Rethinking America: A New Game Plan from the American Innovators: Schools, Business, People, Work

by Hedrick Smith

Overview

The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Russians, The Power Game, and The New Russians shows how America has lost ground, and reveals how innovators are creating new strategies to win in the new global game.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307829429
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/08/2013
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	480
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Hedrick Smith is a bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, and Emmy Award–winning producer. His books The Russians and The Power Game were critically acclaimed bestsellers and are widely used in college courses today. As a reporter at The New York Times, Smith shared a Pulitzer for the Pentagon Papers series and won a Pulitzer for his international reporting from Russia in 1971–1974. Smith’s prime-time specials for PBS have won several awards for examining systemic problems in modern America and offering insightful, prescriptive solutions.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction: Rethinking America
 
The way we see the problem is the problem.
—STEPHEN R. COVEY, THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE
 
Global competition is not just product versus product, company versus company, or trading bloc versus trading bloc. It is mindset versus mindset.
—GARY HAMEL AND C. K. PRAHALAD, HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
 
There is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things.
—NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE”
 
This book is about the need for Americans to develop new ways of thinking—about ourselves as a people; about how we educate our children and run our businesses; and about how we can work together more effectively, to make America work better for more Americans.
 
We live in a world of explosive technological change and of intense global competition. In this restless new world, what is needed above all is a new mind-set—if America is going to sustain a high standard of living into the twenty-first century and to prevail as a global economic power in the long run. And, in fact, a new mind-set is being developed by the American Innovators whose firsthand stories I recount in this book.
 
Take Ford Motor Company. When Don Petersen became president of Ford in 1980, he was appalled. This company, once the pioneer of modern mass production, was in dire economic peril. It was losing customers and money at such a disastrous rate that Petersen was afraid it could not survive.
 
Ford’s leadership decided that drastic measures had to be taken. And so, like other embattled American companies in the 1980s and ’90s, Ford slashed its production, shut down plants, and fired tens of thousands of workers.
 
But then Petersen and his colleagues discovered that these emergency measures were not enough to save Ford.
 
“It was the first time in my life when I could not see a solution,” Petersen admitted. “On any other job I had taken, I had a pretty good idea of how to solve things after a month or so. This time, I had no idea—even after several months. We didn’t have a solution to our basic problem.”4
 
Only when Petersen and his top-level colleagues at Ford had exhausted all the traditional business fixes did they finally realize that what was wrong with Ford was Ford: What had worked for so long simply did not work anymore. They realized that what was needed was a deeper, more systemic change—a rethinking of Ford’s entire way of doing business, inside and out.
 
In order to survive, let alone compete in the new global game, Ford Motor Company had to go through a cultural revolution from the ground up—and from the top down, starting with management’s frame of mind.
 
A completely different way of thinking was necessary if Ford was going to win back its place in the new, dramatically more competitive global environment—an environment in which the rules of the economic game had shifted, without Ford’s being aware of it.
 
And so Ford transformed itself from within. It adopted a whole new concept of how to do business. It rethought its old philosophy of management. It let go of old concepts about power, hierarchy, responsibility. It created new relationships among its people. It committed itself to a strategy of proactive participation, constant learning, and perpetual change.
 
This bedrock, fundamental change in thinking is what began Ford’s turnaround in the early 1980s, a decade ahead of Chrysler and General Motors. At Chrysler, as at Ford, only when the thinking changed did Chrysler’s fortunes begin to change. Later, that same process of rethinking also began at General Motors, though the transformation of GM has a long way to go; in fact, it is far from over even at Ford and Chrysler.
 
Yet Ford’s turnaround represents the kind of deep process of systemic change that is needed throughout America—a revolution that reaches far beyond the world of commerce into many walks of American life—and especially in the way children are educated and the way young people are prepared for the new world of work; in how different parts of American society must learn to work together; in how America sees itself and in how Americans go about building a more promising, more reliable future in a world where America is no longer the uncontested champion.
 
The American Innovators—in schools, at work, in government, and in communities around the country—have understood that what is needed in America is a rethinking of old purposes, patterns, and priorities, and they have been moving ahead and, as a result, making America work better.
 
Many other Americans are still stuck in old-think, in trying out half measures and old fixes, as Ford did at first, and so they have been struggling or falling behind. But traditional fixes of the old system, as Ford found out, are not enough. New technologies and global competition challenge America at the very heart of its culture—its educational system, its industry, its economic system—from the top of American society to the bottom.
 
Over the past decade or more, the new game of global competition has shaken up the world’s old economic order, just as the end of the Cold War has altered the old diplomatic order and left America unable to impose its political will on a disorderly world. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the new economic game challenged America’s economic supremacy and ravaged its industries from the heartland to Silicon Valley.
 
Now, in the mid-1990s, America has made an economic comeback, but critical difficulties persist and more change is needed. As America readjusts, millions of Americans are being left behind. Millions more are uneasy about the future. Rivals in Japan, east Asia, and Germany have been going through their own difficult readjustments in the past two or three years, and they are now gathering strength to compete with new force in the years ahead.
 
What is more, the painful 1980s have left an imprint that has soured the mood of America even during recovery. Americans mistrust short-term gains because they understand that the short term is forever changing. In economics as well as in education, it is the long term that counts.