And here’s an excerpt from JK Rowlings graduation address at Harvard:
I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
A Teachable Moment or "No Constitutional Right to be Offended" by Leonard Pitts
Kids say the darnedest things.
That's how you know they're kids. Their fondness for rash overstatement is part and parcel of a stage of life characterized by impulsiveness and an unshakable faith in one's own righteousness.
The challenge for schools is to balance kids' impetuousness against their right of free speech.
That question brings us to Morgan Hill, Calif., where several boys recently decided to wear American flag T-shirts to Live Oak High School. It may sound innocuous, but it wasn't. See, the boys, some of whom are Mexican-American, did this on May 5 — Cinco de Mayo, as their classmates (nearly 40 percent of whom are reported to be Latino) were celebrating that Mexican observance, some even wearing the red, white and green of the Mexican flag. Moreover, they did it in the context of a national debate over illegal immigration from Mexico.
In that context, on that date and in that place, the decision to wear those shirts was not innocent, but, rather, a calculated provocation. Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez, calling the shirts “incendiary” and fearing a fight, asked the students to either take the shirts off or turn them inside out. When several of the boys refused, he sent them home.
Ironically, it is the decision itself that has proven incendiary. The school district disavows it and conservative critics have lambasted it as un-American. They're right.
At least, I think they are; the Supreme Court has been less than definitive in setting the boundaries of free speech for students. In 1969, it sided with three kids suspended from school for wearing black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War, ruling that they could not be prohibited from expressing their opinions if they did not interfere with the operation of the school or the rights of others.
Subsequent courts have edged away from that affirmation of relatively unfettered rights, allowing schools to ban sexually explicit student speech in one ruling, and speech that seems to promote illegal drug use.
Still, it is hard to see this latest incident as anything but an abridgement of those students' First Amendment rights — not to mention an act of glaring hypocrisy. By what reasoning does Rodriguez ban red, white and blue while permitting red, white and green? All that said, though, neither of those complaints addresses what seems to me the most regrettable aspect of this affair. The educator missed a teachable moment.
Imagine if Rodriguez had corralled the most articulate of the T-shirt boys and the Cinco de Mayo celebrators and required them to research and represent their points of view in a schoolwide debate. The T-shirt kid could have challenged his classmate to explain why he felt the need, if he is an American, to celebrate a foreign holiday. The classmate could have pressed the T-shirt kid on why he felt threatened by a simple acknowledgment of heritage and cultural origin.
Maybe they reach an understanding, maybe they don't. But in any event they learn a valuable lesson: that reasonable people reason their way through disagreements. And that the First Amendment confers not just a right to speak your piece, but an obligation to allow the other guy to do the same.
Instead, Rodriguez taught the opposite lesson: that it is OK to ban the unpopular or provocative opinion. Few things could be less reflective of U.S. ideals.
See, there is no constitutional right to never be offended. Someone should explain that to the students of Live Oak High.
lpitts@miamiherald.com
That's how you know they're kids. Their fondness for rash overstatement is part and parcel of a stage of life characterized by impulsiveness and an unshakable faith in one's own righteousness.
The challenge for schools is to balance kids' impetuousness against their right of free speech.
That question brings us to Morgan Hill, Calif., where several boys recently decided to wear American flag T-shirts to Live Oak High School. It may sound innocuous, but it wasn't. See, the boys, some of whom are Mexican-American, did this on May 5 — Cinco de Mayo, as their classmates (nearly 40 percent of whom are reported to be Latino) were celebrating that Mexican observance, some even wearing the red, white and green of the Mexican flag. Moreover, they did it in the context of a national debate over illegal immigration from Mexico.
In that context, on that date and in that place, the decision to wear those shirts was not innocent, but, rather, a calculated provocation. Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez, calling the shirts “incendiary” and fearing a fight, asked the students to either take the shirts off or turn them inside out. When several of the boys refused, he sent them home.
Ironically, it is the decision itself that has proven incendiary. The school district disavows it and conservative critics have lambasted it as un-American. They're right.
At least, I think they are; the Supreme Court has been less than definitive in setting the boundaries of free speech for students. In 1969, it sided with three kids suspended from school for wearing black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War, ruling that they could not be prohibited from expressing their opinions if they did not interfere with the operation of the school or the rights of others.
Subsequent courts have edged away from that affirmation of relatively unfettered rights, allowing schools to ban sexually explicit student speech in one ruling, and speech that seems to promote illegal drug use.
Still, it is hard to see this latest incident as anything but an abridgement of those students' First Amendment rights — not to mention an act of glaring hypocrisy. By what reasoning does Rodriguez ban red, white and blue while permitting red, white and green? All that said, though, neither of those complaints addresses what seems to me the most regrettable aspect of this affair. The educator missed a teachable moment.
Imagine if Rodriguez had corralled the most articulate of the T-shirt boys and the Cinco de Mayo celebrators and required them to research and represent their points of view in a schoolwide debate. The T-shirt kid could have challenged his classmate to explain why he felt the need, if he is an American, to celebrate a foreign holiday. The classmate could have pressed the T-shirt kid on why he felt threatened by a simple acknowledgment of heritage and cultural origin.
Maybe they reach an understanding, maybe they don't. But in any event they learn a valuable lesson: that reasonable people reason their way through disagreements. And that the First Amendment confers not just a right to speak your piece, but an obligation to allow the other guy to do the same.
Instead, Rodriguez taught the opposite lesson: that it is OK to ban the unpopular or provocative opinion. Few things could be less reflective of U.S. ideals.
See, there is no constitutional right to never be offended. Someone should explain that to the students of Live Oak High.
lpitts@miamiherald.com
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
74 percent of all jobs created in America will be high-paying jobs for high-skilled workers by 2020.
What Jobs Won't Return by Ira S. Wolfe
Our Misplaced, Displaced, and Replaced Work
By Ira S Wolfe, Success Performance Solutions
Download a pdf version of "What Jobs Won't Return."
Two storms blasted across our labor markets. The first, driven by a gale of creative destruction, was kicked strong a decade back by outsourcing, offshoring, and cybertechnologies that began scrambling whole industries. And the second came last year when bursting financial bubbles magnified the longer term furies with the severe recession. We asked Ira Wolfe to peer through the receding clouds at the employment landscape that’s coming into view again to search for those jobs that were blown away like the buggy whip makers of long ago. And we invited a panel of distinguished educators to review Ira’s discoveries through the lenses of their best strategic information. Here are their views of the emerging job horizon. — Ted Byrne, editor
“The picture of the U.S. economy that emerges is of abundance and poverty,” says Edward Gordon. “Abundance of labor, poverty of talent.” In other words, despite high unemployment rates, the U.S. as it stands does not have enough people to fill the jobs that should be created and an oversupply of people to fill jobs that are or should be obsolete.
The economy now sits in a hole more than 10 million jobs deep. How and when we can climb out of that humongous pit seems to be the linchpin for a full-blown economic recovery. According to Gordon, author of Winning the Global Talent Showdown, the United States is headed for this major talent meltdown with 12 to 24 million vacant jobs between 2010 and 2020, mostly high-paying, high-skilled jobs.
The canary has been singing in the labor mine for several decades warning of our growing lack of talent as we enter a transitional labor-market era. Partially due to ignoring the warning and partially the result of the most recent economic crisis, businesses and government are now confronting a day of reckoning: prolonged joblessness for the unskilled, low-skilled, and under-skilled. “We’ve been hearing alarms about the skills gap for years,” according to Gordon, president of Imperial Consulting. “But if ever there was a time to get serious about helping workers acquire the right skills, this is it.”
Thomas Friedman, of The World is Flat fame, suggests that a critical reason for the recent Great Recession is “an education breakdown on Main Street” that has undermined the ability of the average American worker to compete in the global arena.
The September 2009 Employment Dynamics and Growth Expectations Report from the staffing firms Robert Half International and Career Builder also reported that human resource managers judged 47% of their applicants unqualified. Many of these vacant positions were STEM jobs or those that are in science, technology, engineering, or mathematically-related areas.
Unfortunately change in the way we train and educate workers and prepare students for the future is not what you’re hearing in the news. What we’re getting is the same old theme of denial. To re-boot the economy and sustain growth, we can’t just reframe existing jobs. We need to stop creating jobs that employ the current talent pool of low-skill workers. Instead we need to stimulate middle and high skill job growth and start creating talent. Gone forever are the days of semi-skilled, well-paying blue-collar factory jobs that can provide a 19-year-old dropout or high school graduate with a living wage. Today counting on a low-skill manufacturing or service job to keep you in the middle class is as sensible as buying a BETA tape for a Blue Ray DVD player.
Ten million is the conservative number required to get the unemployment rate back to 5 percent. And because the population is still growing and many unemployed return to the job market, we need to produce 1.5 million new jobs a year just to keep pace. That assumes we can create jobs that the country needs and can match idle workers with the right skills to do those jobs.
According to Gordon’s research, “between today and 2020, it is expected that 74 percent of all jobs created in America will be high-paying jobs for high-skilled workers. While there will be a need for 123 million of those talented people, only 50 million Americans will qualify. By contrast, low-paying, low-skill jobs will shrink to just 26 percent of the total jobs in the U.S. Worst of all, just 44 million people will be needed for those jobs, but 150 million or more candidates will be seeking those jobs.”
Click here to read about job extinction - jobs that are gone for good.
In Pennsylvania, the skills gap is hitting middle skills jobs the hardest. According to the 2007 National Skills Coalition report, about 53% of Pennsylvania’s jobs were in middle-skill occupations. But only 42% of the state’s workers likely have the appropriate training for these jobs. That’s significant because 51 percent of all jobs in Pennsylvania are middle skills, with another 30 percent of jobs in the high skilled segment. If you’re doing the math, less than 19 percent of all jobs will be low-skilled. Pennsylvania’s excess labor capacity for these low-skill jobs is over 42 percent and you just can’t move low-skilled workers into middle- and high-skilled jobs without considerable education and training investment. The report concluded that Pennsylvania would require 4.6 times more annual investment in workforce development and education than was currently funded…and that was before the budget cutbacks of 2010.
Even more compelling is Gordon’s prediction that reducing joblessness might be realistic if a lot of the jobs that were lost were coming back. But that just isn’t going to happen – not now and not in the future. “That’s the hard truth that a lot of people don’t want to face,” says Joe Watson, author of “Where the Jobs Are Now.”
What will happen to those 100 million-plus low-skilled American workers? Unless something changes quickly and dramatically, they will either be unemployed or employed by a manager who believes that a poorly skilled employee is better than no employee at all. That might work short-term for an economic boost but it’s a prescription for disaster for business.
For almost two decade beginning with War for Talent paper released by consulting firm McKinsey and Company , a shortage of skilled workers has been forecast. This crisis is by no means unexpected. Beginning in 2001 and accelerated by the Great Recession, job creation models were shattered. Out-sourcing and automation became a fact-of-life for many organizations. Many businesses resisted change, hanging onto processes and people that were inefficient, unproductive, and costly.
Many people ignored the warnings. Others challenged the logic. They argued that the Baby Boomers would retire, tech-savvy Millennials would replace them, and improvements in education and training would turn any shortage of skilled workers from a disruptive gap into a productive bond.
Well, the Boomers aren’t retiring just yet. The Millennials are unemployed . Gen X aren’t advancing up the career ladder. Education is desperately attempting to play catch up with fewer and fewer resources and dollars. And workforce training is just plain under-funded, under-utilized, and just too bureaucratic to re-tool and re-equip over 100 million workers with the skills they need quickly … and desperately.
The recession changed all that. It’s like the recession justified a business cleansing – wholesale lay-offs, plant closings, and outsourcing for the sake of avoiding bankruptcy or closing a business entirely. “Many businesses took the recession as an opportunity to clean house and raise quality,” says Mustafa Kapadia, an outsourcing advisor with EchoPoint Consulting. “The political and moral sting and backlash from replacing five people with one piece of software or equipment and outsourcing entire departments abated, at least temporarily, under the veil of business survival. Employees weren’t sacrificed for the sake of a few extra bucks on the bottom line but for survival and sustainability.” What happened in 2008-2009 should have happened voluntarily in many businesses years ago. The recession just provided the excuse.
Watson agrees. Up until now there has been a “gradual shift in the United States from an industrial based job market to an information-based one. The recession however precipitated a sudden, radical shift in the market toward information and service jobs, pulling the rug out from under what was left of an industrial-agrarian economy.”
The residual effect of this accelerated shift ultimately left at least 15 million workers out in the cold and potentially another 10 million underemployed looking for jobs. And those numbers don’t even take into account all the under-skilled workers hanging on by a thread. How soon will it be until another wave of workers receive pink slips because their jobs aren’t needed anymore or automation and/or outsourcing can replace them? Finding jobs for all those people is simply not going to happen - at least not quickly – even if re-hiring and new job creation rebounds.
Many out-of-work workers, particularly in construction and manufacturing – simply don’t have the skills to pick up where they left off when the economic train leaves the station. “In a sense, says Gary Burtless, a labor economist with the Brookings Institute, “every time someone’s laid off now, they need to start over.”
“What is happening now,” says jobs and growth expert Tom Gimbel, “is no different than 100 years ago when workers who forged horseshoes had to learn to make tires.” Gimbel, who is also CEO of Chicago-based staffing and recruiting firm Lasalle Network, sees the elimination of many jobs due to automation and efficiencies. He recalls that 20 years ago every attorney in a law firm had a personal assistant. The requirements to be a legal assistant consisted of the ability to take shorthand, type 80 words per minute, and make coffee. Today 4 partners share one assistant and associates are expected to do their own word processing.
Another factor making it harder than ever to fix the joblessness mess is that a significant number of workers laid off during the latest recession were men. And men, for the past several decades, simply haven’t kept up with changing minimum education requirements. Women outnumber men in college and make up over half of graduating classes in many, post-secondary, professional, graduate, and business schools. Many of the men will need to retrain and find new careers. That is easier said than done since re-tooling an assembly line worker or carpenter to become a nurse requires more than just a few years of schooling.
But blue-collar workers aren’t the only casualties of technology and a recession. Many professional jobs in finance, media, and even law and accounting will never be the same. The out-sourcing of white-collar work has become possible. “While the number of law school graduates is up,” says Gimbel, “many of these new attorneys never end up practicing law.” Likewise, medicine has been outsourcing the interpretation of x-rays to India and Australia for years. Accounting firms are outsourcing the preparation of tax returns for a fraction of the cost of hiring young college graduates. Businesses are outsourcing payroll and sometimes even the entire human resource function to online and outsourced firms. And law firms now outsource their research overseas instead of hiring new grads since access to nearly all the documents is available online. And it’s not only about saving dollars – the labor with the skills to do these virtual jobs is abundant and most times equally if not more qualified.
An information-driven company used to require hundreds of data entry workers, according to Kapadia. One of his clients started with 400 employees before they analyzed what the employees were doing and the cost of employing them. His company showed management that by scanning forms, the technology could read the data with 95 percent accuracy. “To deal with the five percent error rate, Kapadia shared, “we hired off-shore workers to review the data – to ensure our human quality check. The U.S. counterparts, mostly data entry workers, in the past now become analysts.” The client is creating jobs, Mustafa reports, but the jobs are fewer in number and the skills required are more advanced. All in all, hundreds of data entry jobs were lost but the quality of the company’s work went up. One new job effectively replaced 4 to 5 others.
While professional jobs will surely be created, the type and complexity of work that the newly hired will be expected to perform will require different and more advanced skills sets. New jobs being created require the ability to work remotely, coordinate different systems and teams, and collaborate beyond company walls and even time zones. The successful project manager of the past worked within one company, experiencing more control over the players and resources. “Today,” says Kapadia, “managing a project is extremely hard to do. You have to manage different mindsets. A project manager today is really” a governance manager, a collaboration manager, an outsource manager. A CIO friend of mine who heads up IT for a 2000-employee semiconductor business runs his entire IT department with only three employees. Their function – coordinate, coordinate, coordinate.”
Employers, workers, and politicians need to come to grip with reality. The theme of denial about joblessness is no longer effective. In fact, it’s destructive. Creating new jobs that match the skills levels of the unemployed is politically sound short term but economic cacophony in the long run. Sustainable long term growth requires the creation of new jobs that will grow and inherently stimulate our economy. Reframing existing jobs is simply subsidizing many obsolete workers and postponing the inevitable.
Read what the presidents of several schools and colleges had to say about education and skilled workers.
The definition of work and consequently, the definition of a job is changing. The evolution from agrarian and industrial age jobs to service and knowledge work is nearing its completion, thanks to the help of the latest recession. The ability to use your “head” as well as your hands, not one or the other, is a requirement today. And yet, we have graduation rates hovering around 70 percent for many high schools and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (S.T.E.M.) scores falling well behind dozens of nations. Today knowledge is power and too many workers simply don’t have the mojo.
Employees in new jobs don’t “go to work” … and if they do, they don’t work in permanent full-time positions. They work in part-time jobs, often working for several employers at the same time. But unlike the past when working part-time was a stepping stone to full-time employment or a means to propping up personal finances, part-time work in the future will be by design. Skilled workers will work remotely, simultaneously interacting with different teams in different places and even collaborating on different projects. People with the right skill sets can do that. The contingent worker, or “just-in-time” worker, will become the norm, especially in lower skill jobs. The less versatile the employee, the more expendable he or she becomes.
People also have long complained that they have been swamped by too much information. In 1917 a manager of a Connecticut manufacturing plant complained about the effects of the telephone: “Time is lost, confusion results, and money is spent.” Despite his objections, technologies like the telephone supported economies build around mass production. Today technology and globalization has created a seismic shift from quantitative change to qualitative differences. Economies, once driven by whoever owned the machinery and raw materials, is now being outflanked by the new raw material of business –data. Joe Hellerstein at the University of California at Berkeley, calls it the “industrial revolution of data.” The Economist called it the “data deluge.” Keeping up with all the new information being created is difficult enough. Analyzing it and extracting useful information is harder still. Ignoring it is economic suicide.
This revolution requires a new skill worker – one who has the ability to process large volumes of uninterrupted data and extract valuable information from it. Gordon in a recent issue of The Futurist called for a “[a] new age [that] will require the reinvention of the education-to-employment system.”
In the meantime, employers seeking qualified workers will face unprecedented challenges to recruit and retain them. And our communities will wrestling with the societal, personal, and economic impact of prolonged joblessness.
Can you hear me now?
Our Misplaced, Displaced, and Replaced Work
By Ira S Wolfe, Success Performance Solutions
Download a pdf version of "What Jobs Won't Return."
Two storms blasted across our labor markets. The first, driven by a gale of creative destruction, was kicked strong a decade back by outsourcing, offshoring, and cybertechnologies that began scrambling whole industries. And the second came last year when bursting financial bubbles magnified the longer term furies with the severe recession. We asked Ira Wolfe to peer through the receding clouds at the employment landscape that’s coming into view again to search for those jobs that were blown away like the buggy whip makers of long ago. And we invited a panel of distinguished educators to review Ira’s discoveries through the lenses of their best strategic information. Here are their views of the emerging job horizon. — Ted Byrne, editor
“The picture of the U.S. economy that emerges is of abundance and poverty,” says Edward Gordon. “Abundance of labor, poverty of talent.” In other words, despite high unemployment rates, the U.S. as it stands does not have enough people to fill the jobs that should be created and an oversupply of people to fill jobs that are or should be obsolete.
The economy now sits in a hole more than 10 million jobs deep. How and when we can climb out of that humongous pit seems to be the linchpin for a full-blown economic recovery. According to Gordon, author of Winning the Global Talent Showdown, the United States is headed for this major talent meltdown with 12 to 24 million vacant jobs between 2010 and 2020, mostly high-paying, high-skilled jobs.
The canary has been singing in the labor mine for several decades warning of our growing lack of talent as we enter a transitional labor-market era. Partially due to ignoring the warning and partially the result of the most recent economic crisis, businesses and government are now confronting a day of reckoning: prolonged joblessness for the unskilled, low-skilled, and under-skilled. “We’ve been hearing alarms about the skills gap for years,” according to Gordon, president of Imperial Consulting. “But if ever there was a time to get serious about helping workers acquire the right skills, this is it.”
Thomas Friedman, of The World is Flat fame, suggests that a critical reason for the recent Great Recession is “an education breakdown on Main Street” that has undermined the ability of the average American worker to compete in the global arena.
The September 2009 Employment Dynamics and Growth Expectations Report from the staffing firms Robert Half International and Career Builder also reported that human resource managers judged 47% of their applicants unqualified. Many of these vacant positions were STEM jobs or those that are in science, technology, engineering, or mathematically-related areas.
Unfortunately change in the way we train and educate workers and prepare students for the future is not what you’re hearing in the news. What we’re getting is the same old theme of denial. To re-boot the economy and sustain growth, we can’t just reframe existing jobs. We need to stop creating jobs that employ the current talent pool of low-skill workers. Instead we need to stimulate middle and high skill job growth and start creating talent. Gone forever are the days of semi-skilled, well-paying blue-collar factory jobs that can provide a 19-year-old dropout or high school graduate with a living wage. Today counting on a low-skill manufacturing or service job to keep you in the middle class is as sensible as buying a BETA tape for a Blue Ray DVD player.
Ten million is the conservative number required to get the unemployment rate back to 5 percent. And because the population is still growing and many unemployed return to the job market, we need to produce 1.5 million new jobs a year just to keep pace. That assumes we can create jobs that the country needs and can match idle workers with the right skills to do those jobs.
According to Gordon’s research, “between today and 2020, it is expected that 74 percent of all jobs created in America will be high-paying jobs for high-skilled workers. While there will be a need for 123 million of those talented people, only 50 million Americans will qualify. By contrast, low-paying, low-skill jobs will shrink to just 26 percent of the total jobs in the U.S. Worst of all, just 44 million people will be needed for those jobs, but 150 million or more candidates will be seeking those jobs.”
Click here to read about job extinction - jobs that are gone for good.
In Pennsylvania, the skills gap is hitting middle skills jobs the hardest. According to the 2007 National Skills Coalition report, about 53% of Pennsylvania’s jobs were in middle-skill occupations. But only 42% of the state’s workers likely have the appropriate training for these jobs. That’s significant because 51 percent of all jobs in Pennsylvania are middle skills, with another 30 percent of jobs in the high skilled segment. If you’re doing the math, less than 19 percent of all jobs will be low-skilled. Pennsylvania’s excess labor capacity for these low-skill jobs is over 42 percent and you just can’t move low-skilled workers into middle- and high-skilled jobs without considerable education and training investment. The report concluded that Pennsylvania would require 4.6 times more annual investment in workforce development and education than was currently funded…and that was before the budget cutbacks of 2010.
Even more compelling is Gordon’s prediction that reducing joblessness might be realistic if a lot of the jobs that were lost were coming back. But that just isn’t going to happen – not now and not in the future. “That’s the hard truth that a lot of people don’t want to face,” says Joe Watson, author of “Where the Jobs Are Now.”
What will happen to those 100 million-plus low-skilled American workers? Unless something changes quickly and dramatically, they will either be unemployed or employed by a manager who believes that a poorly skilled employee is better than no employee at all. That might work short-term for an economic boost but it’s a prescription for disaster for business.
For almost two decade beginning with War for Talent paper released by consulting firm McKinsey and Company , a shortage of skilled workers has been forecast. This crisis is by no means unexpected. Beginning in 2001 and accelerated by the Great Recession, job creation models were shattered. Out-sourcing and automation became a fact-of-life for many organizations. Many businesses resisted change, hanging onto processes and people that were inefficient, unproductive, and costly.
Many people ignored the warnings. Others challenged the logic. They argued that the Baby Boomers would retire, tech-savvy Millennials would replace them, and improvements in education and training would turn any shortage of skilled workers from a disruptive gap into a productive bond.
Well, the Boomers aren’t retiring just yet. The Millennials are unemployed . Gen X aren’t advancing up the career ladder. Education is desperately attempting to play catch up with fewer and fewer resources and dollars. And workforce training is just plain under-funded, under-utilized, and just too bureaucratic to re-tool and re-equip over 100 million workers with the skills they need quickly … and desperately.
The recession changed all that. It’s like the recession justified a business cleansing – wholesale lay-offs, plant closings, and outsourcing for the sake of avoiding bankruptcy or closing a business entirely. “Many businesses took the recession as an opportunity to clean house and raise quality,” says Mustafa Kapadia, an outsourcing advisor with EchoPoint Consulting. “The political and moral sting and backlash from replacing five people with one piece of software or equipment and outsourcing entire departments abated, at least temporarily, under the veil of business survival. Employees weren’t sacrificed for the sake of a few extra bucks on the bottom line but for survival and sustainability.” What happened in 2008-2009 should have happened voluntarily in many businesses years ago. The recession just provided the excuse.
Watson agrees. Up until now there has been a “gradual shift in the United States from an industrial based job market to an information-based one. The recession however precipitated a sudden, radical shift in the market toward information and service jobs, pulling the rug out from under what was left of an industrial-agrarian economy.”
The residual effect of this accelerated shift ultimately left at least 15 million workers out in the cold and potentially another 10 million underemployed looking for jobs. And those numbers don’t even take into account all the under-skilled workers hanging on by a thread. How soon will it be until another wave of workers receive pink slips because their jobs aren’t needed anymore or automation and/or outsourcing can replace them? Finding jobs for all those people is simply not going to happen - at least not quickly – even if re-hiring and new job creation rebounds.
Many out-of-work workers, particularly in construction and manufacturing – simply don’t have the skills to pick up where they left off when the economic train leaves the station. “In a sense, says Gary Burtless, a labor economist with the Brookings Institute, “every time someone’s laid off now, they need to start over.”
“What is happening now,” says jobs and growth expert Tom Gimbel, “is no different than 100 years ago when workers who forged horseshoes had to learn to make tires.” Gimbel, who is also CEO of Chicago-based staffing and recruiting firm Lasalle Network, sees the elimination of many jobs due to automation and efficiencies. He recalls that 20 years ago every attorney in a law firm had a personal assistant. The requirements to be a legal assistant consisted of the ability to take shorthand, type 80 words per minute, and make coffee. Today 4 partners share one assistant and associates are expected to do their own word processing.
Another factor making it harder than ever to fix the joblessness mess is that a significant number of workers laid off during the latest recession were men. And men, for the past several decades, simply haven’t kept up with changing minimum education requirements. Women outnumber men in college and make up over half of graduating classes in many, post-secondary, professional, graduate, and business schools. Many of the men will need to retrain and find new careers. That is easier said than done since re-tooling an assembly line worker or carpenter to become a nurse requires more than just a few years of schooling.
But blue-collar workers aren’t the only casualties of technology and a recession. Many professional jobs in finance, media, and even law and accounting will never be the same. The out-sourcing of white-collar work has become possible. “While the number of law school graduates is up,” says Gimbel, “many of these new attorneys never end up practicing law.” Likewise, medicine has been outsourcing the interpretation of x-rays to India and Australia for years. Accounting firms are outsourcing the preparation of tax returns for a fraction of the cost of hiring young college graduates. Businesses are outsourcing payroll and sometimes even the entire human resource function to online and outsourced firms. And law firms now outsource their research overseas instead of hiring new grads since access to nearly all the documents is available online. And it’s not only about saving dollars – the labor with the skills to do these virtual jobs is abundant and most times equally if not more qualified.
An information-driven company used to require hundreds of data entry workers, according to Kapadia. One of his clients started with 400 employees before they analyzed what the employees were doing and the cost of employing them. His company showed management that by scanning forms, the technology could read the data with 95 percent accuracy. “To deal with the five percent error rate, Kapadia shared, “we hired off-shore workers to review the data – to ensure our human quality check. The U.S. counterparts, mostly data entry workers, in the past now become analysts.” The client is creating jobs, Mustafa reports, but the jobs are fewer in number and the skills required are more advanced. All in all, hundreds of data entry jobs were lost but the quality of the company’s work went up. One new job effectively replaced 4 to 5 others.
While professional jobs will surely be created, the type and complexity of work that the newly hired will be expected to perform will require different and more advanced skills sets. New jobs being created require the ability to work remotely, coordinate different systems and teams, and collaborate beyond company walls and even time zones. The successful project manager of the past worked within one company, experiencing more control over the players and resources. “Today,” says Kapadia, “managing a project is extremely hard to do. You have to manage different mindsets. A project manager today is really” a governance manager, a collaboration manager, an outsource manager. A CIO friend of mine who heads up IT for a 2000-employee semiconductor business runs his entire IT department with only three employees. Their function – coordinate, coordinate, coordinate.”
Employers, workers, and politicians need to come to grip with reality. The theme of denial about joblessness is no longer effective. In fact, it’s destructive. Creating new jobs that match the skills levels of the unemployed is politically sound short term but economic cacophony in the long run. Sustainable long term growth requires the creation of new jobs that will grow and inherently stimulate our economy. Reframing existing jobs is simply subsidizing many obsolete workers and postponing the inevitable.
Read what the presidents of several schools and colleges had to say about education and skilled workers.
The definition of work and consequently, the definition of a job is changing. The evolution from agrarian and industrial age jobs to service and knowledge work is nearing its completion, thanks to the help of the latest recession. The ability to use your “head” as well as your hands, not one or the other, is a requirement today. And yet, we have graduation rates hovering around 70 percent for many high schools and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (S.T.E.M.) scores falling well behind dozens of nations. Today knowledge is power and too many workers simply don’t have the mojo.
Employees in new jobs don’t “go to work” … and if they do, they don’t work in permanent full-time positions. They work in part-time jobs, often working for several employers at the same time. But unlike the past when working part-time was a stepping stone to full-time employment or a means to propping up personal finances, part-time work in the future will be by design. Skilled workers will work remotely, simultaneously interacting with different teams in different places and even collaborating on different projects. People with the right skill sets can do that. The contingent worker, or “just-in-time” worker, will become the norm, especially in lower skill jobs. The less versatile the employee, the more expendable he or she becomes.
People also have long complained that they have been swamped by too much information. In 1917 a manager of a Connecticut manufacturing plant complained about the effects of the telephone: “Time is lost, confusion results, and money is spent.” Despite his objections, technologies like the telephone supported economies build around mass production. Today technology and globalization has created a seismic shift from quantitative change to qualitative differences. Economies, once driven by whoever owned the machinery and raw materials, is now being outflanked by the new raw material of business –data. Joe Hellerstein at the University of California at Berkeley, calls it the “industrial revolution of data.” The Economist called it the “data deluge.” Keeping up with all the new information being created is difficult enough. Analyzing it and extracting useful information is harder still. Ignoring it is economic suicide.
This revolution requires a new skill worker – one who has the ability to process large volumes of uninterrupted data and extract valuable information from it. Gordon in a recent issue of The Futurist called for a “[a] new age [that] will require the reinvention of the education-to-employment system.”
In the meantime, employers seeking qualified workers will face unprecedented challenges to recruit and retain them. And our communities will wrestling with the societal, personal, and economic impact of prolonged joblessness.
Can you hear me now?
Monday, May 10, 2010
"Are you on the sidelines or in the fight?" Baccalaureate Speaker asks Class of 2010
May 7, 2010
Rev. Dr. Brian Blount, the President of Union Theological Seminary and the Presbyterian School of Christian Education, delivered the 2010 baccalaureate address in Belk Auditorium on Friday, May 7.
Blount asked the Class of 2010 where they stood in today’s world full of political upheaval, social problems, and people in need.
“Are you on the sidelines or in the fight?” Blount asked.
“When you walk off this campus, are you heading straight for the sidelines or straight into the fights that need fighting?
“In this moment, in precious future moments, with your decision, with your witness to a life lived with, for, and in support of the people who cannot fight for themselves, you will have your chances to stand on the sidelines and watch or get into the fights and dirty your clothes in the dazzling work of the Lamb who was slain.
“What do you want? Do you want to be safe and clean on the sidelines of life? Or do you want to dazzle?”
A Book of Revelation scholar, Blount related the “mad compendium filled with dragons, multi-headed beasts, apocalyptic wars, a city dropping down out of the heavens, cherubim, archangels, a slaughtered Lamb, and seven churches crowded with first-century crazy Christians” to PC’s graduating class.
While some have said he is obsessed with the book, Blount said he is intrigued by the book’s author, John of Patmos, instead.
“I am intrigued because John is a man condemned to the religious and political sidelines by the greatest power on earth, and he refused to stay there,” Blount said. “Even though he was sentenced to be a bystander to the rest of history, he kept writing about the divine dreams that had gotten him exiled in the first place.
“The man sentenced to prison for his writing had the nerve to keep writing even while he was in prison. That kind of courage, determination, stubbornness, and resolve, I must admit, mesmerizes me. I wonder what it was in him that made him so courageous. And I wonder if that something special is in me.”
Further, Blount spoke about John’s Christians in the Book of Revelation.
“He wanted them to step off the sidelines where they were trying to protect themselves by hiding their faith,” Blount said, “and fight the faith fight that John and others were waging on behalf of the Lamb.
“Those who refused to (witness for the Lamb’s way) stood out because their clothes were bleached with fear, Chloroxed with cowardice, soiled by their refusal to live the faith that had formed them.
“He is redefining the concepts of dirt and dir-ti-ness. Being dirty and being soiled are two very different things for John. John actually wants his people to get dirty.”
Blount went on to tell the story of playing junior varsity football. He said that, although he always sat on the bench, he felt proud to wear his football jersey on game days.
“Over each ensuing week, though, the sparkling clean of my jersey became somewhat of an embarrassment. The lack of dirt embedded stubbornly in the fabric was a clear sign to all who saw me that I never got off the sidelines and into the game.
“I was as much a bystander as any spectator. And that dubious distinction was immediately apparent because of my clean, white jersey. I wanted a dirty jersey. I wanted a jersey that demonstrated that I had been caught up in the muck and the mire of playing the game.”
Blount said that people too often do nothing because of a social phenomenon called the Bystander Effect: “the larger the number of people involved in a situation, the less that will get done.”
Blount said John wants fighters, not people who will stand around doing nothing. John’s Christians in the Book of Revelation, says Blount, are ones whose “clothing was not soiled by inactivity, soiled by fear, soiled by cowardice, or soiled by the refusal to live the faith they professed.”
“Their clothing was instead,” Blount said, “dirtied up in the messy blood of the Lamb’s great witness. In John’s crazy clothing configuration, such bloodied, dirtied, messed up clothing dazzles.”
Rev. Dr. Brian Blount, the President of Union Theological Seminary and the Presbyterian School of Christian Education, delivered the 2010 baccalaureate address in Belk Auditorium on Friday, May 7.
Blount asked the Class of 2010 where they stood in today’s world full of political upheaval, social problems, and people in need.
“Are you on the sidelines or in the fight?” Blount asked.
“When you walk off this campus, are you heading straight for the sidelines or straight into the fights that need fighting?
“In this moment, in precious future moments, with your decision, with your witness to a life lived with, for, and in support of the people who cannot fight for themselves, you will have your chances to stand on the sidelines and watch or get into the fights and dirty your clothes in the dazzling work of the Lamb who was slain.
“What do you want? Do you want to be safe and clean on the sidelines of life? Or do you want to dazzle?”
A Book of Revelation scholar, Blount related the “mad compendium filled with dragons, multi-headed beasts, apocalyptic wars, a city dropping down out of the heavens, cherubim, archangels, a slaughtered Lamb, and seven churches crowded with first-century crazy Christians” to PC’s graduating class.
While some have said he is obsessed with the book, Blount said he is intrigued by the book’s author, John of Patmos, instead.
“I am intrigued because John is a man condemned to the religious and political sidelines by the greatest power on earth, and he refused to stay there,” Blount said. “Even though he was sentenced to be a bystander to the rest of history, he kept writing about the divine dreams that had gotten him exiled in the first place.
“The man sentenced to prison for his writing had the nerve to keep writing even while he was in prison. That kind of courage, determination, stubbornness, and resolve, I must admit, mesmerizes me. I wonder what it was in him that made him so courageous. And I wonder if that something special is in me.”
Further, Blount spoke about John’s Christians in the Book of Revelation.
“He wanted them to step off the sidelines where they were trying to protect themselves by hiding their faith,” Blount said, “and fight the faith fight that John and others were waging on behalf of the Lamb.
“Those who refused to (witness for the Lamb’s way) stood out because their clothes were bleached with fear, Chloroxed with cowardice, soiled by their refusal to live the faith that had formed them.
“He is redefining the concepts of dirt and dir-ti-ness. Being dirty and being soiled are two very different things for John. John actually wants his people to get dirty.”
Blount went on to tell the story of playing junior varsity football. He said that, although he always sat on the bench, he felt proud to wear his football jersey on game days.
“Over each ensuing week, though, the sparkling clean of my jersey became somewhat of an embarrassment. The lack of dirt embedded stubbornly in the fabric was a clear sign to all who saw me that I never got off the sidelines and into the game.
“I was as much a bystander as any spectator. And that dubious distinction was immediately apparent because of my clean, white jersey. I wanted a dirty jersey. I wanted a jersey that demonstrated that I had been caught up in the muck and the mire of playing the game.”
Blount said that people too often do nothing because of a social phenomenon called the Bystander Effect: “the larger the number of people involved in a situation, the less that will get done.”
Blount said John wants fighters, not people who will stand around doing nothing. John’s Christians in the Book of Revelation, says Blount, are ones whose “clothing was not soiled by inactivity, soiled by fear, soiled by cowardice, or soiled by the refusal to live the faith they professed.”
“Their clothing was instead,” Blount said, “dirtied up in the messy blood of the Lamb’s great witness. In John’s crazy clothing configuration, such bloodied, dirtied, messed up clothing dazzles.”
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
A simple parable with a great message
Author unknown. Printed in the March 25th University of Richmond's Collegian Newsletter .
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package. “What food might this contain?” the mouse wondered. He was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap.
Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning: “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said: “Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it.”
The mouse turned to the pig and told him: “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The pig sympathized, but said, “I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured you are in my prayers.”
The mouse turned to the cow and said: “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The cow said: “Wow, Mr. Mouse. I’m sorry for you, but it’s no skin off my nose.”
So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer’s mousetrap … alone.
That very night a sound was heard throughout the house – like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught.
The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital, and she returned home with a fever.
Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient.
But his wife’s sickness continued, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.
The farmer’s wife did not get well; she died.
So many people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them.
The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness.
When one of us is threatened, we are all at risk. We are all involved in this journey called life. If we are to make a better world, we must work to create a space where all are treated with dignity and worth.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package. “What food might this contain?” the mouse wondered. He was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap.
Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning: “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said: “Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it.”
The mouse turned to the pig and told him: “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The pig sympathized, but said, “I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured you are in my prayers.”
The mouse turned to the cow and said: “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The cow said: “Wow, Mr. Mouse. I’m sorry for you, but it’s no skin off my nose.”
So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer’s mousetrap … alone.
That very night a sound was heard throughout the house – like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught.
The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital, and she returned home with a fever.
Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient.
But his wife’s sickness continued, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.
The farmer’s wife did not get well; she died.
So many people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them.
The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness.
When one of us is threatened, we are all at risk. We are all involved in this journey called life. If we are to make a better world, we must work to create a space where all are treated with dignity and worth.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
A wonderful and inspiring success story
Published on February 24, 2010 in unsung heroes. 0 Comments
By Scott Allison and George Goethals
Born with fibular hemimelia — missing fibula bones — Aimee Mullins remembers hating her physical therapy sessions as a child. She had to do innumerable repetitive exercises that involved using her legs to bend thick elastic bands to build up her muscles. She hated them and tried to bargain with her doctor to avoid doing them.
Her doctor told her, “Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you’re going to break one of these bands. When you do break it, I’m going to give you $100.”
With these words, her doctor forever changed her worldview. “What he effectively did for me was re-shape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. I have to wonder to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful, and athletic person well into the future.”
By any measure, Mullins’ life has been a remarkable success story. Mullins competed in the Paralympics in 1996 in Atlanta, where she ran the 100-meter dash in 17.01 seconds and jumped 3.14 meters in the long-jump. She is a college graduate, actress, fashion model, and motivational speaker. Mullins works with numerous non-profit organizations and is President of the Women’s Sports Foundation.
“People have continually wanted to talk about overcoming adversity,” she says. “This phrase never sat right with me. Implicit in this phrase is the idea that success or happiness is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience. But in fact, we are changed. We are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically or emotionally, or both.
“I’m going to suggest that this is a good thing. Adversity isn’t an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. It’s part of our life.
“I’m not trying to diminish the impact, the weight of a person’s struggle. There is adversity and challenge in life, and it’s all very real.
“The question isn’t whether you’re going to meet adversity. It’s how you’re going to meet it. And so our responsibility isn’t to shield those we care for from adversity, but to prepare them to meet it well. We do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel they aren’t equipped to adapt to adversity.
“Find those opportunities wrapped in adversity. Maybe the idea is not so much overcoming adversity. It’s opening ourselves up to it. It’s embracing it. Grappling with it. Maybe even dancing with it.
“Perhaps if we see adversity as natural, consistent, and useful, we’re less burdened by it. Darwin illustrated a truth about the human character. It’s not the strongest to survive, nor is it the most intelligent to survive. It is the one who is most adaptable to change. The human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit. Transformation, adaptation is our greatest human skill. Perhaps until we are tested, we don’t know what we’re made of. Maybe that’s what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power.
“We can give ourselves a gift. We can re-imagine adversity as more than just tough times. Adversity is just change that we haven’t adapted ourselves to yet.”
Aimee Mullins’ entire motivational speech can be seen and heard at http://tinyurl.com/yacel74.
By Scott Allison and George Goethals
Born with fibular hemimelia — missing fibula bones — Aimee Mullins remembers hating her physical therapy sessions as a child. She had to do innumerable repetitive exercises that involved using her legs to bend thick elastic bands to build up her muscles. She hated them and tried to bargain with her doctor to avoid doing them.
Her doctor told her, “Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you’re going to break one of these bands. When you do break it, I’m going to give you $100.”
With these words, her doctor forever changed her worldview. “What he effectively did for me was re-shape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. I have to wonder to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful, and athletic person well into the future.”
By any measure, Mullins’ life has been a remarkable success story. Mullins competed in the Paralympics in 1996 in Atlanta, where she ran the 100-meter dash in 17.01 seconds and jumped 3.14 meters in the long-jump. She is a college graduate, actress, fashion model, and motivational speaker. Mullins works with numerous non-profit organizations and is President of the Women’s Sports Foundation.
“People have continually wanted to talk about overcoming adversity,” she says. “This phrase never sat right with me. Implicit in this phrase is the idea that success or happiness is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience. But in fact, we are changed. We are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically or emotionally, or both.
“I’m going to suggest that this is a good thing. Adversity isn’t an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. It’s part of our life.
“I’m not trying to diminish the impact, the weight of a person’s struggle. There is adversity and challenge in life, and it’s all very real.
“The question isn’t whether you’re going to meet adversity. It’s how you’re going to meet it. And so our responsibility isn’t to shield those we care for from adversity, but to prepare them to meet it well. We do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel they aren’t equipped to adapt to adversity.
“Find those opportunities wrapped in adversity. Maybe the idea is not so much overcoming adversity. It’s opening ourselves up to it. It’s embracing it. Grappling with it. Maybe even dancing with it.
“Perhaps if we see adversity as natural, consistent, and useful, we’re less burdened by it. Darwin illustrated a truth about the human character. It’s not the strongest to survive, nor is it the most intelligent to survive. It is the one who is most adaptable to change. The human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit. Transformation, adaptation is our greatest human skill. Perhaps until we are tested, we don’t know what we’re made of. Maybe that’s what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power.
“We can give ourselves a gift. We can re-imagine adversity as more than just tough times. Adversity is just change that we haven’t adapted ourselves to yet.”
Aimee Mullins’ entire motivational speech can be seen and heard at http://tinyurl.com/yacel74.
Monday, December 28, 2009
It's time to look inward for 2010
It's time to look inward
As we head into 2010, the lessons of faith can guide individuals to change their ways. Only then can the nation as a whole better itself. Three New Year’s resolutions can put you on the right path
By Oliver Thomas
Peer into 2010, and you can't help feeling a little queasy. The planet is getting hotter, drier and more crowded. It's also getting angrier. Terrorism shows no signs of letting up, and the global economic crisis has left millions unemployed. Throw Pakistani, Iranian and North Korean nukes in the mix, and I find myself wanting to crawl under the bed rather than out of it in the morning.
And while many Americans would like to change the world, few of us see the need to change ourselves. Take our national leaders, for example. As I watch members of Congress thrash around over various policy issues, I'm convinced that the struggle our country faces extends beyond health care, war and the deficit. It's an inner struggle. The rancorous incivility and obdurate partisanship are not the necessary byproducts of healthy political debate. They are the childish symptoms of a populace that is losing its capacity for empathy and compromise — characteristics of any successful society.
But the problem extends beyond our elected leaders. Behind the housing bubble and resulting economic meltdown lies an inner problem: greed. Young couples wanted more house than they could afford; banks wanted to make easy money on loans they never should have made. And behind the gargantuan federal debt lies yet another inner problem: indiscipline. We want more government than we're willing to pay for. Our unwillingness either to pay more or spend less is literally bankrupting the country.
Here's where our religions might be able to help. It's a fundamental tenet of most faiths that the journey inward precedes the journey outward. As Gandhi famously put it, we must embody the change we wish to see in the world. If the world is to be less violent, then I — not you — must be slower to anger and kinder in my speech. Is everyone who drives slower than I really an idiot? Are the ones who drive faster really maniacs? And what am I teaching my kids when I talk like this? If there is too much sex and violence on TV, then I must turn it off — not just complain to my wife that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
This unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for one's own share of a collective problem sometimes surfaces in marriage counseling. Here's what I used to say to the individual who kept blaming his or her spouse: "Well, how much would you say is your fault? Ten percent?" "Oh, sure," the person would reply. "I'm good for at least 10%." "Great," I would say. "Let's talk about that 10%."
It's time to steal a play from members of the World War II generation. Those people took individual responsibility seriously. They were restrained in their speech and frugal with their money. And, they were determined to put more back in the world than they took out — especially when it came to their children. They understood that the greatest self-actualization (my generation's obsession) came not through titillating their nerve endings but through service to others, whether on the battlefield or in their communities. Neither America's problems nor the world's are insurmountable if we can follow their example.
Of course, it won't be easy. Becoming a better person never is. That's why we work like hell to avoid it. But until we are willing to improve ourselves individually, we will never become a better nation collectively.
So here's my best advice on how to improve us. Starting with me.
New Year's resolution No. 1: Become more empathetic
This is where it all starts. If I can't see the world through others' eyes, I will never be a good citizen, much less able to love my neighbor as myself. Until we understand each other, we will never make common cause.
So how does one become more empathetic? By engaging with people different from ourselves and listening. So take a gay work colleague to lunch. Visit a mosque, synagogue or African-American church. Invite a friend from a different political party over for a beer. Then, ask questions. And listen.
New Year's resolution No. 2: Practice compassion
The Dalai Lama says if you want to make other people happy, practice compassion. If you want to make yourself happy, practice compassion. The quickest way to become more compassionate? Volunteer. I do it once a week at a local children's home, but there are a thousand other choices. Call your local United Way for a list of good options.
Here's another way. Do as the bumper sticker says and start engaging in random acts of kindness. Don't just walk by the homeless person. Take her to lunch. Give your coat to the man standing on the windy street corner in a threadbare jacket. You've probably got more at home. Throw a twenty in the Salvation Army's pot when you're shopping. Just start doing kind things for others. Compassion must be practiced, and here's the thing: Behavior begets habit. Habit begets character. Next thing you know, you've become a compassionate person.
New Year's resolution No. 3: Hold your tongue
James, the brother of Jesus, had this to say about the human tongue: "How great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire! ... For every species of beasts and birds, of reptiles and creatures of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by the human race. But no one can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil and full of deadly poison."
Rarely have I gotten into trouble for things I didn't say. More often, I'm hoisted with my own petard.
Accordingly, I'll start with this simple goal: Speak no harm. When I'm tempted to do otherwise, I'll try to follow my mother's sage advice and count to 20 before I speak. This one will be the hardest for me.
We have much to be thankful for. But while some are being called on to die for our country, perhaps the rest of us are being called on to live for it. Whether we can become the people we must be in order to be the nation the world needs us to be is entirely up to us.
Oliver Thomas is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors and author of 10 Things Your Minister Wants to Tell You (But Can't Because He Needs the Job).
As we head into 2010, the lessons of faith can guide individuals to change their ways. Only then can the nation as a whole better itself. Three New Year’s resolutions can put you on the right path
By Oliver Thomas
Peer into 2010, and you can't help feeling a little queasy. The planet is getting hotter, drier and more crowded. It's also getting angrier. Terrorism shows no signs of letting up, and the global economic crisis has left millions unemployed. Throw Pakistani, Iranian and North Korean nukes in the mix, and I find myself wanting to crawl under the bed rather than out of it in the morning.
And while many Americans would like to change the world, few of us see the need to change ourselves. Take our national leaders, for example. As I watch members of Congress thrash around over various policy issues, I'm convinced that the struggle our country faces extends beyond health care, war and the deficit. It's an inner struggle. The rancorous incivility and obdurate partisanship are not the necessary byproducts of healthy political debate. They are the childish symptoms of a populace that is losing its capacity for empathy and compromise — characteristics of any successful society.
But the problem extends beyond our elected leaders. Behind the housing bubble and resulting economic meltdown lies an inner problem: greed. Young couples wanted more house than they could afford; banks wanted to make easy money on loans they never should have made. And behind the gargantuan federal debt lies yet another inner problem: indiscipline. We want more government than we're willing to pay for. Our unwillingness either to pay more or spend less is literally bankrupting the country.
Here's where our religions might be able to help. It's a fundamental tenet of most faiths that the journey inward precedes the journey outward. As Gandhi famously put it, we must embody the change we wish to see in the world. If the world is to be less violent, then I — not you — must be slower to anger and kinder in my speech. Is everyone who drives slower than I really an idiot? Are the ones who drive faster really maniacs? And what am I teaching my kids when I talk like this? If there is too much sex and violence on TV, then I must turn it off — not just complain to my wife that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
This unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for one's own share of a collective problem sometimes surfaces in marriage counseling. Here's what I used to say to the individual who kept blaming his or her spouse: "Well, how much would you say is your fault? Ten percent?" "Oh, sure," the person would reply. "I'm good for at least 10%." "Great," I would say. "Let's talk about that 10%."
It's time to steal a play from members of the World War II generation. Those people took individual responsibility seriously. They were restrained in their speech and frugal with their money. And, they were determined to put more back in the world than they took out — especially when it came to their children. They understood that the greatest self-actualization (my generation's obsession) came not through titillating their nerve endings but through service to others, whether on the battlefield or in their communities. Neither America's problems nor the world's are insurmountable if we can follow their example.
Of course, it won't be easy. Becoming a better person never is. That's why we work like hell to avoid it. But until we are willing to improve ourselves individually, we will never become a better nation collectively.
So here's my best advice on how to improve us. Starting with me.
New Year's resolution No. 1: Become more empathetic
This is where it all starts. If I can't see the world through others' eyes, I will never be a good citizen, much less able to love my neighbor as myself. Until we understand each other, we will never make common cause.
So how does one become more empathetic? By engaging with people different from ourselves and listening. So take a gay work colleague to lunch. Visit a mosque, synagogue or African-American church. Invite a friend from a different political party over for a beer. Then, ask questions. And listen.
New Year's resolution No. 2: Practice compassion
The Dalai Lama says if you want to make other people happy, practice compassion. If you want to make yourself happy, practice compassion. The quickest way to become more compassionate? Volunteer. I do it once a week at a local children's home, but there are a thousand other choices. Call your local United Way for a list of good options.
Here's another way. Do as the bumper sticker says and start engaging in random acts of kindness. Don't just walk by the homeless person. Take her to lunch. Give your coat to the man standing on the windy street corner in a threadbare jacket. You've probably got more at home. Throw a twenty in the Salvation Army's pot when you're shopping. Just start doing kind things for others. Compassion must be practiced, and here's the thing: Behavior begets habit. Habit begets character. Next thing you know, you've become a compassionate person.
New Year's resolution No. 3: Hold your tongue
James, the brother of Jesus, had this to say about the human tongue: "How great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire! ... For every species of beasts and birds, of reptiles and creatures of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by the human race. But no one can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil and full of deadly poison."
Rarely have I gotten into trouble for things I didn't say. More often, I'm hoisted with my own petard.
Accordingly, I'll start with this simple goal: Speak no harm. When I'm tempted to do otherwise, I'll try to follow my mother's sage advice and count to 20 before I speak. This one will be the hardest for me.
We have much to be thankful for. But while some are being called on to die for our country, perhaps the rest of us are being called on to live for it. Whether we can become the people we must be in order to be the nation the world needs us to be is entirely up to us.
Oliver Thomas is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors and author of 10 Things Your Minister Wants to Tell You (But Can't Because He Needs the Job).
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