‘When Did Immigrants Become the Enemy?’

Three Big Developments

HR managers need to be aware of the effect of three incidents that are shaping our world today, Rice says.

• 9/11. Our concept of physical security is forever changed when the firth poorest country in the world can mount such an attack at a cost of about $300,000.
• Global economic financial shock. Our concept of economic security has likewise changed.
• Arab Spring. The activities of Arab Spring lay bare the theory that authoritarian regimes can be ongoing.

Immigration Must Be Solved

We must solve immigration, says Rice. “I don’t know when immigrants became the enemy,” she says. In the United States, we are united by a creed—not by nationality or race or religion.

In the past, the United States was about how efficient we could be, but now it’s about human potential. We have to invent and reinvent day in and day out. We’ve been the best, but we’re now in danger of losing that position.

We have to gear up to do the impossible, Rice says. It’s not as hard as it sounds; “what seemed impossible seems inevitable in retrospect.”

Who’d have thought a few years back, that we’d be having the NATO conference in Latvia?

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Rice is optimistic about the United States, she says, offering her personal proof of doing the impossible: A little girl born in the Deep South, who couldn’t buy a burger in a white restaurant and who wouldn’t have a white classmate until her family moved to Denver … became Secretary of State.

Apparently, some things aren’t possible, however. Rice intended to be a musician—she read music at 3 and intended to study it in college. But then she went to the Aspen Music Festival. There she discovered others in attendance who could sightread pieces that she had spent years learning. “I didn’t want to put in all that work to end up playing the piano at Nordstroms,” she says.

Dramatic Shift in the Paradigm

Malcolm Gladwell, author of business best-sellers Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, addressed the SHRM crowd with comments about changing sensibilities of generations of workers. He contrasted the protests of the 60s of Martin Luther King with the recent occupy protests.

King, Gladwell says, organized an exquisitely planned series of marches in 1963. He chose Birmingham, the most racially divided city in the country, and he intended to goad Bull Conner, who was in charge of Birmingham’s police and fire departments. His first goal was—through non-violent protest—to fill the jails of Birmingham. That reduces the options of the enemy, King had learned from Ghandi.

Then King involved children. Bull began to panic and ordered high pressure hoses on the children and called out the dogs. The press was present in great numbers and outrage grew. One year later, the Civil rights Act of 1964 was passed.

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Occupy Wall Street

Contrast King’s highly organized protests with the protests of today, Gladwell says. King was a strong leader with a centralized, disciplined organization. The occupy Wall Street movement has little organization to it, and no apparent leaders. It’s a completely different approach, Gladwell notes.

Some other evidence of this change that he sees:

• Chess. It used to be that if you wanted to learn chess, you went to an expert and took lessons. Nowadays, you learn by playing on line.
• Dating. It used to be a private act; now it’s a group activity.
• Trusted source. For answers to questions, you used to consult an expert—the encyclopedia. Now we have Wikipedia

In so many ways, it’s a completely different look at authority and expertise. When you add this all together, Gladwell says, you see that there is a different sensibility, a profoundly different notion of how organized groups should behave.

The old hierarchy was closed, disciplined and centralized. The new one isn’t any of those things. We’ve gone from hierarchy to network.

What’s particularly interesting to Gladwell is that many successes these days result from the combination of the old way and the new way. For example, in Egypt, during the recent protests, the government shut off the Internet. The people went to the mosque—the hierarchy. And then, the people initially wanted to elect a revolutionary, but the revolutionaries all fell by the wayside because they had no infrastructure, no organization.

Gladwell’s take: networks can start things, but without organization, they fall apart.

In tomorrow’s Advisor, comments from Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, and an introduction to the all-HR-in-one website, HR.BLR.com.