VISION: Our Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Forward

By Norman F. Anderson and Seth Kaufman

With his signature straightforward candor, Washington D.C. infrastructure guru Norman F. Anderson unleashes a fascinating, nation-saving plan for the future that is rooted in two questions: What will the U.S. look like in 2030, and what do we want it to look like? Anderson's analysis is driven by the cris

• Language: English
• Publisher: Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institut
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780578873312

Norman F. Anderson

Norman Anderson, Chairman & CEO, CG/LA Infrastructure Norman F. Anderson is Chairman & CEO of CG/LA Infrastructure. He oversees the four pillars of CG/LA's business: Blueprint 2025 2X, including strategic advocacy to double U.S. infrastructure investment; the Leadership Forum platform, which operates in the U.S., Latin America and Eurasia; GlobalViP, an algorithm-driven tool for infrastructure project owners; and Strategic Advisory, including M&A and both brownfield and greenfield investment opportunities. The National Infrastructure Performance Council, Blueprint 2025's steering committee, is anchored by founding chairmen Hank Greenberg and David Petraeus. Mr. Anderson is, or has been, a member of various World Economic Forum groups, including the Global Advisory Council on Infrastructure, the Strategic Infrastructure Initiative, and the Advisory Committee on Building Foundations for Transparency. He initiated and co-authored the WEF's study on Accelerating Infrastructure Delivery (May 2014). For the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee he authored a White Paper on economic statecraft, focused on infrastructure markets worldwide (June 2014). He has taught an Engineering & Entrepreneurship course at Columbia University in New York City. He is a partner in CAMG, a pan-Atlantic infrastructure fund. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.com, and is a regular contributor to CNBC, Bloomberg, CBC, and Fox Business News, discussing the US and global infrastructure markets. Mr. Anderson began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, serving for a total of five years. He is married to the former Ingrid Sckell and has two children - Norman Gabriel (32), an attorney at Latham & Watkins; and Janina Victoria (30), a visual artist and professor at Concordia University in Montreal. He speaks four languages, including Portuguese. He has a graduate degree from Harvard University.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION.

Why I Wrote This Book

Where there is no vision the people perish.

—Proverbs

Looking back from Thanksgiving 2030, I’m stunned by what’s happened to my country. Ten years ago, we were at each other’s throats, eyes closed to economic decline, suffering individually, lashing out collectively. Now, after a decade of growth—over 3 percent average per year—the mighty U.S. economy is no longer an exercise in managed decline or a dumpster fire of zero sum progress, but again a model for the world. It is again how we like to think of ourselves, a City on a Hill. And in all the right ways—liberty, opportunity and equity seem to have driven a decade of Roaring Productivity.

This book is about how we can make that happen. The story of how we can wake up and rouse ourselves is an exciting one, full of new ideas about technology, funding, institutions that give us a voice, and above all a vision of where we are going. As I write in early 2021, there is no single catalyst that will allow us to gather ourselves, wake ourselves up from a very bad dream—the nightmare of bickering, the beggar-thy-neighbor thinking and everything else that culminated in that shocking day—January 6, 2021—when the U.S. Capitol was overrun while lawmakers were certifying a presidential election. We didn’t like what we saw, at all.

This is the story of how our country can roar back. Not because of one decision, but because of a big change in attitude and a series of strategic investment decisions—making big bets on the future in infrastructure and everything else that matters in the life of a great nation facing a dramatic set of technological and industrial challenges—and opportunities.

This is the story of the decisions we need to make—big decisions—driving our country into a future that will give us all hope, include us all, and make us all proud.

Vision is a word that seems to live in that netherworld between describing a prophet and describing crazy. That makes it interesting. We all know we need vision. It gives us the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom, according to the dictionary. There are qualities about it, layers to that dictionary definition. Think about or plan suggests a kind of system, a learned or proposed way of doing something—using scenarios on the one hand, going with your gut on the other. Notwithstanding that minefield, we need to plan the future—and Webster’s suggestion that we plan with imagination is probably an essential ingredient. As Einstein said, Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere.1 This book gives you glimpses of the future—imaginative glimpses to be sure—of how we as a country can get to where we want to be.

I like the last part of the dictionary definition most of all: or wisdom. Getting to the promised land, in 2030 and beyond, requires a different mix of skills than what got us where we are now. Thank goodness, you may say, but it’s complicated.

The challenge and opportunities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution—electrification and digitization, a digital world involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) and high-speed communications networks that facilitate machines talking to machines and learning from each other—require the usual doses of hard work, ingenuity, entrepreneurship and empathy. But this time we are going to need an active public sector that is world-class at optimizing the public commons, the creation of the public good. Wisdom—not just about making money or distributing money—needs a seat at the table more than at any time in our nation’s history since the early years of the Republic.

I wrote this book because our country is in trouble and we seem stuck in the moment. We need a vision and a roadmap for getting there as a way to jolt the country to action.

We are a great country, but we are stuck. Nowhere are we more stuck than in infrastructure investment—that strategic mode by which a modern country projects and creates the future. Spain has a high-speed rail network (we don’t), Denmark generates 47 percent of its electricity from wind2 (we’re at 9 percent), Singapore’s metro set a record in 2020 with 1 million train miles between delays3 (Washington, D.C.’s metro system offers up a delay every 65,000 miles), and China’s engineering/construction companies are anywhere from 500 percent to 2,000 percent larger than our biggest builders.4 China and our Nordic friends constantly contrast their decades-long planning cycles with our besotted fixation on quarterly results.

There is another sense of vision that is our greatest strength.

Vision is an internal thing, the fiery energy of individual liberty that, when we thread the needle of the commons, of the creation of public goods like infrastructure, makes us unbeatable. In that regard, this book is an urgent call to action. Napoleon said, Let China sleep. For when she wakes, the world will tremble5—and in that vein the aphorism that drives this book is this: If we can wake America up, then the power and glory of our individual liberty will once again light the world.

On Infrastructure

Infrastructure has shifted as technology has evolved. Every day, the vast majority of Americans wake up and benefit from clean water, electricity, good travel, fast-arriving goods and incredible communications. Infrastructure projects used to get us there—they were the public works structures that led to improved health, that provided electricity to new businesses, and the bridges—often literally—to the creation of good, well-paying jobs. An example close to home was my grandfather’s 1898 founding of the Oslo Power and Light Company to bring power to the Norwegian farmers in the Two Rivers and Manitowoc regions of Wisconsin. Now, with computer technology and the rise of actionable data, the notion of infrastructure is deepening, and profoundly so. Infrastructure can still perform its old, vital functions, but now it is a less inert structure, and is quickly becoming the brains of our economy. Increasingly, it works seamlessly with the digital world to create improved efficiencies, utilize big data and make some jobs obsolete while generating wonderful new categories of work. The highway of the future, like the one the Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institute6 is designing for U.S. Route 30 in Ohio, won’t be just a road of steel and concrete, it will be a logistics platform, integrated by sensors to a series of networks, knitting our production and service economies together, from coast to coast. The highway will allow connectivity to and from autonomous vehicles, ensure rural broadband and create revenue for businesses, local government and car owners by generating, using and selling data—truly the oil of the 21st century.

I’m not alone in my thinking. Bryn Fosburgh, senior vice president of Trimble, a leading provider of high-tech industrial solutions, sees the future this way: "The onset of electric vehicles [EVs], reduced personal vehicle ownership, and autonomy will require our current transportation network to change in design, and we will need to focus on final mile transportation. Our transportation network of the future will be a platform for digital communications and charging our EVs. This will also become the main funding source for the networks for the future. Also, visualization and remote interaction will be a key component and require high bandwidth and fast communications both when traveling and stationary at your workplace. The Holodeck from Star Trek is fictional, but the more you can visualize and do scenario planning, the less you need to travel. Is our Eisenhower highway in the future digital? Probably."7

This makes infrastructure investment a strategic priority, a first-order priority of the state—along with national defense, economic health, education and health care. This book makes the argument that a strategic program of infrastructure investment is essential to the achievement of those other priorities—and without that investment, at this time of challenge, we will not succeed, period.

Every president elected since 1992 reached the White House by promising infrastructure investment as a top-level priority. We all know in our bones that is the foundation of our country, so our leaders play that theme during campaign season. Once the election is over, however, infrastructure becomes the next priority, after health care, tax reform, Covid recovery, immigration, the global climate threat, and so on. That’s not a complaint, it’s a simple fact.

I argue that the culprit is an absence of vision, a big problem that threatens our country. This book highlights not just why infrastructure is important, but identifies the roadmap—and the will—required to invest with confidence in our future. Our circumstances on this earth have changed. Vision—foresight with commitment, imagination and wisdom—always involves risk, but our current strategy of doing nothing is by far the greatest risk of all. By 2030 there will be as many as 100 billion ARM sensors producing more data every year than has been produced in the history of humanity, including the data from the year before.8 Our future must shape this data to our needs, creating for the seven billion people on our planet, and for the 330 million in our country, a future that engages us and inspires us. Strategic infrastructure is the array of tools—immensely creative tools limited only by the power of our vision—to bend the future to our needs.

Background

I write these words just weeks after one mob briefly took over the Capitol, and a virtual mob of small investors briefly took over the stock exchange.9 There is a lot of anger out there, a lot of people left behind. This is a big problem. Just as out of balance is the lack of reliable—trusted—public leadership in this country.

Another theme that runs through this book is that leadership must take care of the public commons, that the job is to make public space and public goods (of which infrastructure is the exemplar for our society) not just great, but symbolic of who we are and who we want to be. The front yard of America—our parks and public spaces, airports, highways, trains and transit facilities, the electricity that makes it possible, and the digitization that will make everything possible in the future—should be pristine and well-run. Right now, it is anything but that.

There is a tremendously tight relationship between strategic infrastructure investment and investment in our national defense. If we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm,10 we also sleep soundly when leadership does its job and builds the kind of long-term value for all of us ensuring our liberty at night, every night.

I lived on military bases, the son of a U.S. Marine Corps officer, until I was 16 years old. Not only did we grow up breathing in a sense of the fragility of our country, but what was even more interesting is that we all shared life lived on the ramparts—a life lived for others, by definition. My sense growing up—certainly unspoken, but deeply felt—was that civilians worked for money, and our parents worked to keep the country and everyone in it safe. We took care of the commonwealth, so that everyone else could go about their lives, free to do what was important to them. All of the men around us had fought in World War II or Korea or would go on to fight in Vietnam. This was life with a purpose.

The arc of my life has been defined by that experience, but differently composed. My first job after college—my first real job was working in my uncle’s store in Vermont, and my first adult job was working as a 15-year-old card-carrying union construction worker—was as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay. For five years I made the equivalent of $126 a month, and worked mainly in a village that took a nine-hour bus ride on a bumpy dirt road and a seven-hour walk into the jungle to reach. In a real sense, that experience, living with the incredibly generous and gifted Guarani Indians—sleeping on the ground, or on a piece of wood, going hungry, freezing, having gun barrels pointed at me—made me into an adult. It taught me that you could—and therefore should—do anything you set your mind to, and that included everything from getting land for a Guarani community in Stroessner’s Paraguay to starting a business just out of graduate school.

The deepest lesson was that all human beings, no matter how poor, no matter how uncivilized, are wonderful, and have a greatness that burns within them—call it a belief system, call it culture, call it humanity—and that greatness is in all of us, and it is what we are fighting for.

Why Work in Infrastructure?

Let me get this out of the way at the outset. First, it is clear that infrastructure projects—power, water, highways, communications—create public value for extraordinarily large numbers of people. Getting this right, creating an active list of priority projects that create measurable benefits (health, mobility, jobs), is crucial, a fundamental role of the state, here in our country and internationally. This book is the story of discrete projects, large and small, and the people who breathed life into those projects. Wilson Quintella, the executive director of the Tiete-Parana Waterway Authority in Brazil, is a tremendous example of the vision, perseverance and unreasonableness required to succeed in infrastructure. Dr. Quintella was the key protagonist in the creation of the Itaipu Dam, which powered, and continues to power, the Brazilian economy. This was someone who not only willed the transformation of a country, but who made it happen through talent, art and expertise. Great projects transform lives—and in doing so they transform countries. Second, from a career point of view, infrastructure is a big canvas—Claude Monet’s massive Water Lilies have nothing on infrastructure professionals. You have the opportunity to create your own body of work, your own network of world-class warriors, your own corps. And it has worked out as I had hoped—for more than 30 years, I’ve collaborated with people who operate at the highest level to create value now that will be useful for their countries and their people 40 years into the future. Think about that—infrastructure is a profession in which you have an unimaginably large public influence, and you create relationships that last for as long as you live—and beyond that, because the Corps goes on!

Third, and more selfishly satisfying, working in infrastructure—across all the disciplines involved—is intellectually vital. Every single discipline—engineering, finance, technology, law—has its own time horizon, its own reward structure and its own way of thinking. At the highest level the differences are striking. For example, an engineer will focus on a bridge and how to make it last for 30, 40 or a hundred years, while a finance professional will be perhaps more focused on funding a project so that the end-of-year bonus is achieved. Herding those high-concept experts—often they are much more like artists than geeks or wonks—is nothing if not challenging, but what better reason to get up in the morning than to solve this wonderfully complex Rubik’s Cube of public value creation.

Culture is important, and throughout the book I highlight ways that invisible symbols powerfully inform us, drive us and inspire us. Guarani culture may be vastly different from that of the U.S. Marine Corps, but both give their members direction, a sense of purpose and a profound sense of their own right. These are guiding lights, especially as some politicians and nations assault sacred individual rights. More to the point, their goal, embedded in that culture, is to protect the flame of the human spirt, to nourish and to constantly celebrate our better angels.

Speaking of better angels, people often tell me that I’m too direct. You’ve never worked in a company, have you? they’ll ask. Others, being a bit more gracious (although I understand that this is not fully a compliment, either), will say that I tell it like it is. I started my firm CG/LA Infrastructure11 just after graduate school, already married and with a child. My goal, then as now, was to help people build their priority projects, and their countries. This book brings my experiences, collaborations and some of the experts I’ve met together to hone a vision for the U.S., and a roadmap forward for all of us.

So, it’s time to reimagine infrastructure—not simply because we need to invest more in the future, or because we need new things, but because the future that is coming at us with the force of a high-speed freight train will have an engineer from the Chinese Communist Party unless we get up, work together and get moving.

---

1. For the record, this quote is widely attributed to Einstein. Although the exact source of the quote has never been ascertained, it is still a great line.

2. Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen, Denmark sources record 47% of power from wind in 2019, Reuters, January 2, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-denmark-windpower/denmark-sources-record-47-of-power-from-wind-in-2019-idUSKBN1Z10KE.

3. Christopher Tan, MRT hits new reliability high at mid-year, July 6, 2020, https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/mrt-hits-new-reliability-high-at-mid-year.

4. World’s Top Ten Construction Contractors, KLH, August 19, 2020, https://www.khl.com/news/World-s-top-ten-construction-contractors/1145627.article

5. Again, another insightful quote of dubious origin. You can read Peter Hicks’ article tracking the phrase at https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/articles/ava-gardner-china-and-napoleon.

6. The Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institute (ISIP) is the non-profit organization I launched to create blueprints for governments to fund and launch projects.

7. Bryn Fosburgh, conversation with the author, December 31, 2020.

8. Kevin Carbotte, The Next 100 Billion ARM-Powered Devices Will Feature ARM DynamIQ Technology, Tom’s Hardware, March 21, 2017, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-dynamiq-multicore-microachitecture,33947.html.

9. Matt Phillips and Taylor Lorenz, ‘Dumb Money’ Is on GameStop, and It’s Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game, New York Times, January 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/business/gamestop-wall-street-bets.html.

10. A quote often attributed to George Orwell or Winston Churchill, and apparently said by neither.

11. CG/LA Infrastructure was created on April 1, 1987. For the past 18 years we have conducted a series of Leadership Forum events, annually bringing together the Top 100 projects in North America, Latin America and around the world. This has given me the privilege of getting to know the best infrastructure leaders globally, many of whom I am proud to call my friends. CG/LA also owns the GlobalViP major infrastructure projects platform; and the newly created Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institute, a not for profit focused on infrastructure project best practices.

CHAPTER 1.

Our Country in 2030—Who Do We Want to Be?

"Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

—Tennyson, Ulysses1

Infrastructure—creating the water, power, transportation, logistics, the entire 5G ecosystem—has the power to bring us together, and shoot us into a future of our design in a way that nothing short of war can do. This is a big statement, limning a big fact. Everything depends on getting it right: the projects we select, and how those benefit us individually and as a country; the way we think about ownership of those projects, and how broad that ownership comes to be; and how we use the productivity—the massive productivity—to create a world for all of us. The big investments will be in electrification (from Tesla to wind and solar energy), and digitization (AI, Big Data and Machine Learning). And the challenge, as we create tomorrow, will be not just to maintain our tradition of individual liberty, but to build a system (very different