Recently, I wrote about the Big Three Auto companies and how they need to change, and change their product lines if they wanted to stay “big”.   Since those columns there has been even more evidence that these companies are struggling to keep up with current realities.  Additional plants have closed, the production of trucks has been dramatically lowered, the projected number of vehicles to be sold this year has been lowered and now Chrysler has gotten out of the leasing business because the resale value of the big vehicles leased has plummeted.

Earlier in the year I wrote several columns about Brazil and how it will be one of the countries leading the world with economic growth, vision and innovation.  It is a country that leads the world in smart use of ethanol.  It is a country that has a sustained rate of economic growth and a country that seems to be finally realizing its potential as being the country of the future.

A good friend sent me a video about a Ford plant in Brazil that shows what the new and future auto manufacturing plants of the world can and will look like.  It is interesting that this Ford plant is in Brazil and not in the U.S.    Brazil is in the stage of becoming a new model country for manufacturing while the U.S. is stuck in institutional constructs of the last century.  The good news is that Ford has found a new way to …

The economy has clearly become the primary subject today in America.  It has become so not only because of all the issues discussed in the prior column, but also because it has also become the number one issue for voters in this significant election year.

In the “Forecast for 2008″ column on January 9th of this year I wrote:

“The U.S. Economy will not go into a recession as it has been traditionally defined.  There will be a bumpy ride, particularly in the first six months of the year. The traditional conversation will be an either/or discussion:  will there be a recession or not.  While there will most certainly be economic indicators that will point to recession, there will be others that do not.  The problem is not whether there is or is not a recession but rather the symptoms of a reorganization that is going on due to the flow to a global economy.  The view of the economic landscape is still too often looked at through traditional, increasingly less valid historical national measurements that seem to no longer apply. There will be pockets of recession, such as in the state of Michigan, but the economic bumps in the road in 2008 will not fit into traditional national recessionary measurements”

There are a couple of points to be made here.  First I was clearly underestimating the severity of the economic upheavals and equally importantly the negative mindset that would descend, courtesy of the media, upon the general sense of danger and risk.  …

We have now entered the Shift Age, the global stage of humanity’s evolutionary journey.  What this means is that the U.S. must redefine itself within this new global age.  During the second half of the 20th century, the U.S. was a super power, the super power that lead the Western bloc of nations in contrast to the Soviet Union which was the other super power that lead the Eastern bloc.  Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union crumbled in the early 1990s the U.S. simply accepted victory and did not spend time reflecting what this meant. 
 
What does it mean to be the sole super power?  What does it mean to be a super power in this new global age?  There was no national discourse at all on this subject. Where once we defined ourselves as the good guys against the bad guys, the country that stood for Capitalism against Communism we did not reflect on the fact that this definition of who we were had changed.  We entered the new millennium without a new sense of what being a global power meant.   Without a clear adversary to help define us, we lost our way. This has, in part, been part of the problem that has led us to have a greatly reduced stature in the world.
This has been a topic of conversation for me with numerous CEOs around the country in recent months.  It will merit further discussion here in the months …