The Big Obstacle to Business Today
9/23/2010 12:15:28 PM
Today is the first day that the initial round of the health care legislation that was passed last spring will take affect. I was meeting with a friend who is a benefits agent and asked her what changed on September 23, 2010. Her answer was curt and right on the money. "Your freedom changed.”
Are you holding on to your seat? We are turning towards the midterm elections where we will replace or re-elect our representatives for public office. In the next five weeks, you and I will be inundated with political ads. The issues of this campaign are of enormous importance to the well being of our country. The current power struggle goes well beyond the socialization of health care. The big gorilla swinging from the chandelier is the recession. Part of this is the cumulative effect of a series of bad legislative moves (TARP funds and Cash for Clunkers, for example) that simply served to put us into hyper debt at hyper speed. The unnerving thing about the series of bills that blasted through Congress in the past two years is our representatives' admission that they really did not always know what they were voting for or against. They were just voting for a change. (Let me just say that so am I in November.)
As a marketing professional, I am often asked to put a good spin on a bad situation. I tell clients that my business is built around giving them excellent marketing. Promoting the positive about their company and downplaying the negative is a part of effective corporate communications that should be a component of any marketing plan. However, there are certain things that no amount of marketing can overcome. Among those things is poor leadership and horrendous decisions. Yet you will see and hear political pundits do all sorts of contortions around the issues of this campaign season, twisting first this way and then that, to say the candidate X is a no good so-and-so, and candidate Y has the common man at heart, because he is one of us. Yet candidate Y will be distancing himself from politician Z, the person he stood behind just a few short months ago while he was stumping for legislation that was dressed up to be our economic savior, but has been undressed to be the very thing that continues to drag us down. Just this week I heard the President suggest that we are in an economic recovery without new jobs. He was supported in his views by some Ivy League economists. The last I checked, the federal government and universities had not had massive layoffs the way the rest of the nation has experienced. There is not 10% unemployment among government and college employees. It seems to me that the only place the economy is in good shape is inside the Washington establishment and in higher ed.
Let me go on record as saying I think the bad economy is just a symptom of a larger issue: poor leadership. I have been a small business owner for some time now. I deal with business leaders all day long. The thing I admire in most of the business leaders I meet is their ability to work around obstacles. There is a lot of ingenuity that goes into navigating a business to profit. However, when my individual health care plan is no longer available, not because my health insurance provider does not want to offer it, but because the rules on the health care legislation have yet to be set by government regulators and my insurance company does not even know whether that plan will be allowed to continue under the new rules; then we have a unavoidable obstacle. The obstacle to their business becomes my loss of freedom.
Don’t be fooled by the spin of politics. I plan to vote in November. My strong encouragement is you do the same. My vote will be going for uncommon leadership. It was Herbert Hoover who said, "When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.”