February 2006

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This Month's Headlines

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This is our personal note welcoming you to the February 2006 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This month we're ranting even more than usual about the need for change – in the business of work, in the business of education, and even in our basic thinking about change itself.

This month we're pleased to welcome two new members to the Future of Work community: Jack Goldman of Business Protection Systems and Patricia Hine of Herbert S. Newman & Partners. We're also excited about Senior Fellow Peter Cochrane's newest venture, and Jim's upcoming participation in a webinar on the future of recruitment.

We are convinced that sometime before 2010 there will be a major transformation in the way white collar knowledge workers in the United States conduct their business activities. The current relationship between these kinds of "workers" and their employers is as outdated as the apprenticeship model of office workers was in England during the early industrial revolution.

Marcy, on vacation on the beach in Negril, is communicating creative direction for a web project to Kate, working at the northernmost tip of Manhattan. Kate gets in touch with Natasha in Los Angeles and coordinates with Jason (who is currently in Hawaii with his family) to work out some details. This is a typical day in the life of WireMedia, a marketing and advertising communications firm based in New York City but operating around the world, thanks to technology.

This section provides you with brief summaries of several recent notes we've already posted on the Future of Work weblog. In each case we also include a live link to the original post on the blog. And we encourage you to become a regular reader of the blog, where we are posting notes, case studies, and links to other important websites almost every day.

We end each issue of Future of Work Agenda with a personal perspective – our chance to comment on issues and developments in the world of work that we find important and interesting. This is our "editorial" page, where we enjoy offering our opinions and predictions about what's happening (or should be happening) in the world of work and beyond.

From Jim and Charlie

Pray for clouds on February 2. We're feeling a little bit like Punxsutawney Phil (he's the national groundhog who dives back into hibernation if the sun is shining; see his website at www.groundhog.org).

Actually, we really just want to crawl back in bed and pull the blankets over our heads until this whole screwed-up economy and society get straightened out. Last month we were ranting about a forthcoming "fourth turning" that hasn't happened yet – but feels closer than ever (see "As the New Year Dawns" if you missed it in January or want to reread those Great Thoughts). This month we're actually trying to think a bit more about what it might be like – or at least could be like – on the Other Side of the turning.

Maybe what all of us need is a chance to practice doing whatever we do so we can learn how to do it right – like Bill Murray in the fantasy film Groundhog Day, who relived February 2 over and over again until he got his head screwed on right and found True Love. We're sure wishing things would slow down just a bit so we can get our act together as well as good old Bill did.

In truth, we're not complaining. As they say, being too busy sure beats the alternative. But we do find ourselves up to our necks in alligators these days. And worrying about really big problems. We're not quite up to tackling World Hunger, but it feels like we're getting there.

Our lead article this month ("Transforming the Business of Work") is about the crying need for a wholesale transformation in the way work gets done, along with our sincere belief that a major transformation will happen in the next 4-5 years and will be deeper, broader, and more profound than any of us are capable of imagining. And we include some deeper thoughts about what "Transformation" really means, and what it takes to get one going. We hope you'll find our ideas provocative (meaning they provoke you – yes, you, yourself – to do something instead of just sitting there and going about business as usual).

At least you'll learn that, as always, we remain eternal optimists (often in spite of the evidence). We really do believe there's a rebirth of community and civic spirit just around the corner.

Then, in the spirit of "The future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed," we offer an intriguing first-person story of life at work in the present ("A Case Study of a Distributed Organization"). The description was sent to us by Marcie Foley (thank you very much, Marcie), who we've met only electronically. We hope you find her description of life in a truly distributed organization as interesting and encouraging as we did.

But lest you get too comfortable and cozy with those warm and fuzzy images of tomorrow, we bring you crashing back to earth with our February Rant, "It's Time to Start Over," in which we apply our most cynical and outraged thinking to the obvious need for Really Big Change in the U.S. public education system.

We're realistic enough to know that there are no easy answers (and far better minds than ours have spent a lot of time looking for them). We just hope that you believe as we do that doing something about public education is an imperative right up there on a par with finding Osama Bin Forgotten and working our way out of this crazy "War on Terror" that is sucking so much life out of our society, our economy, our youth, and our national sense of optimism.

And as always, of course, we're pleased to bring you our regular Announcements and Best of the Blog sections. We continue to believe that you'll find ideas and information here that you just can't get anywhere else.

So, on to the rest of the newsletter. Enjoy! And please let us know what you think.

Announcements

Two New Members Join Future of Work

We're very pleased to announce that Business Protection Systems and Herbert S. Newman & Partners have recently become small business members of Future of Work.

Business Protection Systems International (BPSI) is a global provider of technology solutions for business continuity and risk management programs. BPSI's Business Protector Gateway^TM software tools have been used in business continuity planning worldwide since 1986. Financial, strategic and operational risks, in addition to natural disasters, pose business continuity threats that can be mitigated through the use of BPSI's Gateway^TM products. Whether the planning decision is a response to a regulatory directive, a Board of Directors' mandate, contractual requirements, or a compliance program, BPSI's Gateway^TM planning tools are up to the challenge from the moment of delivery to the completion of the process. BPSI's Gateway^TM products are perfect for deployment in developing contingency plans for IT departments, data centers, manufacturing operations and stand-alone business units.

CEO Jack Goodman is BPSI's Future of Work sponsor.

Herbert S. Newman & Partners is an innovative architecture and design firm located in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1964, as a collaborative partnership, the firm has completed a wide variety of private and public projects throughout the United States, and has established a national reputation for the design of new buildings and the renovation and restoration of existing buildings of many architectural types. These include projects for academic, corporate, institutional, religious uses, and urban design.

The firm's beliefs and practice are captured in this statement:

As a practice we are dedicated to a human-centered approach to architecture. We base each design on the understanding of psychological needs and human behavior patterns that we have developed over many years, and on our experience that every new project offers opportunities for community-building. We believe that architecture should acknowledge and honor the vital function of tradition in the life of society.

We also believe that it can absorb and express the forces of social and technological change in ways that reveal new possibilities for human experience in the future. A tenet of our work is the idea that the primacy of space, the clarity of path and structure, the luminance of natural light, and the humanizing quality of natural materials, are essential to making a lasting and beneficial impact on the environment in which people live, work, and play.

The firm will be represented in the Future of Work community by Patricia Hine. She is a professional, certified Interior Designer with 25 years of experience in a broad spectrum of venues. In addition, she spent 8 years in the Corporate Real Estate Department of a major insurance company, focused on introducing flexibility into workplace planning, and supporting new ways of working.

Future of Work Continues to Seek New Members

Future of Work now offers several levels of membership that depend on your status and needs: Individual and Small Business, Corporate, and Implementation Partners. We also offer special discounts to nonprofit, educational, and public sector organizations.

These membership programs are described in more detail on the Future of Work website, or feel free to contact us directly for more information about fees and benefits.

All Future of Work members are now listed on the Future of Work website, in the About Us/Members section. We encourage all our readers to consider joining the community.

Please visit our website and apply for membership today.

Future of Work Senior Fellow Peter Cochrane Launches New Firm

Peter Cochrane, one of our favorite Senior Fellows (he is the former head of BT Labs and a co-founder of ConceptLabs), has announced the formation of a new research, consulting, and advisory firm, Cochrane Associates (click here to read Peter's bio on our web site).

He recently established operations to address a specific market niche - "instant expertise and support." This virtual operation spans the globe with people available in the UK, United States, and India.

Cochrane Associates is positioned to quickly assemble specialist teams to tackle customer problems in order to minimize costs while increasing flexibility and innovation. The firm's focus is the provision of practical technology, engineering, operational, and management solutions. It also engages in focused R&D and design with deliverables in the form of reports, presentations, models, simulations, and training.

Please don't hesitate to contact Peter (peter@ca-global.org) if you'd like to explore ways in which he and his team can help with your problems and issues.

Jim Ware to be Lead Speaker at Webinar on The Future of Recruitment

Jim was recently invited to be one of three speakers for a webinar on the Future of Recruitment being presented online on February 7 by Execuserve, a firm specializing in talent management. Execuserve offers time-saving recruitment solutions along with Hire-Intelligence^TM, an online tool that helps companies select, retain, and develop key employees.

Jim will be discussing the changing nature of work and the workforce, highlighting the new challenges in attracting and retaining talented workers.

The webinar is free; to sign up and receive information on how to participate, just go to:

http://www.execuservecorp.com/recruitment2006.htm

New Communications Forum to Convene March 1-3

If you're interested in learning more about how blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other emerging modes of communication can be used for internal and external business communications, Future of Work members Jen McClure and Elizabeth Albrycht invite you to attend New Communications Forum 2006 (www.newcommforum.com).

The Forum will take place March 1 - 3, 2006 in Palo Alto, California. This premiere conference will bring together the industry's leaders from around the globe for keynotes and breakout sessions that examine how blogs, wikis, podcasts, videocasts, and other emerging tools, technologies and modes of communication are affecting organizations. The Forum will also examine how communications professionals are harnessing these tools to engage in market conversations, deepen and strengthen relationships with key audiences, gain new insights into their audiences' perceptions and behavior, and achieve bottom line results.

Future of Work Agenda subscribers can save $200 by using discount code NCFR200. Register at http://www.newcommforum.com, or call Jen McClure at +1 (650) 331-0083.

Feature Article: Transforming The Business Of Work

By Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

We are convinced that sometime before 2010 there will be a major transformation in the way white collar knowledge workers in the United States conduct their business activities.

The current relationship between these kinds of "workers" and their employers is as outdated as the apprenticeship model of office workers was in England during the early industrial revolution. Those relationships changed radically with the advent of child labor laws, safety regulations, and the re-emergence of professional guilds and liberal educational programs.

We believe that a transformation of the same magnitude is going to happen again as our society passes through the "conceptual revolution" (that's Dan Pink terminology; see http://www.danpink.com/aboutwnm.php).

Simply put, the work support structures that were invented during the industrial revolution, and have now become an ingrained part of modern life in the United States, are just as non-functional as the apprentice system was 150 years ago.

Pension guarantee plans are falling as fast as snow flakes in the middle of January in Montana. The U.S. government is doing its best to bolster funding for the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jan2003/pens-j29_prn.shtml) as major companies in the airline industry (and soon the automobile industry) bail out of their obligations – or, more conveniently, declare bankruptcy and let a judge do the dirty work.

Sometime before 2010 we're going to see an utter collapse of the pension system for public sector employees; that will open the floodgates and erase any doubt that this sacred perk of white collar work is gone for good.

Health care is on life support. Less than 60% of Americans now enjoy employer-sponsored health care benefits:

http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=2498.

Seniors are facing the "doughnut hole" gap in Medicare coverage (to say nothing of incredibly complicated drug benefit choices). Sometime before 2010 many families will discover that they need to make choices between Grandma's prescriptions and junior's community college tuition. The percentage of younger families in major financial distress because of exorbitant medical bills will reach a breaking point. Thousands of people in the U.S. will simply die because they and their families can't afford critical care coverage.

Sometime before 2010, U.S. employers will petition the government to allow them to import unlimited numbers of foreign nationals to fill the skill gaps and talent shortages in their workforces because for decades the public education system in the United States has failed to produce a "salable product" that is relevant for the new economy. We're going to have our own "guest arbiter" program (that's a takeoff on a German phrase in case you didn't realize it):

http://www.thefutureofwork.net/assets/Closing_the_Talent_Gap.pdf

And now the stage is set for the transformation. But what is a transformation? A gradual, incremental change? No, not by a long shot. Think about what happens when a seed becomes a plant, a caterpillar a butterfly, or an egg and sperm cell a human infant. Several profound things occur. The change:

1. is irreversible;
2. shifts form dramatically;
3. involves a different metabolism;
4. includes many unpredictable, minute details; and
5. the timing of the process can't be altered.

So, how does a transformation in the business of work play out within this framework?

First, it is irreversible. Once the change takes place it can't go backwards. When serfs ventured off the lands of their lords and moved to the city they didn't come back. Whatever form the new relationships between people and organizations take on, they won't retreat to those of old. Seen any kings and vassals lately? Well, at least not in the industrial world.

The form will shift dramatically. Today the form of the relationship between people and organizations is largely shaped by legal and bureaucratic constraints: employees, employers, independent contractors, wage laws, etc. We believe that the "employment" relationship will shift from a legalistic one to one that is more in a negotiated and continuously re-negotiated form. It will be something like a compact, or a covenant.

The amount of energy put into work relationships, and the amount extracted, will also change. The metabolism will be different. For the five attributes cited above the relationship of energy input to output is definitely not reciprocal at the moment. Workers are contributing greater and greater amounts of energy into the system but are receiving less and less in return.

Their hours stay the same, their benefits decline, and compensation is totally out of whack from the low end to the high end. That pattern is unsustainable. You can't run the horse faster while you decrease the amount of food it gets. Exhaustion and then death become inevitable. We're suggesting here that "inevitable" is sometime before 2010.

The exact outcome of a transformation can't be precisely predicted. Whereas the basic structure and function of the emergent form can be seen in the "DNA" of the organism, exact outcomes are not that refined. Plants grow larger when there is more nourishment during transformation. Toxic chemicals interjected into the process cause deformities. If there is no sunlight, butterflies wait to emerge from the cocoon. Similarly, the fine-grained details of a business transformation will be fuzzy.

The timing of the transformation can't be altered. It can't be speeded up, nor can it be slowed down. The current economic transformation began sometime in the late 1990's as nearly as we can determine at this point. Events continue to play out as the process unfolds – sometimes in fits and starts, but nevertheless sometime before 2010 we expect the transformation will be highly visible and virtually complete.

How are business relationships going to change during this transformation? We think it goes without saying that the web of relationships will grow larger and become more truly global. But we also think that talent pools may actually become more regional. North America's talent pool will begin to concentrate in the Americas as opposed to Asia and Eastern Europe. There are a number of factors driving this shift, but the bottom line is that time differences and cultural divides will become harder to manage. Current experiences with forming and managing global teams and even intercontinental supply lines represent a valiant effort to overcome natural barriers that we applaud but do not believe is sustainable over the long term.

Overhead costs increase geometrically as time and cultural gaps increase. Even though MIT Professor Tom Malone highlights the marginal cost effects of increased technology use for collaboration (http://ccs.mit.edu/futureofwork/) and New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman focuses our attention on the leveling effect of global markets (http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/worldisflat.htm), these factors reach an economic limit when creativity and innovation become the keys to competitiveness and sustainability.

Fostering and leveraging creativity requires close continuing contact along with a certain clash of cultural values at the edge. Think of artists' colonies where potters, painters, and weavers come together in a commons area each day. We haven't yet developed collaborative technologies that completely dispel the need for face-to-face contact – especially where creativity and innovation are concerned.

There are several conditions that are necessary and sufficient for the kind of transformation we are predicting. Just as crops need good weather, sunlight, and water to germinate and transform, so must social and economic conditions change to support the magnitude of change we expect to see.

In our view, the critical conditions for transformational change fall into three categories: cultural; social; and legal.

The cultural shift has already occurred but is under the radar. The psychology of the worker – or, more accurately, the talent pool – has already changed. People today hold vastly different beliefs about the relationships between themselves and the organizations that provide them a living in return for their efforts. The implied "social contract" that existed between workers and employers is broken (and has been for some time). It is actively being re-negotiated right now:

http://www.gartner.com/5_about/news/consumer_evolution.jsp

Social changes are afoot throughout our society. Enron, WorldCom, Qwest, and, most recently, Wal-Mart stories attest to the changing "mood" of workers. Popular culture has picked up on the theme as movies like "North Country", "Fun with Dick and Jane," and even "Syriana" bring the point home. Social psychology tells us that when beliefs shift and social attitudes change it is only a matter of time before behaviors also change. Given a normal 3-5 year time frame for all these things to work through our collective psychology, the time for changes in the last category; the legal system, has come.

So, what are the legal changes to look for? In the United States with its arcane tax code, loose regulation of pensions, health care, and "worker rights" we should see new regulations along with new concepts of equity and justice emerging in all those areas we highlighted at the top of this article.

We expect to see evolution in the public arena towards portable pensions, regionalized (if not nationalized) universal health care coverage, renewed investment in public education, and finally a new tax category for individuals who are "loosely coupled" to sources of "work" are those legalistic, governmental changes needed to complete the recipe.

In fact, we are already seeing some of these things happen:

"As employees become more mobile, HR professionals realize that pension plans rewarding long-term service aren't advantageous. That's why companies that want to attract a work force for the future are making their pension plans portable" ("Workforce Management," Personnel Journal, July 1993, Vol. 72, No. 7, pp. 36-46).

The universal health care movement is growing in strength and public visibility (http://www.uhcan.org/). The argument for increased funding is public education is somewhat dormant at the moment but will undoubtedly rise as an issue with the approach of off-year elections (http://www.publiceducation.org/). While there have been attempts to "leave no child left behind," businesses are left wanting. What remains is a need for change in the governmental systems that support an outmoded industrial model of social organization.

But there is hope. Hope lies in collective social action. We don't expect to see ferment in the streets like there was in 1968, but rather a quieter, less visible transformation. Local action will come from community groups. As the Baby boomers retire from full-time employment they will turn much of their extra energy towards community issues. They will transform and reconstruct a society under a new covenant that more clearly aligns citizenship with the organized power of consumers. Faster and cheaper is not always better.

Sometime before 2010, communities will be re-built. And civil society will return.

Please direct your comments to comments@thefutureofwork.net. We'd love to publish your reactions and suggestions.

Bonus Case Study: A Distributed Organization

Marcy Rye posted this note as a comment on our Future of Work blog recently, in response to our posting back in December ("Distributed Work in the National News") about the Business Week article, "The Easiest Commute of All," which appeared on the newsstands on December 12 (downloadable .pdf version available here). We’re pleased to reprint Marcy’s story here; it’s a great case example of what life in a distributed organization is all about.

by Marcy Rye

Marcy, on vacation on the beach in Negril, is communicating creative direction for a web project to Kate, working at the northernmost tip of Manhattan. Kate gets in touch with Natasha in Los Angeles and coordinates with Jason (who is currently in Hawaii with his family) to work out some details. Meanwhile, Chris chimes in from Canada about a programming project while Dana in Philadelphia asks a question about a client in Washington, D.C., needing print materials.

This is a typical day in the life of WireMedia, a marketing and advertising communications firm based in New York City, but operating around the world, thanks to technology.

Everyone working with the company works from the location of their choice. Natasha started working with WireMedia while she was living in Austria. When she moved to Los Angeles she simply kept going. Marcy, the founder and principal of the firm, has worked from her home office location in Manhattan, from Turkey, Greece, Jamaica, Minnesota, Washington, DC, and more. Jason has contributed while traveling to France, California, and Hawaii. Kate has kept up with her responsibilities from New York, Missouri, and London.

Clients are located around the country (and one in Japan), with a concentration in New York and Los Angeles.

WireMedia has no set hours. Instead each person is expected to be responsible for completing assignments on time, and making sure the clients get what they need, while remaining free to work a schedule of their choosing. Marcy tends to keep typical New York hours of 8am – 6 or 7 pm. Kate and Jason prefer to work late nights about the half the time – often working in the wee hours of the morning. Natasha, on West Coast time, prefers to do some work in the morning and the rest in the early evenings.

We have taken advantage of the multitude of free online tools available to help stay centrally organized with a nationwide and sometimes worldwide distribution of team members. Our "office space" is iChat, an instant messaging application that allows us to see who is "in the office," who has stepped out for lunch (and when they’ll be back), and also provides a means of instant (and free) communication – no matter the physical location.

Another rather new product out there that we rely on is Backpack. Backpack lets us maintain a central to-do list to identify project and client priorities. We also each have our own page on Backpack where any other team member can go to see what each person is working on, what their travel schedule is, or when they might be not available. Our additional emphasis on maintaining clear and open lines of communication at all times also helps to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

There is no central physical location or main phone number (which keeps overhead costs low - something our clients appreciate since it's reflected in the pricing). But it is easy to contact us through the website or of course our email addresses and cell phones, and rigid adherence to internal organization makes it easy for clients to always be able to reach someone who can help them, no matter where the team members happen to be located.

It may sound like chaos, but when asked, everyone on the team grins happily about the rigid organization that means they have the freedom to work on their own schedule from nearly any location on the planet. Since we are approaching our fifth year in business with several glowing client reviews, and the business is growing, clearly our 100% distributed office is working.

Best of the Blog

Here's a small sampling of excerpts/lead-ins from our recent weblog posts. Please get in the habit of reading the Future of Work weblog regularly – bookmark it, or if you have an RSS news reader, subscribe to it. And please contribute as well. We're more than happy to reprint your stories, or to consider featuring you as a Guest Writer. We believe we're creating a unique knowledge base of what's going on out there today, and what's going to be going on tomorrow. If you want to learn about the future of work, our blog is the place to go (along with this very newsletter, of course). Just click on each headline below to visit the full original blog post.

Is There a Wiki in Your Future? (January 14)

I've just started [an] effort to find out what everyone else has been doing over the last month while I've had my head down struggling to survive. And one of the first pieces that caught my eye was a commentary about the Wikipedia by Rex Davenport on the T+D Blog ("Veracity -- look it up").

Wiki's are some of the newest software applications to take advantage of the incredible collaborative power of the web - and one of my new year's resolution is to learn more about them, and even to attempt to contribute to a wiki or two.

The Nation of Villages (January 23)

Toni Kistner of Capital Gaines alerted me the other day to a fascinating article by New York Times columnist David Brooks that appeared on Sunday, January 15. It's called "A Nation of Villages." It is one his best columns in a very long time, and it's very relevant to the future of work. It's all about a looming population and building explosion, and an increasingly dramatic shift away from center cities towards exurbia and even more rural parts of the United States.

Does San Francisco Need Municipal WiFi? (January 24)

Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle has a good column today about how many WiFi hot spots already exist in San Francisco ("S.F. offers more wireless access than any U.S. city"), raising the very legitimate question of whether the city really needs to invest in a municipal, or publicly funded/subsidized, system.

In Our Humble Opinion: It's Time To Start Over

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

There you go again.

This month's rant returns to an old topic: "edumacation." Ya just gotta wonder when our leaders start talking about "splainifying" things to the public, get worried about sending out "mexed missages," and discuss their "stratergery" at press conferences.

Well, good old Maynard was recently sitting in a discussion about how America's losing jobs to those pesky foreign territories when some economic development guy recalled a case where 2600 red, white, and good ‘ol USA blue local jobs had gotten axed and shipped to South Arizona (that's Mexico, for you geographically challenged folks out there).

When they dug into it they discovered that of those 2600 displaced workers who needed new jobs, 600 or so were functionally illiterate. Hello, that means they can't read and write English, lord save us any other language. Holy cow! How do those people get along in this world? For crying out loud, if the can didn't have a picture of beans on it how would they know what they were buying?

No wonder we're getting our butt kicked in the market place. It's not just about cheaper labor, it's also about having the basic capabilities to function in modern society. We (the two of us) think we're beginning to understand why reality shows are so popular. We (all of us) have dumbed things down so far that the average Joe, or Joelle, can't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel. Because they can't read ‘em.

Good friends, there's trouble right here in River City. Does Wal-Mart have an entry-level reading program? Is this why McDonald's has pictures on the menu – because they can't assume people can read the word "hamburger"? Just what in the Sam Hill are we going to do to fill jobs that require a passing knowledge of geography, geometry, or chemistry – to say nothing of English, math, and writing? Clearly something is screwed up big time.

"No child left behind." Give us a break!

At the rate we're going the kids in public school today will reach the job market without the skills to do manual labor, let alone use a machine, or – heaven help us (please!) – build one. Okay, okay, we've said some of this before, but even with our magical clairvoyance we didn't realize it was this bad.

You can throw tax incentives around all you want, but until we are producing an educated workforce the whole shooting match is going to high-tail it to Lower Slobovia or East Kickassastan (or maybe even India, China, and Singapore; get our drift?)

It gets better Horace (or worse, depending on how you look at it). Charlie was recently sitting on a plane talking to a guy who used to be a football coach at the high school and junior college level. The two of them started talking about education and Charlie wondered why a guy with 25 years experience teaching and coaching kids is now selling electric plugs to airplane manufacturers. Answer: he got disgusted with the system. He told Charlie that teachers now spend most of their time enforcing basic discipline and not "teaching" (Jim to Charlie: you just discovered that?).

For God's sake, our schools have become institutions for basic training in civility (and in case you hadn't noticed, they ain't doin' too well at that, either). Hey, we're recovering academics (we try not talk about it, but it's true). We've seen more students than we can count with college degrees who can't write a coherent paragraph or even balance a checkbook. It would be comic if it weren't so damn tragic.

So the rant (here it comes) is this: In Our Humble Opinion, we have to totally re-structure our public education system if we expect to compete in tomorrow's economy, let alone today's. So stop whining, get off your collective butts, and do something.

Let us be more specific, dear readers. (we can just see the mail coming in from the teachers' unions right away).

First, Curriculum: 86 it. Nowadays it doesn't even prepare people to work in a factory screwing widgets together. Go read Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind (reviewed by Charlie in June 2005; click here to go there) and start your re-education. Let's get the basic sciences down first. No more classes on "advanced water polo techniques" as college prep.

Teachers. Put ‘em on commission. Yep, you heard that right; in the real world out here we call it "pay for performance." If you don't teach, and they don't learn, you don't get paid. One more time: if you don't turn out graduates who are employable in the workplace of the future, you don't get rewarded (slightly serious side note: we know "pay for performance" in education is a whole lot easier to preach about than to make happen, but if we don't even try to move in that direction it's all over, end of game, and goodbye economy).

Administrators. Fire ‘em. Just clean house and start over. We call that zero-based budgeting, or "What have you done for me lately?" Cop an attitude and go get a job as a "sanitation engineer."

Low performing students. Don't pass them on to the next level. Good god, you aren't doing them any favors. You're just delaying the agony. In the Army they used to recycle troops back through basic training as many times as they needed until they got it right. Why? Because if you put less than qualified soldiers in the field with a gun they would probably shoot themselves or their buddies instead of the bad guys.

Parents. Well, have you ever thought that maybe Joe Six Pack and Bobbie Jean don't know how to raise kids? Making ‘em is the easy part. Parenting skills are essential, but where in the curriculum does anyone ever even talk about parenting let alone teach it?

Please stop blaming everyone else and face up to it. We're creating generations of malfunctioning parental units. We need to offer classes and peer coaching in the community. Don't be embarrassed. After all, fathers do take Lamaze classes. Why don't young parents have a resource to go to when they're desperate or even just need a sympathetic ear? It used to be their families who lived down the street who helped, coached, and gave advice. Yeah, we know no one wants to hear that line about how it takes a village and all that. But there's actually some real truth in there.

Okay, okay, the editor just threw a coloring book at us. It came from the Presidential library and wasn't even colored in yet (sorry, couldn't help it). You can cry and moan all you want about outsourcing, lack of jobs, and "unfair competition." But the bottom line, In Our Humble Opinion, is that the public education system in the United States is broke – real bad – and until we focus on fixing it all that other stuff is just so much blabbering to cover the naked behinds of the entrenched edumacation establishment.

Please direct your comments to comments@thefutureofwork.net. We'd love to publish your reactions and suggestions. And thanks for listening.

This issue of Future of Work Agenda was produced by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham of the Work Design Collaborative. We encourage your comments, suggestions, and submission of materials for possible future publication. Please contact us at:

Charlie Grantham, charlie@thefutureofwork.net, +1 928 771 9138
Jim Ware, jim@thefutureofwork.net, +1 510 558 1434

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