Advice for President Obama on Providing Guidance on Banks

Max's advice for February 19, 2009

Dear President Obama,

Max grew up as the son of a man who knew 'ALL' the answers to the problems of the world. Max's father said so! Many times, his father let everyone know that anyone who didn't know that he had the answers was a turkey or a knucklehead.

The famous Ma Bell, the second most powerful force in the world (next to God of course), thought so much of Max's father's opinions, that she made him 'Supervisor of Troubles'. This is true!

The advice Max promised you, President Obama.

Provide guidance to banks and financial institutions!

Max wants you to succeed, yet the conditions for success depend entirely on finding innovative ways of dealing with the economic situations. Government is by definition built largely on the skills of bureaucrats and not known for being particularly innovative.

In general, large businesses, which include the banks, are like government, places where the most innovative people have been squeezed out in favor of dependable and reliable focused people.

There is no sure way to get the brain power together to focus on the real possibilities on what can be done to salvage these institutions and restore trust.

Your top advisors may or may not be open to new suggestions on how to return us to solvency. People who have been in the business for decades may have a lot of good ideas. They may also be resistant to good ideas that come from outside their personal sphere.

The universities and colleges have a brain trust of people who have ideas, some which on first sight may appear unpalatable or foolish, who should have a platform to share those ideas with your "small" financial brain trust.

On NPR there was a report about a school board meeting that used telephone meeting technology and had 2,900 people participate. Would it not make sense for a national forum to be called regularly where the call in number was available to all schools and financial institutions to explore new ideas to solve the issue?

Perhaps the presidents of the regional Federal Reserve Banks could be tapped to moderate the meetings so that they could be held for regional groups first and later for those that attended at a national level. You might even get C-Span to televise the proceeding if you do them off hours (these may be the hours these folks are available).

The added advantage of national problem solving meetings would be the education it would provide the people who claim to be teaching the best of ideas.

The technical people who helped with your campaign probably know all the online and telephone meeting organizations that can help set up a national new idea brain trust.

The ultimate goal of an effort like this is not to solve the problem in this function. Rather, it is to discover ideas that have not been examined in discovering ways to resolve this problem in both the short and long term.

Max wishes you well in all your financial efforts.

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Link one is an MIT article on generation of ideas.

Link two is a link to Colorado State ideas for writing.

Link three is to a last generation meeting via simulcast.