Month: October 2009

Crowdsourcing a Presentation: The History of Warfare

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I am going to be giving a talk to a group of undergraduates on the history of warfare. I have total carte blanche to talk about it anyway I want. I think I will cover past and present and various future predictions. I have about an hour to talk.

My request to ChicagoBoyz readers: leave a comment below, preferably in the form of an outline, top-line roman numerals and second line capital letters, showing what you think I should talk about.

Remember, I have to get the entire thing into one hour!

I want you to give me your first cut, off the top of your head, without a lot of research. Just type up the main topics you think I should hit.

When I have prepared the outline I am actually going to use, I will post it.

UPDATE: Shlok Vaidya posted a very interesting proposed outline. Check it out.

NY Times on Job Creation

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The Sunday editorial page of the New York Times has an article titled “Wanted – Leadership on Jobs“. This article describes the current unemployment situation as bleak and requests “leadership” from politicians to arrest this trend. The brief editorial is nine paragraphs long; 8 of them describe the problem, and then the 9th (summary) paragraph includes their recommendations:

If successful, ambitious goals like health care reform and energy legislation may generate jobs, but officials have not persuasively linked them to job growth. Congress and the administration also have not done enough to directly create jobs. That could be done with more stimulus to spur job creation, or a large federal jobs program, or tax credits for hiring, or all three. Or surprise us. Just don’t pretend that the deteriorating jobs picture will self-correct, or act as if it is tolerable.

Often times our debate with the NY Times is presented as a left / right political view issue. However, in this case, the differences are even more profound – the NY Times simply has no idea what the problem set is, so they can’t even fathom a solution.

Job Creation

The first and most profound misunderstanding is that jobs are not “created”. They don’t come about from a fiat by government and can’t be “willed” into existence.

Jobs are a by-product of:

– Either a successful (profitable) business or a business in growth mode
– That has a need for services or labor to meet a business requirement
– That they can profitably sell to a third party, or leverage as part of a broader business venture

The issue of whether or not to hire additional employees is an issue that all of the employers that I have worked with or consulted for over the last two decades have wrestled with continuously. If government or the NY Times wants to increase the number of jobs, they need to peer inside the head of a business executive and work to push the levers that would make them more likely than not to hire. Thus the first and most significant problem with the lack of understanding of the NY Times is that they don’t even frame the problem correctly – if they want to create jobs, they need to think like a business person.

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On the emotional nature of work and business

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As a medical student during the early nineties, I used to ‘decompress’ by reading light-hearted fiction; warm, simple stories about normal human problems. No War and Peace for me. Too ambitious. At the time, I liked to read Maeve Binchy. You’ve probably seen her fiction displayed in bookstores. One story in particular, titled “Marble Arch”, about a young female entrepreneur, struck a chord. By a lot of unglamorous hard work, she’s learned to make a living selling hand-stitched handbags. Her family is nonplussed that she left a salaried position selling cosmetics to strike out on her own:

“Her mother had worked regularly and quietly in a restaurant. She said that her one ambition was that Sophie should never have a job which meant walking and standing, and dealing with dirty plates and difficult customers. She was happy when Sophie was selling nice, fresh, good-smelling oils and paints for people’s faces. She was worried when she seemed to become a person of no account sitting in a little stall shouting her wares to the public.”

It’s an attitude I heard growing up – where a nice safe credentialed job was lauded, while business was seen as mercurial and unsafe. Well, starting a small business is risky. The story continues:

“Sophie sighed, thinking how little everyone around her knew about business…….Really she had made very little impression on anyone, with her own businesslike attitudes. Nobody realized that it wasn’t easy to be organized and disciplined and to make money. It took a lot of time, and worry, and ate into all those hours you could be sitting around and enjoying yourself. Nobody ever got drawn into her belief that people might be on this earth to work hard.”

Nobody ever got drawn into her belief that people might be on this earth to work hard.  Sounds like every lecture ever given to me – as a young person – by my parents. I think they were exasperated by my youthful ideas about work and life. I thought, I really thought, that everything should be sweet, easy and pleasant. Ah, that dangerous expectation: that work should always and everywhere be fulfilling, whatever that means.

If Only Soylent Green Was an Option

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I’ve written about Detroit’s financial woes in these pages. High taxes, an anti-business mindset, and a surplus of government meddling has caused the city to lose residents at an alarming rate. Losing taxpayers results in reduced money for government budgets. When faced with such a situation, the only sane response is to make hard decisions and cut back on non-vital programs. If these decisions aren’t made, then eventually even vital government services will be overwhelmed.

The political leaders in Detroit have failed the test of their sanity. Things just keep sliding into the crapper, with no end in sight.

The latest chapter in this tale of woe is a doozy. It would seem that people in and around Detroit don’t have the cash to make arrangements for their deceased loved ones, and the city doesn’t have the cash to cremate the bodies which are now choking the morgue.

I don’t want to be anywhere near the place if they have a power blackout for a few hours!