Gross says he gained confidence “from a few failures I had at the beginning—and maybe it came from realizing that a few failures at the beginning didn’t feel that bad. Failure that produces learning along the way is not looked on as a scarlet letter. As an employer, I find that when prospects come to me with failures on their résumés that they have taken accountability for and learned from, they are way more exciting to hire than someone who comes with a success that might have been due to luck. Every big company goes through hard times at some point, and having someone who has lived through that is very helpful.”
Successful creators, argues Gross, not only have a gift for seeing things before others do. They have another skill that is just as important, if less glamorous. They know how to get things done. “Getting stuff done is really underrated,” said Gross. “Bill Gates had a vision but then he just stuck with it and stuck with it and stuck with it. People laughed along the way; he just stuck with it. That you cannot teach … You can admire and learn from it.”
And as someone who is immersed in this world, Gross has no doubt that everyone needs to aspire to be what we call a creative creator or creative server, but he also believes strongly that there has never been a better time to do so. “This is a great time to be an entrepreneur,” he argues. “There is lots of money around. And if you make something happen that catches on, you can reach the whole planet with your idea. You have to make something that gets through the noise, but if you do, you have a global reach that is just unbelievable.”
Yes, And
Like Gross, the best educators understand that “extra” and “creativity” are not so much taught as they are unlocked and let out, after which they are usually self-propelled. One school that was designed to foster this is the forty-three-year-old Nueva School, a private school located in Hillsborough, California, between San Francisco and Palo Alto. Nueva is for gifted children. Few public schools can match the resources and teacher-student ratio of Nueva, with more than four hundred pupils and facilities such as a children’s workshop with every imaginable tool designed for students to build things. But the principles Nueva applies in teaching young people from a very early age to be creative are things that others can copy, because they don’t involve money or class size or even the individual genius of students. They involve intangibles, such as trusting teachers, helping students develop the confidence to take risks, and—most important—learning to say “Yes, and,” according to Nueva’s head of school, Diane Rosenberg.
Rosenberg says that she and her colleagues approached the issue of how to nurture creativity by starting with a simple question: Who are successful people in life? “As we looked around,” she recalled, “the answer was that they were people who pursued their passion with a purpose. And they were all-in in doing so. They did it with their entire being, whatever it was. They were pulled by something inside them, not driven.”
That being the case, she said, starting with the four-year-olds in pre-K, the Nueva School encourages all students to find those things that pull them from within, through a combination of classroom fundamentals and project-based learning. Everything starts with a solid grounding in the fundamentals, says Rosenberg, echoing Marc Tucker. “Creativity only comes from a genuine understanding of a discipline,” she said. “We try to provide a solid foundation of core concepts and skills and then encourage students to play with ideas which they develop a passion for. But you cannot play with ideas if you don’t have the core understanding.”
For instance, says Rosenberg, a class might be studying ancient Egypt. They first study all the fundamental information in depth, and then each student is encouraged to explore whatever aspect of that society intrigues him or her—science, the Pyramids, economy, culture—through collaborative project-based research.
“As a teacher, you have to let go a little,” said Rosenberg. You don’t know exactly what a student might want to explore. Therefore, “you have to know that the kids are going to ask questions that the teacher doesn’t have the answers to and that teacher has to be willing to say, ‘I don’t know, let’s find out who does,’” said Rosenberg. “It is about directing them and teaching them how to ask the questions and how to navigate that world … Part of that also involves creating a classroom environment where students feel free to pursue any idea without fear of ridicule, so that kids don’t feel they have to conform.”
Which leads to Nueva’s overall teaching philosophy: “Yes, and.” Explains Rosenberg: “When a student proposes a project idea, our teachers are encouraged to say, ‘Yes, and … would you consider taking it this direction?’” The idea is not just to accept any idea but always to begin by building on something coming from inside that student and then trying to guide it in a productive direction. But it has to start with saying “Yes” to student-generated ideas, whenever possible.
Self-motivation is vital now for other reasons as well. In a hyper-connected world where innovation takes place ever more rapidly, what a person knows today will be outdated tomorrow. In such a world one of the most important life skills will be the ability and desire to be a lifelong learner. If average is over, then school is never over. Some people are born with the curiosity and drive to keep learning long after they have left school. Others need to have it inspired in them, and that often comes from having had at least one great teacher who got them excited about a subject or embraced their own excitement with “Yes, and.” Wherever it comes from, everyone is going to need it because a better education today is one that prepares a student to understand a book that has not yet been written, to master a job that has not yet been created, or to conceive a product that does not yet exist. That is what students in their working lives will have to do, repeatedly.
“Trust,” “ownership,” and “self-propulsion” are important words when it comes to bringing out people’s extras, and Rosenberg uses them a lot. “All great teachers feel like they are working for themselves,” she said. And so do all inspired students. The more trust you bring into a classroom—the more administrators can trust principals, principals can trust teachers, and teachers can trust students—the more each one of them, more often than not, becomes self-propelled, doing more than anyone would ever think of demanding from them.
So yes, it is possible to teach creativity, not only with a radical new curriculum but with some very traditional old values: trust, ownership, self-confidence, courage, and most of all, two common indispensable words in the English language, used together: “Yes, and.” Surely every school in America has room for these basic values in its classrooms.
If Carlson’s Law is correct and more and better innovation is going to be coming from the bottom up and less from the top down, then a leader or teacher or principal cannot be effective without being able to inspire workers or students.
“You cannot command collaboration and creativity,” says Dov Seidman of LRN. “You have to inspire it and create a context and an environment and a culture where it can happen—and where people [who feel] united by a shared vision will then work collectively and collaboratively to make it happen.”
“Extra” also has to be inspired because, as we’ve said, for many people the extra they have to add will not be a software breakthrough or a rocket design or even the drive to exceed a sales target. It will be something simpler but all too rare these days: the ability to connect with other human beings in a way that no machine ever can—whether you are a doctor, nurse, salesclerk, or teacher. Seidman maintains that “this distinctly human ability to be humane, hopeful, and helpful” cannot simply be taught to people; it, too, has to be inspired in people.
“I Kill Jobs”
For all these reasons, the merger of globalization and the IT revolution has made average a dangerous place to be on the workplace spectrum, and one way or another everyone needs to find his or her “extra.”
No one has more bluntly summed up why average is over, and what it means for education, than John Jazwiec, who has headed a variety of technol
ogy start-ups, including RedPrairie and FiveCubits. Blogging on his website, JohnJazwiec.com, he confessed:
I am in the business of killing jobs. I kill jobs in three ways. I kill jobs when I sell, I kill jobs by killing competitors, and I kill jobs by focusing on internal productivity. All of the companies I have been a CEO of, through best-in-practice services and software, eliminate jobs. They eliminate jobs by automation, outsourcing, and efficiencies of process. The marketing is clear—less workers, more consistent output. I reckon in the last decade I have eliminated over 100,000 jobs in the worldwide economy from the software and services my companies sell. I know the number, because … my revenues … are based on the number of jobs I kill. I have killed many competitors. Again, I reckon I have eliminated over 100,000 jobs in the last decade. I know the number, because I know I have been in large markets, and have ended up being one of two companies left standing, where there were many more when I took over. Finally, I have killed many internal employees. When I acquire a company, some of the “synergies” [involve] eliminating duplicate jobs. When I buy productivity software or outsource for lower labor costs, I kill internal jobs. Finally, companies that grow demand internal people to grow. They attract better job candidates. Growing companies kill internal jobs by economic darwinism.So there, I have said it, I am a serial job killer.
He explained: “Any job that can be eliminated though technology or cheaper labor is by definition not coming back. The worker can come back. They most often come back by being underemployed. Others upgrade their skills and return to previous levels of compensation. But as a whole, the productivity gains over the last twenty years have changed the landscape of what is a sustainable job.
What, then, is a sustainable job? Jazwiec asks.
The best way I can articulate what is a sustainable job is to tell you, as a job killer, [sustainable jobs are] jobs I can’t kill. I can’t kill creative people. There is no productivity solution or outsourcing [strategy] that I can sell to eliminate a creative person. I can’t kill unique value creators. A unique value creator is, well, unique. They might be someone with a relationship with a client. They might be someone who is a great salesman. They might be someone who has spent so much time mastering a market that they are subject matter experts …
The largest factor in high systemic unemployment is a failure in our schools and workforce to recognize [that] we have entered into a “free agent” era of labor. Everyone is now a free agent. The days [when] people worked for one company have been gone for a long time. But the days where people could assume [that] if they worked hard and the company they worked for was successful, [this] made them “safe,” is now over. They are over because job killers like me are lurking everywhere … Until our children are taught to be individuals, until our colleges spend more time on creative application, and until we provide training and mentoring for before-gainfully-employed professionals, high systemic unemployment is never going away. In the meantime, the fully employed herd, without creative unique value contribution skills, will continue to be prey to serial job killers like me.
PART III
THE WAR ON MATH AND PHYSICS
EIGHT
“This Is Our Due”
If America had simply underestimated the impact of globalization and the IT revolution and failed to respond to them by improving our system of education, the future would be complicated enough. But we made comparable mistakes with our other two major challenges—the deficit and the intersection of energy and climate. Just when we needed to be husbanding our financial resources and spending every dollar of government revenue in the smartest way possible to advance and upgrade our traditional formula for prosperity, we did the opposite. Between 2000 and 2010 we added more to our national debt in a shorter period of time than during any previous decade in American history. And just when the flattening of the world not only created two billion more competitors but also two billion more consumers, just when some of those new consumers were getting the chance to live in American-size homes, drive American-size cars, and eat American-size Big Macs, just when all the rising energy demand from all these new consumers was affecting the climate and food prices and creating the need for cheap, clean, renewable energy, and just when China recognized all this and began investing heavily in wind, solar, battery, and nuclear power, America dithered, delayed, and underinvested in energy and in the wider foundations of its economic growth.
What makes this all the more troubling is that, unlike the challenges of globalization and IT—which many of us didn’t see or fully comprehend—our energy, climate, and deficit challenges were staring us in the face. In the past, we not only understood both problems; we took significant and often politically difficult steps to address them. This time around, however, we did worse than merely ignore these challenges. In the last two decades, a significant segment of Americans denied that they even existed.
To put it bluntly, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, America declared war on both math and physics.
Ron Suskind’s book The Price of Loyalty recounts the efforts of Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush’s first secretary of the Treasury, to block tax cuts he felt the country simply could not afford. According to Suskind, at one point in late 2002 O’Neill tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits—which were expected to exceed $500 billion that fiscal year alone—posed a threat to the economy’s long-term health. Cheney cut him off. “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said. Cheney went on: “We won the midterms [the congressional elections]. This is our due.” A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary, an old friend, to find another job.
Meanwhile, Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma and currently the ranking minority member and former chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, has called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
In that same vein, Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, went on Fox News Sunday (July 11, 2010) and declared—with no sense of irony at all—that when Democrats raise spending in one area, the spending needs to be offset by a spending reduction in another area, but when Republicans cut taxes in one area, the cut does not have to be offset by any cut in spending. “You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that’s what Republicans object to,” said Kyl. “But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” In other words, raising spending means that one and one make two: the deficit grows. But in the case of lowering taxes without lowering spending, one and one make one: there is no effect on the deficit.
It is as if the law of gravity applies to apples but not to oranges.
To be sure, not all Americans shared this gravity-defying logic, but those who did became a powerful enough force to shape America’s overall budget and energy and climate politics and to stymie reform. They prevented the passage of an energy bill in the 111th Congress and blocked comprehensive deficit reduction. No matter what we Americans say, we are what we do. And this is what we as a country have been doing: waging war on math and physics. We’ve been simultaneously engaged in deficit denial and climate change denial.
There is no other way to say this: Somewhere in the last twenty years of baby boomer rule, Americans decided to act as if we had a divine right to everything—low energy prices and big cars, higher spending and lower taxes, home ownership and health care, booms without ceilings and busts without massive unemployment—all at a time when the country was waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Libya. Our sense of entitlement expanded far beyond Social Security and Medicare to encompass … well, everything.
We went to war against math and physics to finance this fantasy. In reality, though, it was actually financed—as the character Blanche DuBois said in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire —by “the kindness of strangers.” In our case that was the willingness of China to lend us money, Saudi Arabia to keep us awa
sh in oil and petrodollars, and the market and Mother Nature to show us a certain forbearance. That kindness is surely running out. The choice we face is between reducing deficits and greenhouse gas emissions in a considered and deliberate fashion, and waiting for the market and Mother Nature to force us to do so—rapidly and brutally.
There is plenty of room for debate about the proper response to our energy and climate challenges. And there is plenty of room to debate when and whether to a run a deficit—to stimulate the economy during a recession, for example. And there is plenty of room to debate how large deficits can become without seriously endangering the economy. But it is factually, scientifically, and mathematically untrue that deficits don’t matter and that human-driven global warming that could trigger climate change is simply the invention of a global conspiracy of left-wing scientists and Al Gore.
There is something else that our math and physics problems have in common—their solutions. These solutions are not ends in themselves. They are the means to our larger goal—the place we are actually trying to reach. Our goal is to sustain the American dream at home so it can be enjoyed by the next generation and to sustain American power abroad so that the United States can play the stabilizing and example-setting role that the world wants and needs it to play. To achieve both we need sustainable economic growth. And to achieve that we need a systemic response to both our math and physics challenges, not a war on both. In math, such a response involves cutting spending, raising taxes, and investing in our formula for success—all at the same time. In physics, such a response involves increasing energy efficiency dramatically, investing more in research and deployment of cleaner power, and imposing a price on carbon. That, too, requires an integrated approach. We need to do these things not to punish ourselves for our profligacy but to reverse the damage we have done by making war on both math and physics, and most of all to assure economic growth in the future. If we don’t, to paraphrase Cheney, we will get what is our due.
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back Page 19
