http://www.worthwhilemag.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/991

Great article about managing younger workers.

Guess what I thought I was going to do with my life?

Be a college professor!

An intellectual snob educated in New York, I thought the best minds were on the campuses of the American universities (especially those in the Ivy League). So I got my Ph.D. and proceeded to "profess" for ten years. I quit when I realized even I didn't look forward to my lectures (so how could a student) and that the "best minds" were engaged in minor league politics relating to department chairman elections and employee benefits committees.

But I didn't lose my interest in and love for education, so for the past twenty years I've been working on the sidelines and behind the scenes for all kinds of education reform, most recently involving eLearning.

After all these years, the team of activists with whom I'm working have decided that incremental reform at the margins isn't enough: what is necessary is complete systemic overhaul.

And that's NOT the disintermediation of the teacher through technology. Rather, it's the liberation of the teacher from lecturing, grading, and paperwork to enable him/her to interact on a 1:1 basis with a student to promote learning at the student's own pace.

It's our belief that eLearning transforms the teacher into a Socratic tutor, who can help propel students to mastery of whatever the teacher and society deems is the appropriate curriculum.

A little history:

Reading, writing, and education have always been intertwined. When writing was invented seven thousand years ago, it immediately created illiteracy. The ancient Middle Eastern desert dwellers could just as well have called it the �analog divide.�

Forty-five hundred years later, a Roman sergeant shouted instructions to his troops, and the lecture was born. Paper was invented by Ts�ai Lun in 105 BC in China; he profited handsomely. It took Europe another 1,000 years to re-invent papermaking.

In 1450, Gutenberg invented the printing press, and the cost of books dropped by a factor of 400, somewhat closing the analog divide.

During this entire period, most learning took place at the feet of some scholar. Only in the 1890s was the K-12 education system with its current components-- lecture, seat work, recitation and books-- penned into law.

Let�s blame Alvin Toffler3 for our current K-12 problems. The author of �Future Shock� named the global economic transformation: agricultural age begat industrial age begat information age. The waning of the agricultural age triggered compulsory education. During the recent industrial age our schools taught basic skills to most students and higher-level skills to those going into the professional ranks. With plenty of manual jobs, legacy education met the demand, and continuous marginal improvement adapted to evolving needs. Employers and the public were satisfied.

Unfortunately the information age upset the apple cart.

Since the 1950�s, blue collar jobs have plunged from 50% of the available employment to well under 25%, to be replaced with white collar jobs, while the professional ranks have remained relatively constant at 25%.

While basic literacy skills are mandatory for both manual and white collar jobs, many technicians in the trades now need a higher level of literacy and greater thinking skills than office workers. The rapid growth of this new demand has exceeded legacy education�s ability to deliver. Many leaders and public-private organizations have been working hard for decades to reform K-12 system. Faced with a large and complex system under decentralized governance they have made only limited progress.

Continuous marginal improvement seems no longer effective. So what about addressing legacy education from a systems approach?

Redesigning the K-12 curriculum to use technology correctly -- as an enabling tool, not as an artifact or as a replacement for teachers--can be the linchpin of this system redesign.

By using technology correctly, I mean using it the way it is used in the workplace: for basic skills development (for students), for professional development (for teachers), and for specific workforce development skills.

The transformation we've been advocating here in Arizona, which is equally relevant to any state, is called eLearning for Students And Teachers (eSATS).

The eSATS design has two steps that emphasize the connection between teacher and student. The first is the transformation of the teaching process from legacy education to eLearning.

Second is the movement of the digital curriculum and the computers out of the lab and into the classroom. A technology-rich classroom is a must. The ultimate transformation is full student access to a computer all day,starting with at least 4 students per computer and within a couple of years expands to a computer for each student. Who would expect a worker to share a computer in today's world? Why should a student? Laptops have the added advantage of extending learning into the home. There are already pilot programs where this is in effect, and they work.

Classrooms then become work spaces like those we all are familiar with. Why shouldn�t they be? If the grunt work of teaching can be done online � drill, grading, etc �the true work of teaching , which I believe is the training of young minds to solve whatever problems come up in later life, can occur.

What is Workforce Development and How Soon do we Start?

It�s summer, and ten junior high school-age kids are sitting in a room at the YMCA, while their classmates are perhaps swimming in the pool outside. Although they are mostly boys, there are two girls in one corner of the room. Each kid is here spending the day learning how to put a computer together, and learning the function of each of its parts.

The instructor is Ken Mystrom, Motorola Manager of Technology Partnerships and the Executive Director of a not-for profit called StRUT � Students Recycling Used Computers. He is training both the students and a YMCA employee, who will run the program for the remainder of the sessions during the summer. This is called training the trainer, and it�s a tried-and-true method of transferring knowledge and expanding its impact.

Motorola has been partnering in the community with StRUT for 6 years, (along with Intel, APS, Sechler CPA, IBM, and High Tech Institute.) Programs like these are important to large corporations who regularly upgrade their PCs and consign thousands of still-useful machines to the landfill.

This particular event is called �Minor League Techie Camp.� The program is getting bigger and bigger, especially since the YMCA gets to keep the computers the children rebuild. The partnership started in a single school, and has expanded all over the state. You can see how Ken himself is charged up by all this; he loves seeing how quickly the children learn. It�s hard to believe that Motorola actually pays him to do something he loves � make kids happy.


The kids, who have a Powerpoint presentation about computer components in front of them, have already heard a short talk about the pieces of a computer, and now they are busy assembling power systems and mother boards on the chassis. Ken walks around the room, making sure everybody�s machines are going together correctly, reminding them to double check their work. He�s really teaching them several things at once: teamwork, communication, computer assembly, a bit of engineering, presentation skills, and even�because the Y keeps the computers � the concept of philanthropy.

�The black screws go into the hard drive, a gold ones go in the CD-Rom,� says Ken. The drives are held in place by snap-in trays. It�s complicated, but Ken tells me that by the end of the day, working in teams, everybody will get a machine assembled, some in as little as fifteen minutes.

These machines are licensed to run Windows XP, so the computers aren�t outdated. There�s real value here.

But this is about way more than putting computers together for the YMCA. This is about preparing kids for the future, and not for a future of assembling computers.

Motorola sponsors these programs because the company believes it is preparing not only its own future employees, but everybody�s; Motorola believes this is the responsibility of a company known for a lot more than technology leadership. Despite the reorganizations and downsizings, Motorola�s commitment to its communities remains solid.

Why? Because although it�s a public company and has a responsibility to shareholders, Motorola has always taken the long view of its community relations, and after years of being one of the country�s largest employers, some of its programs are actually embedded into the community in the same way its chips are embedded in cell phones.

The Minor League Techies Camp is only one of them. Motorola also sponsors a program for teacher education, in which the teachers come to businesses to learn how the skill sets they are teaching need to be integrated in a work environment. The teachers are learning that their individual subject areas don�t exist in a vacuum, and that when students reach the work force, they will have to know much more than just math or English: they will have to know how to collaborate, how to value their colleagues, how to share resources, and how to solve problems. That�s what their students are learning in Minor League Techies Camp.

Interestingly, most kids learn these skills in pre-school, only to forget them (or fail to practice them) once they being to concentrate on �subject matter areas� in school. So if we are ever to straighten out our public education system, we will have to think about more than just math, science, and reading. You know that area we used to call �social studies�? Well, maybe we just have to re-name it �workforce development.�

Bathroom

the home we saw

more construction

interior courtyard

kitchen

under construction

View from a house rooftop

Hotel El Camino Real from the Bay

They turn into this

Green construction: earthen bricks

Courtyard in the hotel

The hotel

The marketplace

Mission

The first Spanish mission

Cupola recirculates the air

The homes in Loreto Bay - bath

On the boat in the Bay

Central Loreto

The Hotel in downtown Loreto

Drugs!

Here I am in Loreto Bay, Mexico, taking a look at the dream of an entrepreneur. I�m here partly on a vacation and partly on a fact-finding trip, because in the past year a place I always thought was a third world country with an unstable currency has suddenly become one of the hottest places to invest in real estate.

I used to go to Rocky Point thirty years ago, when there wasn�t even any electricity there. It was fun to stay in my friend Bob Smith�s house, which he couldn�t really OWN, he could just lease, because of the vagaries of the Mexican government. I think he lost the house in an election that threw out foreign investors.

Au contraire, for every Mexican dying in the desert to get across the border for a job, there seems to be a Baby Boomer looking for a home by the water and the attitude of manana. And the Mexican government is very anxious to have us.

The Village at Loreto Bay is being built to cater to those Boomers. Jim Grogran,the visionary entrepreneur, acquired from the Mexican tourist agency Fonatur a piece of land directly on the water at the Bay of Loreto, between two already-built hotels and a golf course. He is building a 6000 home sustainable development with a spa and a golf course on this land, and he has already sold 400 homes (the hardest ones to sell). He has a lottery going to select lots; you have to pay $5000 get into his preferred buyer program. This despite the fact that the homes start at about $300,000 and very little financing was available until this weekend, when GE Capital came into the deal.

Grogan�s tag line for this development is �Live fully. Tread lightly.� The area around the Bay is a marine reserve, into which commercial fishing boats can�t venture. We went out on a boat ride this morning and our captain (who moved here from Mexico City, bought the boat and now also has a real estate company) told us that no one in Loreto, which was the original capital of California, and the first of a series of Jesuit missions from Mexico to San Francisco, begs for food because there are so many fish.

Grogan is going to build on only 25% of the land, leaving the rest for open space. He envisions an active lifestyle, in accord with the surroundings, He wants his community to be a model of sustainable development throughout the world. He is, however, bringing a hospital into the town of Loreto, five minutes away, so his north American residents will have quality medical care. If you buy in Loreto Bay, you won�t be roughing it.

But he is not building parking lots or parking garages with the homes; the entire community is designed to be a pedestrian environment. If you drive down from San Diego (fifteen hours), you�ll be parking your RV at the gate. He�s doing organic farming and planting around the homes, with a plant list restricted to what normally grows here.

The homes are built of earth brick and cinderblock in traditional styles and colors that match those of the town, and even have optional cupolas at the top to circulate the air. They have internal courtyards and painted ceramic sinks. And yet the whole community has wireless Internet (you know I�ve already scoped it out).

The old town of Loreto is itself very beautiful, although there�s no denying it�s in the desert. I suspect that the missionaries who created it imported a lot of Spanish plants. It has long been a tourist destination, but not for high-end tourists, who have all adopted Cabo san Lucas. All the better.

Our captain told us that pirates used to hide out in the next harbor over from Loreto, a town called Puerto Escondido (Hidden Harbor). As a result, many of the residents of Puerto Escondido still have names like Davis, Cunningham, and Morgan. This is not exactly the center of the universe even today.

Because I have been watching developers realize big dreams for forty years, I don�t think Jim Grogan is crazy for trying to build a natural, environmentally appropriate community in a third world country. I think he will get it done. If you want a place in the lottery, I can get you one ?

When was the last time you went to the ballet? (Ballet is the place where men of uncommon strength lift women of uncommon grace and carry them about in the air and then launch themselves with graceful leaps from one end of the stage to the other. Very physically demanding. Very graceful. Like tennis or golf, it looks easier than it is.)

For me, the ballet era was about twenty years ago, when my kids were still young enough for the annual Christmas performance of "The Nutcracker." I can still remember going out to ASU�s Gammage Auditorium to see a traveling company from somewhere like Salt Lake City that hired a few local "extras" to play the children in the production. You can never judge a ballet company on its production of that old chestnut, but I remember thinking it wasn't very exciting. After all, I grew up in New York, looking at the New York City Ballet and the Joffrey.

I lost track of dance (except disco) when my kids became teenagers, and all I remember was that Duke Tully, then publisher of the Arizona Republic, tapped Alan Rosenberg, a local bank president, to start a statewide ballet company. Shortly after, there was a succession of publicity around fundraising shortfalls and the usual hand-wringing about how people in Phoenix don�t support the arts in town, even though they give generously to the organizations in cities they came here from.

Over the past two decades, it seems we "saved" the ballet almost as often as we saved the symphony or the opera, all three of which were forever in danger of disappearing..

Fast forward to the 21st century, and Richard Florida(www.creativeclass.org) and Joel Kotkin (www.joelkotkin.com - urban legends) are wrangling about what makes cities attract the "creative class" -- that elusive group of young, educated, enlightened people who presumably vote with their feet about where they want to live. Florida believes cities have to be hip and gay, with vibrant downtowns and thriving high rise communities. Kotkin believes that cities need to attack fundamental problems, like job creation for immigrant populations.

But there's no argument from either side against the prime place of the arts in a successful city. The arts go under "quality of life," that elusive combination of lattes, museums, winning pro ball teams, and star-quality chefs that give cities panache. Never mind New York and San Francisco, we�re in a global competition. Think London.

Everybody expects the arts to be vibrant in a big city. When I first moved to Phoenix in 1968, some arts were missing entirely, and some were pathetic. However, Phoenix is now the fifth largest city in the country. The theatre is vibrant here; we have built the Herberger Theatre and the Dodge Theatre, and we have dozens of really excellent theatrical companies, from dinner and mystery theatres, to Black Theatre Troupe and the Jewish Theatre, to Arizona Theatre Company and Childsplay.

The visual arts are also excellent. There are gallery "scenes," with established Art Walks in both downtown Phoenix and downtown Scottsdale. The Heard Museum is known around the world.

And on Saturday night, at the opening of the Surrealism exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum, I stood face to face with many of the familiar paintings of my childhood that had travelled west from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was really cool to see Tchelitchev's "Hide and Seek" in the neighborhood.

So what happened to the ballet? Well, Alan's son Bob asked me to attend the season's final performance, titled "Innovations," and I have to say I was stunned.

Not only is the ballet alive and well, it is renowned outside the city, although most of us don�t know that. The performance I saw was phenomenal.

Ballet Arizona�s artistic director, Ib Andersen, was lured here from the New York City ballet where he was a principal dancer for a decade. The ballet has been invited to perform in Russia this summer -- Russia, the home of ballet. And it played to sold out performances at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, another home of ballet.

To me, Ballet Arizona is like this year�s Phoenix Suns. It�s a team with great chemistry and extraordinary physical talents. Watching �Innovations� was like watching Amare Stoudemire, John Nash and Sean Marion in the playoffs�I wondered how they could do what they did with human bodies.

Too bad ballet doesn�t have instant replay. Too bad ballet highlights aren�t featured on the six o�clock news. Too bad ballet isn�t presented in an arena. Wait for next year.

For the first time, I went to the National Business Incubator Association conference. This organization, which has been in existence for twenty years, has members from all over the world.

It was worth the trip: my friends from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation were there, and Marianne Hudson, the executive director of the Angel Capital Association (run by the Kauffman Foundation) tells us that most business start ups in the US get their startup money from credit cards and the entrepreneur�s own resources. This is not news to me; I deliver this message to at least one would-be entrepreneur a day. Only about 200,000 businesses get friends and family funding every year, and a mere 50,000 get funding from angels.

However, angels are still responsible for up to 90% of the outside equity for startups. Although they get all the attention,VCs provide only about 2% of startup funding, having bailed on the startup arena. Better yet, if you�re outside Silicon Valley or Boston, although 85% of venture capital went to ten states last quarter, angel groups are more geographically diversified.

Entrepreneurs don�t really want to think about this, but angels are their neighbors, and they invest for profit. Most angels who have been active for any period of time are sadder but wiser as a result of the dot com debacle, during which they overvalued companies, lost big bucks, and got crammed down in the companies that survived..

Today, although an angel group typically sees up to one hundred business plans a month, they narrow their focus to ten companies to visit, and only one or two to fund. And angels come in two flavors: those who prefer the glitzier pre-VC activities and those who provide the only funding for a given company. With all the glitz attached to venture capital, the pre-VC investors are still worried about being crammed down by institutional investors coming into later rounds.


Kauffman has determined that there are 200,000 currently active angels, but between 1 and 5 million potential angels. Last year, angels invested 22.5 billion in 48,000 startups. And the really good ones are also outstanding mentors, because they were entrepreneurs themselves.

But angels are private and hard to find. They also have a wide variety of sophistication, so if they are not sophisticated, they�re not much use as mentors. Some of them can even mess up a startup. (Not all money is good money.) As an example, if an angel group doesn�t hold back some money for a follow-on round, you can start your company and then be left in the lurch if you�re not a candidate for venture capital. Dumb money is a bad investment, so angels are useless unless they aggregate brain power as well as money.

So the growth of angel organizations is helpful not only because it locates angels for entrepreneurs,but also because the organizations educate their members to make them more valuable resources for the businesses they fund. Typically, the angels do their own due diligence. In a group of angels, there�s invariably someone who knows the industry, someone who knows the management, and someone who knows the market.

Good news: there has been a tenfold increase in angel organizations over the past decade. And now that the Kauffman Foundation has stepped in to codify the processes and provide training, there will most likely be a proliferation of angels.

What do these angel groups look for? Someone who has done it before (experienced management); a thoughtful business plan; a good presenter; a strong, although not disruptive, technology; companies that run lean; companies with no debt; companies in which the entrepreneur has invested his or her own dollars; and a founder who is coachable. In the end, angels invest in people: �we back jockeys, not horses.�

One thing I�ve learned: as an incubator, we have to build good relationships with angel groups. I suspect we already have those, which is something in our favor. We�re probably a reliable source for angel groups. However, another thing I�ve learned is less fruitful: most angel groups make only 1-2 investments per quarter.

What does that mean? To me, it means the world needs more angel groups. You should hear how the Chinese government is getting behind business incubation in Hong Kong! One of the Hong Kong incubators is actually run by a former Phoenician, a Motorola engineer who got laid off and went back to China. To his surprise, the government gave him $20m to incubate companies in three specific niches. The R&D is done in China, which is using foreign IP now, but developing its own. In ten years, China will no longer be an importer of R&D.

The Angel Capital Association (www.angelcapitalassocation.org) says it only has 3100 angel investor members. The average size of an angel group is about 43 members, and its average investment $350,000. Come on angels�we need your help if we are to compete with China.