The Next Big Ideas: Postcard from the Aspen Ideas Festival

Authors

• Kara Hurst

  Former Vice President, BSR

Here at the Aspen Ideas Festival (where, at 8,000 feet in elevation, every idea has the propensity to seem lofty), I have spent the better part of the week talking and debating about “ideas that work.”

After a couple days immersed in this crowd, I think the next big “stimulus” effort this country should take on is restoring public trust in business. The challenges in building true political support to sustain a level of transparency and the right level of regulatory oversight should not be underestimated. We need to better understand systemic risk, as currently, organizations that have been deemed “too big to fail” are subject to the same governance rules and policies as other financial institutions. Moving ahead, this has to change. Holding government accountable for an exit strategy to the long and deep regulatory reforms proposed will be the responsibility of the governed.

Austan Goolsbee, speaking for the Obama administration, observed that tying pay to performance is neither anti-capitalistic nor is it revolutionary—it’s good for business and an essential element of restoring the public’s trust.

While the financial markets have dominated the discussion here, other conversations have been devoted to the equally challenging issues of creating the political will to support new directions in energy policy, fixing our broken health care system, creating safe and performing schools for our nation’s youth, and reforming the food and agriculture industry in the United States to give consumers healthier options.

Susan Rice noted that while the United States faces a host of national security challenges globally, the issues are “inherently transnational,” and the Obama administration’s policy efforts thus far have been well-coordinated. The approach is to be “pragmatic, non-ideological, and principled,” and to take “a sober look at the circumstances, and ask what tools we have at our disposal... We see recognition and engagement not as a privilege but as a tool.”

The week wasn’t all bad news. Globally, we have myriad opportunities to use technology to capture and promote innovation, and the participants here have pointed out that our support of open platforms, tools, and information exchange is essential to accomplishing this.

Just as technology continues to change the way we receive information, it has revamped the roles of news reporters and given more people the chance to be information-providers—from news sources to aggregators, analysts, and verifiers of information. In one great conversation, four prominent journalists debated whether this kind of proximity to the information can distort our view. The answer is, of course, yes—and how we interpret and contextualize information has to change. We all need to get this new skill set sooner rather than later. Changes also abound in media generally, where Michael Eisner and Andrea Wong agreed generally that content is king—and the strength of your brand and great high-quality programming are the keys to success regardless of the platform you’re on and how distribution might evolve in the future.

The dialogue is still going, and you can follow along on the Aspen Institute’s website or add your comments below. What are your big ideas?