Page 14 - Green Builder Media Sustainability Symposium 2018

New day dawning. The sun is setting on Old World-style fossil fuel-based energy sources and rising on green sources such as solar and wind.

presented the five-pillar TIR economic plan in a keynote ad- people feel as if they’ve arrived even before they’ve left the station.
dress at the 50th anniversary conference of the Organization If and when Americans truly “get” the new Third Industrial Revo-
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, lution narrative, we have the unequalled ability to move quickly
attended by heads of state and ministers from the 34 participat- to make that dream a reality.
ing member nations. The presentation accompanied the rollout The Third Industrial Revolution is the last of the great
of an OECD green growth economic plan which will serve as a Industrial Revolutions and will lay the foundational
template to begin preparing the nations of the world for a post infrastructure for an emerging collaborative age. The 40-year
carbon industrial future. build-out of the TIR infrastructure will create hundreds of
In designing the EU blueprint for the Third Industrial thousands of new businesses and hundreds of millions of new
Revolution, I have been privileged to work with many of jobs. Its completion will signal the end of a 200-year commercial
Europe’s leading heads of state, including Chancellor Angela saga characterized by industrious thinking, entrepreneurial
Merkel of Germany; Prime Minister Romano Prodi of Italy; markets and mass labor workforces, and the beginning of a
Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain; Manuel new era marked by collaborative behavior, social networks and
Barroso, the president of the European Commission; and five boutique professional and technical workforces.
of the presidents of the European Council. In the coming half century, the conventional, centralized
business operations of the First and Second Industrial Revolu-
Lessons to Learn?
tions will increasingly be subsumed by the distributed business
Is there anything we Americans can learn from what’s hap- practices of the Third Industrial Revolution; and the tradition-
pening in Europe? I believe so. We need to begin by taking al, hierarchical organization of economic and political power
a careful look at what our European friends are saying and will give way to lateral power organized nodally across society.
attempting to do. However falteringly, Europeans are at least
coming to grips with the reality that the fossil fuel era is dying, Lateral Power Charts a Path
and they are beginning to chart a course into a green future. At first blush, the very notion of lateral power seems so contra-
Unfortunately, Americans, for the most part, continue to be in dictory to how we have experienced power relations through
a state of denial, not wishing to acknowledge that the economic much of history. Power, after all, has traditionally been or-
system that served us so well in the past is now on life support. ganized pyramidically from top to bottom. Today, however,
Like Europe, we need to own up and pony up. the collaborative power unleashed by the coming together of
But what can we bring to the party? While Europe has come Internet technology and renewable energies, fundamentally
up with a compelling narrative, no one can tell a story better restructures human relationships, from top to bottom to side
than America. Madison Avenue, Hollywood and the Silicon Valley to side, with profound implications for the future of society.
excel at this. What has distinguished America is not so much our The music companies didn’t understand distributed power
manufacturing acumen or military prowess, but our uncanny until millions of young people began sharing music online, and
ability to envision the future with such vividness and clarity that corporate revenues tumbled in less than a decade. Encyclopedia
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