By Krystal Ball, on Wed Aug 7, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET  President Obama just gave another economic speech, this time in Phoenix, aimed at helping middle class families attain the American dream of home ownership. In truth, however, owning a home is only one part of the American dream. The real core of the American Dream was illustrated well recently by Robert Putnam, a social scientist whose work on community and inequality has influenced the president. In a recent op-ed for The New York Times Putnam talks about the way his hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio, has crumbled. He warns that the American dream is in danger of crumbling right along with it as manufacturing jobs leave and Port Clinton residents become locked in a cycle of poverty, hopelessness and despair.
I just spent the summer with my family and my new baby in my own crumbling rust belt town and I can attest to the fact that seeing that sort of regional despair up close has a way of clarifying your thinking. My little town of East Liverpool, Ohio, used to be the pottery capital of the world. Now China is the pottery capital of the world. The next town over, Midland, PA., used to be home to one of the largest steel mills in the country, offering thousands of good, union, middle class jobs. Now the mill is all but defunct. What will replace these jobs? That’s the real economic question we need to focus on, the real heart of preserving the American dream. After all you need a job and money to buy a house.
We tend to romanticize our era of manufacturing dominance and there is something wonderful about making things. Perhaps with new technology and new economic incentives we can restore some of our manufacturing prowess but there’s no time machine to take us back to the good old days. But listen to Richard Florida, senior editor at the Atlantic. He suggests the job boom we really need is staring us right in the face. Jobs that can’t be outsourced, in a sector that is already growing rapidly. The service sector. Jobs like retail clerks, home health care providers, childcare workers.
As manufacturing jobs have declined in this country, service sector jobs have increased. Perhaps rather than trying to bring back a bygone manufacturing era, we need to find a way to make service jobs the sort of good jobs that you can support a family on, buy a car with, take vacations on.
I don’t know exactly how we do it. But I know the activism among fast food workers and WalMart employees is a good start. I know that companies like Costco and Zappos and Amazon are leading the way by showing that a respected worker is a productive worker. And I also know that turning service jobs into middle class jobs will likely require a willingness among all of us to pay a bit more for the services we use. But keep in mind, manufacturing jobs were not always so great. They started out dirty, low paid, and dangerous. Perhaps service sector jobs can evolve just as manufacturing jobs did in those good old days.
Home ownership is fine. Bridges and roads are great. Education is absolutely critical. But what we really need to preserve the American Dream is a realistic path for all to the middle class through a fundamental shift in the way we view and treat our service workers. Oh, and it might help to have a Congress that was actually interested in tackling these problems, or might even be in session now and then.
Originally posted at MSNBC.com.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Aug 5, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Today’s concept of work, employment, and jobs are an outgrowth of an industrial era that is long gone. The industrial era is not coming back and it is time to rethink the basic concept of work. Despite what politicians say most of the jobs lost in the current downturn aren’t coming back. Work takes on new meaning in the 21st century and it is time to change our conversation. The real wake-up call of this downturn is the enormous skill’s gap between the requirements of a 21st century economy and the skills and experience of the current workforce. Waving our hands and political rhetoric will not close the gap. Our education and workforce development systems must be transformed. Now. The nature of work and the way we think about jobs must change dramatically. Labor Day seems like a good day to start.
Here are 20 random thoughts on the future of work. Add yours.
1) Work becomes more about meaning and impact than repeatable tasks.
2) 9 to 5 is so yesterday.
3) Global sourcing goes on steroids enabling third world opportunity and growth.
4) Free Agent Nation becomes a reality.
5) Projects are more important than jobs.
6) Teams assemble and reassemble based on the job to be done.
7) Changing nature of work transforms our daily commute and transportation systems.
 8) Industrial era organizations give way to purposeful networks.
9) Everything we think and know about professions will change.
10) Education is no longer K-16 but a life long commitment.
11) Workforce and economic development are transformed and become indistinguishable.
12) Work becomes more self organized and less institutionally driven.
13) Job titles are more about what you can do than meaningless status monikers.
14) Compensation is about performance outcomes not seniority.
15) Entrepreneurship becomes democratized and the key economic driver.
16) Work and social become indistinguishable.
17) Getting better faster is imperative.
18) Art and design become integral to work and value creation.
19) Making things becomes important and interesting again.
20) Passion drives meaningful work.
By RP Nation, on Wed Jul 31, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Did you know that we have a second Texas? If you didn’t, it’s not your fault. We don’t talk about it all that much. Unlike the Texas everyone’s familiar with, this one isn’t located in any one geographic location. Rather, it’s scattered throughout the United States. You probably know someone from the second Texas. Here’s the thing: Because we hardly ever talk about it, hardly anyone knows that only 17% of it is employed, compared to 59% (according to the American Communities Survey 2011) in the Texas most people think of.
However, most people in this Texas want to work. Of the other 83%, fully 80% want to work at least part-time and contribute to our society. This population is our nation’s disabled, and it is truly our country’s most underused economic resource.
Our disabled population makes up a large share of the total population – about one-fifth, according to some estimates. Saying that our disabled population is roughly the first Texas’ size is a very conservative estimate. The Census says that it’s actually both a second Texas and a second New York combined, all with that dismal 17% employment rate.
If counted on its own, Texas would have the 15th largest economy in the world based on 2011 data. New York would have the 16th largest. Together, the two states would be ninth, right under Italy and above Russia. Imagine what our second New York and Texas could be if they were employed at the same rate as everyone else. So why aren’t they working and contributing?
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Lauren Gilbert: The 17% Employment Rate No One is Talking About
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Jul 29, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET “Facts are facts, but stories are who we are, how we learn, and what it all means.” My friend Alan Webber, Co-founder of Fast Company and author of Rules of Thumb, has it exactly right. Storytelling is the most important tool for any innovator. It is the best way to create emotional connections to your ideas and innovations. Sharing stories is the way to create a network of passionate supporters that can help spread ideas and make them a reality. We remember stories. We relate to stories and they compel us to action.
Storytelling is a core value at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF). We believe that advancing our mission to enable system change in health care, education, energy, and entrepreneurship is critically dependant on our ability to create, package, and share stories from our work. Everything we do is about storytelling and our Innovation Story Studio is one of BIF’s most important capabilities. By openly sharing stories about the process and output of BIF’s work we are strengthening our community of innovators and becoming more purposeful with every new story.
It is no surprise that BIF’s upcoming annual Collaborative Innovation Summit, BIF-6 on September 15-16, is all about storytelling. I will never forget meeting with my friend and mentor Richard Saul Wurman (RSW) to get his advice prior to our first summit six years ago. As an innovation junkie it doesn’t get any better than having RSW as a mentor. He founded TED for heaven’s sake. I went to the meeting prepared with an approach that I had worked on for weeks. As an MBA, of course I had a matrix, with speakers organized by theme. RSW heard me out and could only shake his head saying, Saul you have a lot to learn about how to create an emotional connection with an audience. He patiently told me to throw away the matrix. He said it was as simple as inviting people to a dinner party. Ask speakers that you want to have dinner with to share a personal story that you are selfishly interested in and invite others to listen in. RSW has been a storyteller at every summit we have hosted and I can’t wait for his story at BIF-6.
I love RSW for that advice. That is exactly what we do. No PowerPoint presentations, no matrix, just stories. One glorious story after another in no particular order, from storytellers (not speakers) sharing personal and raw insights about what innovation means to them. After about four to five stories back to back with no boring Q&A to break the rhythm we take a long break where all of the storytellers and participants can interact, connect, and share their own innovation stories and experiences. No breakouts, flip charts, or prescriptive assignments. It is up to the 300 participants to decide what is compelling and which connections are most interesting and valuable. We trust our audience. The most interesting collaborations every year come from connecting unusual suspects that find value in the gray area between their interests and disciplines.
Every year one of my favorite things to do is connect with each of the storytellers to discuss the upcoming summit and their stories. I just completed these calls for BIF-6. Talk about a kid in a candy store. To talk with each of these innovators is inspiring and a great joy. Check out the storyteller profiles on the BIF-6 portal and you will see what I mean. These innovators are asked to give speeches all of the time. Many of them have written books and do speaking tours. They all have PowerPoint presentations in the drawer and a stock speech they can give in their sleep, which they are not allowed to use at a BIF summit. I always find our storyteller’s reactions interesting when they discuss preparations for sharing a story versus giving a speech. They all say that it is far more interesting and challenging to tell a story than to give a speech. Regardless of their fame on the speaking circuit there is always trepidation in their voices when we discuss their stories. Every storyteller over six years has said that they are excited to hear the stories from the other storytellers and will be glad when they are done sharing their own. That is why they take the gig. It is a refreshing break from the grind of the speaking circuit. Storytelling is harder but more personally rewarding.
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Saul Kaplan: Stories Can Change the World
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Jul 22, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
Need to turn around your company? Trying to start a movement? Want to change the world? Easy Peasy! Just turn it in to a game. Everywhere we turn, it seems there are experts claiming that the best path forward is to engage people with elements of competitive play. The business world in particular has gone gaga for gamification.
I thought games were mainly for kids, and the occasional ice-breaker or temporary escape from reality. Why encourage more of them? As adults, aren’t we supposed to set aside childish things and get down to work on the problems of the real world?
Truth be told, I have always loved games. Stratego was a mainstay among my school buddies. We spent hour upon hour lining up red and blue soldiers to protect our flags. My family’s Monopoly games were epic battles, beginning with the fight over game pieces. (No, I get the Scottish Terrier!) The side deals we struck and the arguments that ensued still liven up family gatherings. In college I became a professional Risk player. Tell me you didn’t learn about the challenges of fighting a multi-front war from playing Risk. Who among us hasn’t attempted to conquer the world by way of Kamchatka?
Games ruled – till it was time to make my way in the real world where they didn’t. By the time online games exploded onto the scene, I was so immersed in reality that I managed to ignore them. I’ve never created a level-80 character in World of Warcraft, won the staff of life in Spore, mastered an artichoke crop in Farmville, or knocked over any pigs with Angry Birds. But others have – hundreds of millions of them around the world. Already, 5.93 million years of total time has been spent playing World of Warcraft alone.
One response to this is to despair of all that wasted time. Imagine if only a fraction of it had been focused on improving our education, health care, energy, and economic systems. Another response, though, is to say: if you can’t beat them, why not join them?
Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken makes a strong case for leveraging game design and mechanics to work on the big social challenges of our time. McGonigal suggests that the four defining traits of any game – a goal, clear rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation – can be applied to any challenge. She even says game-playing makes us better people. The book is a passionate articulation of why we should pay attention to what is going on in the world of games.
 Reading McGonigal’s arguments from my perspective in the world of work and social system change, it seems it’s the voluntary part we should focus on hardest. Organizations have a lot of experience with goal setting, rules, and incentives. What we haven’t figured out is how to align work with personal passion and commitment. The big aha from Reality is Broken is that we enjoy games and spend so much time playing them because it is our choice. We volunteer to enter their fray. Meanwhile, the problem with work is that so much of it feels involuntary. Certainly no one forced us to take a particular job, but whatever sense of excitement or mission we felt as a new recruit has been lost in the daily grind. We signed on to make a difference by capturing Kamchatka and now find ourselves peeling potatoes.
Applying game design in the workplace can bring back the thrill of putting points on the board, beating the odds, and accomplishing important goals. Leveraging game mechanics can unleash passion, potential, and personal commitment. Games can help transform the weak links of social media connections and conversations into purposeful networks.
But even as we increasingly recognize the potential of games to help us change the world, let’s not get carried away. Shakespeare pointed out the problem inherent in gamifying all our endeavors. “If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.” So yes, let’s introduce an element of play to make the office more engaging – but let’s not turn Monopoly into monotony.
This post originally appeared here on the Harvard Business Review site.
By Jeff Smith, on Fri Jul 19, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET  Q. I work as a body man for an elected official who recently told me that I am in his “circle of trust,” which was, he said, why he decided to place me in such a sensitive job. A few days later he directed me to call the scheduler to cancel a midday appearance, and instead had me drive him to an apartment building. He disappeared for an hour and then came back. The next week he did it again. Yesterday he asked me to do it for a third time despite the fact that he would be missing a big event we’d discussed in staff meetings. Before calling HQ, I said, “Yes, sir, but isn’t this a pretty important event?” He replied, “Last time I checked, you were my driver, not my campaign manager.” So far we’ve been able to reschedule some things, but the point is, I am feeling pretty uncomfortable, especially since he is married. What is your advice?
—No name, no location, please
This is a tough predicament, and I’m sorry you’re dealing with it. You have three choices, as I see it.
- Explain to the campaign manager what is happening, without any editorializing or speculation. It may be that he/she is already aware of the issue, but you could probably shed some more light.
- Tell the principal you are concerned about his behavior. Don’t accuse him of infidelity, but say that people on staff are starting to ask questions about the frequent cancellations and suggest that they should stop.
- Quit.
According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Game Change, John Edwards’ body guy tried Option #2, but when that didn’t change Edwards’ behavior, went to Option #1, which resulted in something like Option #3: He was summarily fired by an angry Edwards, who accused him of tattling.
Really, the point here isn’t that he’s cheating on his wife (although that’s troubling and could hurt the campaign); the point is that he’s cheating on the campaign. What he does in his personal life is no one’s business, but wasting a staffer’s time and using campaign time to get off when he should be getting votes or money? That’s unforgivable.
My overall thought: This won’t end well. With his “last time I checked” comment, the principal indicated his probable reaction if confronted, so that approach is unlikely to work. Going to the campaign manager might change the principal’s behavior but may cost you your job—at least your job as body guy—and your chances for upward mobility in this organization. So unless you are absolutely convinced that the principal is going to change the world as a public servant and that outweighs your discomfort, I’d suggest you start looking for other gigs. If you do decide to address the issue directly with the principal before making a final decision to quit, remember that doing so could make it impossible to use him (or other staff ) as a reference.
Q. I worked for a congressman who had a rule not to eat at events so he could talk and shake hands. Not wanting to be rude, he made me grab a plate in his place. So at every event I had a plate of food that I enthusiastically praised and enjoyed. After four events per day not only was I full but I was getting incredibly fat. How did you balance your campaign and your eating habits?
—C.W., Silver Spring, Md.
I may not be the best person to ask here: When my congressional campaign ended, I weighed 107 lbs. (at 5’6’’). But yes, you gotta eat something at events, especially in ethnic communities. The symbolism is powerful. However, that doesn’t mean you have to eat an entire plate. Remember when you were 5 and you tried to spread veggies across your plate to make it look as if you ate more than you actually did? If you are adroit on the front end, you can look as if you are helping yourself to a healthy portion. And no one ever said you couldn’t discreetly deposit your plate on a table before leaving. Just don’t throw it out—someone might see that. Also, work out. Given the stress and terrible food of campaigns, campaign aides should work out daily both for your physical and mental health, even if it’s just push-ups or pull-ups at lunch.
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Jeff Smith: Do As I Say — A Political Advice Column
By Mark Nickolas, on Wed Jul 17, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET It’s been more than two years since I wrote my first piece for the RP. It was April 2011 and I had just entered the graduate Media Studies & Film program at The New School in New York City and was eager, bright-eyed, and knew little about how to make a film, yet alone feature-length documentary films. No doubt, while you can certainly become a successful filmmaker without spending $100,000+ for the formal training you can receive in graduate school, for some of us that is a worthy investment.
In May, I graduated with a newly-minted master’s degree and my filmmaking training wheels have been taken off. Now it’s time to see whether my talent can match my enormous ambitions. I’ve already completed one short film that has been receiving an unexpected amount of national attention in the past week and am already in pre-production on my first feature-length documentary that I landed last year.
So, I’m going to use this website as a personal journal of sorts as I head down this path. I’ll offer a behind-the-scenes style peek at what it means to be an emerging filmmaker in New York City and the things we must juggle, mine fields we must avoid, and obstacles we must clear in this hyper-competitive field where an early disaster can quickly dash your filmmaking hopes for good.
 I’ll admit it. This journey is very exciting but so enormously terrifying. A perfect mix, actually. I feel like I’m standing at Base Camp and looking up at Mt. Everest. But my 15+ years in politics prepared me in many ways to handle this moment. I’m certainly nowhere as intimidated by the grandeur of the stage or the media spotlight as my fellow (and much younger) classmates. I also seem to be able to get most people to answer the phone or return an email, if only because of my background and professional success in other somewhat related fields.
Those are important benefits, no doubt about it. But getting people to open the door is just the first of many steps. Whether I have actual talent to direct a film, am able to find enough donors to help fund the $400,000 budget — and can catch a few breaks — are the real questions.
The great news is that it seems I’ve caught a few breaks already. As has been highlighted at the RP last week, my quirky short film — My Life in the Canyon of Heroes — has shined a good amount of unexpectedly national attention on me over the past few days. After the film made the finals of Smithsonian magazine’s short film contest, it was highlighted in a story in the Atlantic. That led to emails from NPR’s Marketplace and CNBC’s Power Lunch who wanted to interview me for segments. Marketplace was taped and ran on Friday. I just confirmed with CNBC earlier today that we are taping my segment next to ‘Charging Bull’ on Thursday morning and it will run on Friday (1-2 pm ET). There may be more interviews in the coming weeks.
My Life in the Canyon of Heroes from Mark Nickolas on Vimeo.
Funny how life works. That little film was never meant to see the outside of a classroom. It began as a final project in my ‘Cinematic Place’ class last spring. I only submitted it to the Smithsonian at the suggestion of Deanna Kamiel, my professor, and had completely forgotten about it until just before it made the finals when they contacted me for some clearance and rights information. And once it made the finals, the media storm happened on its own. I didn’t reach out to anyone and was as surprised as everyone else when the national media was interested in a 6-minute film about a talking 7,000-pound bronze bull.
Yesterday, I learned that I didn’t win any of the final Smithsonian awards. But how could I be upset? Thousands of people have seen and voted and commented on my first completed short film and I have national press clips heading into fundraising for my first feature project that are priceless. The journey ahead remains terrifying, but I just got a taste of the possible. Maybe I’m now at Camp 1 instead of Base Camp. But — come on — that’s the easy part of climbing Mt. Everest. I get that.
So, I head into my first film with a nice surge of confidence to keep the fear in check. It feels good. There are going to be so many ups and downs in the coming year. Student loans payments are already on the horizon and few get rich making documentary films. But I’m a dreamer and not afraid to go for it. Maybe I’ll be one of the few that make a name for themselves in this field. Maybe I won’t. But I’ll know that I gave it my best shot.
Next week, I’ll preview my feature-length film, tentatively titled A Cloud of Suspicion. I look forward to sharing my journey with you, even when it sucks and I’m battered and bruised from the constant rejection. That’s, apparently, what I signed up for.
By Mark Nickolas, on Mon Jul 15, 2013 at 12:30 PM ET Friend of RP Mark Nickolas has hit the big time. His short film on Occupy Wall Street, and the famous bull that sits near the stock exchange, was the feature of a Kai Ryssdal story on NPR’s “Marketplace.”
Click below to listen in:
From NPR’s Marketplace:
Forget Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon or Warren Buffett. For the past 23 years, there’s been only one non-stop observer to Wall Street’s goings-ons.
The Charging Bull of Wall Street, the iconic 7,000-pound bronze sculpture, sits just a couple of blocks from the New York Stock Exchange. And is pictured in media reports, movies and just about any other popular representation of U.S. financial markets.
The story of the bull is told in new short film by Mark Nickolas, called “My Life in the Canyon of Heroes.”
“He’s still just a temporary installation. There’s a city ordinance that says you can’t have a private work of art that’s on public property for more than a year,” says Mark Nickolas. “And I think they’ve just turned a blind eye to that rule.”
My Life in the Canyon of Heroes from Mark Nickolas on Vimeo.
Nickolas says his movie is told from the point of view of the bull and so, perhaps, can personify Wall Street and New York in a very physical way:
“The fact that the Occupy protests actually began Vancouver, Canada, from his point of view as a New Yorker, there is this sense of ‘how can you target me? I began as a work of art, and who’s Canada to be lecturing us about protesting government.”
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Jul 15, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET  The key to unlocking the next wave of economic growth may be as simple as enabling more people to try more stuff. The industrial era was all about scale and squeezing out the possibility of mistakes. As a result we are too afraid to fail. Companies only take on projects with highly predictable results. Employees fall in line for fear of making career-limiting moves. How will we get better if the fear of failure prevents us from trying anything new? How will we make progress on the big system challenges of our time, if every time someone tries something transformational and fails, we vilify them? What if we reframed failure as intentional iteration?
Take the example of Better Place, the startup that set out to create a world full of electric cars with a novel battery swapping business model. In my book, The Business Model Innovation Factory, I highlight Better Place and its founder Shai Agassi as one of the best examples of business model innovation and the importance of a real world test bed.
In 2005 Agassi attended the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. He was inspired by a framing question asked by WEF’s founder Klaus Schwab at the beginning of the conference, “How do you make the world a better place by 2020?” Agassi took Schwab’s question seriously and decided he would make the world a better place by reducing the world’s dependence on oil by creating market based infrastructure to support a transition to all electric cars. Agassi knew that the only way to accomplish his goal was through business model innovation and industry system change. OK, it didn’t work. After 6 years, raising $850 million in private capital and launching commercial operations in Israel and Denmark, Better Place filed for bankruptcy.
Read the rest of…
Saul Kaplan: Reframe Failure As Intentional Iteration
By RP Staff, on Sat Jul 13, 2013 at 9:09 AM ET 
In his second of his series of World Series of Poker articles for Newsweek/The Daily Beast (here’s Piece #1), The RP interviews leading card sharks (including New York Times pollster/pundit Nate Silver) to draw some lessons for hyper-partisan Washington from the green felt.
Here’s an excerpt from the fun piece:
The marriage of political advocacy and poker wouldn’t surprise close observers of both; indeed, the two zero-sum games are really two sides of the same chip. As esteemed political prognosticator and poker savant Nate Silver told me, “politics and poker share the feature of being both very prosaic and very poetic”: Building your chip stack by grinding with careful mathematical calculations is akin to developing a sound get-out-the-vote effort through micro-targeted polling and door-to-door canvassing; riding an electric run of great cards and lucky flops is as thrilling as being uplifted by a gifted political orator. Of course, Silver—who poetically surged to near the top of the of the leaderboard on Day 1 of the Little One event, only to meet a prosaic bustout on Day 2—concedes that poker is the “more refreshing” of the two contests: “It’s pure, undistilled competition, with no intrigue, no B.S.”
There’s also no disputing that the two games require similar skill sets. A career in politics could in fact prepare someone quite well for a life at the poker table. Consider:
• Serving up fiery, red-meat orations at partisan rallies or stump-speaking amid hostile, heckling crowds at open events can help a poker player perfect the art of projecting confidence… or alternatively, vulnerability… and shape a poker face to confuse opponents as to the strength of any particular hand.
• Retail campaigning—the hand-shaking, back-slapping, and baby-kissing—enabling someone to observe, listen to, and really understand people, can be employed powerfully in a game in which you have to read the strength of your opponents’ hands by their facial expressions and body language.
• Late-night, smoke-filled, back-room, legislative negotiations—tests of endurance and concentration—provide invaluable practice for sitting long hours at tables with adversaries who’d say or do anything to provoke you or otherwise knock you off your calculated strategy.
• Waiting out filibuster blockades, partisan stall tactics, and special-interest foot-dragging—to win even the smallest of policy victories—can equip anyone with the resolve to withstand days of numbing boredom at the poker table, and to resist all temptations to take risky gambits that could send the player to the rail.
Click here to read the full piece at Newsweek/The Daily Beast.
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President Obama just gave another economic speech, this time in Phoenix, aimed at helping middle class families attain the American dream of home ownership. In truth, however, owning a home is only one part of the American dream. The real core of the American Dream was illustrated well recently by Robert Putnam, a social scientist whose work on community and inequality has influenced the president. In a recent op-ed for The New York Times Putnam talks about the way his hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio, has crumbled. He warns that the American dream is in danger of crumbling right along with it as manufacturing jobs leave and Port Clinton residents become locked in a cycle of poverty, hopelessness and despair.
