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?