Employees who do not have high levels of education and technical skill will be continually insecure and will be displaced if they are not continually keeping ahead of the marketplace.  The most painful point the reporter makes is that anyone who starts his or her work career with major family or other responsibilities will have difficulty keeping current with the skills needed.  Maddie Parlier is 22 years old, has completed high school, but has not gone beyond it, is a single mother, and has no spare time or money to take courses and upgrade her skills.  She will be vulnerable to a future replacement by technology.

The problem with the increasing inequality of outcomes in our society in a time of global competition, continuous price pressure, and technology advancement is that continuous education and skill development are more important than ever.  However, achieving this goal is particularly difficult for those individuals who enter the workforce with the handicap of obligations that make continuous learning extremely difficult.

The story about Maddie Parlier begs two questions:

• Why did a woman who is obviously smart and a hard worker not continue her education beyond high school?
• How does someone like Parlier, with time-consuming family responsibilities, find the time to continue to upgrade her knowledge and skills outside of work hours?

When we consider these questions, we are inevitably led to a different way of defining the problem than is customarily used in analyses like these.

Why individuals like Maddie Parlier do not continue in school

My dad, who died in 2001, was a very intelligent person, with great wisdom and insight, and a continuous learner as an adult, but he dropped out of school after the 9^th grade.  My mom, also a person of great intelligence who was a continuous reader and learner all her adult life, dropped out of school after the 11^th grade during the early part of the Depression.  Why?

For them, going to school was an unpleasant and unproductive experience.  The classrooms experience did not engage either of my parents sufficiently to keep them in school, so they dropped out at the earliest possible opportunity.  While it is easy to say that we need better teachers and schools, the bigger problem is that schools do not teach people how to learn.  The educational paradigm is fundamentally flawed. Educators make the judgment that individuals have varying learning abilities, and assume that some people will learn, and others will fail to learn.

I can relate to my parents’ experience by what happened with subjects in which I did not do exceptionally well, like biology, chemistry and physics.

These subjects were taught in a standardized way.  I did not master them, but got good, although not exceptional, grades by sheer hard work and will power.  However, as an adult, I saw their value, and became genuinely excited to learn about the underlying principles of each subject. My daughter even gave me a brief chemistry tutorial on equation balancing recently.

Every one of us gets interested in a subject for different reasons, and we learn in different ways.  I think metaphorically and structurally, and recall information most effectively when I can engage multiple senses in learning the subject.

People have told me I have a photographic memory.  That is not true. I have a photographic memory on certain selective categories of information, but have a below-average memory on others.  My wife can remember the location of a house by a visual map of the color and style of the house and the houses around it.  She remembers foods she ate at a restaurant decades ago, and can even discern differences in the taste of an item from what she ate years ago. I cannot remember what I ate last Saturday night at the local tapas restaurant.

Why do I learn and retain information?

• The subject matter has to be important enough to want to retain it.  I tune out on information that will not matter to me, or that does not strike me as interesting.
• I take copious notes.  Contrary to popular belief, I do not file the notes, but review them once and discard them.
• When I take notes, my handwriting is highly legible, so that I can re-read what I have written.
• If a particular note is important, I underline it.  If it is exceptionally important, I place an asterisk next to it.
• After taking the notes, I re-read them, and I recite what I have written, so that I can hear from what I have written, in addition to seeing it.
• If the notetaking on a subject reveals a particular way of organizing and structuring the information, I create a visual structuring on the page of the notebook, either in the form of a graph, a flow diagram, or a chart.

The more of these tasks I perform, the more likely it is that I will remember what I have written.

My mother used to joke that the reason she dropped out of school was because she was required to do a paper on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in her final semester as a junior in high school. I am sure that no one engaged with my mother in a way that helped her find meaning in the assignment.

Rather than trying to shoehorn every student into a one-size-fits-all educational system, let’s try to figure out the different ways in which to engage increasingly diverse populations in the art and the technique of learning.  The goal is “learning,” not “education.”

How do people with overwhelmingly complex lives carve out time for continuous learning, particularly of highly technical subjects?

How does someone like Maddie Parlier possibly carve out time to upgrade her skills?

• We have to create learning processes that provide more flexible self-learning opportunities.  It would be unfair to expect Parlier to attend a classroom course outside work hours, given her single-parent responsibilities, but she can learn online or in other ways.  If there are fees for such courses, she should be reimbursed under a company’s educational assistance program, just as she would if she were attending a class.  We need to make continuous learning as convenient and cost-free as possible.
• We have to teach people how to use small blocks of time as effectively as possible. A single mother holding down a job does not have big blocks of time for learning.  She might get a series of 5-minute blocks of spare time. We need to figure out how she can use them for learning exercises.
• We have to teach people how to multi-task more.

Alternative learning methodologies

Learning can happen anywhere, any time.  I love the text-to-speech feature of my Kindle, especially when I am in my car and can have the experience of listening to an audio book, even if it is in a computer-generated voice. I learn from online demonstrations of subjects.  I also have found that certain TV programs have presented subjects with far more impact than I have ever learned them in a classroom. My friends showed me about the many free tutorials on YouTube. I have even learned from a casual face-to-face encounter, such as a cooking demonstration at a supermarket or a restaurant.  We should test individuals to determine how they learn best, and should draw from their insights and experience, even at an early age, to figure out what is most likely to excite them. Courses should be created in ways that enable them to be delivered remotely and in a multiple ways.

What always amazes me about learning is what we discover about how people of all ages engage with the world.  Some people learn through video games and master complex subjects.  Others gain a great deal of insights from friends, work colleagues, peers, and even online communities.  Even today, I find that my best learning about potential applications for my I-Phone comes from other users.  One of my nephews told me about a new application called Soundhound, which enables my phone to pick up music sounds in a public place and identify the song and the artist.

In essence, everyone can learn, and we should figure out how to make that learning process happen.

How does learning fit into a busy schedule?

It is easy to criticize people who do not take time to improve their skills.  However, in the real world, people have multiple jobs, are juggling time-consuming family responsibilities, and often have challenging commutes to and from work.  Moreover, many jobs are physically and mentally draining. For many people, the ability to take time to learn simply does not appear to be there.  How can we help people carve out the time to learn?

• We need to show people how to simplify their lives, reduce the wear-and-tear of daily activity, and create learning time.  Too many people drive to work alone every day.  Even when public transportation is unavailable, there are many underutilized carpooling, vanpooling, and ride-matching services available to people.  I gained an extra 90 minutes a day of reading time when I commuted by train between New York and Connecticut. When shuttle services between the train station and the office were unavailable, many people gave me rides to and from the train, and I learned a great deal from them.
• Buying hot, healthy pre-prepared food virtually eliminates cooking time, and frees up time for other activities.
• If I were a young parent today, I would be looking for tools to order groceries, clothing, supplies, hardware and other items online for home delivery to save on shopping time.

If large blocks of time cannot be created, then we have to coach people how to use smaller time blocks more effectively.  I always felt that one of my advantages over other people was the use of 1-5 minute time blocks.  When I watch live television, I put the set on mute during commercials, set an alarm for 3 minutes, and do something productive. More and more, I record programs to reduce the watching time from the original running time by fast-forwarding through commercials. I recapture that time for other purposes.

How do I use 5-minute drives to and from the coffee shop? I turn my Kindle into an audio book and listen to a few pages while driving.  The Kindle also can be read outside while I am walking and even while I am waiting in line at the grocery store or some other retail outlet.  I have done a lot of reading in the security lines at airports, while I watch other people stare into space.  I also remember doing work during the many times I waited with my children at the pediatrician’s offices as they were growing up.  I took my own materials, rather than relying on what the doctor’s office had available.

Everyone has spare time. The only question is how to take advantage of it.

We need to teach people how to multi-task more.

When my children were young, I used to take them to the local doughnut shop, get a cup of coffee, browse the newspaper, and talk with them.  It was a great bonding experience for us, and I typically read to them and talked about whatever I was doing.  I also used to take them to museums on Saturdays and Sundays and learn as they were learning.

Today, the shoe is on the other foot.  When I am with my adult children, I ask them about what they are learning, what books they are reading, what movies or videos they have seen, and what places they would like to visit, and why.  My daughter is great in the sciences, so she continually directs me to good resources.

Also, as I noted above, we have a lot of waiting time in our lives that can be usefully deployed. Today, many people use their cell phones to talk or do text messages while they are waiting for someone, but it is easy to convert some of that time to learning time.

We have to change the paradigm from schooling to learning.  We have to change the paradigm from learning as a highly standardized activity to a highly customized one. We have to change the paradigm from learning as a process that takes place within specific certified courses to one that can occur anywhere.  I have no problem with testing people to see what they have learned, and rewarding them for having achieved a certain level of competence, but we need to make it as easy for them as possible.

This skill and knowledge gap is solvable. We can help the Maddie Parliers of the world compete in the global economy and support their families.

There were several noteworthy insights from the program:

• The German and Central European film-makers were incredibly innovative, and they sparked the development of many features of American cinema that changed the films Americans saw, especially after World War II, when the industry was free to resume its normal kind of film-making.  Most noteworthy was the development of the “film noir” style of movie.  “Film noir” was a genre of film that usually was done in black-and-white, as opposed to color, presentation.  It was set in harsh urban settings, was a type of drama and action film, and often involved criminals or gangsters.  Films like The Asphalt Jungle, Dark Passage (which starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall), and even On the Waterfront could be considered “film noir” movies.
• The filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Central Europe created funds to help others trapped back in Europe come to the United States.  They not only sent money back to people trying to escape from Nazi-occupied countries, but helped them with contacts and created the equivalent of an “underground railroad” to enable people to get help crossing borders, hiding inside Nazi-occupied countries, and eventually finding their way to friendly countries.  Germany and the countries it occupied saw a huge drain on their artistic talent, but it would not have been as big of a drain as it turned out to be, had not American-based exiles provided a considerable amount of financial support.

As an aside, we underestimate the importance of support from abroad in almost every attempt to rebel against totalitarian governments.  I saw this in the early 1980’s when I walked by the Holy Name Church in the South End of Stamford, Connecticut, a Polish church that was clearly soliciting money from both parishioners and members of the public to support the Solidarity movement in Poland.

• The exiles from Germany and Central Europe brought a particular passion to their roles in certain kinds of films.  Perhaps the most insightful part of the documentary was the presentation of different scenes in Casablanca, and the description of the actor or actress in that scene who had emigrated from Germany or another Nazi-occupied country and their passion for portraying the European experience.  The saddest ironies in films like Casablanca  were that the Nazi characters were often portrayed by Jewish actors, such as Richard Ryen, a German who played Major Strasser’s Nazi aide Captain Heintz, in Casablanca.

The Casablanca stories were inspiring and tragic.  Madeleine LeBeau, who played Yvonne, the lover spurned by Rick, fled France, along with her Jewish actor husband Marcel Dalio, who played the croupier.  They had a very circuitous route to America, having to get to Portugal, to Mexico, and to Canada, before having the opportunity to enter the United States.  S.K. Sakall, who played Carl, the waiter, fled Hungary and lost three of his sisters in concentration camps.

However difficult our lives are in America or in other parts of the world, we should remember that there are individuals today who are living far away from where they started or would like to be living.  Moreover, most of us are not living in a war zone, and we have far more creature comforts than people living middle or even upper middle class lives had 1-2 generations ago.  As I write this, I am sitting in a very comfortable Starbucks restaurant in Darien, Connecticut, and enjoying a great morning cup of coffee (I usually go to another coffee shop, but it is New Year’s Day and nothing much is open here.)

The other lesson I took from this documentary is that we should reconsider our ridiculously restrictive immigration policies.  We should be able to distinguish between criminals and terrorists, whom we do not want to admit to America, and those with great skills and capabilities, who will enrich our country and create opportunities for many Americans lacking those opportunities today.  That is the argument persuasively made in the book Borderless Economics: Chinese Sea Turtles, Indian Fridges and the New Fruits of Global Capitalism by Robert Guest.

Finally, we should recognize that an untapped source of support for people in developing economies is the direct transfer of money from individual to individual.  The major, centralized government programs, or even the programs developed by not-for-profit organizations often have too much waste, too many centrally-imposed conditions, and too many intermediaries to be as effective as direct money transfers.  Let’s encourage more efficient money transfer from rich to poor than we do today.

Most of all, as we look ahead to what is often an uncertain and somewhat frightening future, we should take stock of how blessed we are, and how grateful we should be, for those who fought for our freedom generation after generation.

In this case, the employer is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an entity created by a contract between New York and New Jersey and jointly owned by the two states.  This entity is not accountable to elected officers or voters, except for the indirect influence that elected officials from the two states sitting on its board of directors have on the entity’s operations.  Oddly enough, entities like the Port Authority were created over several decades in the 20^th century because elected officials believed that they would operate in a more business-like fashion and not be subject to the corrupting influences of elected officials trying to “buy” votes by bestowing favors on constituents. However, the lack of public accountability means that the customers of the Port Authority, namely those who travel in the New York Metropolitan area, will bear the brunt of the abuses of the pension system.

In one sense, it should be easy to solve this problem: abolish this “pension spiking” scheme in the next collective bargaining session.  However, we get a hint of why these kinds of schemes are so hard to uproot. A toll collector named Princesella Smith is quoted as saying: “I’m blessed. I have a great job, and, in this economy, it’s great that I can cover everything with my eight hours a day and overs.”

Executives and union leaders who both know that paying a toll collector like Ms. Smith $89,599 per year is absurdly excessive also have to confront the fact that, but for her oversized compensation package, she probably would be living in a much more difficult economic situation.  She is a human face to the problem of reducing the government budget deficit.  I found that, at Pitney Bowes and at other large organizations, no matter how well these organizations were managed and how tightly costs were controlled, it was difficult to bring pay into line with what made sense for customers.

The overpaid employee is a real person, often well liked and appreciated for his or her organizational commitment.  While I do not know how good an employee Ms. Smith might be, she is clearly doing a job, collecting tolls on the George Washington Bridge, that few people would choose to do if they had other choices.

Not only are overpaid employees often liked and appreciated, but senior executives often know the families of these employees and the tragedies and challenges the employees face.  At Pitney Bowes’ Connecticut operations, there really are no executives living in enclaves that totally separate them from coming into contact with ordinary employees.  I was highly likely to interact with company employees outside the office. When my second son was younger, the president of the Little League baseball program was a product manager at the company. Our housekeeper’s husband worked at the company. When we went to school events, we would meet parents who were company employees and whose children were friends of our children.

It is easy to blame militant labor unions for fighting to preserve the jobs of overpaid and under-skilled employees.  However, my experience is that these problems would exist in any organization in which executives, voluntarily or otherwise, build close personal relationships with people up and down the organization.

Over time, I developed the skill of confronting people I knew and liked, but who had to leave the company.  I had to convince them that it was not only in our best interest, but in theirs, that we were taking them out of a job, reducing their pay, or in some other way taking an adverse employment action.  I operated on the simple principle that if I could not look them in the eye across a table and justify what we were doing, the action was indefensible.  Thankfully, I never had to make the judgment that an adverse employment action was indefensible when I used that test.

When we teach senior executives to care about employees as individuals, then we create a different problem.  It becomes challenging to look those overpaid and under-skilled employees in the eye, meet them in the coffee shop and deli, see their families in the school events, or run into them on the street, and tell them that you either have to eliminate their job or reduce their pay to bring it into line with what the market pay should be for their job.

Think about the job of a postal worker who manages mail sorting machines.  At Pitney Bowes, we were able to employ and retain people who would do this work at about 1/3 the rate that the Postal Service was paying for the same work.  We were consistent in our pay practices with the real market for this job.  The Postal Service’s pay rates were artificially high, both because of a collective bargaining agreement, and because of the political pressure that postal union workers could bring to bear on elected officials.

The concept of a “living wage” is that people must earn enough in any job to be able to afford a standard of living above the federal poverty line.  However, what “living wage” advocates forget is that the “living wage” movement would result in fewer jobs and more expensive products.  As I look across our economy, I see many candidates for job eliminations if wages for that job get too high, not the least of which is the toll collector job.

When I go to large retail grocery stores and pharmacies, I am increasing seeing self-service stations, including some at the checkout counter.  When I go into bathrooms, I see electrical hand driers, which clearly replace the job of transporting and stocking paper hand towels. Postal sorting machines have replaced most postal clerks who sort mail.  Automated banking kiosks replace tellers, as other vending machines provide 24×7 service in place of retail clerks.

The largest job elimination trend, which particularly comes into play at this time of year, is the substitution of online shopping for retail purchases.  In past years, my wife frantically traveled from store to store to buy Christmas gifts.  Today, she sits with her computer and orders everything online.  While the merchants that deliver in response to online orders certainly employ people, fewer people are needed for online transactions, compared with their retail counterparts.

In essence, the labor union and “living wage” movements, whether they want to admit this or not, are hastening the elimination of the jobs they are trying to protect and enhance. They will win for a few years, but eventually the desire for consumers to get the highest level of convenience and value at the lowest cost will override the desire to protect someone else’s overpaid job.

Unlike Walt Mossberg, whom I quoted the other day, or the many other commentators who celebrated Jobs’ successes, Schulz focused on the fact that Jobs had many major failures along the way, including the Apple I computer, the Lisa computer and the NeXt computer.  He was asked to leave Apple in 1985 and did not return until 1997.  Steven Jobs failed repeatedly and publicly, and he paid in the short run.  However, today, the Apple employees and shareholders are more secure and richer than they ever could have imagined.  He invested repeatedly for the longer term.

That article and the reflections on Steven Jobs’ failures caused me to think about other transformative individuals are their repeated failures, as well as the many failures that have occurred in my life.  Two individuals who have talked, present and past, about their failures were Thomas Edison and J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels.  Edison celebrated his unsuccessful attempts to solve problems through innovation because, as he said, he learned what did not work and it helped him figure out better what did.

More interesting than Edison has been the life story of J.K. Rowling, who, after college, failed at marriage and an early attempt at writing before she finally began to succeed in her late 20’s with the Harry Potter novels.  Rowling gave a commencement speech at Harvard in 2008 at which she spoke about the many benefits of failure, among them, the focus it gave future efforts, the self-confidence and inner security it generated, the wisdom it helped her developed, and the fact that it helped her separate real from “fair weather” friends.

As I have gone on many journeys in my life, I have had both mistakes and colossal failures.  I failed at my first two jobs out of law school, both with reputable law firms.  I made mistakes along the way as a business executive.  I made investment decisions that failed.  Since retirement, I have had many failed attempts to raise money for both Dossia and my film From the Rough, and, although I am more confident about success in both cases, I have actually been propelled forward by the failures.

Each failure requires careful study to understand its lessons.  Oddly enough, my failure to secure traditional major studio financing for the film has taught me that the film very likely has a large underserved market that the traditional studios have ignored, the market for films directed at women and people of color.  The film The Help appears to be supporting my assumption that there is a market for intelligent content directed at audiences Hollywood has left behind.

I have been told that I was stupid and naïve by people experienced in the market spaces in which I initially failed, only to find that I was getting that feedback more because I threatened an established order than that my initiatives were flawed.  My health care vision has been proven right over the last 20 years, despite the fact that I was not taken seriously by industry experts when I first articulated it 20 years ago.

My unsuccessful attempts to accomplish something had the effect Rowling discussed in her commencement speech:

• They increased my determination and will to succeed;
• They helped me sort out real friends from pretenders;
• They helped me seek out help and build support systems I would not have needed if I succeeded immediately; and
• They helped me focus my life on what mattered most.

What particularly resonated with me about Rowling’s remarks was her comment about those who refuse to take the risks of failure.  She referred to them as the “willfully unimaginative.”  She said that they become imprisoned in a psychological world in which their fears and even their nightmares get more frequent and more intense, because they get more removed from the messy real world in which failure is an everyday occurrence.

As I call on large corporations today for Dossia, I see these people every day.  I see them also in government and even sometimes in the not-for-profit sector.  They experience huge stress and expend significant energy worrying about low probability events.  In so doing, they increase the odds that something very bad will eventually happen to their organization, and, perhaps, to them.  When someone worries about low probability risks and tries to avoid them, they usually take their eye off the ball relative to higher probability risks and end up not being able to avoid them.

It’s sad, but I see large corporations inadvertently engender risk-averse behaviors by stupidly conceived downsizings and restructurings.  They announce a big layoff, take a long time to execute on it, and make everyone progressively more insecure, not just during the period of the layoff, but well beyond it.  Survivors learn the wrong lesson from avoiding a layoff.  They become more cautious and put their organizations at much longer-term risk.

I spent a lot of time talking about failures when I led Pitney Bowes, and getting people comfortable with the idea that, if they failed, it would not be the end of the world.  I met with many people we had asked to leave the company, and I deliberately told them that there was life after Pitney Bowes.  I shared my experience with failing at two successive law firm jobs, and being asked to leave the second firm.

This is a time unlike any in my lifetime, although every time period looks more stable and placid in hindsight than it was when people were living through it.  The good news about a turbulent time is that failures happen more often to more people, and there is less of a stigma attached to failure.  Individuals can experiment more, fail faster and more often, and find the right future path sooner and more painlessly than they could at a time when everyone is expected to succeed and failure stands out more.

We should be celebrating the intelligent and determined unsuccessful efforts of people, perhaps as much as we celebrate successes.  That is why, while I commented on Steven Jobs success a few days ago, I want to make sure that I give equal time to his failures.

Today, I have an I-Mac desktop computer, as does my wife, a MacBook Air laptop, as do my sons and my daughter, an I-Phone, as does my wife, and an I-Pod, as do every member of my family.  My wife even has an I-Pad, so she can read her emails more easily.

I prepared this blog, along with most others, on my MacBook Air, which is my work computer, since I take it everywhere.  It holds my PowerPoint presentations as well, and my Kindle software that enables me to read books anywhere I take my computer.

There are many things about the Apple technologies I do not like. There is an excessive drain on the batteries for the phone and the laptop.  The address books and calendars among my laptop, desktop, and I-Phone, do not properly synchronize, in spite of what Apple has advertised. The touch screen on the I-Phone is unresponsive, when I am hot and sweaty on a hot, sunny day.

Nevertheless, Apple Computer, under Steven Jobs, has profoundly changed many lives, including mine, for the better, as Mossberg has pointed out.  The I-Pod was the first Apple product I acquired.  It amazes me to this day that I can have the equivalent of five old-time jukeboxes worth of music of my choice anywhere I take this tiny I-Pod, and that I can dock it in a little holder at home and have it play anywhere in the house.  Jobs revolutionized music by enabling people to get individual songs of their choice from an online retail store legally, without buying albums and without having to search several retail outlets.  The old 45 records are the closest comparison to the I-Pod, since one could buy his or her favorite song individually, but even there, the purchaser also had to buy a song on the flip side of the record, and had to shop at retail stores to get the records.

The MacBook Air is a lightweight device of excellent quality, but, more importantly, it is supported by an excellent service organization that, for a flat annual fee, is able to deliver great telephone and in-store support with scheduled appointments or emergency support.  The Apple service capability, more than the quality of the computers and software, is what caused me to switch from a PC to a MacBook when I left Pitney Bowes.

The I-Phone has changed my life in many ways.  The instant access to e-mails, to a full address book, and to a calendar enable me to do business anywhere. The location service software has enabled me to find my way around places when walking, as well as driving, because of its GPS features.  It has replaced my clock radio and the hotel wake-up call as my alarm clock.  It has also become my camera and my snapshot album. It enables me to keep track of major news and sports items, and to look up information anywhere I can get on the Internet.  It will become extremely important as a repository for health records once clinicians, hospitals, and labs become as automated as pharmacies.

When I was in a rural part of Italy this summer in which my cell phone service and my Internet coverage was spotty, I was reminded of how we now take for granted relative to Jobs’ contribution to our lives. As I see stories about the uprisings in the Arab countries and in other parts of the world, I became even more appreciative of the degree to which the handheld devices Jobs invented put so much power in the hands of individuals that he has changed political systems and how people get elected and govern.

There are only a few people who leave that kind of imprint during their lives.  It is unfortunate that his health does not enable him to continue as CEO, but I hope that he finds the energy to keep contributing to our society and transforming it for the better.

These gaps matter because leaders cannot make good decisions when they do not understand that categories within which they think about the world are out-of-date or even just plain wrong.  Aside from the increasing complexity and interconnectedness in the world, there are three reasons for this:

• Senior leaders continue to be isolated from the day-to-day environment around them, even though isolation is having progressively riskier consequences;
• Everyone is operating in more fragmented media environments in which it is harder to get a holistic view of what is happening; and
• Even if we understand a particular issue, geography, country, market, or culture, it changes so fast that our knowledge become obsolete more quickly.

Senior leaders, particularly older white males, are isolated from what is happening in their organizations, as well as the societies of which they are apart.  In particular, they broadly underestimate diversity and complexity in our society, as well as other societies.

The “Isolation” Problem

When we are at lower organizational levels, we tend to mingle more with ordinary people.  As we move up in organizations and get wealthier, we tend to have assistants who guard access to us. We get higher up in an organization, and are expected to delegate decision-making authority to others, which is considered a good leadership practice.

However, these practices often cause us to get progressively more isolated from the people we lead, as well as other people who live more ordinary lives.  We live in more exclusive neighborhoods, join exclusive clubs for recreation, have people drive us from place to place, and have others perform tasks that touch ordinary people.  When we visit remote operations of whatever organizations we lead, those we visit shield us from the ugly underside of whatever location we are visiting. The end result of this progression up an organization is that we lose a sense of the increasing diversity and complexity in our society.

America and other developed countries have become more globally, racially, religiously, and racially diverse than ever.  People of color live in communities that we used to think of as being very non-diverse.  There are more immigrants from more countries than ever before.

As I have presented our film From the Rough to many potential investors and partners, I have been struck by how limited their knowledge of broader societal trends has been.  In the film, one of the story lines is a dating relationship between a white British student and a black female American student.  Some people have commented that interracial dating of that kind cannot be common.  They are shocked when I tell them that between 8-10% of all marriages licenses are being issued to interracial couples.

The film has international characters, one of whose members is a South Korean student passionate about hip-hop and gangster rap music and culture. Many viewers have questioned how true to reality a character like this can be, only to be surprised when I tell them there are several hundred thousand Korean-Americans each in the New York and Washington DC, and over a million in the Los Angeles metropolitan areas.  They are even more surprised when I tell them that a sizable percentage of young hip-hop dancers and singers are South Korean.

People also underestimate the degree of diversity in formerly homogeneous non-coastal American cities, towns, and suburban areas.  We have more immigrants in unlikely places, like the Vietnamese and Cambodians who work at Pitney Bowes’ Bucks County, Pennsylvania, facility, or the Africans who work at the company’s Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, facilities, or the Tongas from the South Pacific who work at the UPS complex in Louisville, Kentucky.

Throughout the country, we have refugee populations, which have built communities in unexpected places.  Many senior leaders are oblivious to these communities because they not only do not come in direct connect with them, but those interacting with the leaders never have occasion to tell them.

They also do not understand how diverse other countries have become.  Many people formed an image of Australia from watching Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee in the 1980’s.  However, almost 25% of Australians are first-generation immigrants.  Many people of Japanese origin live in Peru, a vestige of a time when the Japanese invested heavily in Peru.  Many entrepeneurs of Middle Eastern origin live throughout Latin America.  Toronto, Canada, is a great center of medical genetics research because over 100 ethnic groups live within its boundaries.

My wife, daughter, and I traveled to Italy already this summer.  For many years, I have seen Albanians and sub-Saharan Africans in Rome and other cities because of the more open EU immigration policies.

However, in the last few years, visiting Rome on business, I was surprised to be served by Indian desk clerks or Filipino hospitality workers at hotels in Rome.  More recently, I have been surprised to learn about the fact that about 90,000 Peruvians live in Italy, and that there is a fast-growing Chinese population.  In Northern Europe, before the financial crisis hit, the biggest issue Ireland faced was the influx of Polish domestic workers into the country.  Of course, the growth of Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East is not only noticeable in France and Germany, but in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark as well.

Today’s isolation is magnified by fragmented media channels and technologies.

In the 1960’s, we grew up in a mass media generation.  We had one TV set in a home, three national networks, and a very limited selection of films, AM radio stations, and other forms of entertainment.  Time Warner estimated that in 1968 it was possible to reach 80% of the core adult audience with three prime time TV media advertising purchases.

We received our news from one of three national nightly news broadcasts. Walter Cronkite of CBS News would end his broadcast every night with the same sign-off: “That’s the way it is.” Today, we would consider this laughingly arrogant, since no 30-minute news broadcast could summarize the world as “it is.”

Today, we are in very personalized and customized worlds.  The way we learn about the broader world is through highly fragmented media.  We do not watch the same TV shows, if we even watch them on a digital TV set.  We see a wide range of films in a variety of media.  We are exposed to global content as it happens.  We communicate by receiving broadcasts, and by broadcasting to a select group of friends through Facebook or LinkedIn.  To reach the core audience that three media purchases could touch in 1968, we would need to buy more than 115 ads.  A recent book called The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser argues that the personalization of content by Google, Facebook, and other popular web sites fragments us even more. I see it with my own children. The world my 25-year-old son experiences is far different from the world my 18-year-old daughter experiences, even if they are in the same place at the same time.

What this means is that, as a parent, an organizational leader, or an advocate for a cause, a product, a service, or an organization, we are far less able to grasp the world in which we are acting in any holistic fashion than was the case before.  Understanding the world our individual children inhabit is more bewildering than ever

What we think we understand changes more rapidly than ever.  Our knowledge becomes obsolete more quickly.

Technologies and markets change faster than ever, and, with them, our mental maps of how the world works get obsolete.  There are countless examples of this.  In medical diagnoses, we no longer think of “cancer” as a single disease, as we did when President declared a “war on cancer” 40 years ago.  There are over 100 varieties of breast cancer, and we are learning that “cancer” is a generic label for a medical condition in which certain cells either multiply more quickly or die more slowly than normal cells.  “Curing” cancer is not a meaningful term in many cases because, while we can eliminate all detectable cancer cells in the body at one time, we may not be able to eliminate what has caused cells to mutate and create new cancer cells.

The concept of a “genetic” link to a medical condition has changed.  “Genes” are not hard-wired as a cause of diseases, except in a small number of cases, but only come into play when ”expressed.”

Beyond medicine, the same need to redefine old categories comes into play every day.  Today, telephones operate as computers, and computers are used for telephone calls.  The Internet has converted analog voice into digital data streams.  The nature of workplaces has changed radically.  We may work where we are and we have connectivity to servers enabling us to perform tasks, rather than going to a particular location.

Geographic areas we visited ten years ago do not even look the same or have the same demographics.  Anyone who visits China today will see cities that bear no resemblance to the same places they visited 5-10 years ago.  Even in America, many cities or towns look different, especially if they have experienced an economic boom of any kind.

Overall implications

Leaders today have to be humble, flexible in their views of how the world works, and in a continuous learning mode.  Adults of my generation or earlier who climbed up an organizational ladder and believed that they had “mastered” a body of knowledge, a set of skills, or a group of people are the most dysfunctional people.

As an adult, I have developed humility and skepticism about my ability to lead others with the boldness and confidence that a predecessor generation justifiably may have had.  This world requires more testing and retesting of whether our fundamental assumptions about the word are valid and whether our messages mean what we intend to communicate, and whether they are getting through.

Many successful adults are in denial about this world. I hope we will find a way to reassert some common experiences, values, and insight as we try to address the increasingly complex problems all societies face.

Nevertheless, I grew up reading about historical figures like the Roman leader Cincinnatus who left his farm to serve in a leadership position, fulfilled his public responsibilities, and then returned as quickly as possible to his farm and his family.  George Washington was admired because he completed his two presidential terms, and then went back to his Virginia home.  Both of these leaders represented a set of values which placed public service above personal ambition.

My dad was a member of the International Typographers Union, which was noteworthy because it had term limits for union leaders.  I have also admired great companies like UPS because they have had implicit terms limits by enforcing early retirement rules for CEOs. I attempted to stay consistent with these values by retiring well before I could get drawn into believing that Pitney Bowes could not survive without me.

Public service has changed from a temporary service environment in which a very broad range of people are drawn upon for their expertise, their diverse perspectives, and their vision of the common good, to one in which a smaller, more ideologically rigid, less diverse, and more partisan group of people have established themselves as part of a relatively permanent government bureaucracy.  This is true of elected officials, appointed officials, government union leaders, and civil service managers.

Government at all levels has become like joining a fraternity in which there are vicious hazing rituals, exclusionary admission practices, and an isolation from people outside the fraternity once a member gets admitted.

This did not happen at once, but it’s time to take a brief look at where we are today.

Running for office or being considered for appointive office

A candidate for elective office opens himself or herself to every possible form of disparagement.  We need to be held accountable for our decisions, but the ability of opponents to disparage us or any member of our immediate and extended families without any accountability is outrageous.

This is an unintended consequence of a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision Sullivan vs. The New York Times, in which a plaintiff lost a defamation case because the Supreme Court held that, in the pursuit of free speech, defamation claims by “public figures” were subject to a much higher standard than claims by ordinary citizens. This much higher standard of liability made it almost impossible for public figures to sue those who disparaged them falsely.

The ability to “terrorize” someone running for office or being appointed to an office is far greater than ever.  The First Amendment framers could not fathom capturing an individual’s random remark with a digital video camera, posting it globally and permanently within seconds, and building a disparagement campaign around it.  In fact, dirty tricksters follow candidates to provoke them into intemperate remarks to post them online.

We have also created such a complex set of disclosure, campaign finance, and election laws that we have increased the cost of running a campaign exponentially, or even the cost of being considered for an appointive office. Incomplete, false, or misleading disclosures, especially of financial data, have been criminalized. What is disclosed becomes the raw material for further disparagement.

Much character assassination that occurs at the national, state, and local levels relative to government officials is a kind of violence, or, if not a directly violent act, an invitation to violence by others.

Throughout history, democratic societies have been served by the collective wisdom of imperfect people in an imperfect, but effective, system of government.  I worry about the effectiveness of a person whose life is so devoid of imperfections that he or she could pass through every conceivable public screen.

Being an elected or appointed government official

Even if an individual survives the rigors of either a political campaign or a high-stakes appointment process, we have made many incremental decisions that have crippled the ability of government officials to have a significant impact on the entities they lead.  Our civil service system, combined with collective bargaining for a sizable percentage of the government workforces, has created a long-term set of stakeholders that will outlast any elected or appointed official.

I strongly support civil service. The most compelling logic for civil service reform was to insure that government had a system for selecting as many jobs as possible on the basis of merit, not political affiliation, and that there be knowledge and experience continuity in the middle and first-line management ranks during senior leadership transitions.

The key to making civil service systems effective is that the system be designed to retain people with good experience, knowledge, and judgment, not to protect incompetent or even immoral managers from being terminated.  It is virtually impossible to take effective disciplinary action in any reasonable period of time against a non-performing manager in most governments.

If an elected or appointive official is blessed with competent and motivated people to make decisions and carry them out, that leadership cadre has very difficult obstacles in getting anything done. Requirements for open meetings significantly reduce candor required for good decision making processes to take place.  We do not share publicly every half-formed thought we have, especially on important issue.  We have private conversations with people until we have a good sense of what we want to say publicly.  The notion that even preliminary discussions must be in public is an over-reaction to the Nixon White House crimes, not a rational way to run government.

When I was growing up, we used to hear about decisions being made in “smoke-filled back rooms.”  Today, the back rooms may no longer be “smoke-filled,” but they exist, and they take place outside the regulatory reach of a government meeting.   Even in government, there needs to be a zone of privacy in which leaders can have small conversations in which they can formulate their policies and actions.

The other craziness with government is the obsession with process for its own sake.  Back in 1991 through 1993, I chaired a public-private task force appointed by Governor Lowell Weicker to implement the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments for large Connecticut-based employers.  The task force was filled with the best-qualified people, and it functioned very efficiently and completed its work within a relatively short period of time.

The task forces in which I participated over the last three years were larger, more cumbersome, and much less efficient or effective.  There was a much higher level of distrust and many more stakeholders felt that they had to be represented.  The groups became larger and the meetings degenerated from problem-analysis and problem-solving sessions to a series of speeches made by each participant.  The participants no longer saw themselves focused on the best outcome for the public, but for the group they represented and on whose behalf they were selected.

The other set of issues that make public service challenging were those associated with getting changes made.  We have made so many more processes subject to elaborate reviews, comments, and litigation challenges that it is extremely difficult to get anything done.

For example, we cannot renovate a bridge or road or rebuild it, even when it desperately needs renovation, without spending years studying the problem.  There has been a broad consensus for at least two decades, that the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River desperately needs rebuilding, but the processes for getting the work done are hopelessly complex and time-consuming.

We also overcomplicate what should be simple processes.  When I chaired the Governor’s Commission for Reforming the Connecticut Department of Transportation, I discovered that the State had made the hiring of an administrative assistant so complicated that the hiring manager had to interview all 28 qualified candidates, rather than the top 3-5 candidates.

Getting rid of non-performers is equally cumbersome.  My Reform Commission members who ran government agencies told me that the average time to terminate a non-performing civil service employee was 18 months, if the agency did everything perfectly.  This is ridiculous.

How do we solve these problems?

• Recognizing the problem is a start.  When good people are discouraged from joining public service, something is wrong.
• We should relook at every law, regulation, process, and procedure to determine whether it serves its intended purpose, and, if so, whether there are excessive side effects.
• We probably need to relook at the First Amendment, as it relates to the way the Internet and modern digital media amplify the effects of false statements, or even true, but misleading, statements.
• We need to retain the civil service system, but assess whether there is a point beyond which the protection of employment and of existing processes does not serve the ultimate merit-based system goal.
• We need a nationwide effort led by the President to rebuild trust among Americans.  Many dysfunctional processes are built on distrust.
• We need to reexamine campaign finance, election, and lobbying laws to see if they violate the rights of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights.  The Supreme Court case last year that struck down some campaign finance laws is a good start in provoking a national debate on the harmful effects of these laws.
• We need to reduce the criminally punishable financial disclosure and background questionnaire laws that discourage public service.

Whole industries and marketplaces, and often political and social paradigms, depend on people willfully denying reality.  In health care, the stubborn myth is that more care is always better care.  This myth enables health care providers to make more money, not have to make tough end-of-life decisions, and appear to be giving the patient what he or she wants.

Excessive care often puts the patient in worse position than if no care were given.  Many drugs are ineffective and have negative side effects. In certain cases, aggressive cancer treatments shorten life. Surgeries not only do not correct the problem for which the surgery is done, but create other complications.  The Dartmouth Atlas Survey, which was created by Dr. John Wennberg, has demonstrated over several decades that there is no relationship between the intensity and cost of health care across regions and the health outcomes.  It often happens that we spend more and get less for our money.

We willfully deny this self-evident truth, because, if we acknowledged it, we would have a health care system with different winners and losers.  Many high-cost health care regions would lose revenues and jobs.  More painful end-of-life conversations would have to take place. Society as a whole would be far better off, but many individuals would have painful readjustments.

Similarly, in the film industry, there is a deeply imbedded view that commercial success for films is totally random.  It is best reflected in how many people have interpreted a famous quote by William Goldman, an author and Academy-Award winning screenplay writer: “In the end, nobody knows anything.” Goldman meant to point out that making commercially successful films is an art, rather than a science, and that there are no guarantees of success.

His thoughtful observation has been distorted into a view that commercial success is totally random.  This view of success as being random is insidious because it denigrates the value of intelligent planning and execution, as opposed to the seat-of-the-pants decision-making many people make.  It turns every filmmaking endeavor into the equivalent of playing the exceptionally low-odds Powerball lottery. It also justifies making no significant changes to what intelligent film industry executives know is an unsustainable business model.

The unpredictability myth enables some to resist any changes in business practices that would increase predictability and likelihood of success.  Companies like Epigogix, which offers predictive modeling on film screenplays, and Opera Solutions, for which I am an advisor, which provides data analytic solutions for increasing the yield on film recommendations to customers, prove that, while results can never be guaranteed, the odds of success can be significantly improved.  There are many film industry executives who have developed extremely workable and intelligent business models, but what has made them successful has not been universally understood or copied.

Among politicians, a similar, deeply imbedded paradigm is that success is a result of luck.  Politicians, many of them far left Democrats, refer to taxes that redistribute wealth as “progressive” and as “ways to help the less fortunate.”  To them, the difference between success and failure is a function of how lucky breaks are distributed.

Success is a combination of smart decisionmaking and luck.  Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, argues that Bill Gates’ success was heavily influenced by computer access he had at his prep school.  He also gives many other examples of people who had similarly privileged access to resources needed for future success.  Bill Gates clearly had an opportunity not available to many Americans in the 1970’s.  However, Gates was not the only student at that school.  Others had the same access, but he was the only one who took full advantage of it.

In my life, becoming the CEO of Pitney Bowes involved a great deal of luck.  However, my work, and the assistance I received from family and friends over a lifetime, enabled me to benefit from the lucky breaks when they came.  I worked hard, deferred many gratifications, and experienced a lot of resentment from those who chose not to work as hard.

Other than lottery winners, there are no instant successes.  Many so-called “overnight successes” are really cases of people who have labored for years to be ready to take advantage of the one big break.  I wrote about this in a blog some time back about the difference between the way Bill Wyman accurately chronicled the Rolling Stones’ success, compared with how popular media described it.  Popular accounts of the Rolling Stones’ origins focus on the early partnership between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and imply that there was instant chemistry and genius yielding early success.

Wyman, a founding band member, told a different story.  The individual band members toiled for years as solo performers and members of other bands.  They experimented with different musical styles, inspired by artists like Lonnie Donegan who led the way with musical pieces that combined multiple musical genres. The Rolling Stones did not achieve instant success, but built the foundation for what appeared to be instant success after the Beatles led the way in the U.S. in 1964.

Even those cases of performers “discovered” decades ago in various Los Angeles area soda shops, such as Lana Turner at Schwab’s drug store, often leave out the foundational processes that led to the “discovery” or that followed it.  Turner grew up under very difficult circumstances, being born in Idaho and moved to San Francisco as a child, and worked hard to be ready for her break.  She made a number of gutsy decisions, including a decision to leave one studio and join another as a teenager.

With the exception of lotteries and those smart enough to take their casino winnings and save them, there are relatively few cases of lucky, overnight sustainable successes.  When people get lucky and win lotteries, they often are unprepared to deal with the consequences of success and either lose their money over time or experience huge disruptions in their lives. A great TV show in the 1950’s The Millionaire, depicted people presented with a tax-free million dollar check (comparable to $10 million today) from an anonymous donor, who often struggled to live with their newly-found wealth.

Adherence to myth is unaffected by one’s level of education and wealth.  Many educators with advanced degrees adhere to the myth that, if only we gave teachers and schools more money, the quality of education would improve.  Clearly, good educators would benefit from having more resources.  However, giving a poor or mediocre teacher a higher salary and smaller classes with more equipment and supplies in a nicer facility will not turn that individual into a better teacher.  Moreover, someone ill-equipped to teach does not get better with experience.  Teachers’ unions and other advocates of more education funding would be much more credible if they acknowledged that many members of their profession do not belong in it.

What do we do about these persistent myths?  First, acknowledge them in a non-judgmental way. Second, recognize that, if there is economic dislocation from changing a paradigm, such as the amount of health care we deliver, the way we evaluate potential feature films, and the way we fund education, we need to anticipate and address that economic dislocation.  Unfortunately, people rely on the rules of a marketplace, a business, a government, or a system, and we need to transition them to some degree to a new system. In the transformation of electric utility service, we call these obsolete systems “stranded costs” and we develop plans to pay for phasing them out. All this obsolete health care, education, and government infrastructure is a “stranded cost.”

Most important, we need to recognize that every myth or paradigm is a temporary way of thinking about the world.  We must stop reinforcing the notion that there is a fixed way of thinking about the world that, once learned, will give someone a permanent advantage.  Experience is valuable, but the most important lesson that we need to recognize is that, sometimes, experience gets in the way of insight.  The art of being successful is knowing when experience is useful and when it must be discarded.

Life is inherently uncomfortable and insecure.  We should not teach our children to seek security and certainty, but to build resilience, continuous learning skills, and the capability to address the widest range of life’s challenges.

Our government not only subsidizes home ownership through the home mortgage interest deduction, but it has created a variety of tools to enable lenders to make home mortgage loans to more people.  Lawmakers have always believed that broad-based home ownership is an inherent societal benefit, because they believe it creates a greater stake in the well being of the community.  Independent of whether owning a home is a good investment, American lawmakers want as many Americans as possible to own, rather than rent, their residences.

However, is this a good idea?  For someone who has a limited amount of discretionary income or asset base, using most of one’s discretionary assets to acquire a home may be a very bad idea.  If a person invests all of his or her savings in a home, the decision violates many principles of good financial management.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Buying a home with your savings is truly putting all your eggs in a single basket.  It is worse than that.  It is putting those savings in a highly illiquid asset that can only be bought or sold in its entirety.  One risk management tool any of us can use with stocks and bonds is to cash in a portion of our investment to protect the rest of the investment.  That option is not available for the purchase or sale of a home: it is an “all-or-nothing” proposition.

Don’t invest in an asset in which there are many independent factors that could significantly depress its value.

When we buy the stock of a public company, the Securities and Exchange Commission makes publicly traded companies describe a wide variety of risk factors.  The most common thread among these risk factors is the existence of single points of failure.  Companies have to disclose risks such as the dependence on a single product’s revenues, a single large customer, a single regulation, or a single patent or trademark.  In cases in which companies disclose these risks, they are considered “single points of failure.”

Airplanes have redundancy built into every critical system because airlines and regulators demand systems that cannot fail because of a single defect.  There are back-up engines, power systems, and controls.

Yet there are many single items that can cause the value of a home to drop significantly.  My wife and I experienced this with the first home we bought 32 years ago.  The federal government forced the state of Connecticut to allow trucks exceeding 80,000 pounds to use I-95, which was not far away from the home we had bought a few months before.  The increased noise and vibrations from the larger trucks significantly depressed our home’s resale value. We lost every bit of our equity.

We invested in a cooperative conversion project in New York City a few years ago.  We lost every penny of that investment because of tax law changes, and because New York City required every newly renovated or build housing unit to be 100% accessible to people with disabilities.

While we had successful real estate investments along the way, we learned the hard way that a single change in the law or some other factor outside our control can wipe out an investment in a home.

Don’t invest in something in which the other party has inside information and you do not.

The U.S. government, as well as every state, protects everyone who buys or sells a publicly traded security from the disadvantage caused by a party on the other side of the transaction who gains unfair advantage by having material inside information. However, there is no such protection in residential real estate transactions.

Buyers have the ability to get a home inspected and to do their own investigation about a home’s market value and the factors which affect it.  However, if a seller knows that someone is considering an action that will affect the home’s value and the buyer does not, the buyer is out of luck.  Similarly, if a buyer knows that a business is considering building on a piece of land and will pay premium prices and the seller does not, the buyer has a huge edge.

Don’t invest in something in which you have open-ended liability.

Homes are money pits (there was even a film by that name starring Tom Hanks some years ago), especially older homes that are often the ones available to first-time home buyers. My wife and I have had basement flooding, a leaky roof from the ice accumulation this past winter, and an underground oil line leak from a poorly insulated oil line.  Although we had sufficient resources to correct all these problems, they resulted in huge, unbudgeted expenses, even after insurance claims were paid.

When my wife and I were about to sign the contract on building our current home in 1993, our attorney Tom Skidd, from Cummings & Lockwood, told us that, before we signed our contract to get the home built, he would bring over something we had to review.  I expected to get a legal memorandum, or some educational materials on the legal risks of buying and owning a home, or an instructional videotape.  Instead, he gave us a videotape of the old Cary Grant-Myrna Loy film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, a wonderful movie that depicted not only the financial and technical problems of building and owning a home, but the relationship tensions a home buying or building process creates. He was and is a very wise person, and we avoided many pitfalls because of him.

The National Urban League and many of its affiliates, and Operation HOPE, a financial counseling firm, have done great work counseling first-time home buyers, and I am proud at what the Urban League has particularly accomplished under Marc Morial’s leadership in the last few years, since he reacted to the housing crisis with a far more expanded set of offerings than had been the case before that.

Final observations

The biggest single lesson from all this is that we need to rethink some long-held assumptions about the benefits of home ownership.  Having a stable and engaged civil society and people committed to the betterment of their communities is critical to the effective functioning of representative democracy.  Whether home ownership is the right way to achieve this goal needs to be re-examined.

What makes this article insightful is that it takes apart batches of job tasks and looks at the skills required for each one, and their replaceability by technology or self-service solutions.  Beyond the obvious example of toll takers, which, thankfully for all drivers, are rapidly disappearing, he points out that jobs which exist because of the need to move physical items or information, jobs which exist solely because supply is artificially limited or restricted, or which exist because of artificial or gimmicky price and value differentiations, or because of government-conferred monopolies will disappear over time.

We can think of many examples of these jobs.  Many other jobs we believe to be relatively secure and resistant to changing conditions will decline in number:

• Jobs that help people get from one place to another for work tasks and meetings may decline over time.  The simplest solution to traffic congestion is a reduction in travel of all kinds.  We can do more work on computers where we live, including meetings, webinars, and telephone conversations, that obviate the need for as many people to travel to a single place every day to fulfill their work responsibilities.
• Things we used to acquire through face-to-face retail transactions are rapidly being replaced by home deliveries or video downloading.  For example, every video rental store in our community has gone out of business in the last 18 months.  Video on demand or home delivery of Netflix movies has replaced what those stores used to do.
• Self-service machines are replacing humans in many tasks.  For example, in many cities, particularly in Los Angeles, I almost never seeing parking garage attendants in public parking lots.  We pay for parking at a machine and exit by placing our parking receipt into a machine at the exit.

However, even more interesting than these examples are the cases in which traditional professional tasks are being either replaced or downsized, done by people outside the United States, or done by people with lower level skills.  For example, in the health care field, many state laws still require laboratory tests to be ordered by physicians, which requires an individuals to visit a doctor’s office to get a reading on vital metrics like cholesterol, glucose, or triglycerides.  However, other states now recognize that the individual is capable of going to a lab, getting a test, reading the interpretive results, and then consulting the doctor, if needed.  These gatekeeper functions for physicians have to disappear because they are not good uses of the physician’s time.

Lawyers have begun to lose work to self-service functions for a generation.  Many people can draw up a variety of legal documents with a little help from the Internet, and can do more of the work on contractual documents that used to be done by lawyers.  The jobs that require professional credentials, such as lawyers and doctors have many tasks that truly require their credentials and experience, but there are many tasks that the client or patient can perform, and others that a less-skilled professional can perform as well.

This is significant because it suggests that, as Kessler points out, we will have many longer-term unemployed people from occupations that did not used to produce them.  The best solution for those people is to reinvent themselves, not to beat their head against a wall trying to find another job like the one they lost.  Generally, when a major newspaper, magazine, or TV show profiles someone who has been unemployed for a long time, that individual has trapped himself or herself in too narrow of field of vision in a job search process.

We have to teach those who find themselves unemployed to redefine their assets and their aspirations to look at opportunities where the economy is growing, not where it is shrinking.  The biggest challenge for unemployment is in those communities in which the entire community is depressed, in some instances, the entire country.  In a recent set of stories about Ireland, articles have commented on the fact that, at the peak of Ireland’s financial bubble, 25% of the population was employed in the construction industry.  This is similar to Las Vegas and Arizona.

People trapped in these communities who cannot leave need to create an export opportunity, in which they sell goods and services to people outside the community and bring wealth into it.  The most difficult challenge is figuring out what people somewhere else might need that an economically depressed community can create and export.  To perform this analytic process, depressed communities often need to bring in individuals to think more expansively about the communities’ potential than the people living in the communities can do on their own.

No job is secure because its requirements will change.  Some tasks will disappear and others will emerge.  Those who recognize this reality will do just fine.  Those who deny or fight it will be highly stressed out.