The Obama Gap (O Hiato Obama)

O Presidente Barack Obama nem assumiu ainda, mas já está recebendo críticas pelo seu pré-anunciado plano para enfrentar a crise. E a crítica vem do Prof. Paul Krugman (em sua coluna em The New York Times), vencedor do prêmio Nobel de Economia de 2008.

Na minha opinião, o Prof. Krugman aponta, com razão, para o tamanho da economia americana e para a pequenez da prescrição que está sendo considerada para a crise.  Mas lhe falta (quem já esteve em governo sabe bem!) o senso da restrição; ou seja, entre aquilo que se deseja fazer e que se pode efetivamente está a chamada restrição!

E não é somente a restrição orçamentária que nós ensinamos em Economia; no caso da economia dos EUA, com sua abertura ao mundo, é muito difícil se estabelecer um conjunto de políticas de modo independente!  Resta perguntar ao Prof. Krugman o que ele sugeririria. Mas vamos aguardar para ver se ele aponta alguma coisa!

==================

The Obama Gap

By PAUL KRUGMAN

 

Published: January 8, 2009

“I don’t believe it’s too late to change course, but it will be if we don’t take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years.”

So declared President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday, explaining why the nation needs an extremely aggressive government response to the economic downturn. He’s right. This is the most dangerous economic crisis since the Great Depression, and it could all too easily turn into a prolonged slump.

But Mr. Obama’s prescription doesn’t live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat. In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed.

Bear in mind just how big the U.S. economy is. Given sufficient demand for its output, America would produce more than $30 trillion worth of goods and services over the next two years. But with both consumer spending and business investment plunging, a huge gap is opening up between what the American economy can produce and what it’s able to sell.

And the Obama plan is nowhere near big enough to fill this “output gap.”

Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office came out with its latest analysis of the budget and economic outlook. The budget office says that in the absence of a stimulus plan, the unemployment rate would rise above 9 percent by early 2010, and stay high for years to come.

Grim as this projection is, by the way, it’s actually optimistic compared with some independent forecasts. Mr. Obama himself has been saying that without a stimulus plan, the unemployment rate could go into double digits.

Even the C.B.O. says, however, that “economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 percent below its potential.” This translates into $2.1 trillion of lost production. “Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity,” declared Mr. Obama on Thursday. Well, he was actually understating things.

To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough.

Now, fiscal stimulus can sometimes have a “multiplier” effect: In addition to the direct effects of, say, investment in infrastructure on demand, there can be a further indirect effect as higher incomes lead to higher consumer spending. Standard estimates suggest that a dollar of public spending raises G.D.P. by around $1.50.

But only about 60 percent of the Obama plan consists of public spending. The rest consists of tax cuts — and many economists are skeptical about how much these tax cuts, especially the tax breaks for business, will actually do to boost spending. (A number of Senate Democrats apparently share these doubts.) Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center summed it up in the title of a recent blog posting: “lots of buck, not much bang.”

The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job.

Why isn’t Mr. Obama trying to do more?

Is the plan being limited by fear of debt? There are dangers associated with large-scale government borrowing — and this week’s C.B.O. report projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for this year. But it would be even more dangerous to fall short in rescuing the economy. The president-elect spoke eloquently and accurately on Thursday about the consequences of failing to act — there’s a real risk that we’ll slide into a prolonged, Japanese-style deflationary trap — but the consequences of failing to act adequately aren’t much better.

Is the plan being limited by a lack of spending opportunities? There are only a limited number of “shovel-ready” public investment projects — that is, projects that can be started quickly enough to help the economy in the near term. But there are other forms of public spending, especially on health care, that could do good while aiding the economy in its hour of need.

Or is the plan being limited by political caution? Press reports last month indicated that Obama aides were anxious to keep the final price tag on the plan below the politically sensitive trillion-dollar mark. There also have been suggestions that the plan’s inclusion of large business tax cuts, which add to its cost but will do little for the economy, is an attempt to win Republican votes in Congress.

Whatever the explanation, the Obama plan just doesn’t look adequate to the economy’s need. To be sure, a third of a loaf is better than none. But right now we seem to be facing two major economic gaps: the gap between the economy’s potential and its likely performance, and the gap between Mr. Obama’s stern economic rhetoric and his somewhat disappointing economic plan.

Making Your Company An Innovation Machine (Tornando sua Empresa uma Máquina de Inovação)

Um relato da revista Forbes de como uma inovadora transformou uma empresa com inovação!

=====================
Making Your Company An Innovation Machine
Terry Waghorn, 01.08.09, 06:00 PM EST
An interview with Nancy Snyder, the first ”innovation czar” at Whirlpool.

There is talk of the U.S. soon getting its first “car czar.” But he or she won’t be the first czar in contemporary America.

For nine years Nancy Snyder has been known as one of the “innovation czars” at Whirlpool, the world’s largest manufacturer of household appliances. She describes that role in the book Unleashing Innovation: How Whirlpool Transformed an Industry, which she co-authored.

Under Nancy’s leadership, Whirlpool (nyse: WHR – news - people ) began a bold initiative in 1999 to greatly increase the new ideas emerging within the company and change where they came from and how they were implemented.

In other words, her team’s goal was nothing less than embedding, as she put it, innovation as part of the core of the company’s operations. By all accounts the program has been an outstanding success.

Jeff Fettig, Whirlpool’s chairman, credits it with adding more than $2.5 billion in worldwide revenue to the company’s bottom line in 2007 (the most recent year for which final numbers are available), and with building a robust pipeline for innovation to allow for continued growth, which, when it hits the market, will have an estimated value of $4.5 billion.

In 2003 Nancy co-authored a book titled Strategic Innovation: Embedding Innovation as a Core Competency in Your Organization. Many people, this interviewer included, consider it the seminal work on the topic.

In it, she outlines the goals she put forth for her program and her strategy for achieving them. They included enrolling every salaried employee in a business innovation course, tying management’s long-term bonuses to its innovativeness and building an innovation Intranet portal that would offer everyone in the company a common forum for learning principles of innovation, keeping abreast of recent research, tracking the progress of ideas from concept toward realization and even volunteering to work on one another’s projects.

Forbes.com: There is much talk these days about embedding innovation, but you actually had to invent the concept as you went along. When you think back to the beginning, what surprising, hidden aspects of innovation did you uncover?

Nancy Snyder: Embedding innovation is inevitably a learning journey, and it’s one that forces you to invent and improvise along the way. When we began our own journey, we had to invent the concept of scaling as it applied to innovation, because no one had ever really done this before.

When Dave Whitwam, the former chief executive of Whirlpool, made the company-wide announcement that encouraged every employee to submit their innovative ideas, there was not one mechanism for collecting them.

I received a sudden flood of excited calls from everywhere and everyone, from vice presidents to factory workers, wondering how they could get started. I was blown away by how much interest everyone showed in the program but also somewhat overwhelmed, because we didn’t yet have a process in place for handling the resulting volume.

One of the solutions we hit on was to implement “innovation teams,” which brought together groups of workers from all levels of the company. For the first time, these teams became our front line for screening and vetting new ideas.

A team had to prove that an idea or concept it was championing met three criteria: It had to bring a benefit to the customer, it had to create a competitive advantage and it needed to return value to our shareholders. Only then could it move into the innovation pipeline.

We also created a series of software tools to help teams collaborate virtually and publish their work across the organization. Ideas percolate literally everywhere, but we can now easily track their progress with a single log-in.

Based on all you now know about embedding innovation as a core competency at Whirlpool, if you could go back to when you first started, what would you do differently?

I’m not sure I’d do anything differently, just sooner. For example, today we have a team of about 1,100 innovation mentors, whom we call “I-Mentors.” They volunteer to help facilitate the innovation cycle throughout the company, not unlike how “black belts” work within a Six Sigma business management system.

These folks take great pride in helping their peers understand the tools available to them and how they can apply them in creating something innovative. My regret is that it took some time before we really understood the value our I-Mentors would add and how we could train them efficiently.

I also wish we had tied our senior leaders’ compensation to our innovation goals sooner. That’s something we did in year three. If we had done it from the get-go, we could have sped up the entire embedding process.

Another regret is that it took us several years before we really nailed down our metrics. Looking back, though, that was inevitable because as our processes evolved so did the things we needed to measure.

For instance, we initially tracked just the number of projects and the people involved. Then as ideas became products, we began to track revenue and even projected launch dates. Today we track revenue; portfolios, which are ideas grouped together by categories; the pace at which ideas flow through the pipeline; and even metrics that calculate the intangible value of ideas.

As the world plunges into one of the deepest economic dips since the Great Depression, most corporate leaders are putting efficiency ahead of creativity and innovation. What are you doing to ensure that Whirlpool doesn’t fall into that trap?

There is always the threat that we can get distracted and fall into a short-term view similar to focusing solely on quarterly results to please analysts. But it’s our belief that the winners in the post-recession economy will be companies that have focused not just on reducing costs but also on investing in the long-term impact of innovation. When the markets turn, Whirlpool will be ready, with our latest innovations in hand.

Terry Waghorn is a partner at SECOR Consulting and an adviser to senior executives in companies ranging from small to Fortune 500. He is co-author of Mission Possible and author of The System.