Jobs: The trend line is not positive

Image via Wikipedia

Robert Patterson has an interesting post on his blog about job creation and the magnitude of the problem we're facing: Krugman - Bernanke’s Unfinished Mission - And More.
He makes an important point that I think is lurking in the back of people's minds, but almost always goes unsaid. We're not going back. This is not temporary. This is a trend playing itself out in some very painful ways for far too many people:

I don’t think many people grasp just how much job creation we need to climb out of the hole we’re in. You can’t just look at the eight million jobs that America has lost since the recession began, because the nation needs to keep adding jobs — more than 100,000 a month — to keep up with a growing population. And that means that we need really big job gains, month after month, if we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment.

It's a great post in that he talks about previous times in history where we've seen massive changes in the nature of work. He has a nice piece on the enclosure movement, but I disagreed with his cause-and-effect. His conclusion, however, I think is spot on:

There are NO JOBS TO GO BACK TO. Just as there was no village and rural work in 1840.

I commented over on Robert's blog, but decided I would copy those comments here. I'm writing (elsewhere) on this right now, and would love some discussion from my blog readers:

Very interesting post.

I take some exception to your conclusions around the cause and effect of the enclosure movement. I don't think it was advances in agricultural practices that drove people off of the land and into the cities. I think what happened was mostly economic, and that it might have been the need for labor to fuel the industrial revolution that led to the social engineering that manifested itself in enclosure.

There were two factors at play: the need for labor; and the requirement for agriculture to be more productive in order to feed the now dependent workers. Most of the advances in scientific agriculture began to happen in the later part of the 1800s. The industrial revolution was in full swing at that time. It wasn't so much scientific advances in agricultural production that happened at that time as it was changes in production practices. Many of the changes in agriculture production systems were not sustainable (e.g. soil depletion and pest issues with monoculture) and the science to inform the problems was lagging.

Which brings me back to work... The changes brought in the industrial revolution were not worker (or even people) friendly. (16 hour work days, child labor, slavery...) Not only do we need a return to more sustainable farming practices, we need a return to more sustainable and natural systems of working (pre-enclosure).

We're obviously starting into the big morph. Where the jobs of old are not being created, and we're never going to "grow" ourselves out of the current mess, we can hope that what emerges from the ashes might be more people and planet friendly. Unfortunately for many they may never make it through the transition. Others will adapt and do fine. One person's disaster becomes another's opportunity.

Surviving the Internet

Image by xeni via Flickr

I've had a ton of conversation of late that start with the person telling me how their email and other electronic communications (it's always a Crackberry) are destroying their life. They tell me how many emails they are handling a day, how many hours they are tethered, working, and on and on and on. It almost always concludes with some rant about how these electronic mediated relationships are so unsatisfying, and how they hate their work. These people aren't doing well. The internet is killing them, and for most of them, it's only going to get worse.

There are plenty of advice columns out there to attempt to help you get a handle on it all. This article is what got me started on this post: Compass: Can We Survive the Internet?

We’re not worried about whether the Internet will survive. No, the question is whether we, as human beings and workers, can survive what the Internet is doing to us.

It lead me to this nice Future of Work article with some survival tips: Seven Ways to Manage Yourself

• Don't procrastinate
• Reduce interruptions.
• Get your papers organized
• Screen non-essential information
• Establish good email and electronic document storage habits
• Use your calendar proactively
• Develop an effective Task/To Do follow-up system

Hmmmm, did you laugh? Isn't this pretty close to the list of efficiency and time management things recommended some 30 years ago? They missed a few: handle mail once, make sure your desk is cleared at the end of the day, screen your calls, don't feed the monkey...

Here's the deal. You're not going to manage your way out of the deluge. The old ways of approaching work won't help you one darned bit today. The amount of information you're needing to grok on a daily basis is increasing exponentially. Go ahead, work your butt off to increase your efficiency 10-15%-- what in the world is that going to buy you? Exactly, not a darned thing but the ability to handle 10-15% more emails a day. Eventually, no matter what it is going to bury you. Think information super-highway road kill.

Not everyone is struggling. In every major morph there are winners and losers. Some people are thriving in this new information rich environment. They don't hate the internet. As a matter of fact, they love it. They rejoice in the opportunities it has created. They bask in the flow. They approach their online experiences with an anticipation, enthusiasm, and appreciation that they never imagined possible. What is it that these people have figured-out that is being missed by so many? Is it even possible to bring the others along? (Just be the ball, be the ball, be the ball. You're not being the ball Danny. )

If it takes 10,000 hours to reach mastery, (PDF Warning: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance) how are people going to get there when most of their existence is spent fighting, rather than embracing the flow?

Andrea's social media headaches

When we last left this story, Andrea's department chair had been contacted by the University's Office of Legal Affairs about her activities on third-party social media sites. Her chair wanted to see her first thing in the morning:

Jim Goodfellow is Andrea's department chair. He's had a rough night of no sleep in anticipation of his conversation with Andrea. He is dreading it. He's been at the University for some 25 years, and these younger faculty are very different than his colleagues were back in the day. He knows he serves at the discretion of the faculty, and most days he walks an interesting tightrope. He's gotten to his position in life by seeking consensus, not making waves, and following the rules. It seems these days that 90% of his time is spent on personnel matters.

Today his focus is on Andrea. She's an incredibly gifted scientist and educator. She is totally committed to her job. She's emblematic of the rising-stars that define the new face of higher education. She also generates a ton of grant money. He's guessing that she won't much care whether she's gotten sideways with the University's administration or not. He's scheduled to meet with her first thing...

"Andrea, we have a bit of a problem with some of your use of technology," says Jim. "Apparently the University isn't too happy with your use of Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook. The Office of Legal Affairs says that you've entered into contracts on behalf of the University by accepting third-party terms of use, and that this is strictly forbidden. They've written asking you to stop using them in the conduct of your University job functions. They shared the policy with me that says that you are completely on your own here, and doing it without the University's permission."

"Okay Jim. I'll get right on that," smiles Andrea. "Does that mean they'll be upping my email quota? Cause you know, the only reason I went to Gmail in the first place was that I was continuously running out of storage. Hey, don't you forward your University email to Google? Doesn't just about everyone?"

"This isn't about me or anyone else. It's about you Andrea," Jim continues. "Apparently they also have concerns with your blogging and use of Twitter." They say that using your personal accounts in the conduct of University business violates the new social media policy." He hands her a printout to read:

The University has established an application process for groups to be recognized by the University as official social media accounts.

The policy only applies to social media accounts created to represent groups, departments, programs, entities, etc. and does not apply to private individual accounts.

Please note that while the University utilizes these services they are not involved with the management or ownership and do not endorse them. Each service maintains its own privacy policy, terms of service and other policies. The University cannot be responsible for your use of these sites.

Jim continues, "And the CIO is asking some questions about domain names? Some crap about University URLs being required for all our sites. He says that any exceptions require his sign-off."

Andrea is taken aback. "Right, like he would ever approve my blog. He'd insist that I use the University's blogging platform. That system works nearly as well as the campus email," she chuckles. "You know, in our business it's sometimes easier to ask forgiveness than permission. I just took the path of least resistance. Let's just ignore the attorneys and maybe they'll go away."

"I'd like to Andrea," says Jim, "But there's this bit about some state and federal laws being broken."

to be continued...

Andrea's social media transgressions: Cloud computing

When we last left Andrea, our ideal university social media educator, she was attracting attention from her university's Office of Legal Affairs. She'd violated a whole host of policies in her efforts to do her job in a more effective way. Her main transgression is her student centric approach to learning. She believes that learning is a social process, and as a person charged with facilitating that learning she goes to the learners rather than expecting them to come to her.

To go to the students requires that she use cloud services. She uses Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, GMail, GChat, Wave, YouTube, Slideshare, Facebook, foursquare (I'm in the Student Union grabbing some coffee if you'd like to stop by and chat)... This is all most excellent. She is accessible. This is what makes her the ideal social media educator. Except that none of this is allowed by her university.

What policy has she violated? She is not allowed to use any of these third-party cloud services in the execution of her job:

...a potential user of a cloud service provider must check with the office of the CIO to see if a contract with that service already exists, as executing a click‐thru effectively implies a contract, in violation of University policy.

Of course, Andrea had no idea that she'd violated a university policy, and this is just the start of things. She's violated several more as well.

(to be continued...)

The Stonemasons' Society meets the Organization Man: Social media version

Image via Wikipedia

We're headed to a clash of cultures of epic proportion. There are two distinct camps. It's the workers versus management all over again.

One doesn't have to read much of the history of the industrial revolution to know that labor was abused by management, and that labor organized and fought back in a massive way. The rights they fought for weren't secured for many until well into the the 20th Century, and the mantra that drove the labor movement is alive and well today. This saying, ascribed to Alfred the Great  sums it up, “Eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours of play, make a just and happy day. ” This thinking continues today. Work is work and play is play, and never the twain shall meet.

On the other side of the coin we have the Organization Man, a term coined by American sociologist William Whyte in his 1956 book of the same name:

An employee, especially of a large corporation, who has adapted so completely to what is expected in attitudes, ideas, behavior, etc. by the corporation as to have lost a sense of personal identity or independence.

In other words, as the thinking goes, you have no personal life. You work for, and represent your organization 24x7. The concept of the organizational man had died-off of late, but it seems to be making a comeback with the attempt to regulate employees' use of social media. There are a ton of thou shalt nots being written to constrain these emerging technologies.

Therein lies the impending clash. Your desire for a personal life, your eight hours of play, versus your organization's quest to manage and control your every social meda exchange. Most organizations are not comfortable with people representing themselves in places like Facebook, Twitter, and the like. When you speak, they want you to speak for the organization. Speaking for yourself is frowned upon, and if you didn't already know, you wear your organizational hat everywhere you go. You are indivisable.

Neither the Stonemasons' thinking of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nor the Organization Man's thinking of the 1950s is right for what is happening today. This old thinking is not going to cross the void, it's not going to carry us into the future.

No one knows what the future holds, It is evolving. There are no best practices, or even good practices to help inform our decisions . The answers aren't to be found somewhere between point X and point Y. There's another dimension yet to emerge.