The Human Strategist:
Lift Off to a Dream

Elaine Baran

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Lift Off to a Dream

T-minus one minute and counting, we are go for launch… The slightly raspy, well-modulated male voice counted down the last ten seconds in an exercise we'd known since before we were in school.

Ten, nine, eight, seven… What heady days those were to be a child - anything was possible. Our parents were going to send men to the moon, end poverty, eliminate racial and civil strife.

Six, five, four… We were surrounded by "the greatest generation" - a generation that was willing to make the sacrifices necessary to insure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.

Three, two, one… We were a nation that would "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

Lift off, we have lift off at… this hour, this day, this year. We had come so far and had forever left to go.

The foundations of a child's dreams are always so tenuous, so unpredictable, so ephemeral, and yet, may be one of the most critical factors in the evolution of our societies. We strategists, as human strategists, have an obligation to nurture the dreams of our children that form our future.

The Foundation of Vision

While in B-school I saw a movie in the required Organizational Development class called "What You Are Is Where You Were When" by Morris Massey. It talked about the value system that each successive generation demonstrates in the workplace and how it derives from experiences at key points and experiences from their childhood. I suspect that for me, and for a lot of other middle class kids growing up in the 1960s, one of the determining events was the space program and all that it represented.

The men and women who put together our space program were driven by so many reasons: to beat the Russians, to honor a fallen president, to further science, to expand humanity's boundaries beyond the earth. What they may not have realized, however, was that the most valuable thing they built was the belief in a generation of children that anything was possible. And now it is our turn to create that hope - to pass on to the next generation the belief and hope that life will continually improve.

There has been a key structural shift in how people progress which occurred in the 20th century - velocity. The 20th century was really the first century in which each successive generation saw a significant change in living standards from the previous one. If you had been brought up in 13th century England, there's a good chance that the way your parents lived would not be appreciably different from the way you would live your life. There's a reason Hobbes called the life of man "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Hope was a commodity in short supply and primarily under the purview of the clergy.

Fast forward to the latter half of the of the 20th century and early 21st century. We have now reached a point where each successive generation has a significantly different lifestyle from that of the preceding one. We may not see the change or think about it on a regular basis, but it's there -- permeating our daily lives. For anyone born after 1950, just look around at your home and note the changes. We sometimes think that since we had TV while growing up (the BIG change from the previous generation), that things are pretty similar. But a child of 6 or 10 growing up today never knew a television without a remote, cable, 100 stations, a VCR, a DVD, a Playstation and probably Internet access to grandma across the country. Phones aren't attached to walls or even to houses and offices. More than one computer sits on a desk somewhere in the house, and by now there may even be one relegated to the garage. Dinner can be cooked in 10 minutes in the microwave. Cars have VCR players, talking directions, built in child-seats and a lot of families have two or three of them. Anything that happens anywhere in the world can be in your living room in less than a minute (unless it's happening someplace really obscure - then it may take an hour or two - but who'd care if it's too obscure anyway?).

And how did we get to this point? By creating generation after generation of dreamers and believers and entrepreneurs and people with the imagination and vision to see that what can be dreamed can be built -- by nurturing each generation and its dreams as they started to build.

Why Do We Build?

So why do we build? What are the many motivations for building, or creating new things?

We build for all the forms of ego gratification - to be the first, to be the best, to be the biggest, to be the tallest - to have honor and glory and perpetuity. It's easy enough to place a value judgment on these endeavors, to deride and belittle them for their excess and extravagance. But these are the dreams that stretch our boundaries, the ones that offer a glimpse of the possible and form the foundation for the next generation's dreams.

We build for simple expediency - to make our lives and the lives of our progeny better. These are the infrastructure projects that enhance our daily lives and provide the platform for developing our economies, our societies and our homes. We evolve as a people when we offer up the opportunities of a better life to all our citizens through infrastructure enhancement. The Interstate freeway system started as a plan to provide for the defense of our homeland - it turned out to be one of the driving forces in creating new lifestyles and opportunities for vast numbers of middle class Americans. The electric conduction and generation system was initially built as infrastructure, but it wasn't the original electric companies that made money - few companies survived the purging and consolidation phase.- The real growth of wealth took place in the manufacturers and businesses which figured out how to use this new source of power to produce better products more efficiently and then market them to the emerging pool of workers - conveniently created by that very same infrastructure.

We build to reconstruct, to replace that which has been destroyed, whether by nature or man. This is the most basic form of building, continually repeated throughout history as wars, aggression, famine, pestilence and natural disasters took their toll. And yet one of the most common elements of rebuilding is that humans rarely just rebuild. They rebuild things stronger, better, more efficiently, more wisely.

And yes, we build for greed. We would not be human if we did not allow for that motivation in what we do.

But we also build for the greater good. Ask any architect or engineer, any designer or artist, any mother or father. We build for the future - for adventure - to reaffirm that we will be here. And helping to formulate that future are the strategists.

Strategists as Vanguard

We strategists are the vanguard of the future we are preparing for. We take the longer view. We look for opportunities where others see only obstacles. We must keep in mind that the systems and products and companies that we are building are not merely for ourselves, but to lay the foundation of future dreams. How do we, as strategists, do our part - now that the battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation is engaged again?

We must be willing to put ourselves in the line of fire. Be willing to make recommendations that may not have an immediate fiscal reward, but must be made because it is right, and good, for the building of our future. We must lead by example - to show the next generation that it is not only greed that drives us, but that we too can see a better world. We must make recommendations and take actions that respect our environmental resources, the lives and health of those less fortunate than ourselves, and that consider the issues of globalization, regionalization and nationalism. And we must encourage those who follow to change everything - to not constrain their expansion in order to savor our own accomplishments longer.

Imagine what today's youth will be able to accomplish from the foundation we build them. Step back for a moment and think of all the creativity, ingenuity and the imaginative solutions that will come from a generation of young people who have instant access to worldwide information at their fingertips, simultaneous translation into multiple languages, the greatest understanding and meeting of their nutritional needs since the dawn of man and the economic power to bring their dreams to reality. We are constantly improving the physical foundation of our society. An even more important groundwork, though, is the attitudinal foundation we are laying down. It is the foundation of belief and faith and hope in a better tomorrow. This too can become an era when we show our children that anything is possible, when countdowns happen all the time and when we can lift off to a dream.