P4 – Here’s the deal our parents signed up for:
Our world is filled with factories. Factories that make widgets and insurance and Web sites, factories that make movies and take care of sick people and answer the telephone. These factories need workers.
If you learn how to be one of these workers, if you pay attention in school, follow instructions, show up on time, and try hard, we will take care of you. You won’t have to be brilliant or creative or take big risks.
We will pay you a lot of money, give you health insurance, and offer you job security. We will cherish you, or at the very least, take care of you. It’s a pretty seductive bargain. So seductive that for a century, we embraced it. We set up our schools and our systems and our government to support the bargain. It worked. The Fortune 500 took care of us. The teachers’ union took care of us. The post office and the local retailer took care of us. We followed the instructions, we washed the bottles, we showed up on the time, and in return, we got what we needed. It was the American Dream. For a long time, it worked. But in the face of competition and technology, the bargain has fallen apart.
P8 – I grew up in a world where people did what they were told, followed instructions, found a job, make a living, and that was that. Now we live in a world where all the joy and profit have been squeezed out of following the rules. Outsourcing and automation and the new marketing punish anyone who is merely good, merely obedient, and merely reliable. It doesn’t matter if you’re a wedding photographer or an insurance broker; there’s no longer a clear path to satisfaction in working for the man.”… “…the type of low-risk, high-stability jobs that three-quarters of us crave have turned into dead-end traps of dissatisfaction and unfair risk.” The essence of the problem: The working middle class is suffering. Wages are stagnant; job security is, for many people, a fading memory; and stress is skyrocketing. Nowhere to run, and apparently, nowhere to hide.”
P12/13 –The difference between what an employee is paid and how much value she produces leads to profit. If the worker captures all the value in her salary, there’s no profit. As a result, capitalist profit-maximizing investors have long looked for a way to turn low-wage earners into high-value producers. Give someone who makes five dollars a day an efficient machine, a well-run assembly line, and a detailed manual, and you ought to be able to make five or twenty or a thousand times what you paid in labor.” So, the goal is to hire as many obedient, competent workers, as cheaply as you possibly can. If you can use your productivity advantage to earn five dollars in profit for every dollar you pay in wages, you win. Do it with a million employees and you hit a home run. The problem? Someone else is getting better than you at hiring cheap and competent workers. They can ship the work overseas, or buy more machines, or cut corners faster than you come.
P18 – Most white-collar workers wear white collars, but they’re still working in the factory.” … “It factory work because it’s planned, controlled, and measured. It’s factory work because you can optimize for productivity. The workers know what they’re going to do all day-and it’s still morning.”
P29 – A great school experience won’t keep you from being remarkable, but it’s usually not sufficient to guarantee that you will become so. There’s something else at work here. Great schools might work; lousy schools definitely stack the deck against you. Why is society working so hard to kill our natural-born artist? When we try to drill and practice someone into subservient obedience, we’re stamping out the artist that lives within.
P45 – School does a great job of teaching students to do what we set out to teach them. It works. The problem is that what we’re teaching is the wrong stuff. Here’s what we’re teaching kids to do (with various levels of success): fit in, follow instructions, use #2 pencils, take good notes, show up every day, cram for tests and don’t miss deadlines, have good handwriting, punctuate, buy the things other kids are selling, don’t ask questions, don’t challenge authority, do the minimum amount required so you’ll have the time to work on another subject, get into college, have a good resume, don’t fail, don’t say anything that might embarrass you, be passably good at sports, or perhaps extremely good at being a quarterback, participate in a larger number of extracurricular activities, be a generalist, try not to have the other kids talk about you, once you learn a topic, move on”… “Which of these attributes are the keys to being indispensable? Are we building the sort of people our society needs?”…
Here’s what Woodrow Wilson said about public education:
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of person, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
P47 – Being good at school is a fine skill if you intend to do school forever. For the rest of us, being good at school is a little like being good at Frisbee. It’s nice, but it’s not relevant unless your career involves homework assignments, looking through textbooks for answers that are already known to your supervisors, complying with instructions and then, in high-pressure settings, regurgitating those faces with limited processing on your part.
What They Should Teach in School – Only two things:
1. Solve interesting problems
2. Lead
P21 – “The industrial age, the one that established our schooling, our workday, our economy, and our expectations, is dying. It’s dying faster than most of us expected, and it’s causing plenty of pain, indecision, and fear as it goes.” We’re surrounded by the cruft of the industrial age, by the expectations, believes, and standards of an era that’s now over.”
P32/33 – “College started as universitas magistorum et scholarium- a community of masters and scholars. It was a refuge; it was a place you went to get lost in ideas, to discover and wander, and to plot a course as an academic. Today it’s a place you go to exchange a lifetime of debt for credit hours, a degree, and maybe a good job. So many people attend (as a percentage of the population, college attendance is ten times what it was a few generations ago) that the universities have no choice but to standardize degree requirements, test, and measure as they compete to make their colleges even more famous via faux rankings and football games.”
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its who life believe that it is stupid.” Albert Einstein
Standardization in the industrial age was not a choice. It was impossible to industrialize without it. Originality and art in the connected age are not a choice, either. It’s impossible to do the work before us without them. It’s impossible to connect without art.”
P59 – “The economy we live in today is very different from the one our parents grew up in. We have a surplus of choice, a surplus of quality, a surplus of entertainments to choose from. We have big-box stores and big-box storage unites and big-box debt. But we’re still lonely. And we’re still bored. The connection economy works because it focuses on the lonely and the bored. It works because it embraces the individual, not the mob; the weird, not the normal. The connection economy revolves around the linchpin, the artist we can’t live without, the individual who chooses to do work that matters, because without her, why connect?”
P62 – The notion that an organization can teach anything at all is a relatively new one. Traditionally, society assumed that artists, singers, artisans, writers, scientists, and alchemists would find their calling, then find a mentor, and then learn their craft. It was absurd to think that you’d take people off the street, teach them to do science or to sing, and persist at that teaching long enough for them to get excited about it.”… “…it’s vital that we acknowledge that we can unteach bravery and creativity and initiative. And that we have been doing just that.”… “In order to efficiently jam as much testable data into each generation of kids, we push to make those children compliant, competitive zombies.”
P113 – THE TALENT LIE – It’s not a lie because there’s no talent out there; it’s a lie because many organizations only pretend that they’re looking for talent. We want talent, they say, as long as that talent is true, productive, and predictable. We want talent if talent means more work product per dollar, more effort per day, more of what we think we’re paying for. Sure, that kind of talent, send it over.” Trued talent, of course, can’t change everything; it can’t create a movement or break a paradigm. Trued talent isn’t talent at all, because it doesn’t wobble. We can’t hope for a colleague or boss or employee who is one in a million and then demand that this person have not grit, do nothing to slow down the assembly line. It’s one or the other: if the organization desires efficiency, it must embrace the status quo and avoid grit at all costs. On the other hand, the organizational that wants growth and seeks to create value has no choice but who hire linchpins, the ones we can’t live without, the ones who stand for something. People with grit.
The typical factory-centric organization places a premium on not-wrong, and spends no time at all weeding out those who don’t start. In the networked economy, the innovation-focused organization has no choice but to obsess about those who don’t start. Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don’t start, you never get a chance.Read more at location 674
What happened to Excellence? Tom Peters changed everything when he decided to devote his life to spreading the word about the ideas in In Search of Excellence. Over twenty-five years, he’s traveled millions of miles and given thousands of talks. I can see the frustration in his eyes when he’s on stage. While millions of people have embraced the thinking behind his work, too many others are still waiting for him to tell them exactly what to do. They don’t understand that Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing. This is a revolutionary overthrow of time and motion studies, of foremen, of bureaucracies and bosses. It’s not a new flavor of the old soup. It’s a personal, urgent, this-is-my-call/this-is-my-calling way to do your job. Please stop waiting for a map. We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them.Read more at location 417