2010-02-23

We need two school systems

Education in America could use a big dose of innovation. How about one public school system for employees, and another for entrepreneurs?

"Go to school and get good grades, so you can get a good high-paying job." In simpler terms that means, "Go to school to become a good employee." But there are too many employees, which is why we have an unemployment problem. Today, kids just out of school aren't finding jobs. At the same time, many of their parents are going back to school for retraining. But they're not finding jobs, either.

With low-priced labor and lower-priced, higher-performance technology, high-paying American jobs will be disappearing at greater speed as they move overseas.

The way to train entrepreneurs is almost exactly the opposite of the methods used to train employees. Another common thread about Ford, Gates and Jobs is that they all dropped out of school. This is not to say education is not important, but training entrepreneurs is different from training people to be employees. It is much like the difference between traditional education and the military academy model.

Many executives with MBA degrees focused only on money. Money was their only mission. If they could cut expenses by firing employees, so be it.

Mission: to create sustainable, well-paying jobs for employees by aggressive growth of the business. Too many executives are trained to grow the business through mergers and acquisitions, using massive amounts of debt. Though this might make shareholders happy, in most cases it rips the soul out of the business, loading it with debt while putting the jobs of employees at risk.

Creating real jobs

If corporate executives cannot grow a business organically, they will often repurchase their shares to make it look as if the share price is going up — again to keep shareholders happy and the CEO employed. This is business manipulation, and not the true mission of a sustainable business. The lesson learned is, a loyal employee is not as important as money.

the mission to create entrepreneurs who create sustainable jobs for the country.

Whether you agree with me or not, I hope it's clear that we need to create more entrepreneurs — since only entrepreneurs can create real jobs.

job creation by those who are true job creators.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/02/column-we-need-two-school-systems-.html