America's Business Plan

I went back to Brown for my five-year reunion this past weekend. The reunion is held the same weekend as Brown's commencement, so I got a chance to hear our commencement speaker, Fareed Zakaria. His address was excellent, and in my mind boiled down to one single point: be optimistic about America's future.

He believes that the threats to the country are real, but that advances in science and America's openness will ensure that our nation remains at the forefront of global progress. His most interesting argument was that the rise of formerly third-world nations is a hopeful sign for America -- it simply means that billions more people will be unleashed to innovate, invest and participate in the global marketplace.

What I liked about the address was that it had a broad perspective on the forces that truly determine the course of history. The identity of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the current state of the stock market, the resignation of a CEO, or an isolated school shooting are not all harbingers of either utopia or armaggedon. This post by Lane Wallace on Andrew Sullivan's blog makes that point clearly -- global trends are often unpredictable and they are based on data that is difficult to sensationalize and thus overlooked:

...enthusiastic futurists and technology evangelists have been predicting revolutionary changes in our lives for the better part of the past century. And without question, our lives have changed. But rarely as quickly, or completely, or exactly in the ways, the predictions envisioned.

At this year's TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, Tim Berners-Lee, who's credited with inventing the World Wide Web, recounted that, when he first sent his boss a memo on his idea (which his boss had reluctantly agreed to let him pursue in his spare time), his boss's comment, in the margin, was a casual, "vague but exciting." And even Berners-Lee admitted, "The things that happened with the web were much more than we originally imagined."

In fact, it seems that the forces that drive a nation's future are often the forces that drive a company's future, or the globe's future, such as disruptive technological advances and global demographic trends, as I discusssed in this prior blog posting. Seth Godin wrote about external factors in business in his original post:

The external factor is not disconnected from your bet. It is your bet, your decision. Damning the gods of fate because you made the wrong bet makes no sense. I rarely see business plans that have a section entitled, "External forces we're depending on." Acknowledging that things out of your control will change is the first step in hedging your bets in advance, just in case.

Where will funding come from? What groups and ethnicities will grow in number and be empowered? Where are scarce resources located? These are the questions that smart CEOs as well as smart heads of state would be wise to ask. Zakaria is right -- beyond the daily drumbeat of bad economic news, or the occasional shock of a terrorist attack, the broader trends appear positive. He mentioned that there are more democracies today than there have ever been and that the world has more peace than it has ever had. As he quoted in his speech, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." In other words, temporary setbacks aside, America's long-term operating environment looks strong.