CHAPTER 11

Massive and Fast: Problems That Cannot Wait

With our institutions in disarray and mired in dysfunction, only a few of them—led by extraordinary individuals with unique leadership skills—will be able to address the global, national, and local challenges that must be remedied quickly (greater than ten years is too long) and at enormous scale. These problems are so big and so urgent that we cannot wait for our institutions to catch up, especially because corralling these crises requires entirely new and imaginative approaches. Clearly, our institutions, as we know them today, are not up to that task.

But while all of the crises covered in this book cannot be seen as anything but acute, a few enormous problems emerging stand out as more dire and pressing than the others. I call these problems massive, fast challenges. They are huge and seem intractable—and we need massive change, fast, to mitigate them. Time is of the essence and to solve these challenges, global or regional collaboration as well as public–private sector cooperation is required.

Two Global Crises

Two global challenges stand out as undeniably massive, desperately pressing, and badly in need of creative solutions as well as focused and concerted attention from countries around the world. They are the dire challenges of lost jobs and climate change. Let’s look at job losses first.

If we take the conservative estimate that 10 percent of jobs in the world will be eliminated over the next ten years by automation technology, we would need to retrain and find positions for three hundred million people currently in the workforce. To add to this challenge, there are more than one billion youth under twenty years old living in underdeveloped countries who need education now and a job in the next ten years. If we do not address this challenge immediately, the likely consequences are dire. Consider the worsening impact of these job losses on wealth disparities for future generations across the globe. And then consider what tens of millions of young people with no obvious future, falling behind other more fortunate people in their societies, will do in response. They will migrate en masse, revolt, start wars. One thing they won’t do is be positive forces in their countries, adding to the potential for innovation and lifestyle improvements that every region badly needs. While this essentially class conflict plays out, a dangerous situation could take root in which smart, pervasive technology would be embedded with people largely unaware of its potential benefits and harms.

Next, let’s consider the global crisis of climate change. Estimates of the effects of global warming suggest we have little more than a decade to dramatically modify our carbon footprint before things are potentially irreversible.¹ Flooding, drought, and intense summer heat as well as violent storms could become the new normal. Drastic changes in global water supplies could severely compromise global health, availability of food, and fragile ecosystems. From today’s vantage point—looking at the lack of political will, the attacks on scientific facts coming from some quarters, and the hot and cold conflicts that separate nations—it is hard to imagine that we can summon up a global effort to stall climate change.

Few would argue that either of these global crises lack the utmost urgency. The challenge of lost jobs involves the nature of migration and the unimaginable consequences of enormous numbers of people being unemployed on a global basis—how that would foment perilous political upheaval and further fracturing of relationships within and among nations everywhere. The challenge of climate change is, simply put, an existential threat for humanity and the natural world. Both crises beg for massive, fast solutions.

But beyond the obvious need for massive, fast approaches to these problems is something particularly compelling and essential. At a time of impenetrable political and social disagreements and global fissures, spreading populist movements, economic dysfunction and disillusionment, technological fears and uncertainty, institutional malaise and imminent demographic warfare, problems that affect everyone like global unemployment and natural destruction from climate change are also galvanizing bonds for all of us. They are enemies at all of our gates; enemies we have in common. And what we need now, in fact, are common enemies of exactly this type, enemies that bring us closer together through our shared efforts to solve and eliminate enormous problems. Left alone, these crises will tear us further apart and render us all helpless.

Indeed, massive, fast programs, by their very nature—specifically their size and scale—address each of the universal worries raised in the ADAPT framework. They provide us with valuable experience and skills that we can use to accelerate our efforts in finding solutions to all of the crises we are compelled to withstand. Examples of success can inspire us to keep going. More granularly, massive, fast campaigns support the development and intensification of the strategies, structure, and cultural elements (the three sides of the change triangle) discussed earlier in the book. Amplifying while speeding up the potential impact of these three elements is essential to overcoming the welter of crises we face.

As it turns out, this is a particularly good moment for massive, fast solutions. Significant financial resources are obviously necessary for a global massive, fast effort, and in developed economies plenty of capital is now available for investment in these types of urgent global improvement activities. As evidence of the deep capital pools, interest rates are at or below zero in parts of Europe and at bare minimum levels in the United States. Using these funds for massive, fast programs would instantly provide substantial employment opportunities around the world, not to mention improve individual well-being and tamp down demographic and other social conflicts. But before those types of investments can be counted on, large global bankers will have to recraft their role and become the starting point for international innovative solutions to big problems, which in time will generate sufficient returns, encouraging other investors to add their funds to the mix.

National and Regional Challenges

While lost jobs and climate change are global in nature, urgent problems at the national or regional level deserve similar massive, fast attention. These crises could also benefit from strategic and tactical advances made in global massive, fast efforts and might gain in shared resources from the collaborative relationships begun during the massive, fast effort. As a starting point, consider this amalgam of serious challenges for countries around the world:

1. Heading off the pending retirement crisis in the United States.
2. Finding a solution to the significant tax challenges confronting Europe.
3. Creating opportunities for people in Russia living outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
4. Addressing the educational and job creation needs of youth in Africa.
5. Creating a positive direction for the UK and the European Union after Brexit.
6. Solving the intergenerational disparity challenge in Australia.
7. Dealing with the environmental crisis in China.

It is tempting to dismiss the notion that in today’s environment we could join together in a massive, fast effort. But optimistically, I prefer to characterize massive, fast as a dormant rather than a lost skill. After all, we have moved hugely and quickly before in an effort so imposing that it altered the trajectory of the world: the post–World War II Marshall Plan. Referencing the Marshall Plan can be instructive for us today because, like now, the world was fractured in the immediate aftermath of the war. Perhaps the Marshall Plan’s most exemplary result was to initiate broad and strong social, political, and economic alliances that lasted upwards of seventy years in the non-Communist segment of the globe.

For that reason, it is worth keeping in mind the critical factors behind the Marshall Plan’s success as we think about engaging in projects that are meant to solve massive problems fast. Columbia University economist Glen Hubbard identified four such factors.² First, there was a very clear global and local governance structure over the money, made possible by the existence of a single source of funding (that is, the United States). Second, there was notable engagement from the private sector; indeed, private sector growth was the target of the plan. Third, there were associated reforms by each government receiving support. Fourth, the regional coordinating body ensured that there was competition for funds; countries had to want the money and have a plan for how to use it.

Inside GAME

Obviously, there is not a single one-size-fits-all program for massive, fast efforts. However the Marshall Plan’s uniquely successful approach is a good foundation for any large-scale challenge that we tackle today. One of the endeavors now under way that clearly follows the Marshall Plan’s gleanings (intentionally or not) and addresses critical ADAPT framework concerns is a massive, fast solution called GAME.³ First, the scope (spoiler alert, it is ambitious): the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship has the audacious mandate of supporting the development of ten million successful, local entrepreneurs in India by 2030, split equally between men and women. These entrepreneurs would start and run small and medium-sized businesses that would ultimately employ dozens, if not thousands, of people in every community. To put that aspiration in perspective, there are 5.6 million organizations with more than one hundred employees in the United States.

That’s a big and stunningly speedy goal for a new organization, but GAME (which is just now getting off the ground) has the advantage of having the right person spearheading it. Ravi Venkatesan, GAME’s founder and chairman, was formerly head of Microsoft and Cummins in India, leading the effort to give both of those multinationals a deep foothold in India. Subsequently, as chairman of Baroda Bank, Venkatesan headed up a campaign that transformed Baroda from a sleepy, bureaucratically bound state-owned firm into an agile, privately owned financial services outfit, India’s second largest, with tentacles in every major money capital around the world. All of this is evidence that Venkatesan understands well how to build and manage large, global organizations in local surroundings from smaller beginnings.

For Venkatesan, GAME is the answer to the enormous jobs problem that India and Africa (GAME intends to expand into Africa once the India program is under way) face because it is the countervailing idea to a series of current trends that taken together will only continue to worsen the employment challenge. First, only 21 percent of India’s nonagricultural jobs come from small to medium-sized enterprises, whereas in China that number is 83 percent, in Bangladesh it is 75 percent, and in the United States it is 53 percent. In other words, India (and Africa as well) is deficient in crucial business segments that create a lot of jobs. Second, large organizations in these regions are narrowly focused on increasing productivity to compete and hence on reducing the total number of people they employ. Automation and other IT initiatives in the coming years will accelerate this bias. Moreover, urban-based technology companies in India and Africa, such as the many outsourcing operations and global customer care lines, will never address employment needs for the vast majority of people who live in villages or small towns. And third, on the other side of the coin, there aren’t enough opportunities for single-person firms in rural areas to make a dent in employment needs.

Ask Venkatesan about the states where GAME is piloting its efforts and he can describe in detail the failed grand initiatives to impose top-down, large-scale job creation. Those initiatives didn’t work because in some cases they lacked sufficient commitments from the private sector or were slowed by too much red tape or were too management-heavy to operate close to the ground in small, close-knit communities. Yet in those same places, Venkatesan notes, there is still a large unmet demand for the kinds of services small and midsized entrepreneurial firms provide that meet basic human needs. These companies include hairdressers, specialized retailers, hotels, and restaurants. As these businesses grow from small operations into midsized entrenched local outfits, they hire additional workers, which expands the pool of potential customers for these businesses. This virtuous circle improves the regional economy and furthers job prospects.

This type of job creation strategy would be difficult enough to execute in a single community or region, let alone essentially over two continents, but Venkatesan has simplified the complexity of this massive, fast project with three inverse foundational principles that propel his plan forward: (1) it has a global vision that is local at its core; (2) it involves marshaling a big organization—complete with governance structures, task forces, and accountability and measurement systems, designed to encourage, enable, and support small and midsized businesses via individual entrepreneurs; and (3) it is based on a strategy that is vast in scope and speed but with almost painfully methodical and specified executional plans. Let’s take a closer look at these three foundational principles:

1. Global vision/local core. Insight and learning from across the world about required skills, technology, and tools for entrepreneurship to blossom are rechanneled to local communities, forging an efficient system to accumulate knowledge globally and deliver it to individuals that can make best use of it in their home regions. The goal is to construct very different value chains of capabilities development and technology needs as well as financing and market support tools in each GAME locale but to have the same broad pool of information and resources available to enhance these value chains. The starting point, support requirements, and skills deficits for each entrepreneur will be very different from place to place and person to person.

   A primary obstacle is to change local mindset from the nearly exclusive pursuit of jobs in the public sector and large organizations to one in which entrepreneurship is viewed as an equally admirable career option. GAME hopes to adopt this way of thinking by globally nurturing entrepreneurial spirit and capabilities through India’s and Africa’s education systems, converting job seekers into entrepreneurs, teaching single entrepreneurs and microfirms how to scale their businesses for greater revenue and increasing the proportion of women who start and thrive as entrepreneurs.

2. A big, well-funded organization encouraging entrepreneurship one person at a time. A key insight that Venkatesan plucked from studying other attempts at developing entrepreneurs at scale was that they tended to be project-based, tactical efforts without sufficient capital or a muscular organizational structure designed to allow the operation to last for a long period of time. By contrast, GAME’s underlying organization is impressive in its scope, resources, and capabilities. It includes alliance partners drawn from government, private sector, NGOs, implementation organizations, nonprofits, and donors, each of whom is thoroughly screened and brings skills necessary to execute on GAME’s overall strategy; a set of task forces spearheaded by these partner organizations focused on each element of the GAME plan, from building the entrepreneurial mindset in schools to creating entrepreneurship models for each locale; and a separate team to support the task forces and help build the ecosystems essential to making the program work and endure. These organizational components are targeted at encouraging, developing, launching, and supporting entrepreneurs one by one within a local business market and environment.
3. Massive scope and speed but methodical plans. When I first discussed GAME with Venkatesan, I was flabbergasted by the breadth of its goals (ten million entrepreneurs in India by 2030) and the extraordinary level of detail that he mustered in planning the organization. Glancing at his organizational map, I see that GAME is set up like a well-oiled machine, with interlocking parts and plenty of checks and balances. There are five sought outcomes, from nurturing entrepreneurial mindset early to turning job seekers into entrepreneurs to enabling women entrepreneurs; four targeted breakthroughs expected to be the backbone for vast scale, including advances in technology and frameworks for expanding capital and consumer markets; and eight task forces designed around the breakthroughs to identify innovations to work on further, mobilize and help fund local partners, and drive action at the local level. And this is just a thumbnail sketch of the depth of GAME’s organizational structure that will serve as a platform for top-down, bottom-up economic development.

Big, complex projects with remarkable degrees of scale are hard to plan for in exquisite detail. Yet GAME does. Venkatesan recognizes that it is essential to be flexible and learn as things change, thus some details will undoubtedly be abandoned the first time a new and better lesson is gleaned. His approach is very much like a field marshal who has prepared the troops with thoroughness and diligence so they can navigate the uncertainties of not just a single battle but the whole war.

As noted, GAME’s operating model closely mirrors many of the essential elements of the Marshall Plan that made it successful. Thus it serves well as a blueprint for other massive, fast projects. To wit:

1. GAME has a well-designed global and local governance structure managing money and other essential resources.
2. GAME has significant engagement from the private sector; indeed, private sector growth is the target of the plan.
3. GAME requires associated ecosystem adaptations in each locale receiving support.
4. GAME’s regional strategy and place-based models ensure there is competition for support; locales need to want entrepreneurship as a core part of their success.

Like the Marshall Plan before it, GAME is entirely consistent with the worldview presented in this book to address global crises. It is Local First; it measures success by interdependence and inclusivity; it focuses on reshaping institutions—in particular, education and financial systems and local development organizations; and it uses technology beneficially to serve human needs.

To these elements, Venkatesan adds two more, which upon closer inspection also were prevalent in the Marshall Plan: learn before scaling and have enough capital to be patient with the projects in the portfolio, giving them sufficient time to evolve, gain a rhythm, and mature.

Of course, there are also differences between GAME and the Marshall Plan and they are equally important. In the Marshall Plan there was a single source of funding and implementation, the US government, but GAME will rely on a much wider support structure: private individuals lending money and talent, corporations providing expertise, local and national governments changing regulations and practices, and school systems altering curricula, just to name a few. The Marshall Plan was primarily designed to rearm economies along the lines that existed before the war, while GAME entails a dramatic change in thinking about how an economy should be built, how entrepreneurs are fostered, and how small and midsized businesses can spur economic growth in India and Africa. Finally, unlike the Marshall Plan, GAME does not implement and distribute projects and resources directly but works through alliance partners.

The Inevitability of Regional Solutions

Although the jobs shortage is a global dilemma—not restricted by any means to developing countries—GAME is a regional answer. There is a good reason for that, having to do with the decline of the nation-state as the predominant identity for many people around the world—and with that the lessening ability of nations to join together and solve problems as a global force.

In 1993, Japanese organizational management specialist Kenichi Ohmae, former dean of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, wrote about the waning influence of nations, anticipating that conceptually countries would be increasingly eclipsed by regional governing entities.⁴ His argument was based on two factors: first, many nations (most notably European but also African and Caribbean countries) had given up control of their currency, a crucial factor for economic unity within a nation; and second, most nation-states were generally not natural economic units anyway, because of the vast disparities within countries. Ohmae’s primary example was how little in common northern Italy had with southern Italy. But today he could just as reasonably point to northern England and London, central China and coastal China, or Uttar Pradesh and Bangalore. Ohmae predicted that not only would regions become more meaningful political and economic actors, but that they would begin to organize themselves across borders. Indeed, today’s massive, fast projects tend to punctuate the enhanced role that regions are playing.

A lot of these regional solutions are popping up in Africa, where massive, fast campaigns are sorely needed. Perhaps the one that best exemplifies the declining relevance of national interests in favor of regional cooperation is a new project called Smart Africa. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president since 2000, is considered an unrelenting force by most who meet him. He led the victorious insurgency that, in 1994, ended the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis by Hutu extremists. Although it is undeniable that Kagame has strongman tendencies (and reasonable critics who appropriately draw attention to that aspect of his record), he has focused laserlike on bringing Rwanda into the twenty-first century and transforming it into a middle-income country. From a broader perspective, Kagame’s most impressive accomplishment is Smart Africa, for which he has organized twenty-six disparate African countries into a coherent unit whose goal is to develop a single technology infrastructure for the continent as a means of advancing regional economies—and, with it, giving Africa control over its future.

Smart Africa’s most audacious ambition is to digitally connect every individual, business, and government within Africa by 2030.⁵ The project hopes to support local development of infrastructure, capital availability, financial and corporate regulations, and social planning to take advantage of the new digital capacity and rapidly advancing economies throughout Africa. It is entirely possible that this cross-border regional cooperative initiative could produce something not seen in the world; a multinational Sovereign Development Fund. In a nod to President John F. Kennedy, Kagame and his fellow leaders involved in Smart Africa have called this enterprise “Africa’s Moonshot.”

That is an apt metaphor for any massive, fast effort. Kennedy’s challenge to the United States to send a man to the moon within a decade was inspiring and, ultimately, wildly rewarding—and a perfect example of what a nation, region, or globe can achieve when people (in the largest sense of the word) rally behind an endeavor. Not only did the United States win the physical race to the moon, but in the process the country elevated the stature of democratic systems compared with their communist rivals and became the world leader in science in ways that benefited the United States in the public and private arenas for years to come.⁶ Millions of jobs were created over the years that could be linked directly or indirectly to going to the moon, many of them tied up in the list of spinoff technologies from the space race that could fill a book—including GPS systems, CT scans, wireless headsets, LED lighting, freeze-dried foods, memory foam, portable computers, scratch-resistant eyeglass lenses, mobile phones, water purification systems, and home insulation, to name just a few.⁷ 

Climate Change Needs Global Action

We need a similarly inspiring vision on a global scale if we are going to overcome the climate change crisis. Global massive, fast projects have shown to be nearly impossible to successfully implement, but climate change demands just that. Indeed, the climate crisis presents the perfect opportunity for leaders from government, business, and civil society or anyone else, such as a precocious sixteen-year-old from Sweden who so captivated the world with her passion about the issue in 2019, to come together on today’s version of a moonshot. There are definite similarities: there is a clear enemy; as Kennedy had the Soviet Union and its lead in the space race, we have an unsustainable planet. Like then, there is evidence we are behind. Solving climate change will require collaboration across all elements of society and may reward us with substantial derivative innovation, new forms of work, and untold employment opportunities. And we have just ten years to complete the undertaking.

The elements of how a global effort to fight climate change could be mobilized today—an undertaking that would include contributions from governments as well as individuals, businesses as well as nonprofits, scientists as well as laypeople—are actually relatively easy to enumerate. Unfortunately this means that our lack of political will or collaboration skills may be the real enemy. These elements can be broken down into four categories.

First, we have to recognize the ways that we as a global society can dramatically reduce our carbon footprint right now. Although reducing the use of fossil fuels is crucial, there are many other possibilities that, if adopted as global priorities, could also have a surprisingly extraordinary impact. The most comprehensive analysis of what should be done to reverse global warming immediately is contained in a book called Drawdown by environmentalist Paul Hawken.⁸ Among the one hundred possible actions and their carbon footprint reductions that Hawken delineates are some surprising entries. Next to the obvious options, like solar farms and geothermal energy, Hawken gives us family planning, plant-rich diets, and educating girls, to name but a few. Each solution in Drawdown has a significant impact on carbon emissions, is business-friendly (although some would greatly disrupt certain sectors but replace them with new industries and companies), and entails actions by all of us. His solutions have the potential to help address elements of other pressing crises described in this book, including creating more jobs and reducing economic asymmetry, tearing down nationalist walls, and rekindling trust in technology and institutions. For a summary of the actions we can take and the impact they would have, see Table 11.1.

The second essential element for establishing a global massive, fast plan to fight climate change is a recognition that we are already living with the dire effects of global warming—and they pale against what people will experience by 2030. Today, we are grudgingly getting used to enormous deadly storms and fires; severe declines in agricultural productivity; droughts; and extensive property losses. While we work to solve the problem of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in the future, we need to have smart solutions for mitigating its impact today.

The third element for establishing a global, fast response is that we must encourage—with resources, development programs, education, and training—the rapid development of new technological solutions for global warming. Hawken provides some known technological answers, but what about the unknown ones yet to be discovered?

Finally, although our institutions do not appear to be up to the task of solving big, weighty problems—in fact, too often their shortcomings are part of the reason for these problems—we must include in any global climate crisis project the institutions that have the enlightened leadership and constituencies to be a positive force in the campaign. At some point we will need our core institutions to again play a central (and trustworthy) role in maintaining stability and fostering a sense of certainty in our lives as local, regional, and global citizens. If our institutions do not have a part in fixing global warming, they will be a major and disconcerting source of inertia.

TABLE 11.1 Top twenty actions to reduce our carbon footprint

©2020 Project Drawdown. SOURCE: www.drawdown.org.
Under Project Drawdown Scenario 2, which stops climate change close to 1.5°C of global warming.

Technology as a Global Facilitator

One development, nonexistent at the turn of the twentieth-first century, that could make global campaigns to tackle global crises more possible is social media, with its unique and enormous reach and capability to rally large groups of people around a movement. No recent effort is more illustrative of this than the Arab Spring in late 2011 and beyond. Interestingly, I got a sneak preview of the Arab Spring and how social media would help drive it four months before it occurred, when I accompanied a global MBA class to the United Arab Emirates. In one of our sessions, Mohamed al Thani, a member of the royal family of Qatar, made a strikingly prescient set of observations to our group. He told us that emergent but limited new freedoms in the Gulf countries and Egypt would lead to a desire for more, and that the region’s relatively young populations were getting extremely impatient with the current leadership and upset at the wealth disparity between people in power and everyone else.

Perhaps of most interest, al Thani argued that new technology, specifically social media and ubiquitous communications channels, would make it possible to organize these disaffected youth in ways never before experienced in the region. If the Gulf and nearby Arab countries did not wake up to managing their populations’ concerns better, he said, governments would be overthrown. Four months later, an uprising that started in Tunisia spread through most of the Arab world, eventually resulting in revolutionary efforts in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen as well as riots in Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, and Sudan. The Egyptian government fell and consequences of the uprising can be seen in the Syrian and Libyan civil wars as well as the extreme violence in Yemen.

When al Thani shared with us his hunches about the region, our group of visiting MBA students was skeptical, believing that the leadership in most of these countries would be able to manage any uprising quite easily. We were wrong, of course; we underestimated the speed with which electronic communications and social media can organize and coordinate activism. As it turned out, the slow machinery of government could not respond quickly enough to dilute the impact of social media. Social media is a powerful tool that can be put in either the right or wrong hands. We would hope that it increasingly serves as the foundation to drive massive, fast and positive change. History will ultimately determine whether the Arab Spring was a positive or negative series of events. But what it has told us already about our ability to propel a coordinated effort quickly across national borders is priceless.

The fundamental point worth reemphasizing is that we will not be able to address the crises described throughout this book fast enough if we depend on the speed of decision-making and implementation typical of the past seventy years. We need to do some important things on a very big scale, very quickly. Although the world may not be in ruins as it was after World War II, it is at a crucial fork in the road. Our choice of direction could lead to a wonderful life for those who are to follow us, or a world that we will not be proud to bring our children and our grandchildren into. The choice is in our hands and in whether we can revive the ability to achieve massive results quickly.