Mining Distilled Wisdom

Among the lessons I learned in Business School and in the private sector afterwards, were these:

B1. Risk / Reward - The more risk one is willing to take should result in a greater reward. Risk represents downside outcomes, reward represents upside. The key to good investments and sound business planning is in finding ways to mitigate the downside risk in order to increase the upside reward.
B2. Time Value of Money - A dollar today is worth more than a dollar next year. Shortening the payback cycle is a way of getting more out of your investment (lowering your risk).
B3. Information = Advantage - The player with better information can make more effective decisions and is better at competing, if the player is able to put the information to good effect. I like the quote: "Perspective is worth 80 points of IQ."
B4. Competitive Advantage - To compete effectively, make the most of what you have and what your opponents lack. Take advantage of their weaknesses while highlighting your strengths.
B5. Evolution v. Revolution - History is made up of long stretches of minor changes (evolution), incrementally improving on the status quo, punctuated by short periods of major changes (revolution), replacing the status quo. To better manage your situation, stay aware of your environment and watch for signs of upcoming potentially disruptive events, which signal a pending revolution.

If you're in business, this List of Rules probably leads you to mutter, "No Sh**, Cooper." But it bears stating, because its surprising how often these rules are set aside in business. I learned a lot of other things in Business School, and in the subsequent 13 years since I graduated, but I'll stop there.

By my early 30s, I'd spent my career learning about selling, providing winning customer service, managing administration in the public sector, and maneuvering through politics. But I'd learned precious few business basics, so I like to tell people I got more value out of my MBA from UT than almost anyone. I paid relatively little and received tremendous insights.

From my earlier career doing legislative analysis, then running the little office that would become the Texas Senate Research Center, then a stint at earning my Masters in Government (which I ultimately abandoned), and also time at a public utility, I also learned a lot about what makes government and politics tick.

Here's a stab at some wisdom mined from working with the public sector.

G1. The importance of balancing competing interests - Good public administrators work within a political environment of competing interests and find a way to strike compromises, or better yet, forge synergies to solve problems of conflict in creative fashion.

G5. Good infrastructure stacks the deck in your favor - A regional economy rises and falls on its infrastructure. Ask any business considering relocation about traffic congestion and they will tell you it's a strike against a region. An effective and healthy infrastructure is a key to a smooth flow of commerce in a region.

Putting these two lists together is the genius of the Public Private Partnership. Having spent considerable time on both sides of the fence, I'm convinced that there is tremendous potential for local and regional leaders who manage to effectively tap into the collective wisdom from business and government and get these two sides to work together with common cause.

One thing I learned on going over to the alternate universe of the B-school long ago, from my perch at the Senate, was that Government is not the same as Business. I cringe when I hear a political candidate say that we need to bring more business practice into government - they generally learn the hard way that many things are not transferable. Some things transfer, many do not. They are two distinct cultures, but that's not to say that each cannot benefit from the other; there are lessons to be gleaned, and that's the root of the Public Private Partnership.

One final thought - we're all stuck living in linear time. Absent a time machine, where we can race into the future, check things out and fly back, we have only hints and clues with which to make our plans on how to behave here in the present in order to get what we want. Unlike Biff Tannen in Back to the Future, we don't have the benefit of a sports trivia handbook to tell us the future outcomes of sporting events we place bets on. Too bad for us, there are no sure things in real life. But we can get pretty close to a sure thing.

Stuck here in the present, watching the future unfold hour by hour, day by day, we make educated guesses about what will happen. Smart business people and smart government officials observe events around them, put two and two together, and gather up a pretty good idea on how things are changing and they position themselves to take advantage.

When it comes to adapting to the impacts of technology change, the smart money is on betting that digital tools and processes will become more and more prevalent. Replacing older processes from the analog world with newer more efficient processes based on digitization is a relatively safe bet. The challenge, and the art of managing change then, is knowing how much and where to spend here in the present to accommodate such upcoming change and take advantage of trends.

Like many others, I've determined that Broadband and Mobility are two of the only sure things we can look at with some certainty. I've bet the farm and staked my career on working to promote better infrastructure to hasten the changes that will bring us all more communication capacity and more mobility options. The evidence is all around us, if we only open our eyes. The daily challenge I face is in convincing the rest of the world that 1) the changes are happening faster than we think; 2) that preparing takes longer than we think; and 3) that the steps we need to take will be more dramatic than we think.

Here in the US, most governments are taking Baby Steps into the Future. When it comes to infrastructure, it's mostly Baby Steps, if you could say we're moving forward at all as a society here in the US. But we need to be taking Giant Leaps, and it doesn't have to be as risky as it seems - there are ways we can do so while minimizing risk. We don't lack the evidence to assure us of the need to add broadband infrastructure, we lack imagination, motivation, and courage. In summary, its leadership that's in short supply.

We're more comfortable here in the present taking baby steps, and lacking leadership, we're stuck with incremental change and evolution, which is fine, as long as we're willing to accept the consequences of not preparing adequately.

The consequences are that other societies with better strategies and bolder moves regarding infrastructure race ahead of us. Over time, their superior infrastructure will stack the deck in their favor. They're becoming more competitive when it comes to areas that we have grown accustomed to leading, like development of innovative technology based on digital applications and broadband communications.

This post is an appeal to government and business leaders to heed lessons from the past, focus on infrastructure, and prepare for a future where broadband dominates. Otherwise, it takes little brilliance to deduce that we will be left behind while other societies race ahead. We're ignoring lessons from the past, as well as signposts on current environmental change, when we neglect to give emphasis to building a robust broadband infrastructure in this country.

We won't get where we want to go by continuing down the same path. We are entering a time of disruption when it comes to the Internet and broadband infrastructure, and unfortunately for us Americans, we are for the most part neglecting our future. Hopefully, we can turn this ship around and change some paradigms, with some well-publicized successes in the next few years.

It's never too late to learn, it's never too late to change, and it's never too late to be redeemed. Managing to smoothly let go of the present and embrace the future, while keeping an eye on the past, is a learned skill, but one we must all learn given the pace of change in today's business and government climate. And as I try to tell my 6th grade son, learning a new skill can only begin with an open mind. That's where it all starts, keeping an open mind. Keep watching this space, keep an open mind, and keep mining distilled wisdom and applying lessons learned, and finally, keep your fingers crossed. The rest is out of our control.