Georgetown suffers from poor management. The country knows this, and accepts it as a fact of life. Flooding swamps the sidewalk of City Hall on Regent Street. People step into the nasty water with not a word of protest. A section of the historic City Hall building facing Avenue of the Republic suffers from neglect. The wood walls fall apart. The paint looks defeated in sadness.
City Hall symbolizes the effects of poor management: things fall apart.
Each of us wants to live daily to fulfill our aspirations for our lives and for a sound society. We aspire not for a society that falls apart, but for a society that stands as a solid foundation for us to build our dreams and aspirations into reality.
In a country that prides itself as a democracy, the denial of local government elections 
has shut out citizens from having a say in their city’s management. In fact, citizens all over this land have no say at all in the management of their communities.
Free and fair elections at State level mean nothing if local communities suffer under the dictatorial pigheadedness of poor management. President Bharrat Jagdeo cannot escape responsibility for this enormous scandal that people ignore so easily. The President has the power to make things happen in this country. Why hasn’t he seen to it that communities have good management in place?
The Garden City stinks with garbage, sewage-strewn floods and dirty streets. Lavish overgrown weeds deface the Botanical Gardens opposite the Cultural Centre. Village after village all across the land suffers from poor management. People shrug and move on, resigned to their fate.
As a people we must look and feel and hear the neglect of the land. We must care to design solutions. Then, we must manage the affairs of this nation, one person at a time. The State fails. Individuals of vision must step into the breach and make the difference.
The great management expert, Peter Drucker, wrote a splendid little book called ‘The Five Most Important Questions You Should Ask About Your Organization’. These questions concern the simple matter of management in life. Although he was specifically referring to non-profits, the five questions apply well to companies, societies, nations, and most importantly, individual lives.
I cannot live a worthwhile life unless I learn to self-manage. I cannot build a company, or transform my community, or contribute to build a nation, unless I apply sound management skills.
Management skills make up the foundation of life skills. Life demands certain essential skills. These essential life skills build a life, like bricks build a house.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century on January 1, the global village has completed the transformation into a global Knowledge Society. Each of us must transform our life and thinking to be able to cope in this new era. The Industrial Age has given way to the Knowledge Age. A consequence of this is the economic turmoil still shaking the US. We have transitioned our world from factories, steel and hard assets into information, software and virtual space. And so Wikileaks has as much effect on the world order as Iran’s nuclear plants. The founders of Google, Facebook and Microsoft became billionaires serving this new Knowledge Age.
Individually, and as a society, we cannot live with the same old habits that we cultivated for an Industrial way of life.
The Industrial Age of factories and mechanized materialism came out of the ideas of Adam Smith, who wrote in his book ‘Wealth Of Nations’ that people have “wants” and “needs” and therefore society should be built to accommodate and fulfill people’s needs and their wants. Mankind lived like that for over 100 years, building a material world.
Times have changed. We no longer just have those six basic needs and those wants that Adam Smith detailed. Drucker proposed that we have aspirations. Every person aspires to something beyond his or her needs and wants.
And a city, a society, a nation fails to the extent that the aspirations of its citizens cannot be satisfied. For each individual, we must learn to manage ourselves so that we achieve our aspirations in life – not just our needs and wants. We look to government to build our public spaces into creative gardens where we could cultivate our aspirations. But governments are failing in this new task, nearly everywhere in the world. Personal initiative should take over, as Drucker recognized.
As Drucker urged us, we cannot succeed without practising sound management skills in this brave new world, where our aspirations define us. Mankind aspires. And a society must be managed to satisfy its citizens’ aspirations. If not, people will go where they can satisfy their aspirations. Hence, a migration culture marches overseas, while the local communities suffer poor management.
Our aspirations drive us, motivate us, push us to live to accomplish worthwhile goals. We aspire for our Garden City, refusing to let this idea become lost. We aspire to a Guyana of great glory. We aspire as a people to stand tall among the nations of the world and be a great people, a nation of outstanding citizens.
Yet, Georgetown reflects a people battered under the weight of decades of unfulfilled expectations. People have come to expect government to solve their problems. And too many people sit idle and wait, expecting central government to come to the rescue.
In this Information Age, as Yahoo says on its website, the new master is YOU. In fact, when Time magazine named YOU as the Person of the Year last year, it was proclaiming the new world of the Information Age.
Georgetown lies in the hands of its citizens. We must aspire for a city that functions. Guyana lies in the hands of its citizens.
We must see ourselves as responsible for the world we live in. Each of us is responsible for the way City Hall neglects the affairs of our city.
And if I am responsible, how do I behave? I cannot just shrug my shoulder and resign myself to the world as it is. I must start from the place of my aspiration, and design a way forward that would inspire me to a life that contributes to society’s transformation. I must aspire. I must want to make a difference. In this Knowledge Age, what advances me forward is my aspiration for a fulfilled life of accomplished living. I cannot live looking to a government caught in its own inept traps to give me my needs and wants. I must live for my aspirations. I must love new ideas. I must embrace innovation. I must aspire.Georgetown can be a great city of glorious splendour, full of flowers and trees and breezy streets with marble stone avenues and delightful architecture and a people friendly and gracious and pleasing to rub shoulders with. Things need not be falling apart.
But, we must ask ourselves if we aspire to be a society that lives for each other’s aspirations, or are we just looking to satisfy our needs and wants? In the new global village riding the information highway, we must cultivate aspirations.
Things fall apart because of City Hall’s and government’s poor management skills.
But you and I need not despair, because you and I have our aspirations and we can each use our personal initiative to build a life to accomplish what we aspire to. If each of us self-manages to achieve our personal aspirations, we can transform the society and allow democracy to play its rightful role.
Let’s not settle for satisfying our needs and wants in a society that falls apart. Let’s cultivate aspirations to be a society sporting a stunning City Hall, seeing ourselves as personally responsible for the walls of our land falling apart. Let’s aspire to cultivate our city into the oasis of Georgetown.
