Boards: build back, and build better: a director's obligation is to take the long look ahead and invest for the future to ensure that your companies--and your country--are engines of new ideas and competitive leadership.

• Author: Otellini, Paul S.
• Position: LEADERSHIP

I KNOW, FIRST HAND, that we are experiencing the worst economic conditions that we have seen since I began at Intel almost 35 years ago. Like every company, Intel is taking steps to manage our way through the near-term reality. It is tough on our employees and our business partners.

When we face a crisis--let's be honest--our habit is to hunker down and hold fast to what we have and what we know: the jobs, the businesses, the institutions, and the ways of life we are familiar with and don't want to lose. It is a perfectly understandable reaction when uncertainty becomes a part of our lives. But I see this economic crisis differently. Our institutions and paradigms have become unfrozen. We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to reshape how things will look and behave as growth resumes.

This is riskier. There is more uncertainty. It is less comforting. Taking that leap can be downright scary. But it is the only proven path to pull out of bad times. If we want to see a return of American prosperity, we have no other choice than to invest in creating the future, not merely preserving the past.

Our entire country is experiencing anxiety about the future. Today, when I look out at the American economic landscape, I'm aware of a cruel, but ironic, fact: I have spent my life at a company that has been devoted to a theory--Moore's Law--about the predictability of technology and product development. And yet I find myself acknowledging that there is nothing predictable about our future economic well-being.

Inflection point

On this issue, we need a lot more candor: For nations like the United States, absolutely nothing about the future is inevitable or guaranteed--not jobs, not leadership, not our standard of living. We are at an inflection point. The fundamentals to which we have become accustomed have changed. How we deal with these changes can lead us to new heights--or they will define the beginning of a downward spiral.

As we contemplate our future, we must accept the fact that many of the assumptions under which business operated for the past 50 years no longer hold true. With the emergence of new economic powers like China and India, America no longer dominates the global economic stage. Innovation no longer belongs to a single country or region. It is more evenly distributed and, in fact, accrues to countries in proportion to the quality and rigor of their educational systems.

The future for every nation will be shaped by new ideas and creativity. These are the engines of future prosperity.

I think it's fair to say that today America lacks the confidence that we have the right strategy to maintain unquestioned leadership in this new environment. And this leads us to uncertainty about our future.

At Intel, it is deeply embedded in our culture that times of crisis are opportunities, not only to build back, but to build better. Our former CEO, Andy Grove, once said, "Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies...