GINGRICH SPEAKS
AT FMI-LEG

According to Newt Gingrich, it’s going to be “big.”

He’s referring to the amount of change headed our way in the next 25 years – and it will be as much as we’ve seen since 1905 until now.

Can’t put that in perspective? Gingrich did Sunday during his keynote address: Living in the Age of Transitions. The talk was sponsored by NAFA’s Affiliates and manufacturers.

If this meeting had been held in 1905, he said, no-one in the room would have likely seen a mass produced automobile yet, not to mention an airplane. The first motion picture was only a couple of years old, and radio was still something used mostly by Navy ships at sea.
 

But recently, said Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and an internationally recognized futurist, a college student took a picture of him with a cell phone, then e-mailed it to a relative.

“And he didn’t think anything of it,” Gingrich said. “Because that’s the world they’re growing up in.”

Gingrich, who addressed a packed house with many more standing in the back, gave a big-picture perspective on the fact that we’re hurtling towards increasingly more choices – and the only way to keep up is to benchmark best practices no less than every 90 days.

Today’s managers must increasingly look for ways to save money and be flexible, he said, or they’ll be easily left behind. 

So how’s it possible? It starts by being the kind of person who says “Yes, if…” rather than “No, because…,” he told the crowd. That opens up possibilities. And later, in a personal interview with FMI-LEG News, he elaborated on ways to bring about “entrepreneurial public management rather than bureaucratic public administration. 

“First of all, all good leaders listen to the people around them,” he said. “The world is bigger and more complex than you are.”

Unfortunately, Americans do two things that are often confused with listening: Allowing our eyes to glaze over while someone else speaks (which is actually “patience,” he said,) or only being quiet long enough to formulate what we’re going to say to the person next (which is more accurately termed “cheating.”)

But true listening is asking questions to the point that you understand and appreciate why the topic makes sense to the other person – whether or not you actually agree.

Past that, he said, good managers in this age of change know that “lions cannot afford to hunt chipmunks.”  In his speech, Gingrich used former U.S. President Ronald Reagan as an example of a lion who clearly recognized the “antelopes” in his line of sight: dealing with the Soviet Union, renewing the American economy, and rebuilding belief in American culture. Anything else – any other “chipmunk” – was not something he handled on a personal level.      

In coming days, however, we’ll have to keep our antelopes in view on both personal and societal levels. As a culture, we’ll have to deal with the rising competition of Asians and Indians. There will also be the question of whether we stay in the game, or we choose to “elegantly decay” like the European model of work as “something you avoid if you possibly can.” Consider, he said, that the French work 35 hours a week and have five weeks of vacation in addition to national holidays.

Janis Pipal, fleet purchasing administrator for the City of Tacoma, attended Gingrich’s talk, and said she’s already concerned that her organization is “acting like the Europeans.”

“I think we are, if people are asking what the City of Tacoma is doing for them, instead of asking what they can do to make things better,” she said.

But with an eye on the future – and a willingness to adapt to whatever comes down the pike next – there’s still a chance that groups like hers will be able to make it through.