An article titled "The New Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends That Will Change the World" by Jack A. Goldstone in the magazine, Foreign Affairs, is primarily about how different factors will impact one megatrend: world population; or perhaps its about how the megatrend of population will affect other world concerns. Either way, this is an interesting article with a positive, albeit politically unpopular, outlook on how to manage changes in the coming decades. So how can Western businesses, non-profit organizations, and government institutions adjust their strategies to cope with these impending changes and their impacts?

Mr. Goldstone begins by asserting that many people have gotten it wrong when it comes to analyzing and promoting particular goals, such as population stabilization. He argues that population size isn't the problem, but that population distributions, demographics, and resource availability are the problems. For instance, he believes that the West's general decline in population growth compared to the population growths of developing nations will produce an aging and non-worker glut in the West, while developing nations will have highly urbanized, young workers at their disposal. And when coupled with Islamic radicalism, food needs, and education opportunities these developing nations may be subject to or subject others to a significant amount of distress without the West's help as this transition takes place. I agree with these assertions, and therefore propose that there are a few key ways in which Western businesses, non-profit organizations, and government institutions should adjust their strategies to cope with the impending population bomb.

The first major way in which Western organizations can strategically position themselves in this impending world order is to diversify. Diversification can take many forms, but organizations in the US should focus on first diversifying their people. In the US, it has often been said that the best way to see the world is to join a branch of the Armed Forces (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force), and while this may be true it shouldn't necessarily be this way. US companies and organizations should stop focusing on merely short-term profitability and goals, and begin focusing on equipping their people for long-term sustainability. Certain US corporations are wealthier than entire governments, and many non-governmental organizations remit aid packages to foreign countries in times of crisis, such as Haiti this winter, that exceed foreign governmental aid packages. With this much money and human resources available to such organizations, more should be done by these organizations to send their people around the world - as the military often is required to do with their people - to improve cross-cultural exchange and learning. This cross-cultural exchange would diversify the ideas and attitudes of the individuals in these organizations. Diversified experiences for Western workers would improve their ability to react to and plan for changes going on around the world, since these workers would have a better understanding of the actual issues abroad, and not simply the political and media rhetoric foisted upon them at home. This can ultimately lead to more help coming from the West to those developing nations because the Western aging populations would have more empathy and desire to teach, work with, and understand the populations of developing nations with younger workers who do not have the same access to the basic services and resources that Westerners had during their youth.

Secondly, organizations with aging populations should begin inviting young visionaries and leaders from other cultures or other walks of life to present talks to those in the organization with their own youthful perceptions and outlooks on life so that communication is fostered between the two groups. Mr. Goldstone mentions that an increasingly urban, modernizing, and young population of Muslims in developing nations will significantly outpace the growth of young workers in Western cultures. Already two Iraq wars and a war in Afghanistan, which now seem to have no end, have shown how ill-equipped most Western leaders, populations, and organizations are to adequately understand and deal with these culturally different and geographically separated people groups. Communicating with one another is an excellent early step to learning how to develop a strategy that works for both parties in the future. President Obama, for all his failings, has at least attempted to perform far more of this work than his predecessor, but no US President alone will be able to foster cross-cultural communication if the organizations that he is in part the leader and protector of are not also engaged in similar cross-cultural communication. (Side note: I think President Obama's policies on family issues and economic protectionism are abysmal and betray the message he is trying to communicate to the world, but that's a different topic entirely.)

Lastly, organizations need to rethink their policies towards smaller groups within the organization. Mr. Goldstone asserts that Western governments should encourage MORE families to have MORE children so that global populations are more evenly distributed in the coming decades, thereby allowing a smoother transition from "the West vs. the rest" to "the West with the rest" as population distributions throughout the world flatten out due to overall improved healthcare and food availability. Families are the fundamental "small group" within any civilized society, and therefore this is a well and good policy for governments to follow, but individual organizations should begin to realize that this means that organizations will also need to "flatten" in order to keep pace with these changing demographics. As cross-cultural exchange increases and globalization increases it will be imperative that organizations position themselves with less hierarchy and more leadership at the local level. While such a statement sounds like an oxymoron, it actually makes far more sense. With more leaders in smaller group settings within an organization there will be better overall decision making and responsibility taking in the organization, meaning less overhead and risk of losing one or two key leaders in an organization; however, in order for this to occur, Western organizations in particular will need to spend far more research, training, and education credits than they have been doing during the past to develop more leaders.

In conclusion, these changes will not be easy to make, but I fear that not seriously reconsidering the strategies of the organization to meet the challenges of the coming decades will result in a precipitous decline in Western organizations as the more urbane, young workers of developing countries outpace these outmoded means of operating in Western cultures. Additionally, implementing such shifts to organizational strategy are not hard to make.  Some easy first steps have already been outlined above, but in simpler terms, here they are again:

• Diversify your people - Send teams overseas to learn from foreign peers.
• Promote cross-cultural and cross-generalational communication - Invite visionary young leaders to speak with your aging populations. Promote knowledge sharing between the experienced, and the up-and-coming people in your organization.
• Develop stronger leaders of small groups / flatten the organization - Remain competitive not through sheer numbers, volume, or wealth, but by developing people who are more able and more likely to act independently for the advancement of the organization, and more importantly for those it serves.