Joe’s Journal: Live from TEDx

Today we bring you a special edition of “Joe’s Journal,” featuring a talk that Joe Maciariello, the Drucker Institute’s academic and research director, delivered at the inaugural TEDxOrangeCoast event, “Innovation Without Borders,” on May 19 in Costa Mesa, Calif.

“The empirical evidence is in,” Maciariello declares. “America is the greatest innovative machine in the world . . . The question, then, is why are we in such desperate straits? Why are we are carrying a $14 trillion deficit? Why are people putting us in the category of Greece?”

The answer, Maciarello suggests, is that while we’ve mastered innovation, we’ve neglected virtue. “I’ve concluded that it takes both virtue and productive innovation to shelter the fruits of innovation for future generations,” Maciarello says, drawing on lessons from Peter Drucker, cardiac-pacemaker inventor Wilson Greatbatch, former Citicorp Chairman Walter Wriston, French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville and others.

 

Watch the video, and tell us: Do you agree with Maciariello? Is restoring America’s goodness the key to restoring its greatness?