Change Management
Whose Life Is It Anyway?
It’s absolutely fascinating how much leverage going green has gained. It’s hard to miss the marketing, packaging, and commitments that continue to grow and show. Many of us make green choices daily, some bigger, some smaller, and some to feel better, all with positive impacts. My observations are that, in consumer goods, the visible focus is on producing “from recycled” materials or from producing from benign components or processes. But what about all the really big stuff we build, produce, or operate?
The globe is dotted with far too many closed facilities, done with their productive lives, some nasty, awaiting a future that may never look green. Nobody likes them and they serve as reminders and warnings for decision makers. It is easy to presume sinister capitalists or overzealous weapons producers as the blame, but it is hard to escape that it’s a lot about economics and prosecution of the national will and multiple interests. Economics is a bit like physics in that processes will frequently follow the paths of least resistance. Similarly, extraction and harvesting economies have denuded the landscape, inviting regulation and in some sectors and countries, restoration efforts, but not yet without irreversible consequences. Getting to green may require multiple generations and someone to pony up on the costs. There is no Utopia, and the noble natives of the planet Pandora exist only in fantasies; and illusions that these harmonious societies ever existed are unsupported history. It’s challenging, because what got us here may eventually constrain us from getting there. What got us here was our capacity to solve problems and overcome obstacles, motivation notwithstanding. How we frame what are problems and opportunities drives important directional decisions.
After all, decisions are typically biased by the productive capability of what we make, build, or operate. What that means is that there is far more weight and attention given to the costs, effectiveness, and efficiencies of fabricating, constructing, and operating than to what happens at end-of-life. For lots of the big stuff, end-of-life is typically far into the future, messier to deal with, and makes the review and approval process more “difficult.” I’ve tested this hypothesis multiple times over many years, and the responses are consistent, end-of-life and decommissioning are not a big factor in the design discussions. Perhaps that is changing.
Over the last 50 years, some of the ugliness that we contend with as enterprises, governments, and consumers has to do with the direct costs and externalities ensuing from unplanned outcomes or effects at end-of-life. Granted, many plans and proposals have language addressing full life cycle costs, yet the evidence of subsequent actions have not aligned. A lens that I’ve found to be helpful is that what we get is precisely what our design, fabrication, and operation is supposed to give us. If it is not giving us that, then we have to investigate, the design fabrication and operation, where the errors or defects were generated that result in what we’re getting. It is as true for what we’re doing today as for what yet awaits us when we have stop or abandon the process. We’ve already designed, built, and operate with end-of life costs, to a good or poor degree.
The challenge ahead is not simple, simplistic, nor easy. Our economic systems create powerful forces and motivators. I really love the life that technology enables and don’t really want to give it up. I have many friends who build and operate some of the really big stuff and they are good, intelligent, highly principled, and ethical people. They care about the welfare of our world and their legacy as much as we do. The challenge is striking the balance between a more certain today and a sometimes very uncertain tomorrow. It gets really hard, when our positive economic rewards are about what we do in the present. They are immediate and positive, versus far into the future and negative. Which would you pick?
For visionaries, this creates an opportunity. The storms of growing public sentiment and distrust of some industries creates an awesome opportunity to design and differentiate with a smarter end-of-life offering. Smarter end-of-life creates value, reduces compliance burdens, fosters complementary lines of business, impacts investor perceptions, and can have a transformative effect on vision, values, and behaviors. For revisionists, a different family of motivators is often necessary. Carrots have longer lasting benefits than sticks.
Sometimes, the military does this well. The really good conquest and occupation strategies are done and executed against a well developed exit strategy. Forethought enables us to manage the present from the future.
“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.” Sun Tzu
The Roads to Nothing or Zero
Mayan Calendar
Zero is interesting since, strictly speaking, there is nothing that actually is nothing. Just because we can’t see it or have the means to measure or detect it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Zero seems like a simple concept, in retrospect, but we often don’t believe that it can exist. Over the years, I’ve encountered incredible walls to surmount in discussions about getting to zero. Stay with me just a little longer.
Zero is, in fact, achievable when we put some tangible qualifiers, like money, patent leather shoes, polio, or Betamax tapes. Those are easy … there are two types of zero that are often hard to conceive, believe, or achieve in the workplace. They are zero defects and zero harm. It’s not because they are impossible or improbable, but because we might be one of those who believe that people are just not good enough to be able to do it. Yet, we can immediately reach zero when conceiving whether or not we can be capable of zero defects or zero harm. In other words, “I have zero chance of achieving zero because, just because.” We can accept some degree, perhaps small, or level of the undesirable as “that’s the way it is,” or “it’s never been done before,” or “we tried that once and failed,” or “whenever you have people working, some things are just unavoidable.” We may have paradigms of acceptability that blind us to possibilities.
Yet, some do achieve zero. Can they sustain zero? Perhaps it is achievable with focus, discipline, and follow-through. Is it worth it? What are the consequences of defects and harm? What do our values say about what we can tolerate a little and what we consider intolerable?
So, where is zero in our paradigms? Is it achievable? I’ve heard from some wearing the yoke of unhealthy practices, be they smoking, alcoholism, or too many supersized heart stoppers with a side of fries, that they believe that the chances of getting to zero are so small, that trying is just a waste of time. What would we say to them if they are dear ones?
What if our processes were wearing the yoke of unhealthy practices? Is trying just a waste of time? If our product or service creates failure for our customer, would we say, “that’s the way it is,” or “it’s never been done before,” or “we tried that once and failed,” or “whenever you have people working, some things are just unavoidable?” Would we say the same to the family of someone who was hurt or destroyed in our workplace?
So, should we take the road to zero? Consider where the road to nothing goes.
Thoughts?
Seneca, Darwin, And The Flying Dinosaurs
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin. It is very specific about who or what survives, yet the more significant message is the meaning that “if you are not responsive to change, you will not survive.” There is ample anthropological evidence providing insights into how the differences we see between peoples may have evolved. It becomes more fascinating when I see birds that share a common ancestor with dinosaurs. Much of the same applies to organizations, governments, cities, businesses, religions, and even management systems. Management systems contain the DNA and resources that define how an organization operates with the intent of thriving and surviving to thrive another day.
A stroll through business publications and historical data depicts behaviors that resemble evolutionary changes. Three important observations come to mind, interestingly evolutionary and fraught with nonlinearities:
- Survival comes from responsiveness to changing requirements
- Extinction comes from decay or disruption
- Decay makes us more susceptible to disruption
Responsiveness connotes action. Something around us changes and we change to take advantage of it or don’t change quickly enough and we become victims of it. We can’t always control what may be changing, nor can we predict them all. But we can always make a safe bet, that is, change is coming, always coming. Are we going to survive the changes? Can we increase our chances of surviving?
“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity” Seneca, mid-1st century AD.
I really like the way Seneca frames change as an opportunity. We have virtual evidence that change is afoot across incalculable dimensions. How we communicate and are connected or marginalized is different and accelerating in morphing. The winners and losers as measured by financial indicators display a huge transformation from economies that harvested resources and converted them in to durables (steel, coal, wood products, and automotive) to one that delivers service and convenience on a virtual plane. Who would have dreamed 50 years ago that giants like Microsoft and Apple would be major players while some giants, perhaps too rigid to adapt, became extinct or were devoured by a competitor or another hungry species?
I’m fascinated because the emergent behemoths have figured out how to redefine how convenience is delivered and value is created. Value has always been created by creating convenience, but the virtual world redefined what is possible. The world Thomas Friedman describes in “The World is Flat” is one where the interconnected web strips away some of the advantages the big and strong hoarded. As the early giants created a generation of convenience on the shoulders of the Industrial Revolution, the rigidity of the delivery systems, consumption of materials, and business management systems evolved into big and strong. Dinosaurs were big and strong too.
The last two years certainly met the standard of being a disruption, a mini ice age from a cataclysmic event. But the decay that preceded and followed it may likely claim more for the museums. Are we going to be lucky? If we’re good, how long does good last?
“There is opportunity in every storm”
No Way!
Sherlock Holmes
How quickly do we label something as “impossible” when evaluating risks, alternatives, or focus for investigation? Does our frame of reference filter out what we can’t imagine or refuse to believe? How much does the race to conclude cost us when we’re under the gun? How much does personal belief, level of ignorance, or cerebral capability affect our judgment? Sadly, even when all that stuff is working well, what makes us forget while under duress? After the recent earthquake, Why didn’t the Chilean navy issue a tsunami warning that cost so many lives, even when they had a plan and process to do so?
I don’t know for certain, but I am certain that there are lots that I don’t know. In fact, history seems to make the most assertive comments about what is impossible sound like idiocy. “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” said Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899. A similar conclusion was uttered in 1843 by a predecessor at the Patent Office. A search on Google will unearth a myriad of similar comments including “640K ought to be enough for anybody” from Bill Gates.
Last year online sales surpassed in-store sales on Black Friday (the in-store sale make or break day). Does anybody recall all the chatter about online sales would never work because they were insecure? I’m glad that Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Pierre Omydar of eBay were steadfast in pushing forward. In-house IT departments have from time to time refused to support technologies that they did not sanction, a behavior that often lags the speed of business (Twenty years ago we ignored the scare tactic and pressed forward installing Word rather than continue to suffer with the less perfect WordPerfect). Some caution is warranted, careful evaluation is appropriate, but functional preferences are not. Technology seems to outpace most things we know and we can be easily scared by the clever. Anyone recall the go to market strategy of a very big blue mainframe computer maker focused on scaring customers away from moving to distributed computing (pc’s)?
Nothing in history, even the industrial revolution, comes close to the rate of change we currently experience, nor the way technology is changing everything we do, and much of what can be done for us or to us. For the most part, the world is better for it, Thoreau lovers notwithstanding. Technology is redefining how we will succeed or not and it does so faster than we can imagine. Maybe we need to get better at imagining? Or perhaps relax the jump to pull out the “that’s impossible” spray paint. A great habit to lose is reaching into the nostalgia bag and saying, “We tried that before and it won’t work here ….”Because it certainly won’t work as long as we believe that past failures define our current capability or possibilities.
Next time I hear No Way, I might imagine, Way!
Thoughts?
Just Questions …
- How do you know if your Lean and Six Sigma training and development program is succeeding?
- When you set out on your implementation, did you develop metrics to gage progress and success?
- Is success measured in terms of training and certification indicators or on the changes in business performance?
- Have you what appeared to be a successful implementation in a failing business or business unit? Are you counting projects and certifications still?
- Are you still using the guidelines for selecting and chartering projects that were suitable for training candidates?
- Are those guidelines yielding the very best, most important business issues for attention?
- Are you running into “stranded investments” of trained resources in areas with insufficient opportunities for high impact projects while other areas are resource starved?
- Is the value of the program challenged or suffering diminishing results?
- Could it be that what worked to get launched now constrains the needs of your current life cycle phase?
- Is form constraining substance?
- Are the rules and tools setting the agenda for what is an opportunity?
- Are the real problems going elsewhere for solutions?
- Are the best and brightest clamoring for an opportunity to be part of the implementation or running away to protect their careers?
- Have you checked for generational deterioration and decay of approaches and quality of analysis and solutions?
- Are the Lean and Six Sigma physicians trying to cure themselves?
- Has critical thinking improved or has it been replaced by a checklist and lots of forms for approval?
- When was the last time you ran your program through a full physical and checked if your practices and practitioners fit your current and emerging business needs?
- Will you know in time?
I Have a Dream
When was the last time you dreamed? Not the go-to-sleep dream, but the dream that has a future that is really attractive, one we wanted to be part of? Is that dream still alive? In the universal words of kids in the back seat of the car, “Are we there yet?” Has the dream taken a detour, stuck in traffic, parked in the remote lot, or crushed in a junkyard, fodder for recycling? In this dream, were we the driver, passenger, or someone on the curb watching traffic go by?
The current calamities have, for so many, turned dreams into nightmares. For organizations, value has been destroyed, visions have blurred, and scarcity and survival have replaced abundance and growth. But, maybe it’s time we dreamed again. There is incredible power in effective leadership. I have believed for many years that the best leaders are the masters of delivering and creating optimism. Great leaders, be they captains of nations, captains of industry, or captains of their lives see light and create visions that pull us into the future. Visions can create the possibilities we dream about and great leaders energize collective motivations into plans and execution.
Growing up, my favorite leaders were defined by adversity, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln to name just two. They manifested an eloquence that gave, to so many, the courage to hope and the will to endure and strive. The adversity and nightmares around them did not defeat them, but rather inspired them to dream, focus, create a vision and motivate the delivery of a better future. It’s possible, not easy, but doable. Without the adversity, the greatness within these leaders may have been buried under the blanket of comfort and success. Adversity defined Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, even the business giants like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is timeless, the message creating and motivating a visionary power to fuel capacity, a capacity to move forward through adversity fostered by what is worst in people and enable millions to reach within and find what is best in people.
Adversity creates opportunity. Adversity energizes leaders and innovators. Adversity is what problem solvers dream about. The Great Depression was a fountain of new business creation, stoking the engines of creativity and diversification. It’s not easy, but doable again.
We approach a season redefined by prosperity. Be it the traditions of giving thanks or the tsunamis of buying presents, they have trappings of what abundance could look like and what “merry” or “happy” would look like. This year may not look as abundant. Maybe it’s the time to dream again, create new visions and challenge the leaders within us to embrace adversity and bring light to others.
Great leaders are judged by what they enabled others to accomplish, because others followed, sacrificed, endured, persisted and overcame adversities. Opportunities are always infinite. What we haven’t considered is always infinite. Only what we’ve accomplished so far is finite, memory is finite, scarcity is finite, even fear is finite.
“Hope is a waking dream.” Aristotle
Just in Case
Just in case. When packing for a travel, what did we add to the bag as we said, “just in case?” Did we sufficient “in case” stuff that we paid extra weight fees for our baggage? When walking into the closet and seeing a wardrobe assortment spanning 6 years and 50 pounds ago, do we hesitate before reaching for something to put into the give-away bag saying, “maybe I’ll wear it keep it, just in case?” How about the files we keep in our desk drawer or in a section of our hard drives, just in case? Do any of the books on our shelf look brand new and unopened after a decade of taking up space, but we keep them, just in case? Are we saving five year old magazines for “when I have some time to read them?”
When setting standards or targets for performance, how large are the “safety cushions” of time we put between when we are done and when it is due, just in case? When preparing a presentation, how many additional slides do we build with details and tangential data, just in case? When ordering materials, printing out decks for a meeting, ordering food for a meeting, setting inventory levels, how much do we add for just in case? Just in time belongs to the confident, but just in case belongs to the fearful. How about our staffing and resource loading? Do we staff up for not coming up short on a peak day, just in case, then find things to do on the slack time?
Management by “just in case” is expensive. Not only is it expensive in inventory, it is costly in added complexity, capability decay, waste, but actually the creation of resource scarcity and often very poor fit. Just in case becomes the catch all phrase for the uncertainties in life, be they rational or irrational, be they quantified or not. How often do we ask the question, what will this cost in opportunity if the just in case doesn’t happen? There are plenty of data and tools that abound to rationally address tangible inventory and the science of supply chain management can transform much of the visible.
Let’s think about the opportunities lost because of just in case.
- What did we not do while spending our time on just in case?
- What did we not consider that was relevant because of the focus on the irrelevant baggage of just in case?
- How much of our focus is dulled because of lugging lots of just in case in our minds or in front of our eyes?
- How many resources sat idle in the wrong place on the wrong topic while we ran into scarcity where it counted because of just in case?
- How much time and how many resources did we tie up or consume on training too many on too much because it was easier to deploy something to a shotgun approach, just in case?
It’s a challenge. Focus is hard and hard choices are what engage our brains and challenge our habits. We may be at a really interesting fork in our lives. It may well be the fork where the direction we chose will require all of the focus, discipline and follow-through we can muster to succeed.
- How much baggage can we afford to bring along?
- Do the reasons or fears that determined what we brought along for “just in case” still determine what we should bring along for tomorrow?
- What are the factors that should determine tomorrow’s just in case?
- Are they determined by the consequences of what happened last time?
- How does the virtual and connected world change all of this?
Cool Beans!
Today I experienced something some really cool healthcare! It left me contemplating that maybe we really do have the capacity to sort out the hurdles we face with the healthcare issue. Today I needed to make an unplanned visit to my physician. With a fully booked schedule (this doctor is good…), one of his team understood that variability and timing creates opportunities, parked me in the waiting area and got me in within 20 minutes. That was great by itself, but the cool part followed.
One aspect of getting my medical guidance from this physician is his impressive use of data and technology. Whenever we meet, the discussion around the vitals is on point, virtual and current. I like that. Data is good. From what I gather, the preponderance of his data travels purely on the back of electrons, who I have found are less prone to hick-ups than those transferred with fingers. I like that. Electrons are good.
I often rant that electrons are far better at some tasks than people like me are. They make less mistakes, don’t complain, don’t have eyesight problems, are fast, don’t forget (I do…) and lots of other great attributes. We’re codependent with electrons, so we can make a good team now and in the foreseeable future. Today I saw electrons kick some serious butt. I needed a prescription for what ailed me.
My experiences with getting a prescription enjoy the benefit and difficulties of many years and some ailments. Getting the prescription generated and filled can be slow, require several hand-offs, prone to errors throughout, and have carried significant transactional costs and liability insurance burdens of the risks and importance they have. Lots of hands and lots of eyes aren’t free. Lots of compliance requirements and the fear of suffering consequences are also very costly. They also have a number of queues in the process of being filled. When we add to that the transactional costs created by insurance coverage, the non-valued costs added to my little pill are scary to contemplate. After all, we’re not electrons, so we have to check stuff to make sure. I don’t like that. Non-value adding costs are bad.
Today I watched Doc, key in my prescription into his electronic tablet, ask for and then input the local pharmacy information, hit the magic key and confirmed receipt at the destination. These friendly electrons did that is a few seconds. I left his office and by the time I drove up to the window at my pharmacy, the little pills were ready. Those living in Cyber-land may say, “So what? That’s easy…” My reply is, “This is cool beans!” I like that. Cool beans are good.
I see promise in this little experience. I see the endless possibilities to tackle this yoke and fear of health care around our collective necks. Solutions are possible. The promise of process improvement still has lots of legs! These hard times may yet precipitate the best of times. Actually, we’re reading this because of our friendly electrons!
I don’t want to minimize or oversimplify what is ahead. The challenges are huge. The players are difficult. The stakes are high. The tactics are ugly. The rhetoric is offensive. The suffering is real. But the opportunity is great. There is opportunity in every storm. I hope and pray we can get past all the storm coverage and move on to finding and harvesting these opportunities.
“When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and true maxim that ‘a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’ So with men, if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great highroad to his reason, and which, once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing him of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause is really a good one.” Abraham Lincoln
“Good, or Got Lucky?”
“To the victor belongs the spoils” is the famous quote by New York Senator William Learned Marcy (1786-1857), recited in the U. S. Senate, 25 January 1832. This one sure gets lots of traffic. It brings with it a lot of imagery of the uglier side of politics, graft and an all or nothing perspective. I can recall, as I read world history in high school, images of conquerors doing all the pillaging and other stuff. Certainly, the principle still has legs today, ugly legs at that.
An interesting cousin to that principle is the one, “To the survivor belongs the story.” We have to always apply it as a warning when reading accounts of witnesses, history, and especially pundits. We should reflect on whether the advice or point of view we’re getting is supportable beyond the sole attribute of survivorship, since survivorship can be due to chance, accident, or many other possibilities. Survivor bias provides a limited retrospective (backward looking view) image, one that does not include participants that did not survive. I can’t truthfully tell you about what I did not see, because I did not see it, so I may just fill in some of the gaps with what must have happened. How often might that be happening?
When we combine the victor-spoils and survivor-story couplings we end up with the perfect formula for revisionism (cooking the history books). This bias is not limited to a particular discipline and can affect our judgments and subsequent actions across our businesses, health, investments, purchases, sales, insurance coverage, and even misplaced confidence or fear. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and other indices continually replace the defunct companies with survivor companies, so it’s less industrial than it used to be.
Survivorship bias is, interestingly, pervasive, be it entertainment and entertainers, sports and commentary, fashion and trends, lots more, and often, management principles. It’s the last one, management principles that deserves more of our attention. Given the experience of the last year, particularly some of the devastation and shifts between winners and losers, survivors will be the ones telling the story about winning on the back end of this mess. Does the condition of survival extend to the validity of the stories? Are there more or fewer heroes that did not survive military battles than the ones that did?
It is important to study survival. It’s important because often there is critical knowledge to be gained and real learning and improvement to be harvested. Survival by accident or random chance is no crime as long as we don’t invent a cause, or create new rules, or lucky charms. Understanding why is the real gain and skepticism is an essential lens.
So, which is it better, to be good or to be lucky? The obvious answer is Yes!
“Have You Recovered?”
It has been one year since the economic tsunami swept across our world. There were lots of financial volcanoes bubbling with excitement, building pressure and spilling over. It became very evident that we did not have lots of volcanoes, but rather outlets under a sea of molten financial foundations with unstoppable pressures. In panic, some of the eruptions were temporarily plugged with financial corks, borrowed from our future, but a big one went and blew up. In the Straits of Wall Street, our own Krakatau, aka Lehman Brothers blew its top, exploded and sent a blanket of financial darkness around the world. The effects were a big contributor to meltdowns that nearly destroyed our capacity to transact business.
Economists have packaged the last year into a classification that fits the lexicon, and called it a Recession, something that happened before, but a bigger one. Yesterday, Chairman Bernanke indicated that as he reads the chicken bones on the dirt, the Recession is ending, but unemployment is not likely to improve for a long time. Some stay still that recovery will not be at all like those we have experienced and that fragility still underpins our economic systems… Some add that the behaviors we found offensive on Wall Street have not changed, and with fewer big players owning the game (my recollection of economics would use the term oligarchs), transparency into behavior is still at serious risk. I’m not feeling better about this Recovery just yet.
President Obama is raising the flag of urgency with the oligarchs, “Unfortunately, there are some in the financial industry who are misreading this moment. Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we are still recovering, they are choosing to ignore them. They do so not just at their own peril, but at our nation’s. So I want them to hear my words: We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses. Those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences, and expect that next time, American taxpayers will be there to break their fall.”
It’s troubling that while we fight a potential pandemic of swine flu on one front, we may have left the dangerous spread of the “hubris flu” still unchecked. What I read so far indicates that we’ll be fighting the symptoms of “hubris flu” by withholding any more “cash shots” in the arms and increasing the use of thermometers (regulation) to find those with fever symptoms to isolate or confine. History is replete with evidence that oligarchies are very susceptible to the hubris flu and these flu strains are typically antidote resistant. They have become resistant by adapting to prior treatments, a bit of Darwinism. Also, the “hubris flu” is deadly, even for those that don’t have it, but are near.
Within the hubris stricken are good people who are capable of getting well, but only from their own will and effort. Compliance suppresses infections, drives them further into the dark and delays transparency. Many of the health improvements must come from a wellspring of personal purpose, ethics, values, and a commitment to a greater purpose, be it national, social, or societal. We have all been changed, for the better or worse, by the Lehman Krakatau eruption. Public trust has been lost for many of the systems and leaders that had our faith, blinded for many. This trust cannot be legislated, mandated, or regulated back. It must and should be earned. All of us must challenge our decisions and actions against the higher standard and expect more from leaders to end illusionary wealth creation and real wealth destruction.
President Obama is clear that more principled initiative and leadership is essential from within, “One of the most important ways to rebuild the system stronger than before is to rebuild trust stronger than before – and you do not have to wait for a new law to do that. You don’t have to wait to use plain language in your dealings with consumers. You don’t have to wait to put the 2009 bonuses of your senior executives up for a shareholder vote. You don’t have to wait for a law to overhaul your pay system so that folks are rewarded for long-term performance instead of short-term gains. . . . It is neither right nor responsible after you’ve recovered with the help of your government to shirk your obligation to the goal of wider recovery, a more stable system, and a more broadly shared prosperity.”
So, back to where we started, is the Recession over and are we in Recovery? If Recovery means getting back what we had and how we were, I hope not. I would welcome a transformation led by a team different than Recovering Hubrisholics.
Recovered yet?
