Rapid Skill Enhancement - Tim Ferriss

I've alluded to Tim Ferriss before (HERE and HERE and HERE), one of the skills sets he's mastered which is imperative for success in the new economy (however we define success and/or new economy) is the ability to rapidly learn new skills.. I'm very excited that.his new book will cover that topic -"The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life."

If talent matters...

I've written about this before, nevertheless it's worth repeating... most companies that complain, especially in this environment, about their inability to find talent really mean that they can't find talent within the price point they want to pay.

A very successful businessman I witnessed make this point in a workforce development meeting.  Other business leaders were complaining that they just couldn't find people who could pass the drug test, or who had the work ethic, etc.  After listening to the complaint's for most of the meeting this gentleman spoke up and said, "I never have that problem."  They all turned around and looked at him, one spoke up and said, "Mr. X, explain to us why you don't?"... He replied, "It's easy, I get the best $10 an hour employee in town, I start everybody off at $15."

Four related pieces:

 

Education Week - There is no skilled worker shortage 

 

WSJ: Commentary: Why Companies Aren’t Getting the Employees They Need “…the author has since posted a follow-up  - HERE

 

In These Times - Alleged Skills Gap Takes Spotlight off Massive Job Shortage 

CNET -  Work with the Cool Kids! Culture is a Weapon in 2011 Hiring Battle

Reading List(s) -

Interesting Reading List from Zappo's - apparently they have these available for all of their employees.  Dan Pink wrote "Free Agent Nation", arguing that we're all essentially free agents in the market place, some of these strike me as essential readings in that regard...  There are similarities in the Zappo's list with those at UNCOLLEGE and at PERSONALMBA -  

We're now in the era of winging it...the education system is not effective, the corporations are figuring out how to make monies without the workers, so each individual is going to have to educate themselves and find their own path to create a life of our choosing.  Liberating in a sense, scary as hell in another. 


"Business Strategy
·       The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content.

·        Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow

·        SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

·        The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth

·        Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

·        Believe Me: Why Your Vision, Brand, and Leadership Need a Bigger Story

·        The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

·        Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

·        The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW

·        The Method Method: Seven Obsessions That Helped Our Scrappy Start-up Turn an Industry Upside Down

Employee Engagement & Leadership
·        Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

·       Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

·        The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary

·        The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

·        Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

·        The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't

Happiness Studies
·        Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment

·        The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

·        Stumbling on Happiness

·        Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

·        Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success

Marketing
·        Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

·        Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Personal Development
·        212: The Extra Degree

·        The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life (J-B Warren Bennis Series)

·        Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results

·        Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Book on How to Think Funny, Write Funny, Act Funny, And Get Paid For It, 2nd Edition

·        Get Off Your "But": How to End Self-Sabotage and Stand Up for Yourself

·        Outliers: The Story of Success

·        What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful

·        Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life

·        You Don't Need a Title to Be a Leader: How Anyone, Anywhere, Can Make a Positive Difference

Coaching...

One on one, personal relationships are imperative to help people find jobs, learn skills, and excel.  The challenge is that in many of our workplaces,  employment agencies, entrepreneur shops and incubators, etc. this "high touch" service is being replaced by "high tech"... high tech is necessary, but not sufficient.

From The New Yorker - Personal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches.  Should you?

"The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention. Consider Maxwell Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, who found, nurtured, and published such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. “Perkins has the intangible faculty of giving you confidence in yourself and the book you are writing,” one of his writers said in a New Yorker Profile from 1944. “He never tells you what to do,” another writer said. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”"

Searchers VS Planners

Interesting piece @ Big Think -

Searching for Searchers

• "Planners announce good intentions – but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out.
• Searchers find things that work and get some reward.
• Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them.
• Searchers accept responsibility for their actions.
• Planners determine what to supply.
• Searchers find out what’s in demand.
• Planners apply global blueprints.
• Searcher adapt to local conditions.
• Planners believe outsiders know enough to impose solutions.
• Searchers believe only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions."

In most communities I've worked I've heard this as "planners vs doers", lots of planners and few doers I've heard people lament... Strikes me as some subtle differences in doers and searchers... nevertheless, communities need searchers and doers, much more than planners.

Employee satisfaction...

Howard Schultz makes a number of interesting points in this Harvard Business Review piece - but, his take on the employee/employer relationship I find especially interesting, Schultz writes:

"...consider how the relationship between employers and employees has evolved from a paternalistic, command-and-control contract to a more collaborative, employee-driven model. Today, enlightened employers know that, if they want great people to perform at the top of their game, they must engage and care for employees' well-being on a variety of fronts that go beyond a paycheck."

And some, obviously, understand this -
Scroll through this list of companies and their pay and perks
- 100 Best Companies to Work For -

SAS in Cary, NC is ranked number one. An excerpt:
"What makes it so great?
A 14-year veteran of this list, the software firm takes the top spot for the second year running.

Its perks are epic: on-site healthcare, high quality childcare at $410 per month, summer camp for kids, car cleaning, a beauty salon, and more -- it’s all enough to make a state-of-the-art, 66,000-square-foot gym seem like nothing special by comparison.

This year, strong employee feedback sent its numbers even higher. Says one manager: "People stay at SAS in large part because they are happy, but to dig a little deeper, I would argue that people don’t leave SAS because they feel regarded -- seen, attended to and cared for. I have stayed for that reason, and love what I do for that reason.""

And HERE for the recent best in the World List -
An excerpt:
"So what makes these companies’ workplaces so pleasant? It differs from company to company, but the running thread in all of them seems to be that they make the little guy feel as important as the top dog. The three traits all of these companies had were employee trust in management, employee pride in the company and workers feeling camaraderie with other colleagues that they were all striving toward a common goal, according to USA Today."

How many of the companies in your community share attributes with these companies? How many of those that don't treat their employee's similarly bitch and moan about not being able to find workers?

Manufacturing

A previous employer used to say, "we all can't flip burgers, somebody has to make something"...

And in old manufacturing towns throughout the U.S. it's not hard to find people complaining about NAFTA and Free-Trade, and economic development, community colleges and others working hard to hang on to those last manufacturing jobs with incentives, lean manufacturing training, six sigma, etc. This has been going on for the last 20 years. And what has been the result?

As this chart on MSNBC shows...
U.S. Manufactures Are Making One Thing - Profits

Which begs the question, if they're running lean and using advanced technologies to make record profits - What are the people they no longer need to make profits going to do?

Starbucks - Microloans

Starbucks - Venti Plans for Microloans

"The micro-lending revolution, which made it possible for community-based lending institutions to bundle together micro-donations of $25 into loans for entrepreneurs in emerging markets, is making its way to your local Starbucks. Starting November 1, if your local bank won’t give your small business a loan, you might just be able to receive financing from hundreds of thousands of everyday coffee-drinking Americans who care about bringing jobs back to their community. At over 7,000 Starbucks coffee shops around the nation, patrons will be able to submit micro-donations as small as $5, which will then be re-packaged into larger loans for worthy local businesses."

Interesting idea. I've argued for a while that helping the unemployed and underemployed develop basic small businesses and teaching the basic skills required to run them effectively is, perhaps, a more effective workforce development strategy than sending someone to school for two-years and/or getting them a certificate in hope they'll find a job. Very simple stuff, ebay stores, mowing lawns, cleaning homes, etc. Microloans would obviously be a piece to that puzzle. The other piece would be great tutoring and mentoring.

A better question to ask

Workforce professionals have been told for years to be more "demand driven" - that is to ask business and industry what skills they need in the workers they'll be hiring. This has always struck me as ridiculous. How many companies can see around the corner? I'd argue very few, they know what they need right this minute, but in this dynamic economy where knowledge becomes obsolete very quickly those same skills will be just as obsolete by the time it takes you to train the workforce. For that matter, that company itself will most likely be changed dramatically during the same period.

In an interesting post @ Huffington Post, Jeff Selingo suggest another question -

"At the same time, employers and politicians need to learn that if colleges provide training only for jobs that need to be filled now, those workers will probably be useless in about two years given the rapid pace of change in most industries.

Colleges need to reframe the question when asking employers what they need. Instead of asking about the jobs they need to fill tomorrow, colleges should ask employers to describe the valuable skills of their best-performing and longest-serving employees. It's likely the answer will be critical thinking, writing, team work, and problem solving -- all attributes of a classic liberal-arts education."

Doesn't that make more sense?

How to find great talent...

Good stuff from Dan Pink -

From his blog- Interesting interview with author George Anders

"George Anders is a top-shelf business journalist, a veteran of the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and now Bloomberg View. For the last couple of years, he’s tried to answer that question by hanging out with the best talent spotters in the world – the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, a squadron of basketball scouts, the folks at Facebook, and many more."...

 "Everybody should be searching for resilience, and hardly anyone does. Being able to bounce back from adversity is crucial in just about every field I examined. You need resilience to be a great CEO, a great teacher, soldier, investor, etc., etc. But when we hire, we’re taught to regard setbacks — regardless of what came next — as flaws in a candidate. So when we prepare our own resumes, we hide our stumbles. That’s wrong! We should cherish people who have extricated themselves from trouble in the past."

And Pink via a retweet - (what if every company had this philosophy?)
"RT @Sisarina: "We have no vacation policy. The best person to decide whether you should take the day off is you." - @TheMotleyFool #TEDxPQ"

Employee's Matter

A very good piece by SJF Institute - this is a conversation that is never had in workforce development circles.  If employee's matter to the businesses in your region, then you should share this piece with them, help facilitate regional conversations on the topic, and clear the path for implementation. If, on the other hand, the biggest workforce concern your businesses share with you is drug testing and basic skills then, frankly, their employee's don't mean much to them and thus the company shouldn't mean much to you.

Employee's Matter: Maximizing Company Value Through Workforce Engagement

"In recent years, the link between responsible business practices and competitive advantage has become increasingly clear. Successful profit-seeking firms that produce positive social and environmental outcomes have grown in number and acclaim. This growth in social ventures is meaningful and exciting, promising to promote greater economic opportunity for people at all economic levels as well as better stewardship of the world’s scarce resources – while proving that firms can indeed do well by doing good.

Although in the vast majority of businesses and at many business schools employees are still viewed merely as a cost, increasing numbers of businesses are taking a different approach. The Employees Matter report profiles 24 fast-growing entrepreneurial companies that clearly perceive a link between employee ownership and engagement strategies and improved business performance, including an improved ability to weather economic downturns."

Real Reform - Teaching What They Need to Know

Good piece by Steve Denning @ Forbes, he says:
"The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy."
The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education

This is especially true, when as this piece in the Atlantic points out -
The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time
"Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops/coworking spaces. Independent workers abound. We call them freelancers, contractors, sole proprietors, consultants, temps, and the self-employed."

The way we live, work, and learn has completely changed - why are we training people for jobs that no longer exist?

We hear so much about "education reform" but almost nobody is talking about real reform that teaches what our children need to know.  Great post at PersonalMBA which answers the question - "What Must an Educated Person Know?"

An excerpt:

"John Taylor Gatto, a renowned education historian and critic of modern industrial schooling, wrote an essay titled The Curriculum of Necessity or What Must an Educated Person Know? Here’s how the essay begins:

"A few years back one of the schools at Harvard, perhaps the School of Government, issued some advice to its students on planning a career in the new international economy it believed was arriving. It warned sharply that academic classes and professional credentials would count for less and less when measured against real world training. Ten qualities were offered as essential to successfully adapting to the rapidly changing world of work. See how many of those you think are regularly taught in the schools of your city or state… Here’s Harvard University’s list of skills that make an “educated person”:

1. The ability to define problems without a guide.
2. The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.
3. The ability to quickly assimilate needed data from masses of irrelevant information.
4. The ability to work in teams without guidance.
5. The ability to work absolutely alone.
6. The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.
7. The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into new patterns.
8. The ability to discuss ideas with an eye toward application.
9. The ability to think inductively, deductively and dialectically.
10. The ability to attack problems heuristically. 

After listing these skills, Gatto continued: You might be able to come up with a better list than Harvard did without surrendering any of these fundamental ideas, and yet from where I sit, and I sat around schools for nearly 30 years, I don’t think we teach any of these things as a matter of school policy… None of the schools I ever worked for were able to provide any important parts of this vital curriculum for children. All the schools I worked for taught nonsense up front. And under the table, they taught young people how to be dumb, how to be slavish, how to be frightened, and how to be dependent."  

How many workers will we need?

Globalization and trade agreements get the blame, but technology is changing our work lives in ways we have yet to fully understand.  Agrarian societies gave us a new merchant class as technology allowed farmers to grow more food, industrialization then grew cities and the service sector... where will people work now?
See this story about Apples new "workforce"... here

Flipping the script -

Couple of good links ...

Teachers as Mentors, Working For Students: Salman Khan “calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help”. 

US Undergrad Education Hits Rock Bottom: The NYT explains why undergraduate teaching in the US is now essentially worthless — it has become an expensive day-care program for unemployable youths.

And a quote- 

It Takes That Long to Break a Child’s Will: From Derrick Jensen “Even when I was young it seemed to me that most classroom material could be presented and assimilated in four, maybe five, years… I’ve since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years.  It takes that long to sufficiently break a child’s will.  It is not easy to disconnect children’s wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure.  Less time wouldn’t do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college.  For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.”

All from Dave Pollard @ How to Save the World - I would also recommend Dave's book below -

Creative organizations

Good piece from Sir Ken Robinson in Fast Company magazine -
The Principles of Creative Leadership

This is one of those areas where if you read what the CEO's say they need and compare it to how most of them run their enterprises and compare it with the structure and emphasis of the education and training institutions in theory preparing students to fill those needs... you see massive gaps.

How well do grades on standardized test prepare students to answer the challenge from these 3,000 CEO's?
"There was a report published in the fall by IBM called Capitalizing on Complexity. It was based on a survey of 3,000 CEOs of for-profit companies, non-profits, social entrepreneurship and public sectors from around the world asking what's on their minds. What was interesting about it was that this year the CEOs said they had three overall priorities. The first priority was running organizations that can respond to complexity because the world is getting more complex every day. Second was how to run organizations that are adaptable and resilient to these changes. But the top priority was how to promote creativity in organizations."

Creating Jobs

Really good piece by Ed Morrison on creating jobs - I didn't take offense at the NPR piece he chastises in this, but I could see how one could, it is cynical and perhaps we do have enough cynicism around -

"What do we know about "how to create a job?" - Ed Morrison

The Civic Process -

The model for engaging communities in the work of the community has, like everything else, changed dramatically.  Most communities are struggling with this process, we as a country are struggling with this process, this piece from Ed Morrison, offers some interesting insights on the model they are working on...

- Agile strategies for sustainable development -

"In an industrial economy, metrics (and the impulse to measure everyone by the same yardstick, e.g., jobs) emphasize control and undercut experimentation. In a sustainable economy -- an economy reliant on flexible, adaptive networks -- metrics provide a critical tool for learning and evaluation to figure out "what works". "

"In building sustainable communities, the civic process for developing and launching collaborative investments is what matters."

Workforce - Human Capital -

Don't call people "human capital"... seriously they are people.  When workforce development professional's get together they talk about being "demand driven" and "engaging employers"... the idea is simple, find out what the employer's in your region need, train people for those jobs, and everyone's happy.  This was a great model in 1989... not so much today.

Why?

- knowledge becomes obsolete at the speed of light, the current model assumes we can train someone one time and they'll keep that job for the forseeable future. Not in this dynamic, global economy.  The shelf life of companies is very short, much less the shelf life of employee's.
- 50+% of all new jobs are temp or part-time jobs.  The consultant is the new model.
- Nobody asks the worker what they want... do they want to be a widget? what do they like to do?  what are they passionate about? where are their skill sets?  How can we possibly assume none of that matters?

Setting the terms of debate... continued

I thought this was a fascinating factoid -

"Just to put in perspective the degree to which these government funds make private foundation resources look like chump change, if every penny of the Gates Foundation 2010 grant budget had gone to K-12 education, it could have paid for less than one full day of nationwide schooling. In other words, the US government spends more each day on education than the Gates Foundation spends across all their programs each year."
Read the rest by clicking HERE

Ultimately, we assume Gates is spending so much money he must deserve to be leading the conversation on education reform. yet, what he spends is a drop in the bucket compared to what taxpayers invest, who appear to have very little say in our schools "reform" agenda.

MIT and Freaks -

Interesting piece in the Guardian about MIT - The MIT factor: celebrating 150 years of maverick genius

It ends with this quote from Chomsky -
"I was just left alone to my own devices. Other people took days off to run their businesses; I went off as an antiwar activist. But no one ever objected. MIT is a very free and open place."

The entire piece points out the weirdos, the diversity, the strangeness that is MIT - which reminded me of this bit by Tom Peters -

Why Do I love Freaks? - By Tom Peters:
(1) Because when Anything Interesting happens … it was a freak who did it. (Period.)
(2) Freaks are fun. (Freaks are also a pain.) (Freaks are never boring.)
(3) We need freaks. Especially in freaky times. (Hint: These are freaky times, for you & me & the [fill in whoever you want here]....)
(4) A critical mass of freaks-in-our-midst automatically make us-who-are-not-so-freaky at least somewhat more freaky. (Which is a Good Thing in freaky times—see immediately above.)
(5) Freaks are the only (ONLY) ones who succeed—as in, make it into the history books.
(6) Freaks keep us from falling into ruts. (If we listen to them.) (We seldom listen to them.) (Which is why most of us—and our organizations—are in ruts. Make that chasms.)

What are you doing in your community to embrace the freaks?

Better than Unemployment Insurance -

Germany has a much better system of UI than we do in the States - the German system encourages employers to keep their folks on the payroll, albeit at reduced hours...

"There is an economy, however, that has figured its way around the Great Recession. Unemployment in Germany is lower now than it was before the downturn (not to mention lower than in Denmark, now, too).

Germany has done well because its labor-market institutions encourage employers to cut hours not workers. Instead of laying off 20 percent of workers, say, a firm can instead lower the average hours of its employees by 20 percent. Both accomplish the same goal, but from a social point of view, cutting hours is much better because it shares the pain more equally and keeps workers tied to their jobs."

Read more by clicking HERE -

If you don't believe the world has changed...

Ten years ago... make that 5 years ago... o.k., three years ago... if you had an idea for a business, how would you have raised $50,000 to get it off the ground?  I guarantee you, you wouldn't have done it like - Freaker USA did -

Click here

Be sure and watch the video... does your community need a Grilled Cheese Sandwich Party?  Does your community need to support ALL of it's entrepreneurs?

Lifestyle Designer's

Part of the rules of the  'New' Economy is that the talented can live anywhere in the world they want... which forces your community to ask, "Why would someone choose to live here?".  Former growth and recruitment strategies were based on recruiting industries to supply the people who lived in your community jobs.  If your community competed based on cheap labor, no unions, lax environmental regulations, and low taxes, you are starting the game behind others in the quest for talent.

Tim Ferris coined the term 'lifestyle design' is his 2007 book, The 4-Hour Workweek. While the title is off-putting to most "professionals", (frankly the title is not accurate, Ferris himself works many more than 4 hours a week), but  many of the concepts are very important for communities to understand.  Young people today recognize that the 'deferred life-plan' model of high school, college, good job with pension, then retirement is no longer a model that works.  Ferris does a remarkable job of laying out alternatives and young people (along with Ferris' marketing genius) have made the book a perennial NYTimes best seller.  Google lifestyle design, and you'll find hundreds, if not thousands of blog post and websites from very talent young people living all over the world like - Cody McKibben, Rolf Potts, the aforementioned Mr. Ferris, and  many others.  Here's a compilation of some of lifestyle design resources - click here

How will communities compete for talent?  How have the roles changed for developing talent?  They've been completely turned on their head and the institutions and communities that recognized this first have a distinct competitive advantage.

But, it's not too late for your community to catch up.

Value of Learning versus the Value of an "Education"

There is a conversation going on in the media on the topic of the value of education.  Do a Google News search for - value of education - and here are some of the links you'll get...

Calculating the Potential Return on Your Major‎ -
Peter Thiel Bets $2.4 Million Against the Value of College‎
Is University Education still worth it?‎ 
Education value
College isn't for everyone
Americans Split on Value of a College Degree 

‎I maintain that this is not just a tough, but important question. If your region doesn't have the percentage of HS/BA/BS graduates you won't get some looks from potential clients. There are regions betting their future on the idea that if they can just increase X, the result will be Y.  Normally it sounds like this - our region is 15% behind the state average in BA/BS degrees, statistics show that a person with a BA/BS degree makes X dollars more than someone with a HS diploma, thus, if we get to the state average we will improve median household income by Y dollars. 
‎

That sounds reasonable on some level doesn't it?  Let me waive my magic wand and give you 1,000 sociology majors (the degree I have)... what company's are flocking to you now?  Which are paying their employee's more money? The probable answer - ZERO.

I struggle with this argument.  In this dynamic global economy, knowing how to learn and a passion for learning are imperative.  I don't think the pieces of paper have value in the market place.  But, skills do, a passion and ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn does... 

WIRED - The Future of Work

Interesting piece in WIRED this month about the future of work -

"The inexorable tide of tech improvements will continue to make blue-collar manufacturing jobs obsolete in the United States. Take the textile industry — we now have the tech to detect minute physical characteristics of fibers and match machinery accordingly, allowing one farmer in America to produce what it might take 800 farmers in China or Kazakhstan to produce."
We've seen reports for the last year talking about the reemergence of manufacturing in the United States - I think this may be true - but, the issue is, the jobs won't follow them back.

Setting the terms of the debate -

Interesting piece in the NYTimes this morning about the Gates advocacy work in education -

“It’s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, 

Click here for the full article -

It's very discouraging for me that Gates, et. al. have essentially framed the debate by which we can discuss education reform, primarily because they are completely wrong. In 2005 Gates  understood this, to this day I use this quote from his speech at the National Governor's Forum -

“America’s high schools are obsolete,” Gates said. “By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they’re broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools — even when they’re working as designed — cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.”

Gates can't possibly believe today what he believed in 2005, simply because the policies he promotes, and the debate parameters he's set, do not address the fundamental issue.   The way we educated is based on a Industrial model and it's completely obsolete.

The future of the library

Well, if I don't watch out this blog could become nothing more than a venue for my apparent man crush on Seth Godin... but, this is another really good post - The future of the library -

With implications beyond the library.  How about your job center? career counseling center at the schools?  They all could benefit by seeing their jobs as "...the local nerve center for information... where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together"... and  "...(a place) to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user serviceable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun."

Early Childhood Education -

Lot's of communities are pushing early childhood education efforts, I think the idea is smart, but the implementation is usually completely wrong.  If implementation entails making PreK more like K-12 it will do more harm that good.

Sweden gets it right - a very good series that compares Swedish PreK to those in England -

Godin - What's high school for?

 Good post from Seth Godin -

 "What's high school for?

Perhaps we could endeavor to teach our future the following:

• How to focus intently on a problem until it's solved.
• The benefit of postponing short-term satisfaction in exchange for long-term success.
• How to read critically.
• The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.
• An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor.
• How to persuasively present ideas in multiple forms, especially in writing and before a group.
• Project management. Self-management and the management of ideas, projects and people.
• Personal finance. Understanding the truth about money and debt and leverage.
• An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever.
• Most of all, the self-reliance that comes from understanding that relentless hard work can be applied to solve problems worth solving."

Collective Impact

An important piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review a few months ago -

An excerpt - "...large-scale social change comes from better cross-sector coordination rather than from the isolated intervention of individual organizations. Evidence of the effectiveness of this approach is still limited, but these examples suggest that substantially greater progress could be made in alleviating many of our most serious and complex social problems if nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public were brought together around a common agenda to create collective impact."

Read the full piece by clicking here 

Other work by the authors, click below to purchase -

Look everywhere, assume nothing -

"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." Stephen Jay Gould

 Where is the talent in your region... that you're ignoring?

How Education Traps Poor Children - Alfie Kohn

Great piece by Alfie Kohn @ Education Week -

An excerpt:
"Remarkable results with low-income students have also been found with the Reggio Emilia model of early-childhood education, the “performance assessment” high schools in New York, and Big Picture schools around the country. All of these approaches start with students’ interests and questions; learning is organized around real-life problems and projects. Exploration is both active and interactive, reflecting the simple truth that children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions. Finally, success is judged by authentic indicators of thinking and motivation, not by multiple-choice tests.
That last point is critical. Standardized exams serve mostly to make dreadful forms of teaching appear successful. As long as they remain our primary way of evaluating, we may never see real school reform—only an intensification of traditional practices, with the worst reserved for the disadvantaged.
A British educator named David Gribble was once speaking in favor of the kind of education that honors children’s interests and helps them think deeply about questions that matter. Of course, he added, that sort of education is appropriate for affluent children. For disadvantaged children, on the other hand, it is ... essential."
Read the entire piece HERE

If you aren't familiar with Alfie Kohn, his work is great - click below for a couple of his books -

Content and Context

Our schools were designed when knowledge was scarce... the schools were a place you could go to learn things you couldn't anywhere else.  That's not the case any more, you can learn from the best and the brightest from hundreds of thousands of lectures and websites on the internet. 

Cody at Thrilling Heroics list some of the best - click HERE

We need to be using these resources and showing students, and all learners, where and how to access this information. And helping them put this information into context.

The Opportunity is Here -

Seth Godin part II -
The Opportunity is Here -

"At the same time that our economic engines are faltering, something else is happening. Like all revolutions, it happens in fits and starts, without perfection, but it's clearly happening.
The mass market is being replaced by multiple micro markets and the long tail of choice.
Google is connecting buyers and sellers over vaster distances, more efficiently and more cheaply than ever before.
Manufacturing is more of a conceptual hurdle than a practical one.
The exchange of information creates ever more value, while commodity products are ever cheaper. It takes fewer employees to generate more value, make more noise and impact more people.
Most of all is this: every individual, self-employed or with a boss, is now more in charge of her destiny than ever before. The notion of a company town or a stagnant industry with little choice is fading fast.
Right before your eyes, a fundamentally different economy, with different players and different ways to add value is being built. What used to be an essential asset (for a person or for a company) is worth far less, while new attributes are both scarce and valuable.
Are there dislocations? There's no doubt about it. Pain and uncertainty and risk, for sure.
The opportunity, though, is the biggest of our generation (or the last one, for that matter). The opportunity is there for anyone (with or without a job) smart enough to take it--to develop a best in class skill, to tell a story, to spread the word, to be in demand, to satisfy real needs, to run from the mediocre middle and to change everything.
¡Note! Like all revolutions, this is an opportunity, not a solution, not a guarantee. It's an opportunity to poke and experiment and fail and discover dead ends on the way to making a difference. The old economy offered a guarantee--time plus education plus obedience = stability. The new one, not so much. The new one offers a chance for you to take a chance and make an impact.
¡Note! If you're looking for 'how', if you're looking for a map, for a way to industrialize the new era, you've totally missed the point and you will end up disappointed. The nature of the last era was that repetition and management of results increased profits. The nature of this one is the opposite: if someone can tell you precisely what to do, it's too late. Art and novelty and innovation cannot be reliably and successfully industrialized.
In 1924, Walt Disney wrote a letter to Ub Iwerks. Walt was already in Hollywood and he wanted his old friend Ubbe to leave Kansas City and come join him to build an animation studio. The last line of the letter said "PS I wouldn't live in KC now if you gave me the place—yep—you bet—Hooray for Hollywood." And, just above, in larger letters, he scrawled, "Don't hesitate—Do it now."
It's not 1924, and this isn't Hollywood, but it is a revolution, and there's a spot for you (and your boss if you push) if you realize you're capable of making a difference. Or you could be frustrated. Up to you."

The Realization is Now!

Seth Godin had a wonderful post today - absolutely brilliant!

The realization is now
by Seth Godin

New polling out this week shows that Americans are frustrated with the world and pessimistic about the future. They're losing patience with the economy, with their prospects, with their leaders (of both parties).

What's actually happening is this: we're realizing that the industrial revolution is fading. The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending.

It's one thing to read about the changes the internet brought, it's another to experience them. People who thought they had a valuable skill or degree have discovered that being an anonymous middleman doesn't guarantee job security. Individuals who were trained to comply and follow instructions have discovered that the deal is over... and it isn't their fault, because they've always done what they were told.

This isn't fair of course. It's not fair to train for years, to pay your dues, to invest in a house or a career and then suddenly see it fade.

For a while, politicians and organizations promised that things would get back to normal. Those promises aren't enough, though, and it's clear to many that this might be the new normal. In fact, it is the new normal.

I regularly hear from people who say, "enough with this conceptual stuff, tell me how to get my factory moving, my day job replaced, my consistent paycheck restored..." There's an idea that somehow, if we just do things with more effort or skill, we can go back to the Brady Bunch and mass markets and mediocre products that pay off for years. It's not an idea, though, it's a myth.

Some people insist that if we focus on "business fundamentals" and get "back to basics," all will return. Not so. The promise that you can get paid really well to do precisely what your boss instructs you to do is now a dream, no longer a reality.

It takes a long time for a generation to come around to significant revolutionary change. The newspaper business, the steel business, law firms, the car business, the record business, even computers... one by one, our industries are being turned upside down, and so quickly that it requires us to change faster than we'd like.

It's unpleasant, it's not fair, but it's all we've got. The sooner we realize that the world has changed, the sooner we can accept it and make something of what we've got. Whining isn't a scalable solution."

Gates v Jobs on Education

Interesting piece here from the NYTimes 'Room for Debate' section  about the differing visions of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on education -

I frankly have struggled with this on occasion - but tend towards the Jobs approach - illustrated by this argument from Mr. Koc 

"In the end, success in the job market is likely less about the specific concentration a student has in college than the development of a range of skills and knowledge that can be applied to a rapidly changing work environment -- the historic goal of a true liberal education."

Ultimately, I think it probably comes down to the advice of one of my hero's - Sir Ken Robinson - we must help students find that intersection between their passion and their skills -

Let kid's rule... and play

I've just recently found two pieces from Susan Engle that I think are really important -

First, Let Kids Rule the School - 
"We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.
That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself."

And, Playing to Learn - 
"In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does. Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on."

What's the model?

This is a question asked often in development work... people in every community are looking for "models" that they can borrow to bring to their community that will work.  And there are people peddling their wares to come to town to teach you how to implement their model.  My short take is it's not in and of itself a bad thing, but recognize that you've got to tailor models for your community. 

Given my criticism of the 'reformers' below, it's fair to ask, what are some models for education?  I think it could be helpful to have a conversation about how to take the prep school model and use it in your public school... Here's a model that makes sense to me -

http://www.newcountryschool.com/

Which I found from an online chat with  Ronald Wolk, whose book is on my reading list - 

If it's good enough for you...

NYTimes piece on Sunday pointed out that most of today’s champions of public school reform went to very exclusive prep schools.  Many of these, like Andover and Phillips Exeter I had heard of, but I was browsing around the websites of some of these I wasn’t familiar with and note that the curriculum’s, class size, emphasis on testing, etc.  appear to be nothing like those that they now promote for the public schools.

Michelle Rhee - Maumee Valley Country Day School – Annual tuition between $13K-$16K. 

Bill Gates – Lakeside School – Annual tuition $25,250

Arne Duncan – University of Chicago Laboratory School – Annual tuition between $20K - $24K

They all appear to have mission statements similar to this one at Duncan’s U of Chicago Laboratory School –

“The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools provide an experience-centered, rigorous and well-rounded education for a diverse community. Recognizing that students have a variety of needs at each developmental stage and learn in different ways, the Schools are committed to help each student:

• Learn to think critically and creatively
• Cultivate a passion for excellence in academics, the arts, and athletics
• Master important subject matter
• Achieve a sense of emotional and physical well-being
• Celebrate both our cultural differences and our common humanity
• Gain a sense of personal and community responsibility
• Develop a life-long love of learning

In pursuit of this mission and in keeping with John Dewey's legacy, the Schools strive to exemplify educational practice at its best.”

As Diane Ravitch pointed out on Twitter yesterday – “Those elite schools teach critical thinking, great arts, not silence, obedience or boot camp, and seldom give standardized tests”

Christopher Hedges recently wrote an excellent piece that, sadly, explains this –

An excerpt:

“Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.”

Read the rest here -

What we in fact learn...

I have a high school diploma, a BS degree, a Master's degree, and one certificate from a prestigious university, working on a 2nd certificate.  This 2nd one is in Entrepreneurship, in joking last week as we left class I said, well the good news is that in 3 weeks I'll be an entrepreneur and have the certificate to prove it.  Which is silly. Just as silly as when we expect someone to leave college with a degree in business and call them a business man, or a degree in accounting and they're an accountant, or (perhaps your getting uncomfortable now) a law degree and they're a lawyer, a doctorate and they're a general practitioner... interesting how expectation changes but what's the reality?

The NYTimes had an interesting piece today about business schools -- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

What we need to know/teach -

I'm going to set aside a piece of this blog for insight from bright people who talk about the "basic" skills necessary to succeed in today's economy.  Here's a good piece from Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, entitled -

How to Get a Real Education

Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business, says Scott Adams

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704101604576247143383496656.html

“I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?”…

“Remember, children are our future, and the majority of them are B students. If that doesn't scare you, it probably should.”

Do people matter?

This piece in the LATimes details the troubles at Ikea's only North American manufacturing facility.

If you want to understand our current workforce development system, understand that this plant has since day one complained that they can't find the workforce they need.  They claim their needs are few - people who can pass a drug test and have a great work ethic.

The first question to any company that complains about their workforce, and says they just need people who can read, write, work in teams, have concepts of quality and a good work ethic, should be - how much do you pay?

Ikea in Sweden starts their employees at $19 an hour, with benefits, and 5 weeks vacation.  If they offered that package in their facility in the U.S., I guarantee you they would get the very best and brightest of manufacturing employee's within a 300 mile radius.  But they pay $8 an hour, with 4 days of vacation outside of 8 holidays in the United States.   And expect the education and workforce system, and the federal/state/local dollars via taxpayers for the K-12 system, the WIB, and Community College, to provide them a cheap, docile labor force that's content earning far less than a living wage.

Ultimately, this will be theme of this blog - If people really matter to your business, if talent matters, then good companies and communities will pay and value them. 

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog. Essentially, this is going to be about economic, workforce, and community development. Here's my primary argument - to understand the world we live in today we can look at two other periods in human history.  First, when humans stopped working as hunters and gatherers, and with the help of new tools, became farmers, secondly, when we left the farm and moved to the cities to work in factories.  When we made these changes in our world, it completely changed the way we lived, worked, and learned.  The transition that started in roughly 2000 to our economy is similar, it's essentially technologically led as during these other transitions, and will completely change the way we live, work, and learn.  We're going to talk about how our communities and people succeed in this dynamic global economy -