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.”"

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."