Innovative ideas matter

By Dr Arvind Kumar

The World Leaders are grappling with problems, trying, and failing, to meet impossible expectations, impossible time frames for delivery and impossible obstacles to success. It is not policies, but ideas that inspire today’s peoples and electorates — and they need to be big ideas, too. The winning ideas will be those that are drawn from a profound understanding of the way the world now works, pierce through the fog of information overload and are promoted with wisdom and conviction. No use for leaders to rely on clever ad men, public relations experts who miss the real mood, or fashion-obsessed focus groups. And there seems no use drowning a nation’s citizens in endless promises of detailed policy goals that an increasingly skeptical public doubts will ever be achieved, and certainly not by central government.

And no use, again, relying on the old ideological rallying calls of the past, when neither the collectivist state nor the marketplace any longer has all the answers, and common sense shows clearly that a skilled mix of the two is needed.

The message people really want to hear from their leaders is how this bewildering flow makes sense, what the real underlying truths are and where it all is leading. They seek deep reassurance and guidance as to where they belong, what the nation they inhabit stands for and what position it aspires to in the new global landscape.