Leadership, A Vision of Our Future

Steve Jobs is considered a visionary by most people. He saw things and then went about making it happen.

A while ago he saw a hobby “computer” kit and merged it with graphic arts, typesetting and word processing to eventually create the Apple Macintosh. Then, magically, out popped desktop publishing for the people and a new world of personal computing. The Mac was competitive because it delivered reasonable graphics performance and sold for around $2,500 vs. the competitors’ solution which were priced at well over $10,000.

Certainly well before the established data processing professional people knew, Jobs knew personal computing was a practical idea which would catch fire serving the needs of the public though many applications yet to be devised. He was only one guy, but he played a major role in generating an “industrial” revolution which has played out into unforeseen wealth, employment for millions, incredible productivity leaps and countless products which we take for granted today, within less than 30 years.

I know enough not to try to predict the future. I’m just not skilled in that area. But, I do see a game changing opportunity right now for us to walk a similar path which Jobs saw for the personal computer business. If only a few of us are willing to go around our political “leaders”, we can help our nation recover from this economic depression, move away from economic doom and gloom, and began to build a new economy of unforeseeable opportunity .

Yesterday I heard Diane Rehm’s interview of American economist Jeremy Rifkin in which I believe he spelled out a positive, renewable energy future for Europe. If we are lucky, our Occupy Wall Street / 99ers will adopt this concept as one of their demands and push the Congress and the President to adopt it, too.

It seems the much maligned European Union has about four years on the USA when comes to renewable energy. The Germans are leading their charge. They’ve transformed about 20% of their energy use into renewable energy, away from carbon-baed fuels. The other European nations are expecting to reach the 20% renewable energy goal by 2020.

Even more impressive is what Rifkin describes as, “the Third Industrial Revolution”, which was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007 and is now being implemented by various agencies within the European Commission.

Rifkin and many others are working with cities, regions, and national governments to develop master plans to transition their economies into “post-carbon Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures”. In 2009, Rifkin and his team developed Third Industrial Revolution master plans for the cities of San Antonio, Texas and Rome, Italy, to transition their economies into the first post carbon urban areas in the world.

What does all this mean for us?

“In the nineteenth century, the first industrial revolution brought together print and literacy with coal and rail. In the twentieth century, a second industrial revolution combined the telegraph and telephone with oil and nuclear power,” explained Rifkin. “We’re now on the cusp of a third industrial revolution merging internet technology and renewable energy. Converging the internet with renewable energies will allow millions of people to generate their own green electricity in their homes offices and factories and then share it across a vast energy internet, just like they now create their own information and share it online with millions of others.

“Because the third industrial revolution is about lateral power, it favors small and medium-sized businesses coming together in networks to create new economic opportunities. The third industrial revolution will create thousands of new businesses and millions of new jobs. Manufacturing renewable energies, converting buildings to micro power plants, storing renewable energies in the form of hydrogen across the infrastructure, transforming the electricity grid and power and transmission lines into an energy internet, and revolutionizing the transport and logistics sector.”

Rifkin has laid out a vision of a bright economic future, one which is global in nature, capable of employing millions, and free of oil dependency. Even better, in my mind at least, is the promise of unforeseeable technological and sociological advances, new products and services yet to be identified and created.

We do not know exactly how it will all come together or how it will workout. But, we do know this new economy is happening right now in Europe. The United States will be a part of it regardless of our visionless “leaders”.

As in the past, even our political leaders will eventually see the merit in supporting a new wave, because eventually, they will see there’s money to be had and they will want it all.

The cycle will begin anew. But at least the rest of us will have a chance to live before the 1%ers accumulate all the "new" wealth.