Nations gain when leaders push ground-breaking ideas
Thanks to today’s twenty-four-hour-a-day news bombardment, it’s hard not to notice all the media speculation about one particular job. The Presidency.
What type of person makes for a good president? Someone highly educated or one in touch with regular Americans? Where should a president put his focus? What kind of ideas should he (she) have?
Questions like this are asked everyday, and answered in several ways, in newspapers, on radio, in social media, and on television.
One thing our president needs to be has nothing to do with policy or party affiliation.
Today’s president needs to be an innovator.
A friend recently offered this observation: Someone knowledgable of the past would seem best able to improve the future.
Although we often learn from our mistakes, we probably don’t want our president getting too much education of this kind while in office.
Unlike 20 years ago, the education of today’s school students demands a healthy exposure to computers and the internet. Our curriculum changes, and it changes fast.
Politics is much the same. It constantly changes, and an innovative idea can be the difference between success and disaster.
Learning from the past is still important and can keep us from repeating mistakes.
But creativity-innovation-allows the breaking of new ground.
Countries like South Korea and Taiwan grasped this in their developmental years, and were able to propel their economies to the front with bold ideas.
They based their economies on once-strange strategies, such as import substitution. Imports were “substituted” with goods made in their country, enhancing their growth many times over.
It was the innovation of their leaders that led to success.
We need to embrace innovation as well.
Our president will likely need new ideas to pull the country from the recession.
What worked in the past is proving insufficient in growing today’s economy.
A president armed with bold ideas and a little luck could launch us into a new golden age.
You can follow Colin Criss on Twitter @ADKCurrent
