“All of this talk about short-term stimulus, even with the good ideas that are sometimes laid out, misses the point that there is not a short-term fix to this high unemployment problem. We are in a new slower growth economy with higher unemployment and we are going to have to invest a lot more in skill training.”

He goes on to say the skills we have are not the skills we need. All the more reason I believe that your ability to learn and adapt is your most valuable skill. Read more in the PBS Nightly Business Report, Private Sector Jobs Rise & So Does Unemployment.

“For years, Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System would not allow anything to be recorded about it. He argued that to do so would crystallize the process and stall the drive for never-ending improvement. I can see that copying others will work well in an organization that has a command and control management style where employees are told to follow a certain path as it will be good for the business and good for them. But if you want to develop a systems-thinking environment, copying will get in the way of deep-seated learning.”

Seems like simply making a procedure can prevent learning from happening. So why do we make procedures? To outsource the work? To be consistent in what we build?

But if we become consistent by using a procedure, we prevent learning.

If you had to choose between having employees learn, and have employees be consistent, which would you pick?

“Freedom lies in our ability to discern truth and choose right actions. Leadership, courage, hope, conscience, character, faith, critical thinking, magnanimity–all those things are available to those who take and read–but only if we develop the vocabulary to understand.”

Reminds me of this Quote of the week that Scott Berkun posted:

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. - John F. Kennedy”

Start reading.

“With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.”

It seems like there are a lot of areas where creativity is celebrated with much less enthusiasm than following a prescribed plan.

“It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.”

Interesting read. I especially liked the bit where the Robin Marantz Henig calls out our confusion “in our scattershot approach to markers of adulthood”:

• can vote at 18
• don’t age out of foster care until 21
• can join the military at 18
• can’t drink until 21
• can drive at 16
• can’t rent a car until 25
• if students, the IRS considers them a dependent until 24
• Parents have no access to college records if the child is over 18
• health insurance under parents’ plans till 26 (or 30)

“For [the millennial child] the act of knowing something has become inseparable from the act of reaching for knowledge. She searches for what she needs to know; in a moment’s time, the answers are at hand. And anything known to anyone anywhere has become indistinguishable from what she knows for herself.”

Memorizing certain things has it’s value, but if you have the skills to find the answer to anything in 30 seconds using the smartphone in your pocket, what things are really worth memorizing? There are two things we should teach: the skill of searching and finding (ie, how to learn) and the skill to evaluate the quality of your sources. That’s it. Research and critical analysis.

“Let Learning Lead. Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first. Learning is defined as the creation of new knowledge through experimentation.”

“You can’t learn anything from doing something right. If you did it right, you merely confirmed that what you already knew or believed was correct. Nothing learned. But if you make a mistake, you can identify it and correct it.”

And then identifies to types of mistakes: commission (doing what you shouldn’t have) and omission (not doing what you should have).

“Errors of omission signify a lack of innovation in your team. Maybe someone thought of a better way but was afraid to say anything. Or maybe nobody even thought about it.”

He used this video from Apple on the “Apple Computer Knowledge Navigator” as an example of a good experience vision and discussed how it directs the actions of the company. Here is a short write-up from Forrester on the talk. Of about 200 different company attributes, the UIE research found that the following three were the most useful in predicting long term success:

VISION – Can everyone on your team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?

FEEDBACK – In the last six weeks, have you spent more than 2 hours watching someone use your or a competitors design?

CULTURE – In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?

The first two are (I think) rather self explanatory, however the 3rd has gotten double-takes for everyone I’ve discussed with. The theory is really pretty straight forward: discovering a major design failure is to be celebrated because it is informative. If the culture of an organization celebrates learning, then you will find learning occurs both with successes and with failures. Wonderful point of view.

Those five traits are:

• Future Market Orientation – how much your managers and execs talk about what will be vs what is. Think about “the extent to which a firm emphasizes, in its market research activities, customers and competitors who are not currently in the markets it serves.”
• Willingness to Cannibalize – how willing you are to destroy something you fought for (or created) in order to create something new. In paper format, this “is an attitude that puts up for review and sacrifice current profit-generating assets, including current profitable and successful innovations, so that the firm can get ahead with the next generation of innovations”
• Tolerance for Risk – The more you are willing to take calculated risk, the more innovative you will be. 
• Incentives for Enterprise – Innovative companies reward employee’s success in a significant way, and failure comes with only a mild reprimand. “By this practice, the firm refrains from rewarding only or primarily seniority or management of current products. Rather, it ensures that adequate if not large incentives are reserved for employees who venture to explore or build new enterprises for the firm.”
• Empowering Product Champions – “By this practice, a firm empowers an individual with resources to explore, research, and build on promising but uncertain, future technologies. In effect, it embeds within the firm the enterprising spirit that enabled it to initiate the original innovation that brought it success.”

These rung rather true for me. 

Chandy ended the interview with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina line: Just like “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” innovative companies are all alike and un-innovative companies lack innovative in their own special way.

Here is a snip from the interview:

Daniel Pink: Tom, in the newest editions of The World Is Flat, most of the additions have to do with education. Why is that? [...]

Friedman: It’s really several things. In the latest edition, I added a whole section on why liberal arts are more important than ever. It’s not that I don’t think math and science are important. They still are. But more than ever our secret sauce comes from our ability to integrate art, science, music and literature with the hard sciences. That’s what produces an iPod revolution or a Google.

—

Pink: [...] Are we asking too much of schools?

Friedman: Absolutely. My wife and I talk about this a lot. Someone asked her the other day if she were to write a book on education what would it be about? And she said: It would be a book on parenting.