E-M8 Entrepreneurial Management for Eternal Mission

The book The 2010 Meltdown: Solving the Impending Jobs Crisis makes the argument that there is an impending shortage of skilled labor that is going to render USA uncompetetive in the near future. While I agree that USA is losing ground in the world competetiveness, I would argue that the problem is not a lack of formal education.

We can blame hiring practices that make it impossible for people with the right skills to do the jobs. We can blame the entire policy making establishment that is continuing to encaurage mass production while mass customization has been the word of the day since the seventies. We can blame reliance on hourly rather than merit based compensation. We can blame focus on activity rather than performance. We can blame complicated and counterproductive credentialing practices that limit the number of truly innovative college programs. We can blame lending practices that do not care about the merit of the business idea, but rather about apparent equity of the entrepreneurs. We can blame everyone and everything, but we will not get very far in the solution, when the problem is not even a problem.

I for one, would love to see the wages of educated skilled workers in this country increase and the bargaining power shift away from the empoyers (capital holders) to the people who are actually bring the only real capital of the information age, the employees. But as much as I’d like to see that, I don’t believe for a second that our country will allow that to happen. 

There is no point saying that there is a qualified labor shortage when lots of talented, educated people would love to get in there and do those jobs but are often screened out by the system.

The whole notion that we do not have enough well trained people is a falacy. It’s just easier for employers to whine about bad workforce, when in reality the problem is likely with the bad management. The same organizations that complain about the lack of qualified workers screen out hundreds and sometimes thousands of applicants for a position, taking years to complete the process.

Even in the medical field, which claims the largest chunk of shortages, there are tremendous inefficiencies and opportunities for staff with lesser amount of medical training to make a real difference. Hospitals can run way more efficiently if we just arrange the work-flow in an efficient fashion, eliminated unnecessary procedures and encouraged preventative care. That would conflict with the billing practices, but that can be easily solved at the conceptual level with not a single extra doctor or nurse necessary. (A posting on my proposal to improve health-care is coming soon.)

If businesses become a little more proactive and innovative about their future workforce needs, they will have no problems in any market. Yet, even in today’s markets, many people are sitting in my classrooms to get a second degree simply because they could not be employed in the supposedly high need areas which their first degree qualified them to pursue. Plenty of experienced network technicians with no formal training cannot get a job. I know MBAs who are forced to accept part time jobs just to make ends meet. That is not indicative of a tight labor market. There are lots of people who can fill the jobs if the selection process was based on merit, not some irrelevant criteria like a degree.

In the world of mass customization there are much more efficient ways to train the workforce than college coursework. On the job, just in time training is crucial to the success of our businesses. Yet, it is also non existant, because our measurement systems make it appear expensive and make spending 6 months interviewing and finally leaving the position unfilled, cheap.

More importantly, there are lots of tasks that can be performed with minimal training, if only our businesses invested in standardization, workplace planning, poka yoke and other ways of optimizing productivity through simplification of the operations. It’s ridiculous to claim that we have a workforce shortage when we purposely make our processes so complicated that it would take a genius to follow them.

American companies are struggling for lack of imagination, vision and drive by the top management and complacency of the employees, who are out of shape from lack of constant competition. Yes, most Americans are terrible at math, do not understand or know even elementary science and generally cannot communicate in their own language, much less in a foreign one, but these are problems that can be overcome and are a side product of lack of leadership. We have enough bright and even brilliant people, it’s just that our society is not a meritocracy, so they do not typically rise to the top. Rather they become disillusioned and pretend to be average to spare themselves the frustration. We do not need a whole country of people who understand laws of thermodynamics, we just have to make sure that those in charge either do themselves or pay attention to people that do. The only way that will happen is that if we as society recognise that the capital of the next age is not buildings, but intellectual property and if we find a good way of legally manage that intellectual property.

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