Ho‘ohana Aloha

Long article, but please make the time to do so this weekend or the next.

Adam Davidson:

In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run manufacturer based in Queens, sheds light on both phenomena. It’s a story of hustle, ingenuity, competitive success, and promise for America’s economy. It also illuminates why the jobs crisis will be so difficult to solve.

…I came here to find answers to questions that arise from the data (Even if you know the rough outline of this story, looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data is still shocking.) How, exactly, have some American manufacturers continued to survive, and even thrive, as global competition has intensified? What, if anything, should be done to halt the collapse of manufacturing employment? And what does the disappearance of factory work mean for the rest of us?

Found via this commentary by JD Meier: Productivity is a Remarkably Good Thing:

“Productivity, in and of itself, is a remarkably good thing.  Only through productivity growth can the average quality of human life improve.   Because of higher agricultural productivity, we don’t all have to work in the fields to make enough food to eat.  Because of higher industrial productivity, few of us need to work in factories to make the products we use.  In theory, productivity growth should help nearly everyone in society.   When one person can grow as much food or make as many car parts as 100 used to, prices should fall, which gives everyone in that society more purchasing power; we all become a littler richer.  In the economic models, the benefits of productivity growth should not go just to the rich owners of capital.  As workers become more productive, they should be able to demand higher salaries.”

On Talking Story:

Calling all Managers: We need you.

We hear a lot about the jobs we need, and guess what? Management of those jobs, and of the quality of work they involve, the future they shape, and the people they grow, isn’t going away. If anything, we need thoughtful, intentional and purposeful management more than ever.

Steve Jobs for instance. (1955-2011) Jobs had vision, to be sure , but he was also a manager…

* October 7 updates are in the comments there, with links to additional articles at Gawker and The Harvard Business Review:

I prefer to dwell on the positive, and see the good in people, and I work on training myself to be so (this is my full disclosure about that constant effort: The 3 Secrets of Being Positive). Yet there is that balance to be achieved at times, in “calling it like it is” – not to condemn, but so you can point out how we need to improve and get better. I found I had to choose my words carefully for this article I posted today, for while I genuinely do admire Steve Jobs for his imagination and genius, I wish he had been a greater manager, giving us that pulpit to speak from too…

zenhabits:

Fascinating thoughts from a great small business owner.

This blog post by Jesse Jacobs is a good continuation of the conversations we’re now having on Talking Story about a) Jobs of Merit, and b) Working in the Knowledge Economy. He mentions Maslow’s Pyramid, which we also took another look at yesterday:

The biggest challenge I see with the current economy and the “job crisis” is that without jobs, we have a society without meaning. And legions of people without meaning is both sad and scary.

In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, no jobs and no meaning stresses both the top of the pyramid, where people are looking to make a difference with their lives, and the bottom of the pyramid,where survival needs go challenged with food and shelter. The whole “needs” pyramid starts to get pretty wobbly.

In “A Job of Any Merit: Your 3 Options” I asked you to get personally involved in job creation. I asked you to share my essay, and talk about it, so with this post, we continue the conversation.

The options we have now may not be that pretty, and they may not be easy to navigate, but giving up on them doesn’t make any sense. Let’s improve them.

Because guess what? YOU are “the Creative Class.”

To read more, click over to Talking Story.

This blog post turned into a longer essay, but I hope you’ll still read it (about 15 minutes of your time), and that you’ll share it, for it’s important:

If you haven’t yet done so, it’s time to ask, “What can I do?” about securing worthwhile jobs and stemming rampant unemployment.

Everyone can do something. Everyone.

You can’t just give up on working because you’ve given up on finding a job.

The options most of us see may not be that pretty, but my purpose in outlining them was to bring our overwhelm down to an individual’s path of action, starting from the situation you may currently be in.

So if two, or all three options apply to you, my hope in describing “A Job of Any Merit” was that context of merit within our available choices — merit is the quality of being particularly good or worthy of your efforts. That’s the way we leave the overwhelm, handwringing, and frustration of having no agenda behind us. Realistically, you can only do your best work in one option at a time.

If you already have a job of any kind, you also have an advantage and some leverage. It is time to use that leverage, and share that advantage.

Thomas L. Friedman sums up the changes wrought by technology since he wrote The World is Flat in 2004:

“The Great Recession” is also coinciding with — and driving — “The Great Inflection.”

In the last decade, we have gone from a connected world (thanks to the end of the cold war, globalization and the Internet) to a hyperconnected world (thanks to those same forces expanding even faster). And it matters. The connected world was a challenge to blue-collar workers in the industrialized West. They had to compete with a bigger pool of cheap labor. The hyperconnected world is now a challenge to white-collar workers. They have to compete with a bigger pool of cheap geniuses — some of whom are people and some are now robots, microchips and software-guided machines.

I wrote about the connected world in 2004, arguing that the world had gotten “flat.” When I made that argument, though, Facebook barely existed — and Twitter, cloud computing, iPhones, LinkedIn, iPads, the “applications” industry and Skype had either not been invented or were in their infancy. Now they are exploding, taking us from connected to hyperconnected. It is a huge inflection point masked by the Great Recession.

It is also both a huge challenge and opportunity. It has never been harder to find a job and never been easier — for those prepared for this world — to invent a job or find a customer. Anyone with the spark of an idea can start a company overnight, using a credit card, while accessing brains, brawn and customers anywhere. It is why Pascal Lamy, chief of the World Trade Organization, argues that terms like “made in America” or “made in China” are phasing out. The proper term, says Lamy, is “made in the world.” More products are designed everywhere, made everywhere and sold everywhere.

The term “outsourcing” is also out of date. There is no more “out” anymore. Firms can and will seek the best leaders and talent to achieve their goals anywhere in the world. Dov Seidman, is the C.E.O. of LRN, a firm that helps businesses develop principled corporate cultures, and the author of “How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything.” He describes the mind-set of many C.E.O.’s he works with: “I run a global company with a global mission and one set of shared values in pursuit of global objectives. My employees are all over the world — more than half outside the U.S. — and more than half of my revenues and my plans for growth are out there, too. So you tell me: What is out and what is in anymore?”

Matt Barrie, is the founder of freelancer.com, which today lists 2.8 million freelancers offering every service you can imagine. “The whole world is connecting up now at an incredibly rapid pace,” says Barrie, and many of these people are coming to freelancer.com to offer their talents. Barrie says he describes this rising global army of freelancers the way he describes his own team: “They all have Ph.D.’s. They are poor, hungry and driven: P.H.D.”

From Simon Sinek:

Jill is an entrepreneur. She is a big thinker with big ideas. She is also an idealist. She imagines a world in which companies make their impact on society their primary bottom line and the financial results that follow as their second bottom line. She is smart and articulate and her ideas are really good, but she’s struggling to get anyone to take her seriously.

What’s the problem?

According to the companies that close the door on her, it’s because she’s only 24.

As Ryan Avent shares,

The political story that is Rick Perry’s candidacy obscures the metropolitan roots of the Texas story.

He also points out another root cause, perhaps a bigger, and more telling one (Hawai‘i, are you listening?)

Yet the big secret to success is Texan cities’ willingness to capitalize on their advantages through an extraordinary openness to growth.