the Atlantic - It's Worse Than You Think

Excellent analysis by Jack Goldstone at the Atlantic -

It's Worse Than You Think: Halftime Between Two Lost Decades

As I've argued elsewhere on this blog, I would add a technological component to this analysis, in that rapidly changing technology is allowing companies to make product, and record profits, with fewer people... thus, figuring out how these 'extra' bodies are going to make it moving forward is an equally difficult challenge.  Nevertheless, a really good piece...

An excerpt:

"So we are headed down and out for the next few years. Nonetheless, capitalism will survive, and spread, likely emerging stronger than ever, as it has done in previous crises. But it is time to face up the magnitude of the current crisis. This is not a "normal" recession that will quickly pass, or from which the economy will just bounce back on its own. We need address its root causes, both cyclical and structural, find ways to fairly share the costs that must be paid, and forge agreements on the new institutions and frameworks we need to move forward."

How Austerity Destroyed our Small Towns

Interesting piece from Alternet/Dissent Magazine - Holy Shit, What a Nightmare! How Austerity Destroyed our Small Towns - two excerpts:

"The gap between comfortable and confident got much wider in the spring of 2011, when a Republican-dominated state legislature passed a battery of laws that tightened school standards, imposed a merit-pay system on teachers, limited their collective bargaining rights, and diverted substantial funds from an already struggling public education system to a private voucher program."

We're seeing this pattern in many of the Republican led states, the school systems are literally being starved to death, all the while the conservatives in control are promoting 'market led solutions'... which means charters... more often than not, corporate led, private charters... the conspiracy theorist in me thinks back to Grover Norquist wish that Government get so small it could be drowned in the bath tub, Grover's dream is damn near a reality.

The only thing more precarious than being an itinerant GM worker, it turns out, is working for a Japanese automaker. Maybe in Japan there’s still something called lifetime employment, but in Nissan’s Smyrna plant, forty miles east of Spring Hill, permanent insecurity comes with the job.

Like the other foreign automakers that have concentrated in right-to-work states in the South over the last thirty years, Nissan has kept the UAW out of Smyrna and its two other U.S. plants, in nearby Decherd, Tennessee, and Canton, Mississippi. Employment-at-will, which is how Nissan prefers its relationship to its 13,000 American workers, implies no long-term commitment in the event of injury, illness, layoff—one reason why so many of the workers on the line today are younger than LaDonna and Tony. Nissan is not a place that many people retire from. And, in 2006, the company made it a lot harder for those who might want to when it cut retiree health coverage and switched all new hires from a defined benefit pension to a 401(k). After Nissan bought out a third of its Smyrna workforce a few years ago, it started replacing many of them with temporary subcontracted employees starting at lower rates than direct hires.

Economic developers believe it to be a home run to locate that big plant in town, the South has been named the new Automotive Corridor in the United States... this illustrates why... the workers will continue to be squeezed, the middle class will continue to shrink, and all the while corporate leaders will scream for our education system to be more "Demand Driven"... because they demand a docile labor force, that won't push back against a system that increasing is stacked against them and putting them and their families in no-win cycles right on the edge of poverty... 

Generation Flux - Fast Company

Good piece @ Fast Company - This Is Generation Flux:

"This is the moment for an explosion of opportunity, there for the taking by those prepared to embrace the change. We have been through a version of this before. At the turn of the 20th century, as cities grew to be the center of American culture, those accustomed to the agrarian clock of sunrise-sunset and the pace of the growing season were forced to learn the faster ways of the urban-manufacturing world. There was widespread uneasiness about the future, about what a job would be, about what a community would be. Fringe political groups and popular movements gave expression to that anxiety. Yet from those days of ambiguity emerged a century of tremendous progress.
Today we face a similar transition, this time born of technology and globalization--an unhinging of the expected, from employment to markets to corporate leadership. "There are all kinds of reasons to be afraid of this economy," says Microsoft Research's boyd. "Technology forces disruption, and not all of the change will be good. Optimists look to all the excitement. Pessimists look to all that gets lost. They're both right. How you react depends on what you have to gain versus what you have to lose.""

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.”"