As these recent photos by David Hobcote show - be sure to click through on the images to see the full resolution shots — the scale of the building is simply staggering, dwarfing the nearby skyscrapers to the point of needing a new descriptor.  Cloud-topper?  Stratoscraper?  (Story continued below)

I wonder what the Taiwanese and the Malaysians will do now that their Tapei 101 and Petronis Towers developments respectively have slipped to second and third place in the standings respectively.    Where is the US in the worldwide rankings of architectural greatness and aspiration, you ask?   Sadly, today’s best US architectural effort, the Sears Tower in Chicago, doesn’t even make the medal stand coming in a sad 4th and looking to slip ignominiously down to 5th place when China’s Shanghai World Finance Center is completed later this year.

And speaking of medal stands, were any of you shocked to watch China take so many more gold medals than the longstanding US powerhouse for the first time in recorded Olympic history?  (China: 51, US: 36, and Russia is getting uncomfortably close with 23 )  The tragedy to me was that I didn’t find either of these bellwethers surprising.  From world-class architecture and construction to world-class athletics, and yes, world-class economic growth rates, the leader’s baton has slipped from the grasp of the United States.

To be sure, the US economy is still the largest in the world by a good margin, and the US won more medals overall in the Olympics.  And yes, it will take some time yet for the countries that are growing faster and inventing and manufacturing more stuff to make up the large technological and economic lead the US established to become a superpower over the last century.  But the very best-of-the-best, the very leading lights across this vast field of disciplines are no longer home-grown in our country.  And it’s not just about buildings and athletics; these are but indicators of national-scale excellence in ascendancy versus decline.   In medicine and health care, the first entire face and whole-arm transplants happened abroad.  The very latest display and communications technologies are developed and manufactured in Japan and Korea.  The world’s computers are manufactured in Taiwan and China.  The most fuel efficient cars are invented and produced in Japan.

Most troubling of all, for the first time in our nation’s history, other countries and international organization are taking the US to task for torturing people across several international US deployments spread across different continents, a situation clearly much more pervasive and high-level policy driven than this administration’s claim of individual rogue officers can explain.  We have quite literally abandoned the standard and leadership of national moral authority.   The US has lost its leadership position across too many fields, and these broad and general trends across diverse manufacturing, finance, health care, technology and innovation, trade exports, foreign dependence, diplomacy, communications, and overall economics and trade paint a more than worrisome trend and future picture for the United States.  We are abandoning world leadership wholesale.

It strains credulity to imagine that this national trend of abandonment across so many varied areas could possibly happen all at once, by coincidence.  These national trends are the clear result of national-scale policy and culture which has simply not kept up with changing times in a changing world.  So if we would like to preserve our way of life and our economic prosperity, and with them maintain our ability to influence other countries, assist those in need, and wield global military power to check those who abuse their own, then as a nation we need to either drastically improve how we play a now global game, or we need to change the game itself in such a way that our American ingenuity can remain at the forefront of a global civilization by example and industry rather than through hubris and castigation.

Do any of you readers have any good examples of national policy gone awry?

]]> http://allthebestbits.net/globalization-of-leadership/feed/ 5 http://allthebestbits.net/do-your-civic-duty/ http://allthebestbits.net/do-your-civic-duty/#comments Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:35:00 +0000 Phillip Alvelda http://50.18.189.95/?p=286 Decisions are made by those who show up. So go and cast your vote without delay. Our country’s future depends on you.

But this one almost made me cry in how effectively it captured the spirit of my personal dreams and ambitions and the motivations that drive me to build large companies that achieve global impact or work to change education on a national scale. It is a speech by Michael Griffin, the current head of NASA. I had the pleasure of meeting and dining with Mr. Griffin last week in Davos at the World Economic Forum, and I have to say that my first impression of the man was of a reserved yet competent administrator who has done a great job in wrangling a difficult government agency in a time of heady political distraction over the last few years.

But read this speech entitled “Space Exploration: Real Reasons and Acceptable Reasons,” and I think you will see the true seeds of greatness in the man. If I weren’t running MobiTV at the moment, I could almost be convinced to go back to NASA and work for Mr. Griffin.

Thanks for the pointer, Mike.