Sales positions, in particular, are costing all companies more because of the shortage of people that can do them. If I were to recommend a career with virtually no risk of obsolescence, I would recommend sales. It may be that what someone sells today will not be what they sell 10 years from now, but the need for someone to acquaint business and consumer customers with potential solutions to their day-to-day problems, and help them select or design the right potential will never go away.

As for your comment about the motivation of young people, I am not worried about an “ambition gap.” I have three children, ages 21, 17, and 14. They do not lack for ambition. In fact, in talking to them and their contemporaries, the regular exposure they have to children who have been born outside the U.S. or who have spent significant parts of their lives outside the U.S. has given them a greater sense of the reality of global competition than I had when I was growing up. They have grown up in a financially comfortable environment, but they want to succeed on their own merits, and to have fulfilling careers. From the survey work I have seen through my Catalyst board membership and other sources, my parental experience is relatively typical. I am very optimistic about our young people.

Relative to the government’s role in education, I am less optimistic. The fundamental problem with government relative to any complex problem, whether it is education or health care, is that government appears to exist to serve its employees, not the public. If employees are motivated to serve the public, then government does an excellent job. If not, the public loses, especially given the fact that government workers are unionized and can exert a lot of leverage on the people that supervise them. Similarly, the civil service system which covers the vast majority of government workers, including management, combined with the multiple layers of employment rights that have been given to government employees, have significantly compounded the difficulty of getting rid of under-performing government workers. My experience with government employees is that the vast majority of them are highly-dedicated, very knowledgeable, very moral, and passionate about serving the public. Unfortunately, they are trapped in systems that under-reward good performance, and protect bad performance.

With respect to education, I have seen excellent models, like the Achievement First Charter Schools in Connecticut and New York, but those wonderfully-performing systems have been attacked in every way possible by defenders of the status quo. We need to cause government money to go to organizations that deliver excellence in performance, like Achievement First, not to dole out money uniformly to good and bad performing school programs and systems.

-Mike

What kind of impact do you think this will have on American innovation and our the future of the US economy? It’s becoming easier and easier to offshore R&D to lower cost channels and have a truly global workforce. In fact its probably advantageous to do this and have Researchers working globally 24×7. Do you see this as an issue for America’s youth and our workforce overall? And lastly, is there anything our government can do about improving the school systems and keeping America at the forefront of innovation?