Marshall Goldsmith on Change

Marshall Goldsmith has a new book out titled What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. He also had a short piece in the August 25, 2008 edition of Business Week Magazine titled We’re All Entrepreneurs – Advice for the young that transcends age.

Marshall discusses the current time of uncertainty and, if we are going to be successful, how we all need to think and work like entrepreneurs. In the Business Week piece he gives the following advice to young people who are just entering the workplace:

• It is tough out there and only going to get tougher.
• Forget about (job) security.
• Like it or not, even if you start out with a large corporation, you are going to be an entrepreneur.
• Make peace with this reality and your life is going to be a lot better.
  

He also discusses how the West originally believed globalization would create a world where we would market our products to a worldwide audience and, in turn, buy products from other parts of the world for less money. Well, those things have happened. Now we are realizing that globalization also means people from all over the world are competing for our jobs. Here's more from Marshall's Business Week piece:

In many of the top engineering and science programs, almost no one has English as their first language - and yet they speak it fluently: That’s global competition.

Marshall goes on:

In an era of uncertainty, nothing can be taken for granted. Young people are going to have to develop skills and talents that make them globally competitive. And they are going to have to keep upgrading and changing their skills and talents to fit the needs of an ever-changing marketplace.

Goldsmith’s book is a recommended read and also available in electronic form as an audio book. There is also a Kindle version. You can check him out on the web at http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com

Are We Ready for Globalized Personal Databases?

Flipping through the paper today I came across an Associated Press article titled Accidental Overdose Killed Heath Ledger. Heath was the talented 28 year old actor who passed away from an accidental overdose last month. According to the New York medical examiner's office, Heath died of of "acute intoxication" from the combination of two strong painkillers, two anti-anxiety medicines and two sleeping aids.

The AP article goes on to discuss how no one doctor would have prescribed all six of those medications because of the cumulative effects those medications would have if they were all taken at the same time. Reading a little further, I learned that three of the medications were actually prescribed and filled in Europe, where he had been recently filming. Could his accidental death have been prevented?

The first place my mind went was technology - it would be relatively simple to create a system that monitors prescriptions and it is being done in a number of states. According to the U.S. DEA Office of Diversion Control, as of December 2007, 35 states had enacted legislation which required prescription monitoring programs: 26 of those programs are currently operating and 9 are in the start-up phase. Fourteen additional states are in the process of proposing, preparing, or considering legislation.

The DEA is also currently encouraging a national prescription management program. In 2005, President Bush signed the National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act of 2005 (NASPER). NASPER is a grant program for states to create prescription drug monitoring databases and enhance existing ones. NASPER requires states to be capable of sharing information and prescription data among states. According to the DEA website, advantages of a national program may include an enhanced ability to identify and track prescription transactions across state lines. This is particularly important given the growing trend of filling prescriptions through mail order and Internet pharmacies.

Could a fully functioning national system have saved Heath Ledger? How about a fully functioning international system? If I could opt into a system like this would I surrender a piece of my privacy?

Later this month I'll be speaking at a futures conference in Dallas on globalization. My preparation to this point has focused around workforce and technology along with some politics and economics..... I'll be adding medical databases.

Business Week: Keeping Jobs Onshore

In this blog I continue to take a look at the August 20 and 27 Business Week feature “The Future of Work”.

Let’s start today by taking a look at offshoring and let’s take it from the perspective of a 22 year old college student. That’s what Business Week Software Editor Steve Hamm does in his piece How to Keep Your Job Onshore. Hamm talks about Matt Cavin, a freshman Theology student at Valparaiso University who, one day while on a summer study program a couple of years ago in China, happened to be reading Friedman’s The World is Flat in a Chinese park. As Matt read it was as if a light bulb went off in his head – experiencing first-hand the intensity of Chinese students as they studied English, Math and Science – Friedman’s words about the movement of U.S. jobs off-shore really hit home.

Fast forward – Matt gets back to the U.S. and remaps his future – he ditches the Theology major and will finish a triple major next spring – International Business, Economics and Mandarin. Today Matt sees opportunity – he is not scared but he is running as fast as he can. Matt understands that today just about any job that can be done over the web can be off-shored. It’s not just the computer programmers anymore – it's lawyers, pharmacists, accounting, banking, medicine….. the list is almost endless.

In his piece Hamm also discusses “multidisciplinary skills” and mentions one of my favorites (likely because this is my background) – computer science/engineering and biology. He goes on to discuss how young people in the U.S. must really sit down and plan their careers, Hamm says they must break down their jobs into the tasks that are easy to move and those that are not. They must prepare and ensure that they are excelling in the areas that cannot be easily moved if they want to stay in this country and have successful careers.

Alan S. Blinder from Princeton published an offshorability index study last March. The study pdf is linked here and it's another must read. In the study he classifies 8.2 million current jobs in the U.S. as being “highly offshorable” and 20.7 million more jobs as being “offshorable”. According to Blinder the most likely white collar positions heading offshore are software programmers, data entry clerks, draftsmen and computer research scientists.

How do we react? How do we plan? For us academics – what do we teach? For our students - what do they study? What aspects/pieces of our respective disciplines are offshorable? What pieces are not? As we update our curriculum are we focusing on the parts and pieces that are not highly offshorable? How are we preparing tomorrows workforce?

Like Matt, the student at Valparaiso - are we (you, me, our colleagues, our students) running as fast as we can?

Business Week: Collaboration and Team Work

Today I’ll continue with the Business Week August 20 and 27th issue that focuses on the future of work. A recurring theme throughout the issue is collaboration and teamwork. Multi-national companies like IBM are hiring sociologists to connect people that have never met into virtual teams. Virtual world applications, like Second Life, with 3D avatars are being used to promote social networking and corporations are creating their own virtual “campuses”, offering thousands of online courses.

Cultural and generational "idiosyncrasies" are paramount as these virtual teams are constructed. Think about creating a virtual team that, for example, is a mix of Chinese, Eastern Europe, U.S. and Indian employees….. people that have never met in the real world, may not speak each others language…… and then mix in the difference in age – the digital immigrants versus the digital natives. Now bundle in the time differences between the U.S. and distant locations….. It almost seems impossible .......

Let’s dig a little deeper into the generational differences. Here’s some startling quotes from the article:

"Dow Chemical expects 30% of its 20,000 workers to retire in the next 5 years".

"Meanwhile, enrollment in U.S. chemical engineering schools is declining and companies like Dow are fighting against the oil and gas companies for a shrinking chemical engineering talent pool".

So what is a company like Dow doing? The company is trying to persuade older employees not to retire by offering flexible hours, three day work weeks and letting those that do retire know they can always come back. So now we’ve got a company like Dow creating teams of workers that may span over 40 years in age difference, probably have never met, speak different languages and work in different time zones. How different is this from a modern college “classroom”? Except for the time zone differences the scenario sounds a lot like a typical community college campus! How many languages is your college website available in? What are the age ranges of students in your classrooms? The next time you walk around campus listen - how many different languages do you hear students speaking?

How are employers dealing with these differences? Companies, like Nokia are looking for employees with a “collaborative mindset”. Nokia is very careful to build task forces that include a range of nationalities, ages and education levels. Members are encouraged to network online and share personal information like photographs and biographies.

And then there is IBM.... IBM’s Web-based services group has a 360,000 member staff that works closely as one big virtual team. The company has started an “innovation portal”, allowing any employee with an idea for a product to build online teams, organize resources and access company talent and other assets.

Corporations are working to create a “seamless global workforce”. We must continue to push and innovate in the academic community, following the lead of companies like Dow, Nokia and IBM, as we structure our modern “classrooms”.

Business Week: The Future of Work

The August 20 and 27th issue of Business Week cover story is titled The Future of Work and it is excellent. I’ll take a good look at some of the interesting content that is relevant to technology and academic communities over the next few blogs. I highly recommend you buy this issue and keep it close - in fact I would consider it to be a must read. Now let's get to the content.

Before we look ahead we need to get some perspective on where we have been and where we are now. Here's a few quotes from the issue:

"According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 34% of adult workers in the U.S. now have bachelor’s degrees, up 29% from 10 years ago".

"The modern workplace no longer resembles an assembly line – it now more closely resembles a design studio where the core values are collaboration and innovation".

"Talented people are still in high demand, and there is no evidence yet that work has become less interesting because of outsourcing".

"The rapid growth of broader, richer channels of communications – including virtual worlds – is transforming what is meant to be “at work”.

Good stuff so far right? Communication channels, collaboration, virtual worlds, future, doing things differently, risk, trying new things….. all the things Mike Q and I write about and have been podcasting about over the past couple of years. Here’s a few more interesting pieces:

"College tuitions have risen 60% since 2000".

"The percentage of 25-29 year-olds with at least a bachelor’s degree has fallen during the last decade".

This is disturbing – could the next generation of Americans be less educated than the previous generation at the same time employers are requiring a higher level of worker education? Have 4-year institutions priced themselves of of the mainstream market?

Perhaps there is some gold here or those of us closely involved with the 2-year schools. Is this an opportunity for community colleges to provide the first two years of a 4-year degree? Translation - many 4-year schools may have priced themselves out of the market for much of the U. S. population. Community colleges are much less expensive and provide an opportunity for a student to economically obtain the first two years of a 4-year degree. We've always done it - it may be time to ratchet transfer up.

Now a little more:

"A Conference Board survey results found 47% of workers were satisfied with their jobs in 2006, in 1995 the same job satisfaction survey indicated 59%".

"Lynn Franco, consumer research director at the Conference Board, believes technology may have something to do with these results – specifically the fact that it is much more difficult to get away from “work”.

From a survey conducted by Beta Research Corp for Business Week: "36% of those surveyed believe they actually got more work done prior to email".

I find this last item incredible - let's think about it a bit - time warp your brain back 10-15 years if you were around then. How connected were you then? Did you have email? How dependent were you on technology to get you job done? If you are an academic - what kind of technology were you or your faculty using in your classrooms? Overhead projectors? Maybe you were one of those on the cutting edge and you had a document camera? Seriously - were you or your faculty more efficient? Personally my answer is no and I really hope yours is too. I'm guessing but believe that many of those who said they were more productive without email have not bothered to keep up with modern technology. Or perhaps they have not had sufficient support from their superiors......

Technology, globalization, communications, ubiquitous broadband, collaboration, virtualization….. exciting times for us in the academic world as we prepare our students for the new world of “work".