Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Bridging the Gap between Business and Government

My entire professional career has been spent in the private sector.  I worked at IBM for 37 years until I retired in June of 2007.  I now consult on innovation and technical strategy with IBM, Citigroup and other companies.  Through all this time, I have enjoyed my career in business, dealing with products and services and working with clients. 

But when I look back over the past forty years, some of my most rewarding times have been my involvement with government boards and committees.  From 1997 to 2002, for example, I was a member of the President’s IT Advisory Committee (PITAC), and served as co-chair of PITAC for part of that time.  After the 2008 elections, I was part of Barack Obama’s transition team, working in the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform (TIGR) group.  In the last two decades I have been involved with a number of Department of Energy initiatives and have served on the boards of Fermilab and Argonne National Lab.

Part of the reason I enjoy my government oriented activities is the idea of giving back to a country that embraced me as a refugee from Cuba fifty years ago and provided the financial support for my physics education in the 1960s.  But, there is also the pleasure of collaborating with experts from business, academia and government to jointly tackle some of the most important and complex problems facing the nation and the wider world.

As we know, the complexity of our problems is only increasing, and so is the need for even closer collaboration among business, government and academia.  Which is why the present conflicts - some call them war - between business and the Obama administration are so disconcerting.  At times, the rhetoric coming out of business and business publications is just plain ugly.

Living Through Times of Political Volatility

As I continue to reflect on the mood of the country and our recent wave election, I came across this excellent New York Times OpEd, Divided We Thrive, by author and journalist Jonathan Rauch.  His article puts forth the simplest and clearest explanation for the wild swings we have seen in recent elections: 

“In all three of the most recent earthshaking midterm elections - 1994, 2006 and now 2010 - the same candidate won: divided government.  That is not a coincidence.  In the last two decades, a strong and persistent pattern has emerged, one that will dominate our politics for some time to come, because it is rooted in two important political realities.  First, the public strongly prefers divided government.  Second, it has every reason to.”

Rauch writes that in 21 of the past 30 years we have had divided government, where one party controls the White House and the other controls the House, Senate or both.  The middle four years of George Bush’s presidency were the longest stint during that period when we did not have divided government, most likely because following the 9/11 terrorist attacks the country was unusually unified.  He points out: “Consistently, when either party, never mind which, obtains total control, its popularity collapses and the voters take the first available opportunity to bring in the other side.”

Reflections on the Mood of the Country

The US national mood seems to be going through wild swings every few years, as evidenced by the results of our recent elections.  After the 2004 elections, we were talking about the coming Republican hegemony.  Not only was President George Bush re-elected, but Republicans enjoyed comfortable majorities in both the House (231 - 200) and Senate (55 - 44).  This Republican hegemony lasted but two years, as the Democrats gained control of the House and Senate in 2006.

Then in 2008 we started talking about a whole new hegemony.  Barack Obama became President and the Democrats gained large majorities in the House (257 - 178) and Senate (60 - 40).  Once more, long term predictions turned out to be short lived.  Our just concluded 2010 wave election saw the Republicans re-gain control of the House (239 - 188), as well as gain 6 seats in the Senate and 9 governorships.

What’s going on out there?  According to CNN exit polls, the parties retained their base.  92% of registered Democrats and 95% of Republicans voted for their respective party candidate in the 2010 House races.  The figures were similar in the 2006 and 2008 elections when around 90% voted for House candidates of their own party. 

But when you look at independent voters unaffiliated with either party, the picture is radically different.  These same CNN polls show that in the 2006 House elections, independents voted 57% for Democrats and 39% for Republicans.  In 2010, the figures were just about reversed.  Independents voted 56% for Republican house candidates and 38% for Democrats.  These are really big swings.  Given that independents were more than a quarter of all voters in these elections, it totally explains why the Democrats took the House in 2006 and then lost it in 2010.

How to Restore the American Dream

Fareed Zakaria recently published a very good cover story in Time Magazine - How to Restore the American Dream - which was also the basis for a special edition of his CNN program Fareed Zakaria GPS.  Dr. Zakaria is a renowned journalist an author, and an astute observer of the vast economic and political changes taking place around the world.  Last June I heard him give an excellent talk at an IBM conference in Shanghai. 

The basic premise of the Time article and CNN special is that while the forces of technology and globalization helped lead America to the forefront of the world stage, they are now hollowing out America’s middles class.  The American Dream, - the possibility that anyone can get ahead and achieve success and prosperity through talent and hard work, - may well be disappearing.

Is the idea of the American Dream dead?  “For large swaths of America, it MAY be.  The national unemployment rate is 9.6% but that only tells a part of the story.  Millions of jobs have been lost in America.  The question is: how do we bring jobs - and GOOD jobs - back?”

The MIT Systems Thinking Conference

I recently participated in MIT’s 2010 Systems Thinking Conference for Contemporary Challenges.  This annual conference is sponsored by Systems Design and Management (SDM) - an interdisciplinary program between MIT’s School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management.  The SDM program aims to provide mid-career professionals with a systems perspective that will help them address and solve large-scale, global, complex challenges.  Most of the students in the classes I have taught at MIT are enrolled in SDM.

The Systems Thinking Conference is intended to showcase innovative ways of addressing complex challenges, in particular, how to integrate technology, management and social sciences to successfully solve very tough problems.  The agenda included sessions on sustainability and urban systems, health care and services.  The talks covered a wide range of subjects, from the global development of Boeing’s 787 to the home of the future.  I was co-organizer of the session on service systems, gave a talk on Technology and Innovation in the Service Economy and moderated a panel with the other speakers in the session.

John Sterman - professor in MIT’s Sloan School of Management and director of the Systems Dynamics Group - gave a very interesting talk: A Banquet of Consequences: Systems Thinking and Modeling for Climate Policy.  The title of his talk is based on a quote by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson: Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.