Change is a five-letter word…

As most of my friends and co-workers would acknowledge, change is not something that comes easily for me. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary decision-making, overly optimistic assessments of the status quo, and every so often a periodic anger based knee-jerk reaction …yes. I always have thought that if six decades of life experiences and forty years of being in an industry steeped in subjective analysis taught me anything, it’s that indeed, the more things change, the more they do stay remarkably the same. I believe however, it’s time that I changed my mind.

So what’s different now? Not the world…not the business cycles of bust and boom and bust again…and not one more presidential election. Rather I’ve come to that realization as probably everyone eventually does, but not everyone admits, that there is a time when younger minds translate to fresher minds and that translates to fresh approaches to the some of the same old problems…and some new ones. And even if the approaches may not always be unique, often the tactical execution of these approaches will be.

This, I believe, is just such a seminal time. A moment when we, once known as the ‘young turks’ of our generation, recognize a changing of the guard, and begin looking forward and not behind. A moment when the wisdom of experience not necessarily always be translated into tactical execution, but rather into counsel and advice to point the direction only and not demand leadership. A time to acknowledge that there are new solutions; or at minimum, new creative thinking not tainted by that old clichéd adage repeated above.

It’s time to let a new generation take their whack at running this country and move it forward on the high end. That’s not going to be easy, smooth or quick so all the more reason to get on with it while the rest of us older and wiser turks get back to making sure the base foundation is secure for them to do so. We’re not going anywhere and we’re not disappearing…at least not yet. We can teach, demonstrate, bestow, and maybe even inspire this new generation of leaders about accountability, about fairness, about compassion…and about making tough, hard and often unpopular decisions when optimism and freshness isn’t always enough.

Alas, the more things change, the more they stay remarkably the same.