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This guest post was written by Dawn Rivers Baker, Dawn Rivers Baker, aka The Journal Blogger, is the editor and publisher of The MicroEnterprise Journal, and the self-proclaimed Socrates of the small business blogosphere.

The jury may be out on any number of issues when it comes to American life in the 21st century — we’re only a decade in, after all — but one thing I think it’s pretty safe to say is that, in this day and age, speed matters.

I am reminded Captain Steve Hiller, the character played by Will Smith in many people’s favorite guilty pleasure movie, Independence Day (1996). Remember him?

Here’s the reason why Captain Hiller was the sole survivor among his squad of fighter pilots sent out in humanity’s first engagement with those marauding aliens: Hiller happened to be blessed with the precise combination of smarts, skills, and flexibility that enabled him to see and respond to risk — and to opportunity — really fast.

He wouldn’t have lasted anywhere near as long as he did if he’d had to stop and consider his options, lobby for favors, or radio back to HQ for orders while he was racing through the Grand Canyon with a superior-technology-equipped alien hot on his heels, would he?

Now, in this week’s intellectual exercise designed to give you a headache, compare that with the pace at which the federal government has been responding to the economic meltdown that is still keeping them up at night (and even threatening a double-dip) almost two years later.

If you judge the actions of the federal government by their own standards, then the responses of Presidents Bush and Obama, and of the Congress, to the economic woes of the nation might be considered unbelievably rapid (well that, and if you overlook the fact that they’ve been ignoring the middle-class pain that might have predicted some of those woes for years).

If, on the other hand, you place the federal government in the context of the rest of the world that it is supposed to be a part of, then you have to come to the conclusion that our nation’s leaders need to figure out a way to do what they do a lot faster.

Then again, the feds are not the only bunch that move at the speed of the last century. Any organization in either the public or private sector that is not structured for rapid decision making, that has layers of hierarchy with pockets of power that are usually pretty zealous about protecting their respective turfs against decision making encroachments from other power pockets, is likely to be seriously left in the dust in this Brave-but-Speedy New World.

You already know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Yes, indeedy. If something like an economic meltdown can happen as fast as it did — and if this is an indication of another way in which the 21st century economy has evolved — then all those hierarchical organizations need to be restructured or something so that they behave a lot more like microbusinesses.

Of course, microbusiness owners are still people. Some of them are better at outsmarting aliens-in-pursuit than others, which means that some of them are better equipped to survive those close encounters than others. But one thing that will favor them out of the gate, setting aside their natural intellectual gifts, is their business’s structure.

Micros are made for speed.

Now, it would be pretty silly of me to suggest that we should get rid of the entire federal government and all those representatives and make the whole thing into something that looks and acts like a microbusiness — although I can think of some Tea Party types who would probably hail that idea as this week’s best episode of blog brilliance.

What I am going to suggest is that microbusinesses have quite a lot to teach many of the other organizations of the world, private and public. The only real question is whether those other organizations can recognize that fact and, even if they do, whether they are willing to learn from the experts.

All of which reduces to this, Mr. and Ms. Microbusiness Owner: what you do is pretty cool.

Don’t ever forget that.

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