The Value of a Seeing Old Things Through New Eyes

Looking at familiar things in new ways changes the way you think. In the face of an intractable problem, I'm in favor of doing two things.

First, I seek a paradigm shift by asking "Is there a different way to look at this problem?" Second, I probe for the underlying assumptions that drive the problem and ask "Are these assumptions still valid?"Perhaps these questions are really one and the same when, I think about it - whoops, there goes another perspective shift!

Tom Friedman said essentially the same thing in today's NY Times column, While Detroit Slept. He suggests that instead of looking at the GM "Crisis" and asking how to structure a bailout to get back to making cars, while trying to fix the problem of gasoline fuel efficiency, we should be looking beyond gas cars and Detroit to the issue of mobility - and devising a new way to deliver mobility. Electric cars beckon.

One new way of thinking about mobility, recently being deployed in Denmark, Israel, and now, it seems, in Hawaii, is to provide mobility miles. Better Place is promoting a system of car-charging stations (re-converted gas stations?) where electric cars can pull in and much like a car wash, have their depleted batteries replaced with fresh batteries while the customer waits. The stations would get their electricity from wind and solar, and customers would pay for mobility miles, much in the same way they pay for minutes on a cell phone. Friedman concludes:

What Agassi, the founder of Better Place, is saying is that there is a new way to generate mobility, not just music, using the same platform. It just takes the right kind of auto battery — the iPod in this story — and the right kind of national plug-in network — the iTunes store — to make the business model work for electric cars at six cents a mile. The average American is paying today around 12 cents a mile for gasoline transportation, which also adds to global warming and strengthens petro-dictators.

Do not expect this innovation to come out of Detroit. Remember, in 1908, the Ford Model-T got better mileage — 25 miles per gallon — than many Ford, G.M. and Chrysler models made in 2008. But don’t be surprised when it comes out of somewhere else. It can be done. It will be done. If we miss the chance to win the race for Car 2.0 because we keep mindlessly bailing out Car 1.0, there will be no one to blame more than Detroit’s new shareholders: we the taxpayers.

We should be asking ourselves - and our government leaders - a very important question: "Before we climb these walls, do we have our ladders on the right walls?" Steven Covey suggests this as the key question of Leadership, Habit No. 2 of his famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In contrast, he offers up Management - setting priorities and assigning tasks based on values and vision (the building of ladders) - as Habit No. 3, which by the way, should always come after Habit No. 2.

My concern with the urgency of these bailout issues at the end of the 2nd Bush term is that we are spending valuable dollars we don't have on solutions we don't need, which will prevent fixing the problems we must fix. Instead of our current sense of urgency to get the train of our economy back on its tracks, we should be having a deep discussion about the the tracks themselves (are they still taking us places we need to go?) and indeed, whether its trains and tracks we need, or something altogether different. We need to talk about happiness, sustainability, and viability, but instead we are talking about kickstarting consumption and GDP, avoiding deflation, and how little we will need to change and still address global warming.

Next post - yet another way to look at cars, global warming and mobility.