Serkan Unsal
İsmail Hakkı Polat
Why Obama can't succeed with the American Jobs Act?
Finally U.S. President Barack Obama made his jobs speech to Congress last week. In his long-waited speech, he announced 'the American Jobs Act' to put the U.S. economy back on track. His tone of voice was a bit aggressive in order for pushing the Congress to act on the plan immediately.
I have no doubt the plan has been prepared in good faith. But it is neither a solution for financial crisis nor a reform for unemployment. After first bailout package was engulfed by old-fashioned Industrial Age players, Mr. President should have launched a more radical action plan that pave the way thru the new fields of Information Era. In this context, the missing point in President's speech was a visionary statement. It could be the soul of the Act that enabled a new 'American Dream' in 21. Century.
Although it was misinterpreted as Made in America (an irrelevant phrase inherited from the Industrial Age), the appropriate statement could be 'The American Innovation Act'. Moreover, the word innovation should be used instead of manufacturing. It could emphasize the Information Age and highlight U.S. as the world leader of it. Further to the soul, there needed a body for the Act, which was the action plan. In the plan, there are promising items like supporting small businesses by means of tax cuts but the main problems of U.S. are corporate bodies such as GE, GD, GM, etc. Despite they all have strong IT infrastructures, they have been suffering to internalize the concepts as data mining, outsourcing, crowdsourcing, CRM due to their traditional mindsets. For this reason, their innovation and competition capabilities are very low and limited.
The Act should also cover a radical downsize for these gigantic organizations in conjunction with a careful outsourcing policy as well as motivations to strengthen their competitiveness by rational usage of the information tools in terms of innovation. Mr. President and his team must bear in their minds that the name of the game is white-collar innovation than blue-collar manufacturing. Therefore, their cumbersome industrial management has to be transformed into an agile information management strategy.
Furthermore, the Act has no brightness to save Obama for the coming elections next year. Action items are disorganized and has no (or very limited) connection to each other. The solutions proposed were ancient recipes so that doesn't help Obama government for eliminating the negative impacts of the crisis, creating adequate amount of jobs and going back to a sustainable economy. Instead of this, they could cover all strategy into a few basic items under a visionary statement that was referred to Info Age and able to motivate the society like the phrase The American Innovation Act.
These could be;
1) To transform the current economic institutions & businesses into efficient managed operations by means of info based organizations.
2) To define, position, develop and promote the information based innovation areas (green energy, new media, biogenetics, info & comms technologies, etc.) and label all their products and services as ?Innovated in America?
3) To prepare short, medium and long term public education plans mainly based on innovation to meet the human resource demands for these areas
This is a plan not for only the country but also throughout the world for America. I wish 'Good Luck' to Mr. President and his team for implementing their Act. However, I strongly recommend them to change their primary focus on word innovation rather than manufacturing.
By Ismail Hakkı Polat
