Tag Archives: programs

Business Roundtable Launches Broad-based Commission to Address Needs of American Workers

The Springboard Project will recommend how to best equip the current and future U.S. workforce for success in the post-recession economy

Washington, D.C. – Today Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. corporations, announced the launch of The Springboard Project – an independent commission that will develop innovative approaches to help American workers acquire the new skills and the education needed to thrive in the 21st century’s evolving labor market. The commission, which will bring together a diverse group of education and business leaders, labor experts, union chiefs, academics, foundation heads and government representatives, is holding its first meeting today in Washington, D.C.

“Given the transformations in the current economy and the long-term impact they will have, this is the moment for business and government to join forces with labor and the online community to make sure that our workforce has the training and resources to meet the demands of an ever-changing marketplace,” said William D. Green, chairman & CEO of Accenture and chairman of The Springboard Project. “I am looking forward to working with such an esteemed and talented set of experts to tackle the unique challenges the American worker faces today and will continue to face even after the recession passes.”

Today’s meeting will officially kick off The Springboard Project’s nine-month mandate to develop innovative and feasible recommendations to the Obama administration, Congress, the private sector, labor and individuals.

“American business leaders are optimistic about the future of our economy and the long-term prospects of American workers,” said Harold McGraw III, Chairman of Business Roundtable and Chairman, President and CEO of The McGraw-Hill Companies. “America’s talented workforce and strong history of innovation have helped us overcome economic hardship before, and we have assembled some of the nation’s best minds to help identify practical and productive ways to ensure today’s workers are equipped to help us succeed again.”

The Springboard Project will:

  • Assess current government services for those looking for work, education and training examine model programs commission research
  • Identify how to harness technology and other resources to help students and workers better adapt to labor market changes so they can secure and maintain employment throughout their working lives

The Springboard Project will issue its recommendations at the end of 2009.

More information about The Springboard Project can be found at www.businessroundtable.org/springboard.

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Business Roundtable. Business Roundtable Launches Broad-based Commission to Address Needs of American Workers. Business Roundtable Resource Center. Kirk Monroe, 13 Mar. 2009. Web. 17 Nov. 2009.
<http://www.businessroundtable.org/news/business_roundtable_launches_broadbased_commission_address_needs_american_workers>.

The New Untouchables

Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.

There’s something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.

In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.

A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

This problem will be reversed only when the decline in worker competitiveness reverses — when we create enough new jobs and educated workers that are worth, say, $40-an-hour compared with the global alternatives. If we don’t, there’s no telling how “jobless” this recovery will be.

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

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Friedman, Thomas L. “The New Untouchables.” Nytimes.com. New York Times, 20 Oct. 2009.

Web. 17 Nov. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/opinion/21friedman.html>.

Richard Lyons

Richard Lyons

Richard E. Lyons has served as a professor of management, department chair, instructional dean, corporate trainer, faculty and staff developer, and independent consultant.  His grounding in sound research and quality management practices, as well as deep learning from his varied experiences, has enabled him to exceed expectations of clients systematically.

Richard launched his consulting and presentation practice in 1999, shortly after the publication of his first book, The Adjunct Professor’s Guide to Success. He has since authored three other books – Teaching College in an Age of Accountability, Success Strategies for Adjunct Faculty, and Best Practices for Supporting Adjunct Faculty. His extensive research on these topics and familiarity with best practices that align with that research undergird his consulting. The strategies that he espouses have been well received not only by clients, but also by audiences in dozens of presentations at varied academic conferences.

Richard has presented on the campuses of community and state colleges, universities and proprietary institutions, in three countries.  Besides traditional institutions, these have included historically Black colleges and universities, historically women’s institutions, and those that serve significant populations of Native American, Hispanic and other diverse populations.  He also regularly utilizes webinars to deepen workshop participants’ mastery of critical learning outcomes. His travel experiences in over forty countries enable him to address issues in a global, futuristic context – a factor of increasing importance at many institutions.

Active throughout his career in professional organizations, Richard presently serves on the board of the North American Council for Staff, Program and Organizational Development [NCSPOD].

Richard earned his B.A. in Management and M.S. in Business Education at Western Kentucky University, and his doctorate in college teaching and curriculum at the University of Central Florida.

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Specialties:

  • Achieving improved accountability outcomes in instruction
  • Adjunct Faculty Issues
  • Alternative/Authentic Assessment
  • Board training and development
  • Change Management
  • Curriculum development
  • Customer service
  • Decision making
  • Department chair training and development
  • Eight habits of highly effective people
  • Experiential learning
  • Focus group facilitation
  • Interpersonal relations
  • Interviewing for long-term effectiveness
  • Leadership development
  • Learning styles of students
  • Listening for understanding and problem solving
  • Mentoring
  • Mission formulation
  • Presentation skills
  • Quality improvement
  • Strategic planning
  • Teaching styles [alignment with student learning styles]
  • Team building
  • Train the trainer workshops
  • Trust and relationship building