Tuesday, July 31, 2012

PERSPECTIVE: WHILE ROME BURNS.


Is there anything more frustrating than to hear our politicians talk about inane and irrelevant subjects while our economy continues to decline and job growth continues to be weak or non-existent? Actually it is worse than we thought! Did you ever imagine that millions of people would be collecting unemployment insurance for as long as two years with no end in sight? And I will bet that many have heard stories of persons on unemployment who have been offered jobs who did not want to start until their unemployment insurance runs out. Then, how about the 45 million Americans who received food stamps in 2011? That is nearly 15% of our population, and the number is growing! The irony is that the Food Stamp program is administered by the a US Department (Agriculture) while another US Department (Interior) runs the Park System where visitors are admonished not to feed the animals lest they be incapable of foraging for themselves.

Anyone who watches Nature at work knows that you cannot run counter to Nature’s laws very long before you will be greatly harmed. The Food Stamp program and paying people to be idle runs counter to Nature’s Laws and America will surely be severely harmed if we don’t stop this ASAP. Our days are numbered! We have to stop “feeding the animals” so they won’t forget how to “forage” for themselves. Have we forgotten that Man is an integral part of the Animal Kingdom?

Getting our economy growing with the attendant job creation is not only an important issue, it is the only issue! If we don’t get some economic growth and job creation soon, does anyone believe that we will be any more capable of reducing or terminating the food stamp program than we can adjust Social Security or Medicare? To accomplish any modicum of growth and job creation, we will need strong and experienced leadership This Presidential election is doubtless one of the most important we will ever see, and this one is all about leadership. We desperately need the most capable and experienced leader possible.

Obama is not that person! He has no leadership experience, and he has learned nothing about leadership on the job and has demonstrated that he has no clue what to do. Worse he has surrounded himself with incompetence. It is instructive to note that every time Obama opens his mouth he makes a Freudian Slip which tells us that he would not do the correct thing even if he did know how, because he is an ideologue. We saw this in his conversation with Joe the Plumber during the campaign of 2008 when he talked openly about distributing the wealth. Then it happened recently when he blurted out that no innovator or business has succeeded without Government help. This is ridiculous, to say the least, and socialistic to tell the whole truth. He also showed his ignorance of how innovation really works when he claimed that Microsoft and other digital technology companies needed the miniaturization of electronic circuitry developed by the US Government space program and to become successful. Actually, it is the other way around; the US space program needed the invention of the transistor to miniaturize circuitry. That device was invented in the late 1940’s in Bell Labs in New Jersey, a private entity owned by AT&T. You may recognize that the name Bell came from Alexander Bell, whom most grammar school kids could name as the inventor of the telephone.

The Media would have us believe that these statements and comments are “gaffs”. That is nonsense; they are “Freudian Slips” which, as described by Dr. Sigmund Freud, are deeply held beliefs that “slip” out revealing what one actually believes about the subject at hand.

For further perspective on why the President must provide the leadership we need at this critical time, you can see what happened when Obama delegated the development of the Obamacare legislation to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and Harry Read, Senate Majority Leader. They produced an abomination that even the democrat members of the House and Senate had to hold their noses and be bribed to pass. It is an old adage that if you assign a committee to build a horse it will invariably come out as a camel. Congress cannot lead, period.

Meanwhile, Romney has the demonstrated experience needed to lead and to turn around disasters. The problem is that the President and the Media have chosen to keep that knowledge from the voters by denigrating and distorted Romney’s record of leadership and turnaround achievements. Moreover, they constantly berate him and distract voters for his not providing more tax returns. They and we both already know what they will show. Romney is extremely rich and pays taxes commensurate with the return on capital he has invested not from a salary. Most of the time he receives no salary for the services he renders. Yes, Romney is rich, but it is not inherited; he gave all his inherited wealtxn ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddv away to charities. What he currently earned he earned on his own by investing in US businesses. Remember you do not become rich by failing.

Romney’s experience in the business community is amazing. By any standard Bain Capital is a huge success, especially where businesses must deal with intense global and digital competition. Founded in 1984, Romney and his partners started Bain with $37 million of private capital which they raised. Bain then invested in or acquired and often turned around hundreds of failing companies and in the process it created thousands of jobs. Today, Bain manages $66 billion of investor capital.

Bain Capital’s performance is considered so exceptional that it is being used by the Business Schools as an example of how to turn around a failing company in a global economy. Imagine if Romney had been the CEO of Eastman Kodak, a firm that invented and owned the camera and silver based film business from the get go only to lose it to global competition when they failed to recognize the significance of the digital camera. Under his leadership Kodak would probably still be a major US business icon instead of residing on the trash pile of failed US companies.

Another example of Romney’s leadership skills is his saving the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games of 2002 which were planned for Salt Lake City. Here is what happened. Before Romney took a leave of absence and left his day-to-day tasks as CEO of Bain in 1999, the Olympic program was $379 million short of needed income, and they were planning to scale it back. Those who followed the issue inform us that Romney ran the planning for the Games like a business. He revamped the organization’s leadership and policies, reduced budgets, and he boosted fundraising by alleviating the concerns of corporate sponsors, while recruiting many new ones. With Romney’s leadership and business acumen the Games were turned from a failure to a huge success and put a feather in the “US Cap”. Doesn’t this sound like what is needed for the US economy right now?

The United States is still the most innovative country in the world, with the greatest universities, abundant energy and natural resources, and excellent workers. So, what is causing our decline? Our Politicians and our Media! In particular we are talking about our President, the members of the Senate and the Congress who refuse to take meaningful action.

Nearly everyone knows that the major factors that inhibit our getting the economy back on track are:

• Government taxes and regulations choke private enterprise and make it non-competitive in the global markets.

• The new digital revolution requires skills that the US has a shortage of

• The lack of concrete plans to control our unsustainable and growing debt caused by entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security creates uncertainty in the business community.

Clearly, Romney has the credentials that are required to lead, and the business experience that is needed to bring back the confidence that the business community must have to invest in the United States. But to win this election, he must guard against the distractions and untruths that the Media and Obama can throw at him. This is what is happening now. Obama is using class warfare to distract us by making us believe that no one can be successful without the prior government creation of technology and infrastructure. Moreover, the ultimate in badness is if becoming successful makes one rich. Romney fits that pattern perfectly because he is rich and is in the “One Percent” that Obama constantly castigates in his promotion of class warfare. This makes him the perfect person for them to harangue and produces an opportunity for Obama and the Mainstream Media, that is Obama’s compliant partner, to obfuscate the facts and demagogue the issues.

We are pleased that Romney at last has starting to lash back at Obama’a silly slip. But he has yet to spell out a job-creation plan that the ordinary voter can understand. He must spell this out and repeat it over and over in the simplest language possible. My earlier blog about using our abundant supply of natural gas to replace oil for our vehicles would be a good starting point.

Finally, it is crucial that we rid ourselves of those politicians who continue to “fiddle while the conflagration grows”.





Tuesday, July 10, 2012

PERSPECTIVE: WHAT GENERATION Y WILL NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE JOB MARKET THEY ARE ABOUT TO ENTER

As a result of globalization and the digital revolution, we are experiencing a paradigm shift in the way business is conducted and how it will be conducted from now on. Many of the private sector jobs that have been lost will not be replaced. This will impact the so-called Generation Y, those born from 1990 to the present. These are our grandchildren, and the structures that mentored their parents and grandparents as they entered the market in their time are no longer there. The reason for my writing this blog is to see if we can provide our grandchildren some ideas of how to deal with this new phenomenon. It is timely because the oldest of our grandchildren are graduating from college or other schools and are about to enter the job market.

For perspective, when we the grandparent generation entered the workforce, we could largely count on being employed by the same firm, and often at the same location, for our entire career. For the most part this was true of our children’s generation, as well. Our bosses mentored us and helped us advance in our careers. But for our grandchildren entering the workforce today, that is a very unlikely scenario. It is highly probable that the job one starts with will not even be in existence beyond five years, let alone at one’s retirement. Consequently, our grandchildren will have to be their own mentors, career planners and managers of their health programs and retirement plans. While they are at the peak of their skill level in terms of the digital revolution which they acquired in grammar and high school, these young folk are poorly prepared to be their own mentors and career planners let alone how to set up health and retirement programs from day one in their first job.

Unfortunately, their parents, their grandparents and their teachers don’t have much of an idea of how to help them. However, there is a book that can serve as a primer for them. It is titled: “The Start-Up of You” with the sub-title: “Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself and Transform Your Career” by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha. Hoffman is an entrepreneur, co-founder and Chairman of LinkedIn  and Casnocha is an entrepreneur and  journalist. The book’s website is: www.startupofyou.com

The authors state that: “Whether you’re a lawyer, doctor, teacher, engineer or business owner, today you need to also think of yourself as an entrepreneur at the helm of at least one living, growing start-up venture, your career.” According to the dictionary an entrepreneur is: “Someone who organizes a business venture and assumes the risk for it”.

They authors further state: “With the death of traditional career paths, so goes the kind of traditional professional development previous generations enjoyed. You can no longer count on employer-sponsored training to enhance your communication skills or expand your technical know-how. The expectation for even junior employees is that you can do the job you have been hired to do upon arrival or that you’ll learn so quickly you’ll be up to speed within weeks. Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it’s now your job to train and invest in yourself.” A further point the authors make is this. “There used to be a long-term pact between employee and employer that guaranteed lifetime employment in exchange for lifelong loyalty. This pact has been replaced by a performance-based, short-term contract that’s perpetually up for renewal by both sides. Professional loyalty now flows ‘horizontally’ to and from your network rather than ‘vertically’ to your boss.” THIS SHOULD COME AS A SHOCK!! Because I doubt that any of us, especially our grand children have ever been told this.

Let’s start by asking why the jobs are not there? Simply stated, it is because entrepreneurs cannot figure out what to do. Newspapers, magazines and books are falling to the new digital technologies and all businesses are determining how and where the new digital technologies will fit to reduce the need for human personnel. In other words the market place is in a state of turmoil for which there is no historic precedent. Worse our Congress and President have no clue what is going on, so they exacerbate the issue by adding unnecessary regulations, take no serious actions to deal with the deficit and muddle the question of whether taxes on businesses should be increased or not. Worse they become easily distracted from the central issue of jobs with petty political matters.

Fortunately, the book provides some great ideas for our grandchildren. The first and foremost, is to know and fully understand your strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who runs a business starts with analyzing the assets and liabilities of the company. When that list has been developed and fully explored, then you can choose the right course that exploits your assets (strengths) and minimizes your liabilities (weaknesses).  One can, of course and should always, continue to work on minimizing one’s weaknesses.

The second important thing that the job seeker must be doing is networking. And the job seeker must keep the network viable and constantly expanding. You never know when someone will know someone who is searching for the very talent that you have.

A third important thing is not to sit around and mope if you can’t immediately find the job that fits your skills, talents or passion. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, found that a long bout of unemployment in young adults provokes long lasting changes in behavior and mental health. Therefore, it is vital that one have a job any job no matter what, even a non-paying job as an intern, to fill the time while you are seeking the desired job. This will keep you in good health and will look well on your résumé even if it only means that you showed up regularly and on time.

I recommend that our grandchildren who are close to entering this new work world get a copy of the book. You can download it on your Kindle or I-Pad. Parents and grandparents of our young folk should also get a copy of the book so you can add some ideas that might help. All generations might want to read some of the other books that are referenced by the authors, as well.
Our children’s generation will need all the help and understanding that they can get from us at this critical time in history when they alone will be experiencing what their parents, their grandparents and their teachers never experienced or maybe could not even have imagined.


A FEW EXAMPLES FOR FURTHER READING
  • “Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself”
    • The author explores the attitudes toward autonomy, informal networks and self-constructed safety nets of the self-employed.
  • “The Brand You 50: Or
    Fifty Ways
    to Transform Yourself from and Employee into a Brand that Shouts Distinction”
    • The author says: ‘You should think about what makes you stand out and then aggressively promote those distinctive skills, accomploishments and passions that make up your personal brand-just like a companywiould promote its products and services.”
  • “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives”
    • The social scientists who authored this book argue that connections up to three degrees away from us have a profound effect on our mind and body.