Here is an intereview with Jeff Immelt the CEO of GE that queries him about the future. Sure he is doing PR and padding things to present GE in its best light, but the interview is interesting. He touches on a lot of themes and if you listen, you will get an idea of what the future will have to embrace (especially when he talks about health care in the last 4 minutes of this video):
About 36 minutes into the video he argues that industrial production is important. It provides high wages. This is good to hear. All those voices about a "post-industrial" society are silly. A healthy country is an ecology with all kinds of activitiy: agriculture, industy, services, etc. To pretend that you can abandon one is ridiculous. When Nixon did a "deal" with Japan to give them a big share of the TV market in the US in order to get a short term political advantage is a symptom of the idiotic short-term political thinking that has infected the US. The other is the idiotic protectionism that pretends it can isolate the US from the rest of the world is just as silly. The future is an "engaged" future where the US deals honestly with the rest of the world on a even playing field. Too long politicians have lied to the American people about industrial policy.
I like the good words that Immelt gives about Warren Buffet. I'm OK with Buffet, but if you want to talk about a person who really understood the future, you need to look at Peter Drucker. I really liked Drucker's book The Post-Capitalist Society.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment