It's Always About Priorities

This is not a paid commercial in any way but I have to say that I am a fan of Bloomberg Businessweek, especially since they changed the format.  Really like the way it is organized, but that is not what this post is about which I would guess comes as a relief to anyone who has read this far.

Along with millions of others, I am also a big fan of Charlie Rose.  One of the best interviewers ever IMHO.  If you don't follow his show on Bloomberg TV, he also has a one page interview in the magazine every week. 

A recent such interview was with Azim Premji, the chairman of info-tech giant Wipro in which Rose sought Premji's opinion on a range of topics one of which was, as you might guess, what thoughts he had about the U.S. and its role as an economic power going forward.

I thought his response was very telling both in terms of his identification of both our strengths as well as our weakness.  Here's what he said:

"The U.S. is a complex country.  It has a high predominance of immigrants who have been eminently successful.  But in the past 20 years, government has increased spending on jails by six times in the U.S. whereas the per capita spending on education has remained the same."

A message in there somewhere?  Ya think!

Anyone who has followed this blog, even sporadically, knows that one of my hot buttons has always been on the subject of education and more specifically, our continued failure as a country to have the political will to make the investments in an educational system whose state of disrepair has to be at least equal to if not worse than our physical infrastructure. 

Said differently, when a well-respected world business leader such as Azim Premji takes note that we think it is more important to increase our spending on jails than on education, sadly it gives us yet another way of underscoring just how little we seem to understand the challenges we face.

Trickle Down Education

I have never been one of those who keeps careful records, and when it comes to something about which you care a lot, while you may not always recall precise dates, you certainly don't forget that you have feelings about the subject and have voiced them.

Such is the case with the post you see below which I came across the other day when I was trying to clean up folders to create a bit more space.  As I read through it again, I was both encouraged and discouraged at the same time.

Encouraged because the subject of putting some real effort into rejuvenating public education and getting it back on track actually appears like it might be getting our attention.  Pols from both parties are starting to talk about it a fair amount and for sure business leaders are raising their voices too.  Look what Bill Gates is trying to do about it.

I was discouraged because Friedman and others have been banging this drum to make this a national priority for a long, long time, and here we are six years later and not much has happened. 

I know as a country we have more challenges to deal with than as they used to say "Carter's got pills" but I can't think of a single challenge that if we were to make it a top priority would do more to benefit our country than fixing public education.  It touches us all.

A colleague here in the office gave me some plane reading last week as I was on my way to a conference in Chicago. It was a copy of a recent the NY Times magazine that comes with the Sunday paper. Tom Friedman had an article in it called The World is Flat. Pretty powerful stuff. Essentially he laid out the challenge facing our country if we are to remain competitive in a world which (thanks to cyber communication) has removed the barriers to the application of intellectual horsepower.

His point is that if we as a country (and that really means we as a business community) don't really get behind a genuine, consolidated effort to push up the educational standards soon, we are in big, big trouble. As he points out, by the time our students get through the 12th grade, they are last in the educational rankings of all the industrialized countries. Not a happy list to be on to say the least.

When you look at the achievement level of students coming out of the educational system in places like China, South Korea, and India, particularly as it relates to math, the sciences, and engineering, and then superimpose the degree to which they outnumber the U.S. in population, the issue seems pretty clear. Just to give you an idea, in China, he says, there are already more people using cell phones than the population of the U.S.

Bottom line, Friedman's point is that in the not too distant future, if we don't get things fixed in this arena, it isn't just going to say Made in China, etc., it will say "Designed in China."

I think he's right.  [Posted: April 18, 2005]

Global War for Talent

As this written, I no longer remember where I stumbled across the info that came out of a 2008 study by The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and which placed the United States 18th among the 36 nations examined.

While I know 2008 seems like ancient history and in Twitter years probably qualifies as prehistoric, but even way back then there were folks concerned about where America stood from an educational perspective.

Indeed, even with data this old, if you were looking for a way to get back on your diet by losing your appetite in a hurry, you can read the entire article here.

I am guessing that most of us would have a tendency to say, that if the sky hasn't fallen by now, it's time to worry about something else like trying to figure out if the Eagles trade of McNabb to the Redskins was a good one, and if so for which team. (As a Giants fan, I'm worried about both.)

If you read some of the think pieces about our country's prospects for the future as a global player most don't exactly make you want to run out and bet the ranch on our educational system as the answer.

Certainly I realize that many of the articles that look at this stuff as very much half empty are done to, as they say, "sell papers" but the fact remains that even if things are not as dismal as they project, to say that we do not face major challenges is a huge understatement.

When one reads articles on how to fix all this, the Rx always seems to say we need to develop more collaboration between parents, teachers and school administrations. Rarely, or at least not often enough, there is little talk about the role that business leaders should play.

Sure there is a fair amount of financial support for scholarships, but in a sense it feels to me that by the time those are awarded, we have already lost hundreds of thousands of kids with equal or better potential because they have been destroyed by the system before they even had the chance to compete.

As to putting cost of education out of reach for most middle class families, there is plenty of fodder there for books much less blogs.

If business leaders hope to compete effectively on a global basis, then they best think about putting some of that R&D money into helping to figure out how to save the intellectual capital that is going to waste.

H-1 visas are not an answer, they simply mask the disease.

Mike for President

When I say Mike for president I am not talking about Jordan. Actually I'm just expressing the thought that a lot of sports fans do when they are passing accolades along about one of their idols.

In this case however I am not talking sports, I am talking about America's ability to compete in the world economy - a game I think most of us would agree we cannot afford to lose and yet if you read Michael E. Porter's recent article in the October 30th issue of BusinessWeek it feels like a game which while it may not be out of reach (yet) it is one where we need to put some points on the board in a big way.

Porter is, as most know, one of the leading gurus on competitiveness. In this most recent piece called Why America Needs an Economic Strategy (talk about an understatement!) Porter lays out in words that even I could understand both the need and some proposed solutions.

I should say as an aside that it is really nice to see someone do more than just write about "the problem" (as if we didn't know!) but also take the time to try and show the reader a "way out." This is also one of the reasons that I am such a fan of Tom Friedman who often does the same thing.

Anyway, what caught my eye was not just the subject which I found of immediate interest, but after reading it, I was pleased to see that he too was pounding the drum on one of the subjects about which readers of this blog will recognize as one about which I have pretty strong feelings - read public education. Here's what Porter had to say on the subject:

"A final strategic failure is in many ways the most disconcerting. All Americans know that the public education system is a serious weakness. Fewer may realize that citizens retiring today are better educated than the young people entering the workforce. In the global economy, just being an American is no longer enough to guarantee a good job at a good wage. Without world-class education and skills, Americans must compete with workers in other countries for jobs that could be moved anywhere. Unless we significantly improve the performance of our public schools, there is no scenario in which many Americans will escape continued pressure on their standard of living. And legal and illegal immigration of low-skilled workers cannot help but make the problem worse for less-skilled Americans."

This is not to say that there are not other strategic failure factors that Porter brings to the reader's attention, but for sure this one is super critical.

Presidential elections remind me of the sort of hopeful feeling that many of us feel on New Year's eve. A new beginning and a chance to make move forward with a "clean slate." An over simplification to be sure, but it is still hard to not feel some of that even though we know that the issues that we there on the 31st don't go away on the 1st.

All that said, and since we by this time tomorrow we will have a new President elect, and since I am a bit of an idealist anyway, I hope that the president and members of both houses will have read this article and will take it to heart, especially the closing paragraph which says:

"The new Administration will have an historic opportunity to adopt a strategic approach to the U.S.'s economic future, something that would bring the parties together. America is at its best when it recognizes problems and accepts collective responsibility for dealing with them. All Americans should hope that the next President and Congress rise to the challenge."

Yeah, I know, but somewhere in the past I must have been related to Don Quixote.