My 90-Second Video on How to Get Promoted in a Recession

Getting Promoted During a Recession is one of a series of 90-second career musts videos I did recently as part of my work as Contributing Editor for career matters at U.S. News & World Report.

My 90-Second Video on the Job Interview

Ahead-of-the-Pack Job Interviewing is one of a series of 90-second career musts videos I did recently as part of my work as Contributing Editor for career matters at U.S. News & World Report.

My 90-Second Video on How to Write a Resume

Ahead-of-the-Pack Resumes is one of a series of 90-second career musts videos I did recently as part of my work as Contributing Editor for career matters at U.S. News & World Report.

Commencement 2.0: How I'd Change the Graduation Ceremony

Traditional rituals have benefit. Older people especially find comfort in them.

But the young are, well, too young, to feel much nostalgia. At commencement ceremonies, many mainly feel bored: "I can't wait for it to be over. I'm starved."

I've written often on reinventing education but not heretofore on education's capstone. Here's my vision for Commencement 2.0.

• Every graduate, as she or he crossed the stage to get the diploma, would give a one Twitter-length (less than 140 characters) speech. The audience would be encouraged to tweet each other about it in real-time.
  

(To avoid the ceremony being longer than an hour, if there were more than 100 graduates, there would be a separate ceremony for graduates within each of a university's colleges or majors. In a large high school, there'd be a ceremony for each academic subject. Each student would attend the ceremony of his or her favorite subject.)

• One non-graduate would get to give a blog-post-length (200 words ) speech.
  
• All the above would be enshrined on a monument to be prominently placed on campus. (or if a virtual university, on its website.)

The New Ideas the Republicans Need

It's widely agreed that to avoid becoming irrelevant, the Republican Party needs new ideas, better ones than the Democrats'.

If I were drafting the Republican Party's platform, these would be its central planks:

Schools and colleges must issue a report card on themselves. Today, schools and especially colleges get away with terrible-quality teaching and have essentially no accountability to students. Every school and college should be required to prominently issue a report card on itself (spot-checked by government) to prospective students and their parents. The School Report Card would report (on an A to F scale):

• How much growth in reading, math, thinking, etc. its students make--broken out by initial achievement level.

• Graduation rate. The report released two days ago by the American Enterprise Institute shows the shockingly low percentage of college freshmen who graduate if even given six(!) years--it averages only 53% across so-called four-year colleges, but even that is misleadingly high because the most selective 100 of the nation's 1600 "four-year" colleges have extraordinarily high graduation rates--because they accept mainly superstar students.
  

• The results of a customer satisfaction survey, in which students (and in the case of K-12 students, parents) rate the quality of the school's teachers, curriculum, campus climate, and extracurricular activities.
  

That Report Card would end up doing more to improve American education's quality than all the blue-ribbon panels and massive spending we currently force onto the taxpayer. For example, a school or college knowing that its poor results will be prominently posted on its website, will feel greater pressure to improve. Another example: The government continues increasing the amount of taxpayer-paid grants and loans to college students. That merely allows colleges to raise tuition more. They colleges correctly calculate, "Now the students have more money. We can raise tuition." We give the colleges all of that taxpayer money while requiring less accountability from them than we require of tire manufacturers, which must mold into each tire's sidewall, its tread life, traction, and temperature rating.

The New Republicans will create a nation of entrepreneurs. If we're being honest, American manufacturing and even most services will never be able to compete with low-cost countries such as China and India. And businesses need ever fewer and fewer locally based knowledge workers, creatives, and leaders, in part because ever more work product can be transmitted over the Internet and because services such as GotoMeeting, WebEx, and Skype are making worldwide virtual corporations ever more viable. Sure, short-term, our tax dollars can create government jobs for such workers but with other countries successfully competing with us, there will be fewer tax dollars to pay those government workers.

The only way to create sustainable, good jobs is to create new, important products and services. And key to that is entrepreneurship: a nation of people trained to keep their antennae out for unmet needs and with the skills to convert those unmet needs into viable businesses, those that can make money without cutting ethical corners and which can afford to pay their workers a decent wage

The plan to create a nation of entrepreneurs has two components: 1. Make entrepreneurship a required subject in school and college. It's far more important that every high school graduate have entrepreneurial skills than that they know the use of the doppelganger, quadratic equations, stoichiometry, and the causes of the Peloponnesian Wars. 2. Increase the quantity and quality of Small Business Administration- and private-sector-offerings: business-plan and business-operations courses, and the use of current and retired successful entrepreneurs as mentors for aspiring and ongoing entrepreneurs.

True Freedom. Republicans like to paint their party as the party of freedom yet many want to restrict women's rights to choose if and when to have a baby and whether gay people have the right to marry. Internationally, the Republicans (as well as many Democrats) tend to meddle in countries that choose to have a government it doesn't like--whether Latin American countries on the left or right-wing regimes in the Middle East. The New Republicans must respect that it is not their way or the highway. They need to honor the libertarian wing of its party so that it is not hypocritical when it calls itself the party of freedom.

Health care is a right but the same level of health care is not a right. I believe that, by virtue of being human, everyone is entitled to basic health care: preventive and routine diagnosis and treatment by a nurse or nurse practitioner not of one's choice, expensive specialist-physicians and treatments only when clearly cost-effective, etc. If you pay--whether fee-for-service or into a new single-payer government-run system--you're entitled to choose a physician, more readily get to see specialists, and have access to a fuller range of treatments, even those which, from a population-wide perspective, may not be cost-effective.

The New Republicans will treat taxpayer money as carefully as their personal money. The government, Republicans and Democrats alike, spend taxpayer dollars as though it can always print more. (Whoops, it can.) The problem is that when you print more money, each of our dollars are worth less, so we have less buying power, our savings are worth less, and our children's future is mortgaged. And if we keep diving deeper into debt, America's credit-worthiness withers, which means that the mammoth cost of servicing our debt will continue to grow and eventually no one (read, China) will lend to us.

The New Republican Party must treat taxpayer money as if it were its personal money. That means fewer and more tightly-budgeted projects, and importantly, requiring good evidence of cost-benefit before spending. For example, the Democrats are massively funding efforts to control global climate with little regard to cost-effectiveness. So many respected climate scientists remain uncertain that even the unimaginably expensive efforts and painful restrictions being enacted and contemplated will make much difference. Too little attention is being paid to cost-benefit and risk-reward. You and I don't go into great debt on wildly expensive, risky schemes. Neither should the government with our tax dollars.

What do you think? If you were drafting the planks of a new Republican platform, would you include the aforementioned? What changes would you make in them?

How Foolish Are We to Stand for Government Motors?

Wayne Root, who ran for VP on the Libertarian ticket points out that every time the government tries to run something, it's driven bankrupt or nearly so: Social Security, Medicare, Amtrak, education (large and mushrooming budgets yielding insignificant improvement). And now it's going to attempt to, with our tax dollars, run GM, allowing large amounts of car costs to go into union pockets instead of into increasing the quality of its vehicle parts and assembly. And we, like sheep, continue in our Obama-induced stupor and say okay to Government Motors. Here's Root's argument, which is an excerpt from his forthcoming book: The Conscience of a Libertarian.

Government Can't Run a Brothel
By Wayne Allyn Root

So we've just put government in control of General Motors? Well that should solve the problem. The same people that have run the American economy into the ground now think they can run an auto company. Has anyone thought this through? Government loses money at virtually everything it does and touches. Virtually every level of government operates at a loss (deficit). Government can't spell, let alone achieve, profitability at anything. Government is the most disastrous and inept failure at everything it does of any organization in the world. It only survives its colossal mismanagement of everything by raising taxes and therefore confiscating more money from the private sector- filled with people who are competent and do know how to run a business and achieve profitability. In other words, government only survives by confiscating money from smart people in the private sector to pay for its mismanagement, waste, corruption and nonstop failure and losses.

Government runs Social Security. It is fast approaching bankruptcy. Government runs Medicare. It is fast approaching bankruptcy. Government runs education. Education runs through tens of billions of dollars each year and yet somehow manages to produce worse results virtually every year (and always demands more as a reward for utter failure). When government took over education, America's children were ranked among the best in the world. Today our children's educational record is among the worst in the industrialized world.

Government took over Amtrak in the same way it took over GM, promising a quick return to profitability. Amtrak bleeds losses every year for the U.S. taxpayer. In 1970 when Amtrak was founded, $300 million was approved by Congress to run it. The government predicted profitability within 5 years. That was 39 years and over $30 billion dollars in losses ago!

Government is promising (again) a quick return to profitability. Yet these are the same government bureaucrats who have produced a deficit of $1.75 trillion per YEAR. These same government bureaucrats have produced a national debt of somewhere between $60 trillion and $100 trillion (depending on how many years out you predict the responsibilities of Social Security and Medicare). Our national debt is now larger than world GDP (every dollar created in the world each year). You actually think these same people (with the track record above) can takeover GM and turn a company that loses billions per year into a profitable company in a short period of time? We've now put the world's most inept and corrupt bureaucrats in charge of GM, and we expect improvement?

But here's the clincher. In my adopted home state of Nevada, prostitution is legal (and always profitable). It is impossible to lose money in the world's oldest profession. The most profitable brothel ever was the infamous Mustang Ranch. The owner earned so many tens of millions of dollars, that he grew fabulously wealthy. But he “forgot” to pay his taxes. He was indicted for tax evasion, escaped to Brazil, and is still today a fugitive from justice. The U.S. government took over the Mustang Ranch. The most successful and profitable brothel in America went bankrupt in one year under government management. That ladies and gentleman, no matter how you feel about brothels, tells you all you need to know about the ability of government to run a business.

One more “small problem” with the government's plans for GM. They are keeping unions in charge. Virtually nothing has changed. The same unions that destroyed GM with bloated salaries, pensions and healthcare for life go on running the workforce (with a few small changes for “show”). Yet the government is also demanding that GM change strategy and focus on building small cars with green technology. Those same smaller cars are the least profitable that can be built. There is very little profit per car. The big gas guzzling cars and trucks actually had the highest profit margin. Yet even these big trucks and SUV's could not pay for the bloated union compensation plan that destroyed GM and Chrysler. Now we have the worst of all worlds- companies run by Obama and his minions- all people with ZERO business experience- demanding that we keep paying unaffordable union wages, while we build small cars with lower profit margins. Are you starting to understand why our country is $100 trillion in national debt? Our country is run by people who couldn't run a lemonade stand. The only thing that Obama and his hand-picked executives are capable of doing successfully is fining or arresting the lemonade stand owner for not getting the proper government licenses.

The moral of the story? Nevada is a state where the constitution bans income taxes and politicians (we limit the time politicians can meet and serve), but welcomes guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. We have common sense in plentiful supply. Here's my common sense tip of the day: If the federal government can't run a brothel, they certainly can't run GM. The same people responsible for massive deficit and debt, losses, waste and mismanagement on the federal level as far as the eye can see, should not be put in charge of any company. We are in deep trouble.

Best Blogs for Advancing Your Career

The people at blogs.com asked me to create a list of the top 10 career blogs. Candidly, I don't regularly read any blogs but search the blogosphere and Net on a just-in-time basis: If I need info, I google for it, which takes me to sites and blogs. But if I wanted to read blogs to advance my career, these would be at the top of my list:

How to Change the World: Practical Blog for Impractical people." http://blog.guykawasaki.com. Guy is a master at using tech tools such as Twitter and LInkedIn to abet your career. He also comments about and links to the best new career/biz-related books, e.g., What I Wish I knew when I was 20." and In Pursuit of Elegance.

Gary Hamel's Management 2.0. http://blogs.wsj.com/management. Recent post titles in this Wall Street Journal blog: Empowering Natural Leaders in Facebook-Generation Ways, Nine Ways to Identify Natural Leaders" and Management Moonshots: the product of a discussion with 35 distinguished business leaders.

startupnation.com/blogs. A multiple-author blog, this one is gratefully career counselor-free. Instead of their usually too generic advice (network, feel the fear and do it anyway, etc.) this site is long on practical specifics. Recent posts: Help for Small Biz: SBA Backs Interest-Free Loans, how Merchant Services Work, 15 Questions to Measure the Strength of Your Home Biz.

TheChinaObserver.com. I believe this is the rise of the Chinese empire and the fall of the American. Chinaobserver.com is my first-choice blog for figuring out how people outside of China can figure out how to capitalize on the China boom.

Allthingsworkplace.com. Recent posts: Are You Really Developing Leaders, Which Comes First: Job Performance or Job Satisfaction, Four Tips for Presenting at the Meeting Table, Speaking? Three Ways to Satisfy Your Audience.

ben.casnocha.com. Ben Casnocha is the smartest (and nicest) young business-oriented guy I know. His blog shares his musings about business and entrepreneurship. He's especially good at questioning conventional wisdom.

Businesspundit.com. Recent posts: Accrual accounting for non-accountants, 25 businessmen who broke the rules (and some laws), 25 Well-Paying Jobs Most People Overlook (and why.)

Science blog + genetics. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog+genetics. I'm betting that genetics will do more to help the world (and create lots of great jobs) than any other innovation. Written in plain English, this blog would keep me current, easily.

Hit and Run. Reason.com/blog. When I start to think I'm crazy for being nervous about the mammoth transfer of jobs from the private sector to the government and government-mandated sector, I get a reality check from this intelligent libertarian-leaning site.

Marty Nemko. martynemko.blogspot.com. You'll hate me for saying this but I truly believe this blog has the most useful advice on most topics related to advancing your career, for example, salary negotiation, overcoming procrastination, managing anger, succeeding in small business. Yes, you'll have to click "career advice" on my tag cloud to avoid having to read my posts on politics (libertarian-leaning,) race (reverse discrimination is rampant,) and men's issues (men are treated poorly relative to their merit,) but I think you'll find that worth it.