Learning Without Scars
As a third-generation educator, it is easy to say that teaching and training are in the blood for Ron Slee. From his beginnings as a coach, through his time at McGill University, Ron developed a foundation for the work he does today. From working within dealerships, to operating a consulting company, creating a training business and running twenty groups, Ron has been directly involved in this Industry since 1969. Ron has been known as the industry expert for years, and has brought this expertise to bear through his training programs. Today, Ron provides specialized, job function based internet based subject specific classes, job function skills assessments, as well virtual seminars and webinars. These courses are designed for manufacturers and their dealers, as well as independent businesses in the construction equipment, light industrial, on-highway, engine, and agricultural industries through Learning Without Scars (www.LearningWithoutScars.com). This platform is a continuation of the work begun by Quest, Learning Centers which was established in 1996. This training is aimed at improving dealer parts and service operations through qualified people that are knowledgeable in using operational metrics and current market and operational best practice methods.
Learning Without Scars
Navigating the Future of Work: Addressing America's Skills Gap and Employment Challenges with Ed Gordon
Prepare to navigate the treacherous waters of America's employment and skills terrain with Ed Gordon, the sage voice behind the white paper "Job Shock" and the influential book "Future Jobs." As we dissect the alarming skills gap threatening to leave half of the workforce in the lurch by 2030, we dive deep into the crumbling education-to-employment pipeline. This episode isn't just a history lesson—it's a wakeup call to the systemic failures that have been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, and a rallying cry for the comprehensive solutions we so desperately need.
Throughout our journey with Ed, we traverse the pivotal moments that have shaped the workforce—from the era of blacksmiths to the technological tidal wave of today. We reflect on the transformative power of the GI Bill and the role of women during WWII, and address the decline in corporate training, leaving many adrift in a sea of self-education expectations. The value we place on teachers and their role in shaping a skilled workforce stands in stark contrast to the rapid pace of change in the employment landscape, raising crucial questions about our societal commitment to the future.
Our conversation culminates in a stark realization: a significant number of youth are adrift without the ambition or direction seen in their peers. We underscore the importance of providing guidance and opportunities to these young individuals, offering a glimmer of hope and a pledge to keep exploring what lies ahead for our children and grandchildren. This isn't just chatter; it's a mission to chart a course for the future of work and education, ensuring the next installment of our discussion will be as enlightening as it is imperative.
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Oh, and welcome to another candid conversation Today. I'm extremely happy to be welcoming Ed Gordon, who's from Chicago. He's been writing blogs and doing the Gordon Report for years now. He's in the desert, as you can tell from the back behind him. Good morning, mr Gordon. How are you today?
Speaker 2:Good morning, fine, thank you Thank you Good to have you here.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we've got a busy time. There's a lot of material to talk about. Maybe you could give people just a thumbnail. You'll have known each other now for 20 odd years from your book I think it was Future Jobs, right.
Speaker 2:Yes, here's the book.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:Future Jobs Solving the Employment and Skills Crisis. It was my 19th book on this topic Won a National Book Award from the Independent Publishers Association, and it's available on Amazon and you can order it all over the place, and it summarizes what you're going to hear today, as well as a white paper that we published after COVID, called Job Shock, because the COVID crisis made the whole employment and skills deficits even worse than it was before.
Speaker 1:And then it's on.
Speaker 2:This is on our website imperialcorpcom. You can get this free on our website, imperialcorpcom. Ok.
Speaker 1:So Future Jobs was stunning to me in a number of areas and let's not mess around, this is roughly 20 years ago. Right that it was published then.
Speaker 2:Future Jobs was published originally in 2013. And then I updated it in 2018.
Speaker 1:OK, so 10 years ago initially, and you suggested in there that by 2030, 50% of the American workforce wouldn't have the skills that would be required to have them be employable. Am I saying that correctly?
Speaker 2:Approximately. You're right, yes, and let me tell you, yes. I wrote a book called the 2010 Meltdown even earlier, talking about the huge retirement of 73 million boomers that started in 2010. Now this year 2024, more boomers are set to retire than ever before and the workforce is growing at a rate now of 0.2% per year and that is now projected to continue to at least 2032. So you have a very small number of younger people entering the workforce on one end and you have 73 million people who have retired between 2010 and 2030 on the other end, and about a third of those boomers were what I call skilled, meaning they were lawyers or they were plumbers, they were brain surgeons or they worked in advanced manufacturing or they could build a Boeing airplane about a third of them. So now the employers are struggling to replace those third of the baby boomers. Now, just today, this came out, and this is the Joltz report that the Department of Labor issues periodically. Officially, we have around 9 million vacant jobs. I suspect that that's an undercount by several million.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2:OK. Now one of the Federal Reserve Governors suggested that, in order to get interest rates down, that employers just stop reporting all these vacant jobs and then the Fed will lower interest rates. Well, there's a problem I have with that. Now the Fed feels that if employment is robust, it means the economy is expanding, businesses are borrowing more money and it's going to cause more inflation. All right. My problem is that two thirds of the jobs that companies are hiring right now are replacing people who have retired. All right, particularly smaller companies.
Speaker 2:The National Federation of Independent Businesses reports an all-time high number of companies that can't find skilled people. All right, so is this a problem? Yes, it's a problem. Is it going to go away? No, and the way many of you have filled those jobs is by poaching from other people in your industry or trying to import workers from other parts of the US or from overseas. Well, the problem is, this is a global talent shortage, and it's true all over the US now. So those strategies are bankrupt. Basically, there's no one left to poach.
Speaker 2:In other words, the skilled worker critical mass across America is now insufficient to support this fourth industrial revolution that we're going through, where machines, equipment, technologies and jobs are just becoming more complicated and, according to Georgetown the Center for Employment and Training, by 2031, 75% of all the jobs will require a 12th grade reading level of comprehension and math and a post-secondary component, a certificate, two-year degree, apprenticeship or four-year degree or more. And right now about a third of the young people coming out of high school qualify for that number. That was true when I graduated from high school, and that's 1970. And then we had a lot of low-skilled jobs that paid what you'll call a blue-collar middle-class level of wage.
Speaker 2:And this isn't 1970 anymore, folks. Those days are over. And this is not a Democrat, republican, liberal, conservative, deep state, chinese, russian conspiracy Forget all the conspiracy theories you want. And raising tariffs, putting a wall around the US and keeping all the immigrants out, fleeing from international business, nato, all alliances that's not going to solve this problem. This is a systemic collapse of the education to employment ability of communities to just basically produce enough educated people to fill your jobs. We aren't doing it. We're just not doing it, and it's critical. Now it's going to get worse, a lot worse.
Speaker 1:You know, if we look at all of the issues that cloud our heads, the only thing that drives the American society, if not all free societies, is people being able to enjoy worthwhile work that provides them a wage that is sufficient for what their needs are.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:And I think one of the responsibilities that we've kind of there's two sides to the coin that bottom me. One is I don't believe the educators in K through 12, trade schools or universities have done their job of creating work-ready people for our economy. I think that's the fundamental need for a country over their school system. Further, I don't think employees employers rather have done their job. I think what we've got ourselves down to is that a lot of businesses look at employees like tools in a toolbox. They need to sell more widgets. They'll go see if they can hire somebody else to make a widget. They bring the person in to make the widget, they show them what they want them to do, they train them on how to do it, they watch them get started and then they tell them do that, get better at it, faster at it, fewer mistakes, and that's your job. And if that job changes, I'll change you, I'll get rid of you and get somebody in. So the employers aren't doing anything to help develop the employee beyond the job function they were first hired for. So we have a stagnation in the employer side and low skilled people coming out of the school side.
Speaker 1:I know that's an oversimplification, but too many people in the industries that I work with have decided they make money to get rid of people, and it's true to the point that their sales numbers have gone up, that dollars have gone up, customer service has gone down, customer attention has gone down. The number of distributors in the channel has halved over the last 30 years. In other words, there's half as many people competing for the business. So if your sales don't go up, you're in trouble and your market share has gone down in the operating side of the business parts and service where everybody makes money and needs to make money because customer service is no longer there, because they don't have enough people to answer the phone or make callbacks or anything else. Again, I know it's an oversimplification, but that's a trap, and you spoke about this at a convention, I don't know five, eight, 10 years ago, and everybody's heard the words. Nobody's doing anything about it. It drives me crazy.
Speaker 2:Correct, correct. Okay, let's. I want to tell you a story that illustrates this problem. Now, this was an article that appeared recently in the business section in the New York Times and it's about how electric vehicles are killing or creating jobs. Now this is in Detroit and Ford has said now they're going to go and convert a factory from making regular gasoline cars to electric vehicles. Well, the workers are upset because it's going to kill jobs and they don't want them to do it. Now in Detroit, and another location is another Ford plant that closed a long time ago, and across the street is a technical college, and in the technical college they have a program where they're taking auto workers and training them to build electrical vehicles, and there's a grant from the state I don't know a Ford is supporting this or whatever so that if you sign up, the tuition is basically free, all right, and there are a lot of jobs right now they're trying to fill, okay, and the question is why aren't more? Question number one why aren't more of the Ford workers signed up in these programs to build electrical vehicles? All right, that's number one. Number two is Ford Motor Company encouraging them by giving them some time off and even subsidizing that process, so they have their workers, okay. Now, third question are the Detroit public schools educating enough kids to come out of high school so they have the basic reading and writing and math? And when you mean basic, I mean they can comprehend instruction manuals and computers and do the math. And now that's at the 12th grade level. Are they doing that? All right? All right, now let's just set that aside.
Speaker 2:Let's go back to 1890s or early 1900. Henry Ford was going to build the first cars. Oh my God, the blacksmiths were outraged. All those horses were going to be gone and they were going to be out of work. Well, now I have a question how many of those blacksmiths ultimately went and learned how to make a bottle of tea and work in a Ford plant? Well, some of them did, obviously, and that was a big transition from the farm and into the city, from the farm into the factory or offices. All right, and we made that transition 100 years ago.
Speaker 2:In fact, we created, we were the first nation in the history of civilization to create a public school system where everybody got some education, at least enough to work in a factory or an office. And then, in the 1920s, we actually went a step further and sent women to high school. Are you nuts? Women shouldn't go to high school. You're going to give them ideas. But we did that and my mother in the 1920s in Chicago was one among the first women to get a four-year high school education. All right, well, thank God, we did that.
Speaker 2:When World War II came along, rosie the Riveter, how many planes and ships and guns that they built. Of course, then they lost all those jobs, but we did pass the GI Bill and many men came back and went and got technical education as well as degrees and they became the skilled workers and the middle class grew and we've done more and we did a great job. So by 1970, we had the best educated workforce in the world. Really we did. And then Bill Gates screwed it up because he had to introduce those damn PCs all over the place. Remember, a long time ago, before many of your audience was alive, we had computer centers with the big blue IBM boxes. We're sitting on elevated floors in air-conditioned centers and that's where the computers were and the weird people working on the computers. Then we moved and we started putting those PCs everywhere in offices and factories etc. And that really screwed things up. So what happened? Well, for a while I have news for you Companies started training workers in order to use that equipment.
Speaker 2:And from the 1980 to the mid-1990s they set up corporate training and development. Some of them set up corporate universities, and actually there were several books written, all about the learning, organization and investing in human capital. Oh my God, this is incredible. And then around the mid-90s, someone said hey, we can put some software together on a disk. They had disks then and we can eliminate all those training programs and we'll just give you this software and you can go home and learn how to be a salesman or you can learn anything you want, all by yourself, and we don't have to have a training center anymore. So training started to retreat I know because I owned and operated Imperial Corporate Training and Development and it just gradually shrank down and down and down and down. And now we have maybe 20%, 25% of companies still train workers and the rest don't. We empower you. You go out and get the education and come to me and you can work for me, otherwise I'm not interested.
Speaker 2:So why was it in the 20th century that we developed this? Well, there was a demand for it and it was popular. Remember the space race? Who was going to get to the moon first? Well, when I was in grammar school and high school, they forced all that science and math down my throat. But we landed on the moon, didn't we? In 1969. And we had the National Defense Act that pushed more money into schools to train more kids in math and science. Well, that all ended. That was no longer a priority. We landed on the moon. So that's over, ok?
Speaker 2:Well, right now, who are the teachers? Who are the teachers that I had? They were mainly women and many of them were very bright. They necessarily didn't have a degree in education, but they were bright, and I got a pretty good education from those women and men too. Well then, we, we, uh, hey, we started allowing women to go into and become CPAs and doctors and attorneys and uh, and all these professional areas, and we esteemed those jobs.
Speaker 2:What about teaching? Well, you know. And now, hey, I'm a helicopter parent. My kid is bright, you know that, and he only gets A's or she only gets A's. So who goes into teaching?
Speaker 2:Uh, well, people who can't make it into business. You know that. You know, when Ed Gordon gets up in front of a business group. I, uh, I say I'm president of Imperial Consulting Corporation in Chicago. I don't talk about the 20 years I spent in the higher ad in business psychology history teaching, because numbskulls are teachers. They're not Now business people. That's different. Our business schools I did teach some business stuff. So when you say businesses aren't training, right, short term, but we don't encourage more people to go into education as a career either, because it doesn't pay very well and we don't really esteem educators maybe business people or professors in law schools, but other than them we really don't encourage that too much. And if I'm a parent, uh, my kid only deserves an A and I don't want any homework for that kid.
Speaker 2:And anyway, now, with chat GDP, you don't have to learn to write. You don't have to learn to read. And with the internet, uh, google, et cetera, all the facts are right there. You know, like, look at the two of us, the talking heads. You know all you got to do is go on and find a webinar. It'll tell you everything you need to know. You don't need to read a book, newspaper, magazine, no, and if, and you can rely on on the internet or social media and television for all your news, uh. So why aren't we doing more about, uh, skilled workforce? Well, society is not interested. We've moved beyond that. I yeah, I was at a world future conference a few years ago where they said that soon you could get a bachelor's degree and you could be totally illiterate, because all you needed to do was look at pictures.
Speaker 2:Yeah, isn't that wonderful, yeah, and I think your employer's that is that the kind of person they want to hire to repair an engine or build a ship or a plane? I don't think so.
Speaker 1:So in in in the midst of all of that, I agree completely, the computer is part of the issue. But I'm going to take it a different way, in that Alex Schuchler, who's a good friend of mine, who started smart equip, was sourcing a device for rental businesses. We call paper to glass. So here comes the computer and, oh, we got to do this. It's the latest and greatest thing. This is the fifties and the sixties. So I got to get a computer.
Speaker 1:So what did they do? They went for the volumes accounting parts, where the transactions were, where there was a lot of clerical work. So we had these card X cabinets and we had a box we had in one place where I was working we had about 150 feet stacked too high and clerks working the cards about five cabinets long. So we there were 30 or 40 people doing that job and you opened it up and you, you, you took a card and you could see everything. You could see what was in the warehouse, what the location was, what we sold, what we ordered when we ordered it, how long it took to get when we had back order everything.
Speaker 1:So the computer comes in. We got rid of all of that. We took it from a paper form of six parts, went all over the damn place and we replaced that with a screen that looked exactly like that piece of paper and instead of somebody writing on it, they typed on it. So congratulations, keep punching heads along. All of a sudden now, instead of being able to go to the card, and the information is current, it's now two weeks, three weeks, four weeks old. It's no longer any years. We did the same thing in accounting and it's it's so.
Speaker 1:I took data processing back in the 60s when I was in university. I wanted to work for IBM and they weren't hiring. When I came out and I got a job on a contract for a year to fix a problem that would have been created by the computer system, that the inventory had grown three, four, five times. And by the time I got there the return on capital employed was something like 15% and they said fix the problem. Okay, so we learned how to fix the problem, we learned how to use the computer, but the people that were working in the parts business in those days, they could have cared less. Their education wasn't sufficient to help them. Mine was, thankfully. But that is a. It's a asset that goes away. It's got a shelf life. Unless you stay current, you're toast.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So here we go. I had a similar programming languages, learned how to do a fair trend, cloball, all these esoteric languages where we could translate our English into computer understandable words, fantastic. So now you come forward and the customer has been left behind. Here comes the computer. The company's feeling better about themselves, they feel good, they're on the latest and greatest, they're building the Henry Ford Ford. Part of Kiddy's got up because they're making more money. And now we switch a corner. We can use the computer to make more money. We can replace people with this tool. And when they replace people they did it deliberately. They make more money. This is cool.
Speaker 1:But customer service went in the toilet. Right, I had eight guys working for me and I think it was 1970, that were at a counter and telephone parts business. And if you can imagine, if you could close your eyes and think of the building, you walk in the front door and it's right in the middle of this room. To the right of the front door is the counter with the eight guys and to the left is a small seating area, customer waiting and a receptionist and a telephone operator. And imagine me sitting in front of that door, about 40 feet away in my cubicle and I see the counter, I see the receptionist. That's what my view was when I was looking up this Friday afternoon.
Speaker 1:A guy comes in about 3.30, and it's a wonderful day, homes are ringing, there's people stacked at the counter is phenomenal. This guy comes in, he looked to his right, he sees the counter's jab, he goes over to his left, he sits down, picks up the phone. I'm watching this, ed. He picks up the phone, dials a number. I can see the operator pick up the phone. Then he asks for the parts counter. She sends the phone over to the counter. I can see a man leaving his customer, saying excuse me, I have a phone call here, do you mind if I? I'll be right back and he leaves the customer. He's serving to answer the phone. He answers the phone, he does all this stuff and it comes to the end. He said okay, we've got everything installed, I'll go pick it for you. Where do you want me to ship it? He said it's okay, I'll pick it up, I'm over here, all right. So we trained the customer that they've got better service if they use the telephone than if they walked in. And this is taking place in 1970.
Speaker 1:A little other side story every five years. And this was a category dealer in those days. They were heads and shoulders above everybody else's as far as market share and profit and everything else. They were going to serve it every five years of every customer that owned a machine anywhere in the world. They went and interviewed them with an employee and they published a report as to what they found, what was necessary, blah, blah, blah. All of that they stopped in 1965, and they converted then to doing 20% per year, not 100% every five. They thought, oh, this'll be better, it's less money for us and we get the same amount of information once every five years. That's cool. One of my friends and associates did that when he was working at Caterpillar. It's wonderful information. So this is 1970 now and the market share for parts. If you own the Caterpillar machine, you bought 83% of your parts from the Caterpillar dealer. Fantastic, and there's a whole bunch of reasons for that.
Speaker 1:But let's not go there. I'm putting on. I'm talking at a Caterpillar dealer meeting in Oaxay, mississippi about 2005, roughly, and there's a couple of hundred people in the room, one of which is the president of Caterpillar the United States. It was called the Commercial Division and I wander around the room like you do as a teacher. You know I wanna be there and I've got a lavalier and I got a hand mic and I see this guy and I go up to him and I said do you mind if I ask you a question? He said no, go ahead. And I said what's your market share for parts in the United States these days? And I wasn't sure he was gonna answer, but he did. He said it's 38.3% and I thanked him for being that honest and I said you know, of course, although you're probably too young to remember, but you know, in 1970 it was 83%. He said yes, I know our market share has gone down by more than 50%. This is to a group of Caterpillar dealers who were the reason for it going down by that amount.
Speaker 1:Caterpillar, about 10 years later, had a Wall Street Journal article about the fact that they were gonna get on the dealers but to become more proactive and get involved with their customers because they weren't getting the personal service business that they required. There's a problem with that and it's everything what you were talking about. Where are the skills? Who's covering the customer? So I wanna touch more customers. I'm gonna have to go on the market. I'm gonna have to hire a bunch of salespeople. That means somebody knows how to sell.
Speaker 1:Right right, and you know I used to. We were the first ones in Quebec to have a product support sales team in the Caterpillar world worldwide and the prerequisite said you're gonna love this. They had to have legible writing.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:When the argument came do we pay them commission for selling things or does the shingle sell? Well, the shingle won that argument. I mean, everything points in the same direction. Business is messing up, but they feel good about it because their sales are going up. And the only reason their sales are going up is the number of competitors that I have is shrinking. Right, and their employees are assets to me, the most important asset you've got. They're viewing them as tools in a toolbox. I don't have to do anything with these guys. I hire them. If they don't do the job, I'll hire somebody else. But hey, you can't hire somebody else, you can't find them. That nine million jobs you reference, I think that's low by a bunch.
Speaker 2:Oh, I do too. It's over 12 million.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we've got a whole bunch of people that have stopped looking. They're discouraged because they can't get you, because they don't have the skills.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, some of them have skills, but they need additional specific job training to do what you want them to do. Okay, and they have applied and applied and applied and again, most companies won't train them. So they have become very, very angry and they've taken other jobs, many of them part-time jobs, lower paying jobs, and they're angry about this because they are now losing their middle class economic status and are being forced down into a lower economic situation. And they blame and they're looking for what is doing this Okay.
Speaker 1:They want a reason.
Speaker 2:That's right. So if you're on the far left, you look at that and they say tax the rich and redistribute the income, or free college tuition. Many people start college and drop out because in the end they find out they don't have the skills to get through college courses. It's not a question that they're stupid. It's a question that their elementary and secondary education was insufficient. And they don't realize that until maybe they're 22 or 23 years old. And then they see how all those years were wasted because either they had poor teaching, or they didn't apply themselves, or their parents really didn't emphasize education, that that was necessary. They spent too much time on sport activities or other activities, so they're angry. Now, on the other end, people say well, the immigrants are taking away our jobs. Well, in all reality, we can't import enough skilled immigrants to cover all these jobs, all right. And now every country is actually looking for skilled immigrants, and many of those countries. Their populations are shrinking, literally, not just the workforce, but the overall population. Germany, france, italy, great Britain, canada, china, japan, south Korea all those countries have shrinking populations, all right. So, or America, first, let's put tariff walls around the US and we won't allow any. We'll build up our local industries. All right, we can do that and cut off all immigrants who. You can do that. That will cause tremendous inflation and we don't have the. We still don't have the skilled workers to.
Speaker 2:I'll give you an example of us. For years, imperial Corporate Training and Development, which was our training company that I ran, we had a large commuter railroad in Chicago. That is still there and growing and moves hundreds of thousands of people around. They could not get electricians, conductors, maintenance of way drivers or electrical people, so they had us run what we called workforce education programs. The majority of the people and those were recent immigrants to the US who needed English as the second language and they needed reading, math, writing skills. 15 trade unions ran apprenticeship programs for the railroad but you needed at least a ninth grade reading level to be in a classroom and function as a learner. We helped hundreds of those workers to get into those apprenticeship programs because this railroad could not hire people. They were good wages, some of the highest wages in the railroad industry. They couldn't find the electricians and others, and they're still doing that.
Speaker 2:We don't run that program anymore. They're still running those programs. They're investing in workers. Why are they investing in workers? Well, if they don't, they don't have a railroad. So why does Boeing invest huge amounts of money in training programs? Well, they need skilled technicians to put together those Boeing 737 airplanes. That's why they run the programs. They are having problems, like every other manufacturer, finding individuals who have the necessary educational abilities to learn, to learn how to learn. So this is true. Overall, manufacturing will be short a million workers within a few years. High-end manufacturing and their high-end and so is Airbus. Airbus is the same problem. And now they have quality problems.
Speaker 2:You read about in the news. I remember all the quality training that Imperial used to do in manufacturing and quality circles and team building and ISO 9000, all of these. That's all gone. We don't. You don't hear about quality. So the irony is this Companies are not training to save money and they, short term, they're buying back their stock. They're relying more on technology. They're lowering quality. Predictivity looks like it's up, but it really isn't. Long term, all they're doing is they're draining. They're draining the workforce out of skilled people. That's really what's going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2:And this fourth industrial revolution we could go back to. Hey, why don't we go back to 1970? Let's take all these, all this computer stuff and throw it away. Well then you'll have plenty of low-skilled jobs. Well, that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen in a million years. But when employers think they can take technology and that alone will run their business. I remember when AT&T, the Bell operating companies were wiped out and it was just going to be AT&T and George Allen was the new president, and the joke was AT&T stood for George Allen and two temps.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:Well, that's you know. But now what the companies are finding is that I maybe need fewer workers to make this widget, but they have to be able to run these computers and they have to be able to do all these other things as well. All right, and I can't find the people that can do that, so it's the educators. It's their fault, because I don't have time and money to do the training. They're sending in people who can't read and write.
Speaker 1:Right, we have enough people that we can blame. And you know, it's really strange that the comments you made about we cut back on training In the early nineties, everybody in the construction world, the associations, the manufacturers they stopped doing management training, stopped it All together. Right, it was too expensive, right. And I remember I taught, as you know, as you did, at university and I remember sitting in my house in the summer because consulting in the summer wasn't really a good time. You spend time with your family. You do different things. I sat in front of a computer, talking to the computer and created three 250 page books to go into management training. I went through the whole process of having my clients come in and test it. We created and then for 20 years more than 20 years, I did all the parts of service training for the associated equipment, distributors, the people you spoke with and parts and in service. We had three levels 15 hours a year, so there were 45 hours of total training time. And what my wife and I said is well, we don't need the big bucks, we can do this trust effectively. And we did the whole thing and we said to the AD okay, you don't need to do that anymore you don't need to pay somebody to do a class. We have the class. We'll pay you a commission for the people who come to our classes. And we varied it the more you send, the more you'll get. Everything's cool. We've done that for a long time and in 2000, everybody deemed well, that's too expensive. So we're going to go to webinars and the webinars is not going to be 15 hours away from home, it's going to be an hour in the office. So we built a bunch of webinars.
Speaker 1:I hated those damn things. I couldn't see my student. So we started, we shifted up on it. We used an eight foot by eight foot screen. We had a projection camera. My definition ran things from the computer and I could turn off remotely the screen and I could walk in front of the screen and they'd see me and I talked to them. So they saw me. I didn't see them. So it was a little better and I broke it into 10 minute segments, because that's the learning theory. And I started wearing Hawaiian shirts stupidity, because that became a brand. Everybody's saying okay, I wonder what shirt he's going to wear this month. I'm going to wear this week with this. So we did that for a while and that's what got me started we put everything on the internet, all of our classes and I'm going back to your chat GPT statement, check, gpd and the other tools that we have are wonderful for saving us time, but there's one thing that nobody really thinks about Somebody has to know what question to ask, and nobody's training them on the questions.
Speaker 2:Well, no one's training them how to think.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the issue Problem solved?
Speaker 2:They don't know. There are questions, there are a lot of others.
Speaker 1:So that process improvement thing you talked about, your member total quality management. Your member continuous quality improvement. Your member six sigma. Your member five s, all of these things they've gone.
Speaker 2:Right, Okay Now. Let's now talk about solutions.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay, good idea Because.
Speaker 2:I'm into solutions. That's the first half of this book. Is the problem. The second half of the book are-.
Speaker 1:Good answers.
Speaker 2:Who's doing something about it. All right, I was just talking today to a good friend of mine. His name is Jack Oaks. Jack Oaks was an adult education in Santa Ana, california, for his whole career.
Speaker 2:Santa Ana is near Disneyland, near Anaheim, and is a large concentration of small manufacturing that started to implode in the late 1990s as the Anglo population was moving out and the Hispanic population was moving in and the manufacturers could not find workers. So they created Bridge to Careers. This was a program with the Chamber of Commerce, the local business people and the school system. They contacted me because I'd written a book. You know what it was called Skill Wars, winning the battle for productivity and profit.
Speaker 2:So I worked with them on this Bridge to Careers and then it moved into they created something they called High School Inc. It was one of their high schools and they created six career programs. So this became a career academy high school. So it was a marriage of the liberal arts plus six business sectors that dominate Santa Ana, california, and they created the High School Inc Foundation. So now they have 50, 100 businesses giving money to the foundation to support these six career academies in this public high school. This is a public high school and it's become very successful. Now they are working to integrate this into the elementary schools. So when the children come out of elementary school in the ninth grade and they say I want to go into high-tech manufacturing, they're not reading at the sixth grade level, they're reading somewhere in your high school.
Speaker 1:Let me interrupt just for a moment because at the same time in Santa Ana there was a program developed called AVID in the education community, called advancement via individual determination. My daughter, who's got a master's in education, teaching in California, she drives that for her school district. She's doing this in middle school, that's grade six, seven and eight.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Every week, every student in every subject has to stand up and address their classmates for 15 minutes on something they learned on that subject this week. That's making a difference in their life.
Speaker 2:Okay, so Santa Ana is struggling to expand this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because, let's face it, this is collaboration. We're not into collaboration right now in our society. We're into confrontation. Who's the enemy, who's responsible for this skills disaster? You have an enemy's list.
Speaker 2:Usually, when I speak to groups, business or educators, the business people blame the educators, the educators blame the business and the parents. The business people blame the unions. On and on and on. It goes Well, guess what? High school link is made up of all these people and they trust each other and they're putting their money where their mouth is. Why are they doing that? It's called survival, because these local manufacturers are going to go out of business unless they can create long-term educated workforce. All right, now, that's one example. There's another Wisconsin. It's called the New North. These are the New North North. The New North these are 19 counties in Northern and Eastern Wisconsin. They have a lot of manufacturing and they too were running up against some of the same issues. I key noted two conferences, summits for the New North, and they have gradually now set up collaborations with technical and community colleges, expanding apprenticeships, trying to improve K-12 education in that area of Wisconsin.
Speaker 2:I've spent a lot of time in North Dakota. North Dakota is doing the same thing. Everyone was leaving the state. It's a tiny population and they did it to diversify the economy. They have aerospace in Wisconsin, they have pharmaceuticals in Wisconsin, they have a large Microsoft consulting center in Fargo, and they did it all for the same reason the children were leaving, the small businesses were going out of business and the tax base was going to hell.
Speaker 2:This was a collaboration between local businesses and their communities. The politicians got involved, democrat and Republican. Are we going to do that again? Well, I was very busy setting up regional talent innovation networks. Retain the kids, retain the businesses, retain the tax base. Grow the economy. Go into new business sectors because you rebuild your local workforce. That was very popular. I was very busy with this.
Speaker 2:I've written many books about this. Go on our website, imperialcorpcom. You'll see it all. You'll read all about this. Covid put an end to a lot of it because everything got shut down During that process. American learned hate-creator enemies list.
Speaker 2:Let's blame someone for our problems now. It's not me. It's not that I don't push my kids hard enough in school. My kids need time off. They need more sports, more video games, more Facebook pages. The teacher's not working hard enough and they need more education. It's not that businesses are so focused on short-term profit. I mean, I taught strategic planning. I believe in strategic planning, both short-term and long-term.
Speaker 2:So a large part of what we're dealing with here is the angst of our society right now, how people look at the future. Is there a future? What is the future? Am I willing to work with others in my community and take a risk? Am I willing to sacrifice something now to survive for the future? Now, those of you out there that say you know, ed Gordon's a jerk, he doesn't understand business I ask you this question how are your children, your grandchildren? What future do they have in this society? Are they going to live as well as you do right now? Will America still be the world-beater in technology and coming up with new innovation and ideas? This is a real crisis and there are people out there who are willing to deal with it in your community, but you've got to go out and look for them and ask and ask them and work with them to build a future for your community.
Speaker 1:I think that's a beautiful endpoint for this particular discussion conversation. What does the future look like for your children and grandchildren? And you know, ed, what I'd like to do is I'd like to follow this up in a month, let some people think about this, and then we talk about the answers to that. What does the world look like for your children and grandchildren? I'll just give you a sidebar for a moment. I've got two grandchildren, one's 22 and the other's 18. The 22-year-old is finishing her master's.
Speaker 1:The 22-year-old is in the Navy, in the Nuke program, where he goes to school from eight to four or five days a week, with two hours of tutoring, individual tutoring every day, 24-7, 365. I mean, there's no way to hide from this. Those kids are driven, they're ambitious, they work like maniacs, but that's the minority anymore, ed. They're fine. It's the 60% that don't have that juice, don't have that ambition, don't have that drive, and nobody and you just pointed to it nobody's giving them a path. So, if you don't mind, that's where I'd like to put it, koda, let's end this conversation there, unless you want to wrap it in a different way. I think that's a perfect end.
Speaker 2:OK, so everybody listening.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Yes, and please Talk to me in the early part of March.
Speaker 1:We're going to try and get on Ed's calendar the early part of April and we'll just continue with what's up for your children and grandchildren. So, ed, everybody mahal, thank you very much. We'll see you at the next Candid Conversation.
