The same goes for organizations. We all have a life cycle. When training organizations this was a major model I used. The Life Cycle is explained in detail in my book, From The Inside Out: How to Create and Survive a Culture of Change. There are a couple of books left on Amazon with used books starting at 14 cents. If you cannot afford that price, let me give a brief summery of the Life Cycle here for nothing.
Change, simply stated, is that something which was something is now something else. The reason it did not stay the something it was is because of the second law of thermodynamics (entropy). Entropy means that systems tend to break down over time. They break down to the extent that the energy needed to maintain systems exceeds the initial energy needed to start them. Entropy applies to all systems, which is why systems either grow or die. The Life Cycle model is off to the right.
Let's apply the Life Cycle to the United States government.
START UP Thirteen states were populated with 2.5 million people infused with the passion and desire to be free from England, free from an autocratic government. They had, minimal laws were self-reliant, and they shared excitement and vision with their new country and government.
GROWTH From a new, upstart nation we developed to the most powerful nation in the world. We found where our weaknesses were and plugged up the holes. We did things we could be very proud of and some not so much. The roles of the citizen evolved into one of being a follower of rules, regulations and an ever-increasing number of laws. We had war and peace. We grew and prospered. Our tomorrow stood a good chance of being pretty much like yesterday, and yesterday was a good day. We ate our dinners with Ozzie and Harriet, David, Ricky and the Beav and his family.
MATURITY A complacency sets in. We accept the status quo. We accept we are the most powerful nation in the world and stop working at keeping it there and remembering how we got there. We listen more to the naysayers. We stop growing and really appreciating what we have. We begin to ........
DECLINE We have lost our excitement and vision. Why? We now have 37 more states with 317.5 million more people than in our start-up phase. It's been 23 years since the last constitutional amendment even though we experienced very dynamic and changing times. Determining how many federal laws we have in effect is almost impossible, but it seems to be around 50,000. We have a 74,000-page income tax code, a 20,000 page Obamacare law with rapidly rising debt. Thirty-seven out of every 100 people are no longer participating in the job market. Almost half of us receive money from some government entity. We have classes of people who feel they are entitled to the bounty of other classes. We have a genuine concern over the sustainability of Social Security and Medicare. We let everybody cross the Rio Grande who is not afraid to get their ankles wet. We have a Middle East we seem to have no idea what to do with, and they know exactly what they want to do with us. We have 3 designed separate branches of government which seem to function as one. Our longest serving "citizen legislator" John Dingell (D) served almost 60 years in the House before he retired. Some Congresspeople (against the Founders' intent) are still serving having been there 40-50 years. There is no clear delineation between the public and private sectors (Public sector telling the private sector what they must pay their employees). And, sadly, we have a two party system which, as they say, is nothing but 2 cheeks on the same butt.
What to do? What to do?
Before an organization gets so far into decline that it cannot get out it must....
RESTART We must get back the excitement and vision we had in start up. Restart is actually Start Up of a new and higher order.
While I completely disagreed with him politically I thought we might have had our restart with the election of Barack Obama, a minority with little or no experience at almost anything might just shake things up. He was certainly different. He promised to "fundamentally transform the country." Good! I believed we needed that, but what I believed we needed was a better, stronger America, not to restart by jettisoning the United States of America and replacing it with Denmark. We can see that restart doesn't always work. I believe our current restarting (Obama's "transforming") is like the corporate restart that brought us the Edsel, New Coke and the Betamax. The election of Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden would continue our trip down the yellow brick road. If Bernie Sanders is elected, we could change the name of the USA to the USD-the United States of Denmark.
Enter Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, we have 3 people in the presidential race today who have no political backgrounds, have no ties to policies currently in place and do not appear to "owe" any other politician their success. We know how difficult coming in and changing this is for a new President. Washington DC is really run by the 40 year government bureaucrats in a 6X6 cubicle in the basement, and maybe that will never change until we go into complete decline, but I really believe bringing in an outsider with proven leadership skills and a commitment to the Founders vision of America may be the best chance we have to restart the United States.
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