Category Archives: Learning

Longer Incubation Periods

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On Thursday Morning, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Alan Webber over an early morning coffee, who founded Fast Company over a decade ago.

We were talking about some of the skills young people should have in order to launch successful ventures.

Alan noted that while someone is trying to get a startup going there are often two competing needs: The need to make enough to pay the bills and the need to invest a lot of hours to get an idea off the ground. In order to circumvent these challenge he suggested that people learn how to quickly make money on the side, like doing social media consulting on the side for older people who don’t understand for $50 an hour. In launch Fast Company he and his co founder launched a side business called Fast Company Knowledge Exchange or FCKE to finance their work getting their business going.

While I agree that is a very good skill and may be something Force For the Future needs to develop, it’s not the best solution if we want to maximize for impact. Let me draw an analogy from nature. Humans have the biggest brains of any creature that has walked the earth. We also have one of the longest maturation periods of any animal. The more space in the formative years you give an organism to develop the greater it’s potential. That’s what society should be doing, providing longer intellectual incubation periods for its young people. Universities occupy the space where this is supposed to happen yet most young people are at school just because it feels like what they are supposed to do. And they get out of school take an average job, get used to the money and sacrifice their dreams.

The best time to do a startup is in that period of 18-23. You’ve got the least to lose, are capable of functioning autonomously in the adult world and succeed or fail, it’s an amazing learning experience that will push you into a world of possibility, with plenty of interesting opportunities for your next job/venture whatever it may be.

Here I’ll let Seth Berger, who founded And1 while he was in college, do the rest of the talking for me again (besides you probably didn’t read my other posts anyway), because I’m tired of seeing college students go down the corporate route, flush their dreams down the toilet and never leave because double quilted TP is too nice a luxury to sacrifice.

Q: As a successful entrepreneur, what advice do you have for students who are interested in starting a business?

Berger:  Start a business before you go get a job. Here is the reason. If you go get a job, you are going to succeed…. If you come out and work, what are you going to make? 50K to start? You tell me.

So let’s say you are 21 and you get out of school making $60,000. You do real well and three years later they say, “I am going to send you back to grad school. I am going to pay for you. Then, come back to work. When you come back you are making $175,000.” Five years after that, you are going to be making a half million bucks. You are going to have a husband or a wife, two kids, nice car, summer home, country club. At what point are you going to say, “I am going to go start my own company.”? The answer is never.

What you will do is work until you have made enough money, somewhere in your 50s, to go do something you really want to do, instead of now, when you are broke…. When I got out of graduate school and I drove a Honda Civic Hatchback. I was broke. I didn’t care. It just didn’t matter. But once you get used to the good life, you won’t go back. So if you are thinking about starting a business, start the day you graduate. You don’t need experience. You don’t need money. You don’t need someone else to tell you that you can do it. Just go start it before you get used to making all that money.


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Making Sense of the Big Shift – Corporations Are Failing At Talent Development and Universities Are Doing No Better

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I attended the San Francisco Supernova Mixer Tuesday night, where John Hagel and John Seely Brown from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge presented their research on the Big Shift– “a major new effort to track the real impacts of what we call the Network Age. ” My copious notes on their talk are posted here.

Corporate America Doesn’t Know How To Succeed In The 21st Century – And Now It’s Hitting Their Pocketbooks

The basic message was that Corporate America is broken because it is not adapted to utilizing the powerful technologies of the digital age. Pinpointing with precise metrics exactly what corporations are doing wrong and providing prescriptive solutions proved very difficult. All they could show was a million and 1 correlations that in aggregate mapped the overall downward trend of Corporate America. While untangling the problem was like untangling a geek’s rat’s nest behind his computer, the solution was quite clear: talent development. The future of business is dependent on developing people, in many cases your employees, to be leaders and innovators in their respective fields. To do that they need to be able to participate in knowledge flows and have built-in structures and habits to absorb our increasingly exponential pool of tacit knowledge. Corporations are doing a terrible job of talent development.  Don’t get lost in complex economic theories and financial manipulation, focus on you developing people. We are a culture now, that is dependent on innovation, not over optimizing and over leveraging paradigms past their expiration date.

In the digital those who are successful are lean, nimble, fast learners, who utilize increases in knowledge flow to amplify creativity, collaboration and innovation.

And passion is more important than ever. Because only those with passion are able to keep up with the pace of change.

The way I see it big centralized corporations are dead. Meaning nearly all of the Fortune 500. The startup atmosphere, with small teams of innovative, highly driven people, for now is king. But eventually we’ll find ways to scale our structures back up to take advantage of increased size and more brain cycles, without the bureaucratic inefficiencies of today.  But the new kind of corporation will look radically different than anything we know today. It will a new kind of institution re-imagined from the ground up built upon the fundamentally new set of rules of the digital era.

Universities Are Stuck In Old Paradigms, Too. They Are Failing At Their Core Purpose

Since my focus for the last year has been understanding what it takes to be successful in the context of how we educate ourselves, this prompted me to ask the question, if corporations are doing a terrible job of talent development  how our universities doing? The institution accepted worldwide as the format by which we should develop our young people. And as you might expect the answer I got from everyone I asked at the event, was that universities are just like corporations: well adapted for old paradigms, and woefully inadequate for the rapidly changing digitally dominated world.

Two seats away from me I met a student who is a junior at Stanford. Perfect I thought, “Here’s a guy who is at the university credited with perhaps the most entrepreneurial spirit of any university in the world. This will be a great way to get some feedback and test out some of my hypotheses.” And as you might have expected he confirmed my hypotheses, leaving me both dismayed and excited at the same time. Dismayed because one of the best universities in the world is failing at its core purpose, and excited because the necessity of the organization I’m creating has increased drastically.

The Best Way To Make An Impact and Learn At The Same Time. Why Do Very Few Do It?

I asked the student what the startup culture was like for undergrads at Stanford. He said that Stanford didn’t really want to invest in their undergrads, because the value proposition was much higher for the graduate and Ph.D. students because most undergraduate startups fail to make any money. I think that’s a big load of crap. How can you not invest undergrads? The biggest technology companies in the world today were started predominately by people who dropped out of their undergraduate education in order to pursue a start up. Think Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, in fact I think Google is the exception.  How can you not nurture the entrepreneurial spirit of undergraduates at Stanford? My friend Jeff Seibert who graduated from Stanford last year and is the cofounder of DFJ backed startup Increo Solutions, said they were just one of maybe four or five startups that came out of their graduating class, and he wasn’t even sure if all of those could be taken seriously.

I then told the Stanford student I was talking with that Stanford should invest in its undergrads to undertake startups for the learning opportunities alone. Most of the people who I’ve talked to who have been involved in the founding of startup organizations almost unanimously agree it has been the most exciting and intensive learning experience of their entire life. The student agreed with me, “Oh yes, the learning experience is great, I mean, that’s all there is with the first startup, because you’re probably going to fail anyway, if it’s your first.”

That’s a very dangerous statement to believe. Yes you have to logically acknowledge that the facts say that most startups will fail. If you go into the start up experience expecting it to fail but knowing it will be a great learning experience, it will fail and it won’t be a great learning experience. The concentrated learning only happens as a result of the intense focus that occurs when you have 100% commitment and the resolve to never give up until you make it work. The learning can only happen as a byproduct of your desire to succeed. If you go after the learning experience, you will have neither a great learning experience nor a successful venture. I’ve heard the equation that Understanding= Knowledge + Action. And that makes sense to me. That is why the best way to learn is by doing. Happiness is the same way, the more you go after it directly, the more elusive it is. This is probably because when people go after happiness they go after the pleasures instead of the gratifications. Pleasures make you feel good in the moment but have no lasting effect on your happiness. Gratifications trigger no feeling in the moment but make you lastingly happy. Think Flow. For more on this read Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

You have to emotionally believe you going to succeed but logically know that it’s very difficult. It’s this kind of Orwellian doublespeak, of holding contradictory truths in your mind, that is essential for people who dare to be different, and dare to change the world.

Stanford should fund its students based on the value of learning experience alone. They need to get them on a trajectory to solving the world’s important problems now, because if they get sucked into the corporate world, and get used to the comfortable wage, they will never be able to turn back, and another potentially innovative soul is lost. And boy, does the world need every innovative soul it can get right now.

Seth Berger who founded AND1 while he was in college expresses the sentiment well that the time to start your first business is while you’re young. I linked to the quote in another draft I’m writing right now, so don’t be surprised if you see it again.

Berger:  Start a business before you go get a job. Here is the reason. If you go get a job, you are going to succeed…. If you come out and work, what are you going to make? 50K to start? You tell me.

So let’s say you are 21 and you get out of school making $60,000. You do real well and three years later they say, “I am going to send you back to grad school. I am going to pay for you. Then, come back to work. When you come back you are making $175,000.” Five years after that, you are going to be making a half million bucks. You are going to have a husband or a wife, two kids, nice car, summer home, country club. At what point are you going to say, “I am going to go start my own company.”? The answer is never.

What you will do is work until you have made enough money, somewhere in your 50s, to go do something you really want to do, instead of now, when you are broke…. When I got out of graduate school and I drove a Honda Civic Hatchback. I was broke. I didn’t care. It just didn’t matter. But once you get used to the good life, you won’t go back. So if you are thinking about starting a business, start the day you graduate. You don’t need experience. You don’t need money. You don’t need someone else to tell you that you can do it. Just go start it before you get used to making all that money.

Succeeding Isn’t Complicated. Just Commit.

You have to believe with all your heart, with complete emotional congruence that the startup you are working on is going to make it BIG. In the early 1900′s Andrew Carnegie commissioned Napoleon Hill to interview the world’s 100 most successful people, an impressive undertaking that included the likes of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Charles Schwab. This book is the oft quoted Think and Grow Rich. What Napoleon Hill discovered was that there is a basic process that every successful person went through with little variation. The foundation of any successful venture is a visionary who has a definite purpose and a burning desire to succeed. He also has faith that no matter what happens, no matter what challenges are thrown his way, he will be able to overcome them. He has 100% believe that he will succeed, even when he is teetering on complete collapse. And it is that kind of conviction that ends up being the difference between success and failure.  The 3rd thing all the people he interviewed did, was create definite plans of action and begin carrying them out immediately. Many times their initial plans were wildly off the mark. But that’s to be expected, it’s very rare that you will strike gold on your first attempt. The point of that first attempt is to get the feedback to make your second and third attempts successful. Thomas Edison is famous for finding 10,000 ways a lightbulb wouldn’t work before he found one way it would, and he completely revolutionized the world as a result of his determination. That that same dogged persistence, not coincidentally, is possessed by every other successful person that Napoleon Hill interviewed. What they all had was incredible ability to persevere through failures, regroup and create new updated definite plans of action based on their lessons learned until they found one that worked. Now there are other things that you need along the way in order to accelerate your growth, this includes things like mastermind groups learning how to be decisive, and specialized knowledge, but these complimentary skills will fall into place naturally if you pursue the process of burning desire + faith + organizing a definite plans of action + persistence in the right order.  You will notice interestingly that most success stories are very similar to one another and that’s because there are certain rules of success that work. The challenge isn’t to find new ways to be successful it’s to find new ideas you want to be successful with.

In Made to Stick the Heath Brothers also noted that most successful, or as they call it, sticky ideas also followed a similar pattern. “We will give you suggestions for tailoring your ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose. But isn’t the use of a template or checklist confining? Surely were not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach? Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying. If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.”

People think that they need to have mastered a huge laundry list of skills before they even begin. You don’t. You just need to begin at square one with a burning desire to do something, anything. Seth Godin in his recent TEDTalk on Tribes describes this phenomena as well, “It’s fascinating [that] all tribe leaders have charisma. But you don’t need charisma to become a leader. Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that’s where charisma comes from, from the leading. Finally, they commit. They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe. They commit to the people who are there.”

The Power of Purpose and Knowing What You Want

Purpose is incredibly powerful. When you have purpose the right opportunities seem to flow magnetically to you. This isn’t some bullsh*t metaphysical phenomena like the Secret or the Law of Attraction where the universe just gives you whatever you asked for. Scientifically, it is probably explainable by understanding parts of the brain like the Reticular Activating System, which basically controls what you focus on. And when you can control what you focus on you begin finding possibilities all over the place. When you don’t control what you focus on you end up just satisfying your Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, sex, food, comfort, rinse repeat. Here are two examples to illustrate the power of purpose the first is from Colonel Colditz, the second is about understanding the flight path of an aircraft that knows its destination.

“When people know their desired destination, they’re free to improvise as needed and arriving. Suppose I’m commanding an artillery battalion and I say we’re going to pass this infantry unit through our lines forward. That means something different to different groups. The mechanics know that they’ll need lots of repair support along the roads, because if a tank breaks down the bridge the whole operation will come to a screeching halt. The artillery knows they’ll need to fire smoke or have engineers generate smoke in the breach area where the infantry unit moves forward, so it won’t get shot up as it passes through. As a commander, I could spend a lot of time enumerating every specific task, but as soon as possible know what the intent is they begin generating their own solutions.”

“When an airplane takes off it has a flight plan. However during the course of the flight wind, rain, turbulence, aircraft, human error, and other factors keep knocking the plane off course. In fact the plane is off course about 90% of the time. The key is that the pilots keep making small course corrections by reading their instruments and talking to the control tower. As a result a plane reaches its destination.”This is the power of knowing where you want to end up and making continual adjustments along the way, while staying true to your values.

Let me again return to my observation of Stanford’s ineffectual culture. If Stanford’s culture fails to encourage most of its students to be entrepreneurial, then why does it have a reputation as such an entrepreneurial institution? It gets its reputation from a few very successful startups that are by and large outliers in the community. I’m willing to bet the culture is not very different from your average, stodgy, nose-to-the-sky Ivy League institution, but it does have one key difference: proximity to the innovative and vastly more creative corporate culture of Silicon Valley, which a student with strong initiative and motivation can easily tap into, and use as a launching pad. But the culture does not directly encourage this, and it seems as if it directly discourages this type of behavior, impregnating students with the feeling that they must have lengthy resumes and many degrees before they can do anything of importance. I think an educational institution should be measured more on how many students even try, then on how many succeed. To put it another way, if we want to judge how entrepreneurial a culture is, we should look at how many students are attempting to start entrepreneurial ventures in Boolean fashion — did they try to start one or not, not how successful the most successful startups are.

Leave Your Nest

Another thing that this student said that really surprised me, was that this was the first entrepreneurial event he had attended that was not on campus. That’s astounding. How can you not take advantage of the incredible opportunities to meet amazingly creative people, that come to public gatherings in the Bay Area every day. I don’t blame him, I blame the culture. Some people end up making an impact because they naturally pursue the goals in the right way. But those who don’t focus on the right things on their own, yet still have a desire to make an impact, should be pointed in the right direction by the talent development institutions, today known as universities, that they are a part of.

After the event was over, I waited for my turn to talk to John Seely Brown, and asked him how he thought universities were doing as far as talent development goes. He agreed that they are making the same mistakes as corporations. I asked Kevin Werbach, a renowned professor at Wharton the same question and he gave me the same answer as well . But of course, he doesn’t think universities will die, he thinks the middle of the road certainly are in fact headed towards the gutter, but people still need to be certified, and the top universities will still be able to capture value if the best faculty stick around. But what if the faculty leave because they have higher leverage environments to place their energy? I think this is a likely possibility. But more on that in a future post.

Even though Stanford brings amazing events on campus, it’s incredibly important to go to events like the one we were at off-campus. The best part of the event was the questioning and networking afterward. I can get the information and lecture online, from the web stream on my couch at home. But I can’t get the on-the-fly introductions, the rapid feedback based on the same lecture we all witnessed, the rekindling with familiar faces, and the chance to meet exciting new people I’ve never met before. I made new contacts and got new leads and I exposed myself to more positive randomness than any sheltered event on campus can produce. This is certainly not to say that on-campus events are not valuable, they can be very valuable, but I find it amazing that so many students have never walked out the back door, to participate in the very beneficial activity of attending events in Silicon Valley.

In this post I have used Stanford as an example of the failure of Universities to develop the next generation of young leaders.  In a future post I will go on talk more broadly about why the current educational model isn’t well adapted for the 21st century and why entrepreneurship is the process uniquely suited to remake the world in the 21st century. While you’re waiting, I’ve described many of my thoughts on this here in the 12 minute speech I gave at the World Future Society in mid-July.

Other ideas inspired while writing this post, but didn’t make it into the post:

- Almost everything that is valuable that has been created by humans began first as an idea in someone’s mind.

- I got tons of great feedback tonight, I am now ready to go to more networking events. There’s a natural rhythm to putting your head down and moving projects forward, and going out to a lot of events, meeting people, networking your ass off and getting feedback.

- I wrote the foundations of this blog post on my cell phone while walking to BART.


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The Big Shift: An Evening with John Seely Brown and John Hagel

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From Eventbrite:

We’re delighted to launch our first 2009 Supernova Mixer event at Wharton Ι SF Campus on Tuesday, August 11, 5:30pm – 7:30pm. Please join us for a lively conversation with Deloitte’s John Hagel and John Seely Brown (Center for the Edge) on The Shift Index — a major new effort to track the real impacts of what we call the Network Age.

In their initial report, they address why most companies fail to harness the “Real Time Web”  and connected knowledge flows for competitive advantage ∙ Return on Assets of US firms is falling even as productivity increases, the gap between winners and losers in business keeps growing ∙ and, big companies are losing their leadership positions faster than ever.

Here is my blow by blow with occasional commentary in italics and insights that resonated with me in bold.

We’ve become completely fixated on short term measures of our economy.

What are the indexes that business leaders and policy makers look to?

All of the major indexes are short term focused, like unemployment.

We are in the middle of a long term economic shift, there aren’t many indexes to measure how are we doing on the long term shift.

Everyone said this is an interesting project but you’re crazy to take it on.

The Big shift  just looks at the US economy — We look over decades not just quarter to quarter –

What are the dimensions of the big shift? They have 25 indexes. Impact index is the bottom line. I like that — impact is the entrepreneur’s drug of choice.

Corporate performance is measured primarily by return on assets. We wanted a measure that went beyond income statements. We didn’t want to go to return on equity because you can play games on the capital structure to fudge those numbers.

Return on assets has gone down dramatically over the last 40 years.

Labor productivity has increased at a significant and sustained rate. Why aren’t companies able to capture the value of increased labor productivity?

But this is an average and there are big winners and big losers in an average.

So let’s look at how the top quartile has done and how the lower quartile as done.

The “winners” have just struggled to stay the same.

The bottom quartile has gone down a lot.

The topple rate (number of companies in the top quartile who have fallen into lower performance) has increased.

People are so focused on the short term that they’ve never bothered to look at this over the long time. And the conclusion is that business is broken. Public companies in the US are doing worse and worse over time.

If you can make it into the S&P 500 now you can expect to stay 15 years. 1938 you could expect to stay for 75 years. That’s a big change. Isn’t one answer that it’s just time compression? The pace of change, i.e. everything, has increased therefore everything is on a compressed time scale?

Cause: Emergence and proliferation of digital infrastructure.

Barriers to entry are systematically coming down. Competitive intensity increases.

Market is becoming more efficient.

Companies may not be benefitting but customers are benefitting.

Creative Talent: Richard Florida — or knowledge workers — their cash compensation as gone up greatly over the last few years. Anyone who isn’t in that group their return has been going down significantly.

Customers are pulling margins out of business and creative talents are squeezing more capital out and companies are caught in the middle and losing profits.

Knowledge spreads really rapidly. Anything innovative you do inside company walls flows out pretty quickly. The same knowledge flows provide all of us the ability to learn and improve faster.

Public companies haven’t figure out how to take advantage of these knowledge flows to improve at more acceptable levels.

Right now the story is largely bad news for companies and good news for customers. Basically Corporate America is dying and in is ashes startups in bunches will rise, who with 10 people can do what 500 people did before and do it faster and in leaner, more innovative ways.

This is the tip of the iceberg on the kind of analysis that can be done with the work they started with the Big Shift Index.

Shift index is going to be an annual event so they can keep score and see if things change.

They want to start to do comparisons between industries and internationally across countries.

20th century companies became preoccupied with stocks. The shift to the 21st century is away from the notion of the firm that preserves and protects assets and scalable efficiency, and towards scalable learning and participation in knowledge flows.

Very little of the architecture of our firms are structured right.

Q: Could part of this downward trend be because the definition of assets have changed over time

A: Things have pretty much balanced right –

Q: Could you say this is the end of Branding or the end of American Manufacturing?

A: All the elements you have talked about are elements — manufacturing is being sent overseas and branding have less premium than ever before. Companies are investing more and more in branding and their performance is getting worse

Toyota is obsessed with continual learning. There is no reason we couldn’t take Toyota’s strengths for utilizing knowledge flows in manufacturing and apply it to every other dying industry and reinvigorate it. There’s no reason we couldn’t reinvent manufacturing if everyone did that.

How do you move from knowledge creation to knowledge flow? With knowledge creation going faster and faster that increases the rate of tacit knowledge creation. We don’t know much about how tacit knowledge flows, we only know how explicit knowledge flows.

There’s a human element here. One of the indexes is worker passion, not worker satisfaction. A number of the metrics were original survey work.


They wanted to define a logic structure for the big shift: what are the enablers, amplifiers, barriers etc.

They found passion is a really important factor for how we participate in knowledge flows.

People who are passionate are much more active in knowledge flows.


A key in making this big shift is that we have to make our passions our professions. If we don’t we are going to get more and more stressed. If we are passionate it’s only going to get better.


An interesting twist: People who are passionate are not the employees who are the most satisfied. They are the ones who leave.


By far the self-employed are the most passionate about their work. Passionate people are leaving corporations.

The big wild card in all of this is the public policy shift towards economic liberalization. We could go into a period of increasing protectionism. These trends are at least dampened or reversed overall if that happens.

In 20th century the big advances were in communication and transportation. Scalable manufacturing and marketing was for the first time possible. It led to a different set of institutions that captured the economic value of that century.

Similarly, due to digital infrastructure we’re going to see a new set of institutions capture today’s economic value.

As the world gets flatter and flatter in terms of connectivity. Talent density in cities is increasing. Why is business travel actually increasing?

A lot of it has to do with enhancing face to face interaction because that how tacit knowledge flows.


The world can both get flatter and spikier. How do you find the spikes and connect them? That’s what startups try to do?

Hypothesis: So basically we need more passionate young people working on startups that are tacking big problems?

We are basically going to see big companies decrease in effectiveness and startups increase in effectiveness and that trend will only continue with the flow of passionate people into the startup world. So we should encourage this trend by having more startup companies?

What kind of public policies are necessary to facilitate more creative talents?

In any high growth economic situation you’re going to see a lot of inequality. But it’s fluid in equality because the growth is happening as a result of disruption.

Toyota has taken raw assembly line manufacturing job and made it incredibly creative. Anybody can be a creative worker given the right rules and management settings.

Technology has focused more on automation and standardization and scalable efficiency and not on creating scalable peer learning environments were creativity can be harnessed.

We are not going to go completely towards a free agent nation. Because institutions have the potential to dramatically increasing learning and effectiveness. People are fleeing because these institutions aren’t efficient. But you’re going to start to see a trend back towards institutions once these institutions begin to master new dynamics of knowledge flows.

The big shift index doesn’t measure knowledge flow directly it looks for proxies that get a sense of whether knowledge is flowing or not. are people moving, are people connecting with each other?

They want to take this index down to an individual level so that a company can address how they are doing in the 21st century and where their gaps are?

What does it mean to build a talent driven firm? That may be the purpose of the future of our institutions. That’s an approach that may turn out to be more relevant for institutions in the 21st century. (And everyone is a talent).

Great — that’s what F3′s goal is: talent capitalization – more on that in upcoming post.

Leverage in the U.S. is about financial leverage — we all know what that produced in the U.S.

But corporate leverage was different in China. Companies focus on capability leverage — they say is there anybody out there that has assets that are complementary to ours — they did this because they didn’t have a solid financial sector.

Because china didn’t have any IP protection, they had a different mindset about innovation, where what ever they had today they had to get to the next stage because they weren’t safe. While we certainly don’t support abolishing intellectual property laws, we believe this is a more productive mindset for innovation in today’s world.

Q: What advice to you have Obama

Every public policy question should be reframed as a talent development question. Once you do that things start to fall in place.

If corporations suck at talent development how is the university doing? Are they doing a good job of talent capitalization and if they do try to adapt modern methodology  for utilizing knowledge flows are they going to be able to do that faster than new kinds of institutions with less historical baggage?

(Obviously that’s a leading question)

Talent development is performance improvement over time. US companies have recently been increasing performance by squeezing and not developing talent and that’s not sustainable.

There is exponential learning in World of Warcraft.

Talent isn’t something you can do in a quarter.

When John Hagel talks to talks to executives about talent development they ask what training program should they use? They worry if they train them that they will leave.

But if you are training people faster than anybody else why would they ever leave?`


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Romanticize Doing NOT Learning. Learning Is Just a Byproduct

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I’m actually annoyed learning is romanticized so much. I have an image of my head of a woman  with a fashionable side-bag full of books from university who purrs in a spanish european accent, “I just love learning!” Fine. That’s better not loving learning. But I find many people are content to just continue learning without ever considering actually doing something with what their knowledge. It’s quite selfish, I think.  You clearly have a lot of resources at your disposal and you’re just going study for years justifying your intellectual masturbation because society upholds this pursuit with a kind of aristocratic prestige. There are so many big problems with pouring your heart into. Devoting years to learning is fine, but do it with a purpose of spreading your insights and improving your surroundings.

Anyway, that’s not most people. But there are certainly a lot of people who fit that mold. And when I sense that, my stomach rolls over and pretends to play dead for about 3 minutes.

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My Speech at The World Future Society

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Over the weekend I spoke at the World Future Society on a panel entitled “Youth Can Change the World”. I talked about how every young person can make an impact but that we need to change how we think about education in order to open up that possibility for more people.

The most difficult part of this process was getting this down to about 12 minutes in length. In the brainstorming phase I wrote over 8,500 words and organizing and cutting ideas was a big challenge, but I am pleased with the final result.

I enjoyed writing and giving the speech and hope to do more in the coming months and years. I will be iteratively adding and improving both the content and the slides of the presentation.

Here are my slides and the transcript of the speech. The video recording of the speech is now posted here.

Youth Changing the World: By Making Education More Entrepreneurial

Youth Changing the World By Making Education More Entrepreneurial

I’m here to tell you that every young person can change the world, and that our future depends on a collective attempt to do so.

Over the course of the last few years I’ve been deeply interested in the meaning of success in the 21st century at both an individual and societal level, focusing primarily on the role the educational system plays now and the role it should play in the future. I will describe a few changes the 21st century demands, a few of the failures of the current system and finally I’ll tell you a little bit about the startup organization I’m founding to implement these ideas about how to lower the barrier to entry for young people who want to make a difference in the world.

We are at a critical juncture for humanity. The world is facing some tremendous challenges: Radical Climate Change, looming water crisis, global pandemics, and billions desperately trying to rise out of poverty putting increasing strain on our depleting resources. These are big existential threats.

But this is also an extraordinary time because in this hyper-connected, technologically advanced world we also have more opportunity and more power to create the kind of future we want than ever before. Thinking about these problems is daunting, but if we are to find solutions it will come from unleashing the ingenuity of the next generation of young leaders.

We’ve got a generation of young people itching to get more involved and make a difference. A year ago, the Obama campaign harnessed that energy beautifully. We continue to get excited when we hear an inspirational speech or a call to action, and we exhibit unparalleled optimism about changing the world, but that enthusiasm begins to fade when we are forced to return to a school system that is outdated, constraining and depressing. There are so many dire problems to work on that there is no place for apathy yet many are trapped by it. Apathy is the result of an irrelevant educational system closing us out from the things we really care about.

Many young people are longing for something more meaningful in their education and work, and giving us a chance to engage with the big issues of our time could be the difference between resigning to dispassionate ‘pay the bills’ work and an insatiable entrepreneurial drive to improve humanity.

Why doesn’t our education system nurture the innovative spirit and leadership traits necessary for changemaking in the 21st century? Because it is a legacy of the industrial era that was designed to stamp these traits out.

The educational system was designed to train factory workers. And changes since have been incremental and on top of the same fundamentally outdated system. We are still all force fed the same handful of subjects that have been taught for years. And to succeed in the system requires obeying authority and coloring within the lines. Now, the system basically churns out intellectual factory workers, who are expected to be the cogs of large organizations, producing the same product for their lifetime in the work world. Today’s young people are great at analyzing narrow disciplines and writing 5 paragraph essays, yet we know little about ourselves and how to use our strengths to make an impact.

And so instead of having a large crop of these leaders needed for succeeding in the 21st century, we have students who hate school and think that’s what learning is. So they disengage and begin living weekend to weekend.

Succeeding in the 21st century requires flipping a number of educational practices on their head.

Instead of filling our heads with knowledge for 15 years, we should want to do something first, of tangible value to real world, and then learn the skills necessary to do it. Learning skills on an as needed basis fosters deeper understanding and greater motivation because it furthers a goal you care about. This also answers the ubiquitous question heard from students, “Why am I learning this?”

Instead of trying to optimize for the perfect balance of curriculum focus instead on what excites you and gets you really pumped up. The person who focuses on the pursuits that motivate and energize them will almost always be more successful than the person who tries to optimize for the best composition of knowledge, before even beginning to take action.

Focusing only on what excites you might make it seem like learning basic fundamentals would be avoided. Quite the contrary, as long as it furthers the bottom line: impact. As the great philosopher Frederich Nietzsche said, “He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.”

Instead of jumping into a standardized one size fits all education. You should cycle between divergent and convergent stages. In the divergent stage you’re being endlessly playful, trying to figure out what interests you. You do things like watch a few TED Talks, read a good book, watch a short documentary, prototype projects, talk with professionals in the field and share experiences with peers also on the journey of self discovery. By cycling between stages of exploration and focus you are certain to find topics that excite you and beckon you to dive deeper.

John Seely Brown former head of Xerox Parc has a quote I love that supports this approach, “Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … and once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world… you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

And if there is one thing a young person should achieve, it should be a passion for lifelong learning. Because any amount of learning you do in school pales in comparison to learning you’ll do throughout your life.

After you have found your passion act on it. The people who become most successful aren’t brilliant savants leagues ahead of their peers at 5 years old. Their secret lies in showing leadership and initiative at an early age, which opens up more opportunities and puts them on an accelerated path.

Everyone has a desire to matter, so when young people find their passion it will often be channeled towards making an impact. So by pursuing learning in roughly in this way we will have young people who are motivated lifelong learners who can contribute meaningfully to world.

A concept embodying the type of young person who approaches learning the way I just described is that of life entrepreneurship. It’s the idea that you seek out opportunities where you can make an impact and create a life uniquely suited to your strengths.  Life entrepreneurship is much broader than just starting businesses, it’s about consistently taking the initiative to improve your surroundings and advance your goals.

Entrepreneurship is also very flexible. We don’t remember most of what we we’re taught anyway, but you can always take the experience of making things happen with you. And come to any situation knowing you can find the problems and inefficiencies and solve them.

Entrepreneurial ventures also create an incredible amount of innovation and wealth out of almost nothing. At TED this year Juan Enriquez jolted us with an incredible fact: Investment in Startup companies represents .02% of US GDP but it represents 17.8% of US GDP output.  And that stat doesn’t even acknowledge burgeoning field of social entrepreneurship.

And now Introducing my startup Force For the Future… Force For the Future will bottle up this process, get more young people on this entrepreneurial path and accelerate the learning curve and impact by providing them with foresight, skills, connections and a support network of peers, mentors and organizations.

Basically this model boils down to unschooling but plus the resources of an institution like Harvard/Stanford.

It’s the idea that you will contribute the most by putting your time and energy into the things you are really passionate about. And aims to strike the optimal balance between being completely off on your own, where it’s easy to get lost and being part of a large system where you’re always told what to do.

Most fields in the 21st century are headed in a direction of decentralization and education is no different. Many of the pieces of 21st century learning landscape already exist, so one of Force For the Future’s primary functions will be acting as a liaison so that so a young person with desire can navigate through this entrepreneurial ecosystem and accelerate the process of turning an idea into a reality.

So much of achieving impact is about being connected with the right people. Force For the Future will connect you with the mentors who can make a big impact with a little time investment. We’ll connect you with the entrepreneurial veterans only a few years older who can dispel the illusion that making a big impact is not a dream but an achievable reality. And we’ll connect you with peers who are at a similar place on the rollercoaster ride that is life entrepreneurship.

If more young people get on a path to solving big problems, not only will we have happier, more fulfilled people, but we’ll have innovators who can lead us out of these economic and environmental crises and totally reinvent the world we live in…

I want to leave you with one final thought.

Margaret Mead once said,” Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

What if it wasn’t just a small few who managed to escape the system and dared to change the world but we provided learning environments that allowed all young people partake in the creation of a world worth living in.

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Getting Excited Is Just The First Step

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Picture 4

So many people write about the solutions they’ve found and the things they’ve discovered. I rarely see people write about they problems they are confronting, the different factors they are weighing, the sacrifices they are making and ultimately how they decide. We hear success stories all the time, that follow a traditional story arc: at first he didn’t know what to do, then he got an idea, but the challenge seemed too daunting and he thought about giving up, but he persevered and made it happen. You can do it, too! And then they run off a list of traits that they think allowed them to succeed. But those lists are most of the time emotional feel good junk food. They make us feel good, pump us up and let us know that it is possible for us to enjoy that success as well. But pumping someone up and not giving them good options about how to proceed is very dangerous. It’s deceptive to credit success with tips that hint at the process that underly it without providing enough awareness of the real ingredients. It is the process that unlocks that potential to replicate results.

I’m not saying these are bad, it’s good to share your story and I don’t know how much more can be accomplished in the time speeches like these are given, except for the emphasis on the hard work needed, and on pointing to resources that allow the inspired to learn more in depth about the process of building a strong foundation for success. I don’t know many of organizations that really prepare young people holistically for success. School certainly doesn’t teach you how to be successful. It teaches you socialization and a narrow band of academic knowledge. Being more transparent about your process will give other people the opportunity to guide you in the right direction through offering advice, point to resources and opening up opportunities. That’s the approach I’ve taken, I had no idea how to get Force For the Future started. So I took my ambitious ideas for a project and learned how to get lunch and coffee meetings with people who could give me the feedback and point me to the resources necessary to begin down an entrepreneurial road. I picked their brains and told them about my problems and got advice about how to succeed and now I have a network of friends and advisors who I can rely on for almost any problem I have.

Getting pumped up is necessary but being told something is possible without being told how is like telling a kid there’s candy hidden somewhere in a one hundred room mansion. He’ll be excited at first and run around looking for it. But then he’ll give up after while, frustrated. And maybe his eyes will light up again when he’s reminded tomorrow that there’s still candy somewhere in the mansion. But his enthusiasm will soon fade and his expectations will lower next time you bring it up. And he won’t ever find the candy because he was only told of it’s existence he wasn’t told anything about how to find it. And that’s how most people start to feel about success: like a helpless kid who just doesn’t want to be messed with anymore. He’d rather sit and suck his thumb than get his hopes up again only to be disappointed.

We need better structures to support those with the desire to do something big to actually make it happen. This is an incredibly important problem to solve. We need more young people on a trajectory towards solving today’s big issues and providing the resources, support structure and education for them to do that is the difference between resigning to dispassionate ‘pay the bills’ work or an insatiable entrepreneurial drive to improve humanity. This is a problem that I think is very surmountable and am working with some great people on some solutions right now.

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The Coming Educational Landscape Pt. 2

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First I recommend you read the previous post on this subject.

Concurrently to that facebook discussion I was having this discussion over Instant Messenger as a result of this tweet: Hypothesis: Future of education is the structure of unschooling combined with resources of a Harvard/Stanford. What do you think?

Cory

i find ur stastus interesting

do u mean something like an online school?

11:40am

Max

well I think that’s one model, but it’s not sufficient, face to face is still very important for learning

I’m thinking something more decentralized but in a local area

11:42am

Cory

so essentially there are still “schools”

but every school has resources like harvard

?

11:43am

Max

hm, I don’t know if that’s possible, one school will always have more resources. I suppose every school could have what harvard has now, if harvard then had even more…11:45am

Max

but more specifically, what I’m proposing, is that the structure of unschooling combined with resources comparable to that of Harvard is better than what Harvard currently provides. This would create more engaged, and effective people

11:46am

Cory

hm

i like your goal for sure

11:48am

Max

And I think many colleges could provide more value by adopting that model, instead of trying to emulate harvard

I sense a ‘but’

11:49am

Cory

i cant say but yet, cuz im not totally sure what a more local education would be like

11:49am

Max

I”m actually working on this btw, I’m taking a gap year and working on a startup that aims to foster this , by allowing more young people to actually make big ideas happen, instead of it just being momentary enthusiastic and losing interest.

Entrepreneurship and startups give you the early signal of what it will look like

21st century demands being entrepreneurial in my opinion, that doesn’t necessarily mean starting a business though.

11:51am

Max

ex: Preben Antonsen, close friend who went to Lick, wants to get todays youth more into classical music, so as part of “Formerly known as classical” he organized a concert. That’s entrepreneurial, it’s making things happen and it’s way more empowering than anything that happens in the classroom.

11:55am

Cory

another great idea

you always appear on my newsfeed

and sadly

no one else is really enthusiastic or about the world or engaged

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The Coming Educational Landscape Pt. 1

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Earlier this morning I posted this statement on twitter: Hypothesis: Future of education is the structure of unschooling combined with resources of a Harvard/Stanford. What do you think?

Almost immediately engaged conversation began in number of places. I wanted to share that discussion in a more open space. (Here is part 2)

Below is our facebook conversation lightly edited and separated into clearer threads.

Thomas Mamajama Mallon at 11:36am June 10

I think we’ll have a more fluid pricing model, i.e a cost more proportional to ranking, but unschooling will principally happen at the grammar/high-school level. I don’t think traditional college is going anywhere withing the next 2 decades.

Max Marmer at 11:42am June 10

Let’s say unschooling model I just proposed is competing with traditional college. What does traditional college do better?

Joseph P Jackson at 11:47am June 10

See weapons of Mass Instruction, Gatto’s newest book. Also see Tapscott’s recent article at Edge on the end of the University and Neil Gershenfeld’s interview in SEED on how the MIT model is obsolete. FAB lab networks, community techshops, etc being the future. On the contrary I think the University could die faster than the state coerced system. Tuition hit 50K per year for “4 yr liberal arts undergrad” even before the financial collapse. The credentialing function is dead as soon as Web 3.0, semantic web/blog/social software mining for reputation metrics comes online, est 10yrs.

Max Marmer at 11:59am June 10

A lot of good resources here.

1) Gatto: I will check it out. However I saw him speak at Future Salon last year and while he had a lot of good ideas, I wasn’t impressed with the coherence of a solution, though he was really good at delivering anecdotes that illustrated the problem. Did you read the book? Maybe that’s better.

2) I read Tapscott’s article, it was great.

3) I will check out Gershenfeld’s article. I’m a big fan of his and it’s my intention to involve the making community in Force For the Future. It was reading Fab four years ago that inspired me to go down this route. Digital Fab owns a significant part of 21st century learning landscape, I think. Not all of it though. There are some really key startup/entrepreneurial parts I’m working on.

Max Marmer at 11:59am June 10

4) Great answers on credentialling, that’s what I’ve been feeling, but that’s a great expanation of the tools that will actually take the system down. A degree is one, very antiquated way of signaling competency, but it’s much better to prove competency with the work you actually did. Project based learning is a way people can show they have real skills and can actually contribute, not just explain how it works on tests and papers.

It’s already not the most effective way to judge talent, if you’re willing to do research for 10-20 min online and see what a person is like and what they have done, and who they surround themselves with. Just 10-20 min isn’t scalable if you have 100+ people applying for a job.

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Changing Education: M.I.T. Takes Big Step in Right Direction

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Find the original article here.

M.I.T. has just undergone a large change in the way it teaches many of it’s technical classes. The lecture format has been dropped in favor of more active approaches to learning. I believe this is undeniably a good thing.

I think there are two key changes here that this shift addresses, and one more change they would do well to incorporate. The important shifts are narrowing the breadth of the information in order to increase focus on the essential, and increasing engagement by filtering knowledge through an action oriented lens. But this approach still lacks the clear communication of why this knowledge is important in the first place. I’m not arguing that it isn’t important but communicating why it is important is an essential part in giving students the motivation to learn the material.

Narrowing Breadth

Teachers have a tendency to cram as much information as possible in the time they have rather than focusing deeply on communicating the key insights. All that information may be important but the dilution of the key principles makes the lesson overwhelming and decreases engagement and motivation.

In an article in the education journal Change last year, Dr. Wieman noted that the human brain “can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once.”

“But the number of new items that students are expected to remember and process in the typical hourlong science lecture is vastly greater,” he continued. “So we should not be surprised to find that students are able to take away only a small fraction of what is presented to them in that format.”

Effective teaching needs to be consistent with how the brain actually learns. Absorbing the breadth of information that needs to be covered actually would be quite easy if the key concepts were communicated effectively first. Don’t try to understand a vast set of information by going through it in entirety once hoping the unconscious will miraculously synthesize a pattern. A much better method would involve learning the underlying pattern first. A lot of the information should now snap into place as most ideas in a class are just variations of the underlying pattern, and only require one additional step to achieve a deep understanding. But from my experience this is a major departure from how most teachers teach. There’s almost no flexibility in class because teachers have a fixed amount of curriculum they have to cover.

This has many parallels to current scientific understanding of the creative process. When the mind just tries to absorb everything and doesn’t know what it’s looking for it’s overwhelming and very little ends up being well understood. It’s like trying to write when you’re asked to write about anything. There’s simply too many things that nothing comes to mind. It’s much easier to be creative when you guidelines are defined. Creativity is working within restrictions. You need to know what to focus on. Asking clear, concise questions helps a lot. If you don’t know what you don’t understand first formulate a clear question. That narrows the confusion from a diffused feeling of understanding nothing to a specific topic that needs a little more attention.

Increasing Engagement

“There was a long tradition that what it meant to teach was to give a really well-prepared lecture,” said Peter Dourmashkin, a senior lecturer in physics at M.I.T. and a strong proponent of the new method. “It was the students’ job to figure it out… The people who wanted to understand,” Professor Mazur said, “had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, ‘Let me figure this out.’ ” But for the majority, he said, a different approach is needed.

When you do that you are only going to engage the very top of the class for who the material comes completely naturally. But that cuts out a huge percentage of people who are very close to developing a deep understanding but just need a little help. The school system only works for two types of people. The student who is conditioned to accept whatever they are told and will do whatever is necessary to get the good grade and get into an Ivy league school. And the student who is so passionate about a subject that they are completely driven to develop a deep understanding of the subject. But often this type of student does well in only a few subjects and becomes a very narrow minded person early on.

M.I.T is taking real steps towards make learning a more active process.

“Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” Professor Mazur said, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.” The new approach at M.I.T. is known by its acronym, TEAL, for Technology Enhanced Active Learning.

Not surprisingly, “younger professors tend to be more enthusiastic about TEAL than veterans who have been perfecting their lectures for decades.”

Wider Applicability of Purpose

Life is long. The most important thing schools need to instill is a lifelong love of learning.  If your goal is ‘success’, and you measure it over the long haul then everything else should be secondary to instilling that motivation. We rush people through piles upon piles of information and almost never stop to tell them why they are learning all this information. We never give the breathing room for them to explore the knowledge. See what it’s useful for out in the real world. We rarely ever let them exercise creativity. School is about doing what your told and not questioning authority.

In talking with many teachers the thing that seems to be holding them back the most from becoming more creative and innovative is fear. They are afraid to give up control to the students. Not being able to predict what students will do with their time and whether they will use it wisely or laugh it off causes teachers to shake in their boots. There a few teachers who I’ve had who do have the courage to be different, and most of the time they’ve been more than rewarded with an incredibly engaged and enthusiastic class of students who look forward to coming to class and enjoy learning. How about that for a concept: Learning is fun.

The best  way I know of to increase engagement and purpose is project based learning that interacts directly with the real world. This can stimulate desire, creativity, purpose and in the process create a better world. But I’ll save that for another post.

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Reading Is Programming Your Mind

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If you think about it, you don’t remember most of what you read. So why is reading so highly valued? You may say it is esteemed because it is an enjoyable activity, but I don’t think that really captures it. Television is enjoyable yet it is frowned upon by many. A typical answer to why reading is regarded as an edifying activity would be, “when you read you learn things about the world.” But I would only be satisfied with that answer if I remembered most of what I read. I, like most of you, only remember a very small fraction of the ideas I come across. Yet I consider reading to be one of the best ways to develop intellectually and increase the chances of being successful in the world, however you chose to interpret that concept. Reading isn’t about memorizing facts but programming your mind to think in the ‘right way’.

How you think and what you think about are largely determined by the thoughts you put in your mind. Every time you read you’re filling you mind with the worldview and ideas of the author. Copying their insights about the world onto your internal map.

But I urge you to be careful because not all programming is good programming. Pay close attention to what you’re reading. The mind doesn’t care how it’s programmed. It will readily accept a hateful, self-destructive worldview just as easily as an accurate and fulfilling worldview. If you have inaccurate beliefs eventually they will catch up to you and affect your ability to operate effectively in the world. 

Every time you read you’re incrementally brainwashing yourself. Either by painting over old areas or creating new ones. I try to brainwash myself to think like people who I consider brilliant and insightful. I want my thoughts to be flavors of ideas from people I respect. Note, that even some of the most brilliant people ever to exist were full of flaws. So I just want to understand and internalize their gems of insight. Ultimately, internalizing their thoughts gives me a high quality field of concepts I can use to interpret and reconcile my experiences with the world. Insightful ideas are usually the result of making connections across subject areas, synthesizing previously disconnected ideas. 

How Does The Concept of Programming Affect What I Read?

Before you dive into reading somebody’s writing ask yourself if you really want to understand their worldview. Ask yourself, “will their worldview give me better insight into how the world works?” And furthermore, “will their worldview give me richer insight than the worldview of this other author I could read?” You cannot make the decision if a book is worth reading in a vacuum. You need to compare it to the alternatives. If you believe in optimizing in attempt to create the best possible life like I do, then you will constantly strive to read the books that will have the biggest influence on you. 

But how do you find the most influential thing to read while swimming in more information than could possibly be read in a lifetime? As Clay Shirky notes here, this is not a new problem. There has been more information than a person could read in their lifetime since the library of Alexandria. But now, due in large part to the internet, the information superhighway, the abundance of information is much more in your face. A lifetime worth of information passes directly in front of our eyes everyday. In order to navigate this crowded world we need better filters. I’ll talk more about the filters I use, which are relatively primitive and subjective. Fortunately better tools are being created as we speak.

What Do I Want From a Book?

Two things come to mind. I want knowledge that can help me create changes in my behavior that will improve my life. Or I want new stimulating ideas that give me insight into new dimensions of the world. Those two are actually closely related. Stimulating ideas either add or force me to to reconsider aspects of my working theory of the world. And since my working theory of the world must be accurate enough to produce positive effects in the real world, both of the things I want in a book, behavioral change or interesting ideas, reinforce the underlying motivation of living a more effective life. 

Ideas, insights and information are very interesting concepts to me. Below are some follow up topics I’m thinking of writing about:

What I Mean by a Working Theory of the World, Looking For Highly Processed Information, Striving For Intelligence Instead of Being Satisfied with Smarts,, Using Horizontal Scanning to Inform Book Reading, Articles Vs. Books, Reconciling the Self-Help Industry, The Reading-Writing-Discussing Feedback Loop, and How to Increase Retention of Ideas.

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