What will next year’s Labor Day look like?

Today is a strange Labor Day. The holiday was created as a way to get back to work. Yet the U.S. economy currently has a high unemployment rate, not counting those that have stopped looking for work and those that are independent and/or permanent contractors, whose work (or lack of) does not get counted in these statistics.

This unemployment is happening at a moment of incredible challenge (and, yes, opportunity). The challenges facing our nation (and our globe) include the need for sustainable energy production and use (to avoid wars and to save the environment), the need for sensible health care, the need for healthy food and the need for better education (I’m sure you can think of many more). Each one of these challenges represents opportunities that could fuel our economy for decades.

Yet here we sit. Paralyzed by assumptions and models that are failing us. Read more

Knowledge is the New Oil - And Intellectual Capital is Your New Factory

If I ask you whether we live in the industrial or the knowledge era, you wouldn’t hesitate. You know that our economy has transitioned.

That doesn’t mean that industry and manufacturing have gone away, just that they are not the dominant source of value creation. Agriculture didn’t go away when the industrial era began. Industry won’t go away with the rise of the knowledge era.

But I find that most managers don’t have explicit models for the role of knowledge in their business. They know it’s there. They know what to do with it. But they are dealing with it all on a gut level. But you don’t want to rely exclusively on your gut to manage your business. Read more

Redeploying Agricultural Intellectual Capital

The challenges facing the food industry provide an important chapter in the story about the end of the industrial era.

In past posts, I have talked about how the large industrial model has lead to dangerous monocultures in bananas and unsustainable concentration of salad green production in the Salinas Valley. There is a growing realization that we need to think about sustainability in agriculture. This is a significant challenge–but also an enormous opportunity. Read more

21st Century Skills

There was an editorial in the Boston Globe yesterday about “The Value of Teaching 21st Century Skills” that has set off a firestorm of comments, mostly negative. The writer, Maura Banta, sets out the view:

That is why the debate over the value of teaching students so-called “21st century skills” is baffling. These skills include problem-solving, financial and business literacy, global awareness, and innovation. A vocal minority disregard them as “soft skills,” others recognize them for what they truly are: the number one job requirements for anyone interested in success after high school. Read more