We were told to pursue our dreams. Reality may alter that. Be Ready!

Is Your Diploma Worth the Paper It's Printed On?

Youthful Rebellion

Bob Dylan once wrote, "20 years of Schooling and they put you on the day-shift." It was a smack at a system that was trying to assign all of us a number. Remember, Don't fold, spindle or mutilate? That was a counter culture rebellion against making all of us a data point. Both had underlying motivations in the desire to be valued as an individual. The Graduate was told his future was in plastics, and we snickered.

50 years later the data points have won. The best we can do is prepare for the future.

Gigging Millennials

Millennials are facing the brunt of a sea change in how we find work.  The Gig Economy is taking over. Estimates are that 34% of the workforce participates in the gig economy. Intuit is estimating that within two years that in two years 43% will be in the gig economy. Work in the gig economy is temporary, with the best gigs going to people with the right skills. The best jobs are in IT and computers. 

Education is how workers get the skills, but the model used by boomers, go to school, learn to think, get a degree and get a job isn't really working anymore. The required skill sets are much more specific. 

With that in mind here are some of the weakest majors for today's job market.

A posting from from CollegeGrad.Com ranks the Top Ten Worst majors for Jobs. You'll see a lot of majors that were popular through the 90's. It is not surprising that Liberal Arts tops this list. With liberal arts colleges charging as much as $70,000 per year for a full ride, you might have to question, "Is this really worth it?" It sure seemed that way when I went to school.

1. Liberal Arts/Liberal Studies
2. English
3. Humanities
4. Journalism
5. Art
6. Music
7. Theater Arts
8. Marketing
9. Public Relations
10. Management

The Only Constant is Change

Change is coming at us faster than any of could have imagined in the 60's and 70's. We're all struggling to keep up, and that includes educational institutions. According to the authors the book Careermegeddon - Cracking the 21st Century Career Code, Marcia LaReau and Neil Patrick assert events are conspiring to make good scarce and hard to retain. They cite six engines of change:

1. Globalization and offshoring
2. Technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics
3. Disruptive business models
4. Education and the speed of  institutional change
5. Demographics and the aging population
6. Fiscal policy

With job requirements changing so rapidly, and job skills becoming obsolete within five years, keeping current is the only hope for employment that provides a sustainable lifestyle. That coupled with the trend toward more contract workers makes the work environment a lot less stable. This book is a place to start working on your career plans.

Advancement and Education

Getting the right training and keeping skills current are essential, but are educational institutions able to keep up with the rapid change? When I went to college, we were supposed to follow our dreams. I was encouraged to pursue a career in a field that most closely matched my gifts and my dreams. It would all work out, and for 31 years it did. That is, until the great recession. Changes in how people consume media and age have conspired to force me to re-purpose myself, and I'm not alone.

Millennials and Uncertainty

Could it be as simple as a STEM education? It all depends on the direction. According to the National Science Foundation STEM careers in computing are going unfilled right now with many more jobs than qualified applicants. The same is not true for careers in engineering, physical sciences and mathematics. There are exceptions in engineering. Jobs that deal with extracting mineral wealth from the earth pay well with low unemployment rates. It's a highly skilled position with a limited number of openings.

The gig economy has highs and lows matched with uncertainty. It's an uneven ride. We all need to be prepared.

Music Makes Your Tasks Easier

You Probably Already Knew That

This blog isn't about what you and I might think our listeners ought to be hearing. It is about how a portion of our listeners spend their time listening to the music.  I've been through this discussion many times, but in order to serve your audience, you must have your audience in mind. You are here to serve the audience. There is no service of nobody is listening.

Core Values of Music

If you were part of the discovery of the Core Values Project, you might remember the revelation that the classical core used music as a way to help them concentrate on work and other tasks. Classical music has intensive and ambient qualities depending on what the listener brings to the music.

There's plenty of research to support that assumption.

The research was done by the Public Radio Program Directors Association. If you look at Qualities of the Heart and Spirit notice the top two qualities.

• Internal State (peaceful, soothing, relaxing)
• Inspired by Beauty and Majesty (of the music)

Head Clearing Experience

The Station Research Group published listener comments from the focus groups. Among them:

(3. CLASSICAL MUSIC CLEARS THE MIND AND HELPS LISTENERS FOCUS ON THEIR TASK)

• Classical music does alter your brain waves. 
• Has anybody else seen that? it has a physical reaction 
• …Lowers your blood pressure. 
• Yes, you can concentrate better. 
• ...Or whether it’s writing a poem and you just need the feeling. So then you want to listen to feeling. 
• It seems to be enjoyable yet you can achieve what you want to. 
• It just seems to help clear the way and make it easier. 
• It gives me something to focus on; it brings order into chaos. 
• If you listen to Bach, it just orders your mind. For some reason, if I have to do a lot of paperwork I love classical music
• I've heard they’ve done studies like Mozart stimulates your intellect or something.

Music Helps You Concentrate

Chad Grills, CEO of the Mission and publisher of the podcast The Story, wrote and article about 

The Science Backed Ways Music Affects Your Brain and Productivity

Among his findings:

• Music with lyrics works better with mundane tasks.
• Ambient music works better with more challenging tasks.
• Music can help relieve negative emotions like stress, anxiety and depression. 
• It can even decrease instances of confusion and delirium in elderly medical patients recovering from surgery.
• For the most part, research suggests that listening to music can improve your efficiency, creativity and happiness in terms of work-related tasks.

There are even some lines in the article you might want to borrow for your next fund raiser. The benefits of music could be applied to any format and platform.

Stepping Up Philanthropy

I read where David Koch said he was going to step up his philanthropic efforts. Koch called it his moral obligation to give more. He says he'll focus on medical research and arts.

There's plenty of up potential among the wealthiest and corporations in this country. Most corporations give less than 1.5% of pre-tax profits  and giving is way down.

The national trend, according Lisa M. Dietlin, president of the Institute of Transformational Philanthropy.“Corporate America is giving less and less,” said Ms. Dietlin, adding that overall, corporations constitute 5 percent of all charitable giving nationwide. She made her comments in an article published by the Observer in 2015 about the top ten corporate givers in the tri-state area.

The Big 10

Growing Income Gap

The Eroding Base

Pew Research published a report about the shrinking middle class. I remember learning that the strength of this country was it's robust middle class. According to Pew the middle class has been eroding steadily for the past four decades.

Looking at the chart below reveals growth of the wealthy ranks and the poorer ranks. The result is an increasing income disparity.

Why does this matter?

According to a report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, there is a reduction in economic growth as wealth becomes concentrated among a smaller portion of the global population.

The International Monetary Fund released a report in June, 2015 that outlined the problems created by the rising inequality in income distribution.

• Inequality affects growth drivers.
• Inequality dampens investment, and hence growth, by fueling economic, financial, and political instability. 

           Financial crises.
           Global imbalances.
           Conflicts.

• Inequality can lead to policies that hurt growth. 
• Inequality hampers poverty reduction. 

You can read more at Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality:A Global Perspective

The prospect of increasing crisis, global imbalances and conflicts does not seem to be a bright prospect. If you take the downturn of the middle class and combine it with the growing ranks of impoverished, you can see the consequences of the continued accumulation of wealth among the top one percent and what it means for the rest of us. 

More Guns - More Violence

I think you've heard the arguments before about...Good Guys with Guns.

If that is true, why are there 30,000 deaths a year from gun violence. Who, exactly, is being deterred?

Emily Badger's blog for the Washington Post questions the logic foisted by pro gun lobbyists.

More guns, less crime? Not exactly.

Pro gun lobbies like to cite research that more guns on the streets reduces gun violence. A 1997 paper by John Lott and David Mustard concluded that "concealed handguns are the most cost-effective method of reducing crime thus far analyzed by economists."

Not So Fast

Turns out Lott and his research have been discredited.  A more recent study written by Stanford's Abhay Aneja and John J. Donohue and  John Hopkins' Alexandria Zhang, goes one step further. It methodically picks apart the existing literature — including Lott's — and reaches a dramatically different conclusion:

Overall, the most consistent, albeit not uniform, finding to emerge from both the state and the county panel data models conducted over the entire 1977–2006 period with and without state trends and using three different models is that aggravated assault rises when [right-to-carry] laws are adopted.

In other words, more guns...more violence.

Food Going to Waste

Not Enough to Eat

People are going hungry everyday. According to Poverty.com 

About 21,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every four seconds, as you can see on this display. Sadly, it is children who die most often. Yet there is plenty of food in the world for everyone.

So Much is Wasted

Remember when mom would try to coax us to eat our vegetables or chipped beef with, "Don't waste your food! Think of all the starving people in China." A friend of mine had a snarky answer, "Name four!" I never would have gotten away with that one.

Apparently the food waste problem is much larger than we thought. According to an article in the Salt Blog by NPR's Alison Aubrey, nearly half of the food produced in America goes to waste.

The UN estimates it is a $2.6 trillion issue. 

Some are Willing To Help

A huge portion of the produce grown in the US is thrown out because it is imperfect. The produce could be donated, but it is cheaper for the farmer to simply throw it out, According to Aubrey's report seven states offer incentives for farmers to donate the food. The hope is that there will be more.

You can find out more by going to Aubrey's blog, including information about the grocery chain that will feature less than perfect produce in its stores.

To Tackle Food Waste, Big Grocery Chain Will Sell Produce Rejects

Why should we care?

The bottom line is that it costs our country more to ignore hunger than it does to do something about it. Check out this video from No Kid Hungry. 

Here's how No Kid Hungry breaks down the costs of hunger.

According to the Center for American Progress, the annual cost of hunger or its threat (i.e. “food insecurity) includes:

• $130.5 billion: Illness costs linked to hunger and food insecurity in America.
• $19.2 billion: Value of poor educational outcomes and lower lifetime earnings linked to hunger and food insecurity in America.
• $17.8 billion: Value of charitable contributions to address hunger and food insecurity in America.

Nobody should be going hungry. As individuals we can only do a little. As a community we can do a lot.

The Bike With the Chrome Dipped Frame

This is a story about friendship, community and sense of place.

This story begins in 1948

Milwaukee County built a Velodrome in Brown Deer Park for the 1948 Olympic Trials. Bike racing was part of the Milwaukee areas sense of place. Speed Skating was important to the European immigrants that settled in the area and worked in Milwaukee's machine shops. Many of the skaters from that area populated the Olympic Speed Skating Team. The muscle set used in skating was similar to the set used in bike racing. The races were the skater's way of staying shape in the warmer months after the skating rink in West Allis closed down for the season.

From hollandercycle.com

About a decade later I went to Brown Deer Park to watch races at the velodrome. The State Championships and the Nationals were held at the park that year. Watching these athletes fly around the track was exhilerating.  I was hooked. When the Milwaukee Wheelmen announced there would be stock bike races at their sanctioned races, I signed up. I dreamt that someday I would be racing against those great athletes competing at the velodrome.

One Thing

There was something standing in the way of my dream. I didn't have the kind of bike my competition used. I had a heavy old Schwinn with a coaster brake and streamers coming out of the handlebars. I may have even had mudflaps and a rearview mirror. They all had ten speeds! I tried saving up, but my meager allowance and the few dollars earned mowing lawns meant I would have enough money in about two years.

What I had was Pete. Pete ran the local bike shop. I had been hanging around the shop for a couple of years. Over time we developed a friendship. Our family had close relationships with many of those who provided services for us in the 50's and early 60's. Our TV repairman, the auto mechanic, the lady who ran the bakery at the grocery store, the man who remodelled our bathroom and kitchen, even the people at the haberdashery were all friends. We were loyal to them as they were loyal to us. Those relationships are a lot different than the retail and service experiences today.

 I told Pete what I wanted to do, and he was was willing to help. He had a pile of scrapped bikes in the back, and he allowed me to scavenge parts to try to build a bike. These were castaways. Many of the frames and rims were bent. The hubs were rusted and the brakes worn. The problem was most of the frames and rims were a lot heavier than those on the competition's bikes. I did manage to put together a bike, but the weight was only slightly less than the Schwinn. These bikes weren't anywhere near as fast as the ten speeds being manufactured by Schwinn. I raced with this homemade bike the first summer. I managed to place in a few of the races, but I could never compete on a consistent basis against the the much lighter and faster ten speeds.

A Great Offer

One day while looking for a lighter frame, Pete approached me and offered to help me build a bike from scratch as long as I acknowledged I got the bike from the Brown Deer Bike Shop. It was a marketing opportunity for Pete and a chance to compete for me. I did not hesitate. Through the generosity of my much older friend, I became competitive.

The stakes were higher that summer. The Wheelman had put up a donated track bike as the grand prize. It had a chrome plated frame, and I thought it could be my ticket to competitive sanctioned racing against the best in the state and the country. I won the first race! I was in the points lead. I could almost see myself riding on the chrome plated track bike.

Overcoming Obstacles

At this point some bigger and more athletic boys joined the competition with top of the line Schwinn ten speeds. I rode hard, but I started dropping in the standings. The dream of the bike with the chrome dipped frame seemed to be slipping away. To top it off, the guy with the points lead told me it didn't matter if he won the prize. I felt a pang of injustice. That wasn't the worst of it. There was another racer who was into trash talk, and with each defeat he made sure I heard about it. He boasted he would take over, vault past me in the points race and ultimately win the coveted track bike with the chrome dipped frame. For a while I let him get inside my head.

During the last two race dates, things happened that changed my outlook and built my self-esteem. In the fifth race most of the competitors in the stock bike races were on vacation. As a result, the points leader and I went head to head in a match race. The organizers first said there would be one race. It was a chance for me to pick up five points and be back in contention.  I put everything I had into the race and passed him on the home stretch. I was really tired but quietly happy. Then the organizers said there would be a second race. I had nothing left. He won easily. There was no way I could make up the difference in points in the final race. Still, I had eight more points. I was back in second in the standings.

Not His Script

Something else happened. The trash talker pointed out during practice next couple of weeks that if he won the next race and I failed to place, he would win second place. He boasted there was no way I was even going to place. He was laughing as he tried to get inside my head. I didn't rise to the bait. All I said was, "We'll see." He laughed again. The way it worked out, if I finished third I would have enough points for second place. I wouldn't win the chrome plated track bike, but I would win a gift certificate to Ware's Cycle Shop, one of the sponsors of the race.

During that final race, I came from back in the pack and finished third just a wheel behind the trash talker. When it became awards time...when they called my name for second...my tormentor stood in disbelief. I hadn't told him where I finished. When I accepted the certificate, I smiled for the camera, and I smiled at him. He still couldn't believe it.

I discovered during the match races that I had so much more in reserve. I found out I could compete and win even if I was not the most gifted, or the fastest athlete.

Out of that group I was the only racer that moved to the next level the next year. By doing so, I joined another supportive community willing to help as I continued to race for another five years.

Continuing the Tradition

My oldest son, Matt, is now racing.  He discovered last year that the bike he bought at a department store was way to heavy for competition. He asked me about where he could buy something lighter. We looked at new bikes. They were way out of his price range. He was disappointed, but I told him not to worry. I took him to a local bike shop in Bloomfield. It's a mom and pop operation. We talked with them about what Matt wanted to do and what he hoped to accomplish. It turns out they have a back room filled with used bikes. We found just what he needed. We've been back to the Bloomfield Bike Shop a couple of time for parts and service. They know Matt and they are willing to help fill his needs. He's experiencing that sense of community and loyalty I did back in the 60's.

Matt races in the State Games next week.