If you are a laid of car-worker, journalist, forest worker, mass media marketer it is surely a bit like being the proverbial "Buggy Whip Maker" in 1905.
But we have a big advantage over those living in 1905. Today we can try our new things in public. We can talk about new ideas in public. By having this huge public conversation, we can find the now unknowable future much more quickly. In so doing we can limit the pain.
No city could be more in the fog than Detroit itself - the city that can look back at 1905 and see how it was the primary beneficiary of the end of horse power.
So today I called my new friend Luther Keith, the GM of Arise Detroit, and asked him to tell me how he was seeing things.
Few are as well connected with issues. I asked him if he was seeing any signs of the stimulus getting through to the community groups. So far he had seen none.
But what he was seeing signs of the growing understanding that what was really needed was a "Reinvention" What does that mean - for it is question that applies to all of us - Detroit is just the first mover?
What do you think?
