Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, made the case for why in an essay in The American Interest on July 10, 2016, entitled “When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism.” “Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust … Societies with high trust, or high social capital, produce many beneficial outcomes for their citizens: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for businesses, higher levels of prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity, among others … The trick … is figuring out how to balance reasonable concerns about the integrity of one’s own community with the obligation to welcome strangers, particularly strangers in dire need.”

  Minnesota right now is wrestling with that trick—as are other communities in America. Michael Gorman, who heads Split Rock Partners, an investment fund, and is a founding member of the Itasca Working Team, eloquently shared with me how he sees the challenges and tensions around this issue in Minnesota today. (It is not as if Minnesota hasn’t faced this challenge before: as Hewitt joked, until the 1960s the Lutheran Germans would not sell to the Lutheran Norwegians!)

  “Most of us who grew up here identify with the tribe of Minnesota,” said Gorman.

  There is something special about our civic culture that has developed over time. Minnesotans and Minnesota companies are distinctive in their level of engagement and commitment to the community, and their willingness to devote financial and human capital toward the public good. There is a sense that we can’t let up. Minnesota still retains the elements of community and connectivity that have served the region well since pioneer days. With the arrival of recent immigrants from backgrounds very different than their predecessors from Northern Europe, however, the cultural pH is changing. Figuring out how to include Minnesota’s new voices and perspectives while retaining the best attributes of the majority culture that has worked for a long time is a challenge.

  From one side, he argued, the commons in Minnesota needs to be expanded and become more inclusive—the definition of being Minnesotan needs to broaden so that every person, regardless of their background, sees Minnesota as fertile topsoil in which to grow and prosper. But it cannot just be a one-way conversation.

  “There also has to be assimilation from the new arrivals,” said Gorman. “Our message has to be: ‘We are glad that you are here and can’t wait to see the contributions you will make to our community. That asks something of us. But it also has to ask something of you. What are you doing to embrace the existing culture, to be a part of this place you have chosen as your new home?’”

  As a son of immigrants, Gorman is sensitive to this balancing act. “Immigrants in every era have taken comfort in the traditions and cultural touchstones from their homeland, particularly in the private domain. But regardless of our cultural heritage, all of us have to participate in American society. To do that successfully requires speaking English, gaining an education, and making a contribution. Most people, particularly those who immigrate in search of a better life, just want to live in a peaceful place and raise their children to be productive citizens. We should help them do that in every way possible.”

  Institutions have failed some of these new immigrant communities miserably in their own countries, Gorman added. Many have grown up in stressed and dysfunctional societies, or lived in refugee camps—“so trust is understandably in short supply. They have just been trying to survive. And the reason that is relevant is that we trust that institutions work here, that justice will be fair—we can count on our government to be largely noncorrupt; those are defining attributes of Minnesota. But to a new arrival, these may not be natural assumptions. We should be clear about how things work here, and back it up by making sure interactions with the community build their capacity to trust. There are many moments of truth, and everyone has to play their part.”

  New immigrants and native-born Minnesotans all need to act like we’re on the same team, Gorman concluded: “Many parts of Europe have paid a heavy price for failing to integrate immigrants into mainstream culture. We should be very intentional about not making the same mistakes. It is all about building trust that our future together is preferable to one characterized by separation and isolation.”

  This is a very important conversation. It is often avoided by all parties, but it cannot be any longer, now that states such as Minnesota are receiving a large influx of immigrants from traumatized countries in the World of Disorder. That’s why what happens here and in similar communities matters a lot now—and innovative social organizations, such as Itasca, are going to be critical to making this work.

  But color me an optimist. As anyone from Minneapolis or St. Louis Park will attest, one of the favorite outdoor pastimes of the area is walking around the lakes that dot the Twin Cities, almost all of which are lined with beautiful walking trails and bike paths. (With Minneapolis’s 22 city lakes and more than 170 parks, no resident lives more than six blocks from a park, according to the mayor’s office.) As I’ve said, those lakes are one of the Twin Cities’ great Mixmasters—you see every income, every race, every class walking around them. One day in the spring of 2016 I was walking Cedar Lake with my wife and friends and we bumped into three local African refugee community leaders—two from Somalia, one from Ethiopia—one of whom I had met at a University of Minnesota seminar. They were walking around the public paths on this warm May afternoon, just like we were, just like my mom and I had done hundreds of times over the years. Every once in a while a group of Somali women would also pass, walking the lakes wearing traditional Somali robes and head covers, but you could see their very modern Nike walking sneakers peeking out from below, almost like they were winking at you.

  If I have to bet, I am going to bet on those lakes. I am going to bet on the basic decency that is still at the core of this community. I am going to bet on that decency expanding to embrace the people it has left out and behind, and on that embrace being reciprocated. Not because anything is “inevitable” but because I met too many people applying hope.

  It Takes a Dining Room Table

  But it only works if you start with “a dining room table,” said Tim Welsh, the Itasca cofounder and McKinsey partner.

  “What we’ve discovered in Itasca is that a dining room table really matters,” Welsh explained. “When issues were really difficult to deal with—literally—we would get all the key players around someone’s dining room table.” In 2006, when Itasca persuaded the legislature to overturn the then governor Pawlenty’s veto of the transportation bill, it was after discussions around the Itasca member Charlie Zelle’s dining room table, including key Republican legislators willing to vote against their own sitting governor. At the time, Zelle was the president and CEO of Jefferson Lines, a local bus company.

  “Itasca does that regularly,” said Welsh. “I just hosted two dinners of next-generation leaders, in my dining room, about what our generation wants to see the state become. You get them all together around a dining room table and they leave realizing, ‘There are other leaders in the community who want the same things that I do at just a basic human level—that the community be safe and that everyone have better opportunities.’ It is a check your ego at the door and check your politics at the door group.”

  It would be easy to simply classify (and possibly dismiss) the Itasca Project as just another well-intentioned group of civic-minded individuals. It is anything but. In fact, I would suggest that Itasca could be a model of how dialogue and community building happen in the age of accelerations—between businesses, governments, and key civic players. It is living by Mother Nature’s killer apps—nimble, hybrid, heterodox, diverse, fact-based—unbound by partisan ideologies or other entrenched interests.

  Indeed, Itasca is a thoroughly twenty-first-century network. It has no by-laws, board of directors, executive director, CEO, or office space—no formal structure in any sense. It’s got a laughably bad website. Indeed, the group notes that it needs to exist only if there is work to be done—tha
t is why it is called a “Project.” It’s made up almost entirely of volunteers. The volunteers are very senior leaders from nearly every part of the community—business, government, and nonprofit. The only full-time staff are two project managers seconded to Itasca by McKinsey. And because there is very little staff, these volunteer leaders actually do the work. It manages itself through a Working Team that meets nearly every Friday at 7:30 a.m. for ninety minutes. “Yes—quite senior volunteers meet nearly every Friday morning,” noted Welsh. “All of them describe this as one of the most interesting meetings on their calendar, a meeting they ‘genuinely look forward to.’”

  Yet, despite its unusual structure, Itasca has made a tangible contribution to the economic and civic vitality of Minneapolis–St. Paul since 2003, argued Welsh. Besides its success in advancing the state’s transportation infrastructure and working on minority inclusion and CEO diversity training with people such as Sondra Samuels and MayKao Hang, it has:

  • Launched Real Time Talent, one of the most innovative workforce development initiatives in the country. It links the curriculum and training for more than four hundred thousand postsecondary students with the skill requirements of employers in the state (RealTimeTalentMN.org).

  • Created the Business Bridge, which facilitates connections between the procurement functions of large corporations and smaller potential suppliers located in the region. As a result of this effort, participating businesses added more than $1 billion to their spending with local businesses in two years—a year ahead of their goal.

  • Helped to build the case for investing more aggressively in higher education. By strengthening relationships between business and higher education leaders, and using a fact-based set of findings to justify investing more than an incremental amount, a coalition organized by Itasca helped increase spending in the state by more than $250 million annually.

  That’s not bad for a group of people with no budget, no office, no charter, virtually no Internet presence, virtually no staff—but a huge abundance of trust. It’s amazing what happens when people gather around a dining room table, and build trust by focusing exclusively on what they can do to push the community forward. Of course there are disagreements and different perspectives. That’s not the point. That’s a sign of health. The point, said Welsh, is that you don’t get up from the table until you’ve worked those differences out so you can move ahead—and no grandstanding allowed.

  “Trust doesn’t just materialize,” Welsh concluded. “It takes work. It requires a whole bunch of people to keep at it—to keep showing up, and that doesn’t just happen magically.”

  PART IV

  ANCHORING

  FOURTEEN

  From Minnesota to the World and Back

  The timing of this book was an accident—but it was an accident waiting to happen.

  Many of the ideas that make up this book were roiling around in my head for a while, but it took a chance encounter with a parking attendant to inspire me to pull them all together—to do what Dov Seidman calls “pausing in stride”: to stop and reflect and try to imagine some better paths that might help more people take advantage of this age of accelerations.

  What has surprised me the most is how many unexpected things I’ve learned along my journey from Minnesota to the world and back to Minnesota—personally, philosophically, and politically.

  As I alluded to earlier, I knew that what was pulling me back home to Minnesota and St. Louis Park was not simply an academic interest in the extraordinary politics of these places. What was pulling me back was a reaction to four decades of covering the Middle East and then Washington, D.C., and seeing how much these two arenas had come to mirror each other—and how little they resembled the places that had shaped me in my formative years.

  My time in the Middle East led me to realize that, with a few rare exceptions, the dominant political ideology there—whether you were talking about Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds, Israelis, Arabs, Persians, Turks, or Palestinians—was “I am weak, how can I compromise? I am strong, why should I compromise?” The notion of there being “a common good” and “a middle ground” that we all compromise for and upon—not to mention a higher community calling we work to sustain—was simply not in the lexicon. So when I came back to Washington in 1988, after thirteen years abroad, it was with a certain eagerness to rediscover America. But over my nearly thirty years now of reporting from Washington, what I found instead was that with every passing year American politics more and more resembled the Middle East that I had left. Democrats and Republicans were treating each other just as Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Persians, Israelis and Palestinians did—self-segregating, assuming the worst of each other, and, lately, shockingly, never wanting one of their kids to marry one of “them.”

  This is awful and has become totally debilitating at exactly the wrong time. We have so much work to do. We need accelerated innovation in so many realms, and it can only happen with sustained collaboration and trust.

  So, as I said, I went back to my roots in Minnesota to see if this place—where, in my memory at least, people practiced a politics based on that “common good” and where trust was more the rule than the exception—still existed. The place had certainly become more complicated than it was, but, all in all, I was not disappointed, for all the reasons that I have explained.

  My most important political lesson, though, was how much the kinds of efforts being made to build a more inclusive St. Louis Park and Minnesota matter—not only for those who live there, but for every community in America today.

  Just review some of the trends we’re witnessing: There are now roughly fifty million students in K–12 public schools in America, and in 2015—for the first time ever—the majority were minority students: primarily African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. At the same time, students on free and reduced-price lunch programs hit an all-time high in 2016. A report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce predicted that by 2020, 65 percent of all jobs in the economy will require some postsecondary education and training beyond high school. Meanwhile, a research study by the University of Oxford’s Martin School concluded in 2013 that 47 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.

  What those numbers tell you is that, in this age of accelerations, everyone is going to have to raise their game in the classroom and for their whole lifetime. What those numbers tell you is that we truly cannot afford to leave any child behind anymore. What those numbers tell you is that pluralism matters more than ever going forward, because on current trends America will become a majority-nonwhite country over the next quarter century—yet without having worked out our racial issues. The foreshocks are being felt right now, and with more migrants fleeing zones of disorder, this problem will only become more acute across the globe. Therefore, societies that can truly make “out of many, one” will have so much more political stability, not to mention innovative prowess.

  What those numbers also tell you is that leadership matters more than ever—at the political and personal levels—but a particular kind of leadership. At the national and local levels, we need a leadership that can promote inclusion and adaptation—a leadership that starts every day asking, “What world am I living in? And how do I engage in the relentless pursuit of the best practices with a level of energy and smarts commensurate with the magnitude of the challenges and the opportunities in this age of accelerations?” It is also a leadership that trusts the people with the truth about this moment: that just working hard and playing by the rules won’t suffice anymore to produce a decent life.

  That’s why leadership also matters more now on the personal level. Back in the 1960s, in places like Minnesota, we had so much wind at our backs that “you needed a plan to fail.” No more. Now you need a plan to succeed, a plan for lifelong learning and skills growth. That means more personal leadership, more of everyone taking ownership of their own future and embracing the “star
t-up of you.”

  It is not too late for any of us, let alone America, to manifest that kind of leadership. But as the environmentalist Dana Meadows used to say about mitigating climate change: “We have exactly enough time, starting now.” And not a moment less, because the margin for mistakes or delays is shrinking on every front for every nation and every person. I repeat: when the world is fast, if you get off course—as a leader, a teacher, a student, an investor, an employee—you can find yourself with a very long road back. Small errors in navigation can have really serious consequences when the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law are all accelerating at this speed.

  Finally, philosophically speaking, I have been struck by how many of the best solutions for helping people build resilience and propulsion in this age of accelerations are things you cannot download but have to upload the old-fashioned way—one human to another human at a time.

  Looking back on all my interviews for this book, how many times in how many different contexts did I hear about the vital importance of having a caring adult or mentor in every young person’s life? How many times did I hear about the value of having a coach—whether you are applying for a job for the first time at Walmart or running Walmart? How many times did I hear people stressing the importance of self-motivation and practice and taking ownership of your own career or education as the real differentiators for success? How interesting was it to learn that the highest-paying jobs in the future will be stempathy jobs—jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being?

  How ironic was it to learn that something as simple as a chicken coop or the basic planting of trees and gardens could be the most important thing we do to stabilize parts of the World of Disorder? Who ever would have thought it would become a national security and personal security imperative for all of us to scale the Golden Rule further and wider than ever? And who can deny that when individuals get so super-empowered and interdependent at the same time, it becomes more vital than ever to be able to look into the face of your neighbor or the stranger or the refugee or the migrant and see in that person a brother or sister? Who can ignore the fact that the key to Tunisia’s success in the Arab Spring was that it had a little bit more “civil society” than any other Arab country—not cell phones or Facebook friends? How many times and in how many different contexts did people mention to me the word “trust” between two human beings as the true enabler of all good things? And whoever thought that the key to building a healthy community would be a dining room table?