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The rallying cry for change by our current political candidates conjures up the familiar metaphor of rearranging the deck chairs while the Titanic is sinking.

A less trite and perhaps more apt metaphor was developed by a group of managers when I asked them to draw a picture representing the leadership style of their CEO.

They drew a gigantic hourglass sitting on a small desk with the CEO standing at a blackboard calculating the rate of flow and listing people to blame.

"He's great at analyzing what's happening and placing blame," they said, "but his solution is to keep changing the location of the hourglass. He needs to understand that no matter where he puts it, he can't reverse the passage of sand. He has to accept that inevitability and find creative ways to deal with it."

Although it may not help them get elected, our regional, state and national leaders need the courage not to delude either themselves or us with fuzzy, shallow notions of things they will "change." They need to accept the inexorable paradigmatic shifts facing our world and find ways to respond to them. Here are five truths that must be faced:

The era of cheap energy is gone

We need to stop colluding with our politicians and treat the disease, not the symptoms. Temporarily dropping the North Carolina gas tax will only result in deeper potholes, not solve the problem. Changes in tax strategies at the state or national levels - be they advocated by Democrats or Republicans - won't stop the sand from flowing through the hourglass. We must accept the change and accommodate it by making the quest for alternative energy sources an absolute priority.

Right here in the Triad we can begin to conquer our addiction to cheap energy by such simple measures as carpooling, gentle driving and moving our thermostats a few degrees outside of our comfort zones.

Travel is no longer easy or fun

This is a corollary to the demise of cheap energy. The time when we could rely on airline competition for discounted fares, multiple schedule options and easy access to frequent flyer miles are over. We can no longer spontaneously jump in our cars and take a sightseeing trip without a significant investment.

The N.C. Department of Transportation recently announced plans for an additional midday train between Greensboro and Charlotte with additional stops. This is a start, but we need to take a lesson from Europe, where gasoline has always been expensive compared with the United States, and make light-rail and other forms of public transportation a much greater priority.

Subjectivity and 'feel-good' standards have undermined our educational systems

Wake Forest University recently announced that it would no longer require undergraduate applicants to take the SAT exam. Schools that have dropped the SAT requirement indicate that it allows them to better promote diversity, levels the playing field for those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses and gives greater weight to high school activities and grades.

Another perspective is that it replaces an objective standard with subjective and often "fluffy" selection criteria. Once students are admitted to college, grade inflation compounds the problem by ignoring the statistical reality of the bell-shaped curve.

Author Garrison Keillor's humorous statement that all the children in Lake Wobegon are above average has some not-so-funny real-world consequences. According to most surveys the average GPA at public and private colleges is above a 3.0. The societal legacy of this erosion of objective standards is that, compared to our competitors in other countries, our college graduates have unrealistic expectations of their own value, an inability to learn from constructive criticism, and a significant deficit in measurable skills.

American influence is waning

The United States emerged from World War II as the industrial and military leader of the Western world. While our country is still powerful, the signs of our decline are indelible.

The dollar has much less value, technology is a global commodity, and as we in North Carolina are painfully aware, manufacturing seeks the low-cost provider. Like it or not, on the teeter-totter of global economics we are going down as China is going up.

It is economic suicide to, as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama advocates, reward those firms that provide jobs in the United States and punish those that don't. We need to move past this campaign rhetoric and find ways to accommodate the way the sand in the hourglass is moving.

Our culture is out of sync

In sociological terms, we suffer from a cultural lag. The culture that got us here is now a barrier.

Studies indicate that the United States is the most individualistic culture in the world, but the future requires teamwork, collaboration and cross-cultural competence. We need a much deeper and less-biased understanding of global geopolitical and religious trends and we need to be much less ethnocentric in our cross-cultural interactions.

The sand continues its inexorable flow through the hourglass. All change brings opportunity. We here in the Triad can do our part by helping our leaders understand the forces that are shaping our world and not collude with them for shallow, self-serving and, ultimately, inconsequential change efforts.

David Noer (dnoer@elon.edu) is the Frank S. Holt Jr. Professor of Business Leadership at Elon University and an honorary senior fellow at Greensboro's Center for Creative Leadership. He writes a monthly column for the News & Record on leadership, organizational behavior and community issues.