Who is more American? Is it the Kenyan or the Mormon? Who created or destroyed more jobs? Is it the community organizer or the private equity economizer? The candidates are focused on attacking personalities and circumstances rather than reality.
But, what really happened to blue collar jobs? This answer is straightforward. Our blue-collar laborers became too [...]
I am a student of history, particularly economic history. Lately, I have been immersed in reading about technological innovation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Transportation was transformed from stagecoaches and steamboats to railroads, automobiles and airplanes. Electricity transformed communications from mail, telegraph and telephone to radio, television and now Internet.
In the process, [...]
Over the past two decades, I have often asked executives about their toughest problem. Not surprisingly, they use many different words to answer this question. However, there is quite a consensus around, “Running the enterprise I have while trying to create the enterprise I want.”
Keeping the existing enterprise running tends to be a very demanding [...]
I recently visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. One can question the whole “City on the Hill” imagery, but the Great Communicator was undoubtedly able to evoke a positive emotional response from me three decades after the original narrative. How does this compare to the Current Communicator?
Both Presidents inherited troubled economies– one could easily argue [...]
Much of contemporary analytics focuses on tabulating and portraying characteristics of existing systems, whether they are for energy supply, health delivery or a wide range of other complex systems. This type of analytics addresses “what is” or in many cases “what was.” This approach is backward looking, which makes a lot of sense if there [...]
We continue to anguish over escalating healthcare costs. To gain control of these costs, we need to understand one essential equation. The total cost of healthcare is
Total Cost = Costs Per Use x Number of Uses
Careful design of delivery processes to eliminate unwarranted care process variations can decrease the costs per use. Variations are unwarranted [...]
We often see dire assessments of our educational systems. K-12 is judged to be quite poor compared to other developed countries, as reflected in comparisons of educational achievements across countries. This is particularly true for STEM — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. More broadly, our high school graduation rate of roughly two thirds means that [...]
It is difficult to transform a large enterprise. Leaders of many private sector enterprises have told me that their toughest job is managing the enterprise they have while trying to create the enterprise they want. Not surprisingly, the failure rate is very high, as illustrated by 200% turnover in the Fortune 500 in the past [...]
I am pleased to report that this week John Wiley released “The Economics of Human Systems Integration: Valuation of Investments in People’s Training and Education, Safety and Health, and Work Productivity.” I edited this book with contributions from many economists, systems engineers, and behavioral and social scientists. The overarching question that motivated this book was, [...]
We seem to be in times of great uncertainty and potentially enormous changes. I have been wondering how different this is from the past. To answer this question, I reviewed our country’s first 40 decades – from 1620 until now in the first year of the 40th decade. How many decades would you guess there [...]
