, politically and economically. Britain was the crucible of the Industrial Revolution and its military forces secured the colonies as surely as the English language invaded their cultures. When Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, she presided over the largest empire in history: the empire on which the sun never set. If you had gone to her court in 1870 and suggested that this empire would be over within a generation, you would have been laughed out of the building. But it was true. By the end of World War I in 1918, the empire was fatally wounded and, by the time I was born in 1950, it was a memory. Culturally, politically and economically, the twentieth century was dominated by the United States, as surely as Europe had dominated the nineteenth. Whether it will dominate the twenty-first century remains to be seen. As award-winning US scientist Jared Diamond has shown, empires tend to collapse rather than fade away.4 Think of the Soviet Union and its rapid dissolution in the 1980s and 1990s.
All organizations are perishable. They are created by people and they need to be constantly revitalized if they are to survive. When organizations fail, the jobs and communities that depend on them falter too. Among the worst affected these days are young people. Youth unemployment rates are more sensitive than adult rates to economic turbulence, and the recovery of the job market for young men and women tends to lag behind that of adults. For millions of young people, the future seems bleak and despairing. They have no work and see no prospect of it. The International Labor Organization consistently argues that creating jobs for the millions of young women and men entering the labor market every year is a critical component in the path towards wealthier economies. It is not only the quantity but also the quality of jobs that matters. In a world of headlong change, where lifelong employment in the same job is a thing of the past, creativity and innovation are not luxuries, they are essential for personal security and the health of communities.
Thomas Friedman, author of the World is Flat, argues that, “Those who have the ability to imagine new services and new opportunities and new ways to recruit work … are the new Untouchables. Those with the imagination to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies will thrive.” The solution is better education and training. Here, too, the future cannot be business as usual. “We not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college – more education – but we need more of them with the right education. Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity. We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.”5
“The challenge now is to transform education systems into something better suited to the real needs of the twenty-first century. At the heart of this transformation there has to be a radically different view of human intelligence and of creativity.”
One of the reasons the old systems of education are not working now is that real life is not linear or standardized: it is organic, creative and diverse and always has been.
Some weeks before our son started at university in Los Angeles, we went along for an orientation day. At one point, the students were taken away for a separate briefing on program options and the parents were taken to the finance department for a form of grief counseling. We then had a presentation from one of the professors about our roles as parents during our children’s student days. He advised us to step out of their way and spare them too much of our career advice. His own son had been a student at the university some years before and had originally wanted to study the classics. The professor and his wife were not optimistic about his job prospects. They were relieved when, at the end of the freshman year, he said he’d decided to major in something “more useful.” They asked what he had in mind, and he said philosophy. His father pointed out that none of the big philosophy firms were hiring at the time. His son took some philosophy courses anyway and eventually majored in art history. After college he found a job in an international auction house. He traveled, made a good living, loved the work and the life. He got the job because of his knowledge of ancient cultures, his intellectual training in philosophy and his love of art history. Neither he nor his parents could have predicted that path when he started his college studies.
The principle is the same for everyone. Life is not linear. As you live your life you take or avoid opportunities, meet different people, have unexpected experiences and create a unique biography along the way. What we become in the future is deeply influenced by our experiences here and now. Education is not a straight line to the future: it is also about cultivating the talents and sensibilities through which we can live our best lives in the present.
BEYOND IMAGINING
In December 1862, Abraham Lincoln gave his second annual address to Congress. He was writing one month before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and in his message he urged Congress to see the situation they faced with fresh eyes. He said this: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”6
I love the word “disenthrall.” We all live our lives guided by ideas to which we are devoted but which may no longer be true or relevant. We are hypnotized or enthralled by them. To move forward we have to shake free of them. Over the past few centuries of industrialism, more and more people have moved off the land into cities and seem to believe that they can live apart from the rest of nature. The climate crisis reminds us that we cannot. In most respects, we are like most other organisms on earth. Our lives are brief; we pass through the same cycle of mortality from conception to birth to death; we have the same physical needs as other species and we depend on nutrients that the earth supplies.
“We may not be able to predict the future but we can help to shape it.”
Biologically, we are probably evolving at the same rate as other species, culturally, we are evolving at a uniquely furious rate. The cultural lives of dogs and cats are not changing that much. They seem to do pretty much what they’ve always done. There’s no need to keep checking in with them to see what’s new. In human life, there is always something new and the pace of change is quickening every day. The reason is that, in one respect at least, we human beings are different from the rest of life on earth. We have powerful imaginations and unlimited powers of creativity. In imagination we can visit the past, and not just a single view of the past. We can review and reinterpret the past. We can enhance our sense of the present by seeing with other people’s eyes. We can anticipate possible futures and we can act creatively to bring them about. We may not be able to predict the future, but we can help to shape it.
It may be that some of the challenges we are creating, in the natural environment, in politics and in our conflicting beliefs, will overcome us, and maybe sooner rather than later. If so, it will not be because we have made too much use of our imaginations but too little. Now, more than ever, we need to exercise these unique creative powers that make us human in the first place. The challenges we face are global and personal. As this is my book, let’s start with me.
2
FACING THE REVOLUTION
“By about 2040, there will be a backup of our
In 2010, IBM published
Diamond, J. (2006).
Friedman, T. L. (2007).
Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.
