The USA workforce needs to be assertive upon respective institutional leadership to step into the 21st century and provide the guidance required to be competitive and relevant. Individually or collectively, working people need to insert ourselves into the conversation or debate within our own spheres of influence and help to guide our own economic futures. This is a call to lead from the bottom – and yet it isn’t. It is in fact recognition that leadership comes from the top and that the absence of it has had dire consequences.

While purging some old files I came across an article clipped and saved. It is an interview with self-described “social ecologist” and generally-accepted management master Peter Drucker from the March 10, 1997 issue of Forbes magazine. The interview was conducted by Robert Lenzner, a columnist and editor for Forbes at the time, and Stephen S. Johnson.

Mr. Drucker’s observations and conclusions form a foundation for much contemporary organizational management theory and some practice. His is not the consummate view, yet he is revered as a critical thinker regarding the relationship between humans and organizations. His perspective and opinion were solicited up until he passed away in 2005 at the age of 95.

Although Drucker’s students are famous for being bosses (very short list: Jack Welch, GE; Andrew Grove, Intel; Shoichiro Toyoda, Toyota Motor), he viewed the workforce as the most valuable asset of any organization. And he viewed leadership’s role in an organization as “to prepare people to perform” then get out of the way – the very demonstration of respect for working people.

A compelling case can be made that leadership throughout the USA economy – including that of organized labor – and in our society in general, failed to prepare us for what we are experiencing.

The proverbial perfect storm has been building adagio since 1945, whereby we are, generally speaking, a workforce unprepared for the successes of the USA’s essentially-achieved dominance of philosophy. Our society engaged in hot and cold wars, overthrew governments, and in ways economically overwhelmed other cultures in the effort to certify the superiority of what is termed “our way of life”. The problem is that we “won”, influencing disparate cultures to adopt market economics if not capitalism.

That said, our leadership spectacularly failed to prepare, in Drucker’s context, our economy and society for the inevitable effects of our “success”, and missed or dismissed, how other societies would assimilate our way of life into theirs versus imitate it, and become market forces in their own right.

What will the doingness of the USA workforce look like in this 21st century? How do we ensure we participate in the design of it? How will our society contribute to a world economy that we wanted to create and neglected to anticipate?

Please stay tuned.

I am advocating for a dynamic, engaged, productive, and compensated workforce in the United States of America. Albert Einstein, a definitive outside-the-box kind of observer, noted that “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” When it comes to current economic circumstances in the USA, “the same kind of thinking” is driving the punditry and noise-disguised-as-insight about that we don’t make things and that global trade is inevitable and that working people somehow created this condition. All of this distracts from producing relevant and useful options or scenarios that would inspire action.

We, the workforce of the 21st century United States, are a generally educated, intelligent, and dynamic bunch. We get – at a visceral level – the forces that affect a global economy, consequently, ourselves and the companies and organizations where we work (or don’t as the case may be). Yet I get the sense that there remains a19th century mind-set of “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” still being practiced about work and the workplace. Our capacity to trust or count on leadership, be it of business, politics (NOT a dirty word, in fact, the word denotes ‘citizen’,) or virtually any of our traditional institutions, is irreparable. There isn’t enough duct tape and baling wire in FEMA to rescue it.

That is where the opportunity is exposed. Respect and dignity of people need to be foundational attributes of the workplace in order to participate in a still-taking-shape economy of this century. Working people need to be partners in the decisions that affect us and we need to get smart and assertive about this.

This is not an effort to seek and lay blame. That is not to say that identifying practices and perceptions that don’t work and are ineffective and counter-productive will be avoided. To the contrary, it is acknowledgement that working people can no longer afford to look to or wait for individuals in traditional leadership positions to figure it out without our participation.

I don’t have THE answer. In the words of Douglas Adams’ omniscient computer Deep Thought: “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you is that you’ve never actually known what the question was.” This is one person’s attempt to formulate compelling and meaningful questions, less about how to create jobs than to address how to create workplaces that are consistent with the economy that exists – and is likely to exist throughout the next 25-50 years.

Please stay tuned.