As America tries to recover from the economic meltdown of the past few years, its important that this country begin looking for solutions that will keep this from happening again in the future. And so the question has been posed, “Can the Obama administration repair the damage that’s already been done? Is it possible to fix this mess within the next four years? Eight years?
These are some very tough questions with no easy answers.
Without question there is no shortage of opinions on this matter. The political pundits, financial community, business community and even the religious community have expressed strong opinions on what it’s going to take to move us through these challenging times and restore our country’s economic health.
As I’ve listened to the “experts” I have yet to hear anyone give any concrete long term sustainable solutions that will not have a negative impact on our economy and our way of life. We definitely cannot continue to bailout companies that have not been fiscally responsible for keeping their companies profitable. And we can not spend our way back to economic health. I am of the opinion that bailing out companies is only a quick fix to a company’s problems. It does not create a long term strategy that will keep companies from falling into the same repetitive cycle of bad management and greed.
With that thought in mind, I would like to interject that I believe the only way to create a long term strategy to repair our economy is to create a new conversation with men.
Let me explain what I mean by this.
In this new conversation, men would recognize that there is no excuse for a CEO to receive multimillion dollar pay packages when a company is on the verge of bankruptcy. This is plain and simple greed which should be unacceptable. Men would learn that excessive spending is never good for the bottom line and therefore they would learn to cut back on some of their lavish spending before they would begin laying off the ordinary workers who are really the backbone of any company.
Men would also learn that their self worth should never be wrapped up in their titles and incomes. With this new understanding, we would not have investors killing themselves and taking their families lives simply because of falling stock prices or diminishing portfolios. This new conversation would challenge men to become social entrepreneurs who would take their love of business and create companies that want to eradicate a specific social issue. Their company then becomes and extension of their passion and creativity and is less likely to fall victim to greed.
Can you see the benefits of this new conversation?
Obviously there are no easy solutions to fixing our great country but I believe this is a great start. It all begins with a new conversation with men.
Are you willing to engage in this dialog?
