Fiscal Cliff | CorporateIntel

It has been over a week now since our Presidential Election, a good time to reflect. A broad consensus would seem to exist that it is good the election is over — on this we can all agree, and hey, that’s a start.

If the numbers tell the tale correctly, slightly more than half of us are pleased with the outcome and slightly less than half not so much. Some might argue this is how the Founding Fathers would have it, the decision is meant to be hard, to test our minds around this important choice, to continually rebalance power and draw it back from wide deviations away from center. The election is also meant to test our system, the backbone of this magnificent, ongoing experiment known as democracy, with the orderly assignment and peaceful transition of authority. No one in any lifetime favors all the victors in office, but we know to lawfully accept them until it is time to choose again. We can be proud that the process of choice remains a shared value, whether we got whom we wanted or not.

As mentioned previously, I try hard in this blog to be nonpartisan, because I believe careers are best approached from a nonpartisan context and that business is something we share, something that can bring us together more than separate us if we want that. I like that a broad coalition of CEOs is putting immense pressure on our elected leaders in Washington to make a deal that avoids the Fiscal Cliff, and I am assured that when that deal is made it will include varied input and smart compromise from any number of clever contributors.

Elections probably shouldn’t be emotional, but they are. If ever logic needed to prevail over sentiment, one would think that would have to be the case in choosing our government officials by the prized process of casting a vote. Unfortunately our human leanings get in the way of that, and rather than carefully analyzing the particulars of a candidate’s expressed ideas, we get drawn into the contest. We begin to root. It becomes too much like a sporting event, the candidate is coached and the marketing team fuels the public rivalry. There we are, cheering and booing for one side or the other. The problem with that is that unlike sports, even if my team loses, I still live in my city and you live in yours. I don’t have to get onboard with your team because they won, and next season I can go back to rooting for my team, hoping at last justice is done and yours loses. I am happy to allow my emotions to be manipulated because it’s all part of the entertainment experience. It sort of doesn’t work if I don’t feel that way — why buy tickets and t-shirts and stay glued to the TV unless my honorable team can defeat your hack team?

Those kinds of emotions may carry over to the voting booth, but it is obvious the metaphor implodes there. Your team will never be my team, but the President has to be our President. That’s not just Constitutional law, it’s pragmatic. It’s meant to make sense, to bring order and assurance. In the workshop I teach on executive leadership, I spend a lot of time talking about how business is well advised to be pragmatic. There is a role for emotion in business, but that is in brand building, bringing a customer into a relationship with goods and services where Like Is Not Enough. Decision making among business leaders has to be sensible, reasonable, credible. When you work for a company, you may agree or disagree with the executive team, but you don’t undermine them. You discuss, push back, respectfully argue and create reason to be heard, but to defy the leadership is not only to put the business at risk but also yourself at risk.

Both major party candidates in this federal election had strengths and weaknesses. Both raised vast financial resources. Both purchased gobs of advertising in key battleground states, and both tirelessly traveled the country to connect with their prospective constituents. Much has been and will be written about the strategy and tactics utilized by each, but on Election Day the competition ended. When a President is elected, he is not the party’s President, he is the nation’s President. To think anything other than we all have a stake in the President’s success is folly — dangerous folly.

Where are our passions now best applied? To ensuring the pragmatic. To demanding consensus. To lending our shared voices to the phones, email, and social networks that reach our Congressional Representatives — letting them feel the heat and urgency of our need to get on with it. Democracy works when vast numbers participate and fails when apathy rules. Be passionate about insisting on reason, be passionate about reminding our elected leaders they have chosen a path of service, be passionate about our shared need for innovation and ingenuity that takes us somewhere better and doesn’t leave us running in place. Let all emotion — especially anger — be tabled for pragmatism, at least until the highly paid political consultants whip us into a frenzy again two or four years from now. If you have to be mad, be mad that our elected leaders just might have the chutzpah not to work together on your behalf. That is something you really can do something about. I can be accused at times of idealism, but I promise you we do have that power. We really can begin the real work that only gets done when shared.

A unique aspect of our humanity is the ability to experience emotion, to feel passion, and when appropriate, act on that to drive an outcome grounded in substance and belief. I have seen it happen more than a few times in my career, and when I have, it has been almost impossible to replicate or counter. It has to be well placed. Right now it has to be placed not on who won or lost the election, or whose team got a trophy or some time off, but on how the important work ahead gets done in a pragmatic way we can together acknowledge as progress.

New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously articulated, “We campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.” That’s a much more applicable conceit for elected leaders than winning the World Series or the Super Bowl. Let’s not wait another two or four years to do democracy. Let’s do it daily. Together.

Last week more than eighty corporate CEOs signed and published a manifesto, agreeing that our nation needs both spending cuts and revenue increases to move forward. It was a simple, clear statement, meant to advise Congress and our soon to be elected President that it is time to break the stalemate. Here is the text that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2012, reprinted for convenience:

“Policy makers should acknowledge that our growing debt is a serious threat to the economic well-being and security of the United States.

It is urgent and essential that we put in place a plan to fix America’s debt. An effective plan must stabilize the debt as a share of the economy, and put it on a downward path.

This plan should be enacted now, but implemented gradually to protect the fragile economic recovery and to give Americans time to prepare for the changes in the federal budget.

In order to develop a fiscal plan that can succeed both financially and politically, it must be bipartisan and reforms to all areas of the budget should be included.

The plan should:

Reform Medicare and Medicaid, improve efficiency in the overall health care system and limit future cost growth;

Strengthen Social Security, so that it is solvent and will be there for future beneficiaries; and

Include comprehensive and pro-growth tax reform, which broadens the base, lowers rates, raises revenues and reduces the deficit.

The recommendations of the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission, which saved $4 trillion and addressed all parts of the budget, provide an effective framework for such a plan.

The plan should be conducive to long-term economic growth, protect the vulnerable, include credible enforcement mechanisms to ensure that debt reduction is achieved and leave the next generation better.”

Strangely the formation of this consensus among competitors from a sample of highly influential business leaders on multiple sides of the political divide did not receive more attention. No, it’s not a perfect proclamation or unusually eloquent, but it could be a spark to ignite meaningful pressure on those in our government who need it most.

Perhaps there is too much noise out there to hear the unified voice of corporate direction demanding an end to party stalemate. Agree or disagree with the particulars, but it is time for the entire population to embrace the same demand. No action by Congress is not a reasonable response to the Fiscal Cliff we face together. No deal in Congress means all Bush-era tax relief will be eliminated at the end of 2012, while across the board federal budget cuts will be mechanically enacted in virtually all areas of non-entitlement or interest expense as a result of sequestration in our failure to address the debt ceiling. Both parties agreed late last year to sequestration in the event that well-considered budget policy could not be deployed on a line by line basis, with expected care and diligence applied to the hard decisions that have to be made rather than whacking the morass with a machete. You would think dedicated, elected officials would have long ago embraced the gravitas of their charge. Sadly, the time for surgical precision is quickly running out.

Any common ground has to agree that the Fiscal Cliff is not worth any ideological mandate. The nation cannot afford a repeat of last fall’s debt ceiling fiasco, which in my opinion was one of the worst failures of democracy and representative government in a generation. We need to get back to business.

As I have written before with respect to innovation, building a consensus is not the same as caving to compromise. There is cop-out compromise and there is collaborative compromise. Cop-out compromise means walking away from one’s core values, abandoning that which is fundamental to being constructive, the undermining of sound judgment. Collaborative compromise arises from acknowledgment of the real prize — progress that likely cannot include every single designated component serving an agenda. Collaborative compromise is guided by consensus, a combining of good ideas around an agreed set of goals articulated and guided by sound leadership. The eighty-plus CEOs who delivered their move-ahead manifesto understand how to build a consensus because they have to do it everyday to hold teams together, get stuff done, and create economic value.

When compromise means abandoning one’s truest values to survive then I agree that is not a good definition to support, but I don’t see that in our economic dialogue in Washington. If compromise means reasonable give and take to support a well-advised consensus as illustrated in the CEO Manifesto, then it is time for our government to compromise. More than time. It is the essence of representative democracy. It is what they were elected and hired to do.

We must get back to business. People need to work. Government services have to be provided so we don’t bump into each other. Taxes need to be fair and they need to be paid. Credit markets need to flow. The economy needs to function. All of this underlies the free markets we cherish.

No candidate should ever take your vote for granted, you award it as your precious right. Reasonable action by Congress is overdue. Contact your representatives now. Tell them that walking us over they Fiscal Cliff will cost them their authority. Sequestration means they didn’t do their jobs. Demand leadership, demand shared vision. We need to overcome the impasse immediately following the Presidential Election.

Let’s get on with it. Back to business.