Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Bot Vid: Quadrotor. James Quadrotor.

The University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP lab has done it again–another quadrotor video that’ll make you gasp. This time the team has taught a swarm of quadrotors to play the James Bond theme tune on a selection of musical instruments. It’s astonishing, and even comes with its own special Bond effect light show. On a more serious note, the swarm precision here demonstrates how hugely complex tasks could be performed by groups of these machines. And the drum-tapping bot is a hint at how quadrotors may find a use performing repairs or clean-up jobs on the outside of structures like skyscrapers.

Unemployment has been high for far too long, and voluntary turnover has slowed to a crawl in just about every sector of the economy. So why are employers worried about a talent shortage?

That’s the paradox Deloitte has been tracking since 2010 in its longitudinal survey series, “Talent Edge 2020.“ The latest report, released in January 2012, asked executives to list their three most pressing concerns about talent. The top concern for corporate leaders was brain drain–over 70% were highly concerned about retaining critical talent over the next year; two-thirds expressed the same concerns about high-potential employees.

These worries are well founded. Only about one-third of employees at larger companies expect to stay with their employers when the recession ends. Of course, employees with mission-critical leadership skills don’t even need to wait for the economic tide to turn, and many are not.

And leadership is key. As Good to Great author Jim Collins has demonstrated, leadership drives great business performance; the absence of leadership doesn’t just invite poor performance, it actually creates risk.

Creating Leaders

People often describe certain individuals as “natural-born leaders,” but the truth is that business leaders are made, not born–shaped through the assignments they receive and the experiences they have. That formation can happen by accident or by design. Leaving leadership development to chance can be chaotic and unpredictable; organizations that want to ensure that they have the leaders they need, now and in the future, would do well to embrace leadership development by design.

Most of the executives in the latest survey agreed that leadership development is a high priority at their companies, but few believe their organization’s capabilities are up to the challenge. And while over half the companies surveyed identified leadership development as an important priority, there remains a large disparity in how they put this into action.

Some companies remain reluctant to invest heavily in training because chances are that some of the people they’re investing in may eventually take their newly honed skills elsewhere. Turnover is a fact of life in business today, but by investing in employees, by demonstrating a genuine concern for their career development, by enhancing their skills, we can create and retain more high-performing, high-potential leaders.

Though some will inevitably leave, it is important that the investment in them is not seen as a loss. These individuals become valued alumni–some of whom may return in time–and potential clients, who can appreciate firsthand the benefits that accrued from the organizations where the focus was on education and development. It’s a strong value proposition for businesses, and it’s attracting a lot of attention.

At Deloitte, the centerpiece of our leadership development and retention strategy is Deloitte University in Westlake, Texas, where we help our people build the capabilities to better deliver valuable insights and to address our clients’ most critical and complex business challenges.

Not every organization is going to be willing or able to make such a massive investment–nor is it a quick fix, and the talent paradox is a challenge that must be addressed immediately. There are steps a business can take right now to prevent the impending brain drain.

Immediate Steps for Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders 

If two out of three members of the workforce are considering leaving their jobs once the economy improves, it implies a deep reservoir of personal dissatisfaction across the entire corporate sector.

Here are a few thoughts businesses should take into consideration to ensure high-performing talent feels a combination of purpose, impact, and mastery in their current jobs–and are ready, willing, and able to serve as the leaders of the future.

1. Identify your next generation of leaders–and then ask them to step up.  Leadership should not wait for the best talent to come to them–at that point, they may already be on the way out the door. Instead, prioritize and reach out to the people that demonstrate the most leadership potential. Create a plan together that aligns their goals and career satisfaction with the overall business strategy. Whether they are members of the Boomer generation, Gen X, or Gen Y, employees across the board say promotion and job advancement is the number one thing that would keep them with a company. Employees are eager to step up and lead, they just need the right support.

2. Align the work with the purpose.  Just as companies must provide products or services that are needed and relevant in the marketplace or their client matrix, every person within an organization wants to feel that the work they are doing is meaningful, their role is important, and they have the power to affect the company, their community, and importantly, their own career.

3. Then, give them the capabilities to go do it.  Once you’ve identified future leaders and ensured they feel satisfied with their position and future potential, empower them with the skills and tools to do their jobs well. That means providing training opportunities, mentoring, networking, stretch assignments, and on-the-job learning that will enhance their professional development. At Deloitte University, we’ve designed state-of-the-art classrooms for cutting-edge simulations that put our professionals in real-world client scenarios. Whether it’s in-person or virtual, learning is critical to attracting top talent and keeping them satisfied.

Yes, even in a recession–even with high unemployment–companies that rely on highly skilled leaders risk losing them. Practice leadership development by design, and become an organization that leaders seek out…and stay with.

Diana O’Brien and Alice Kwan of Deloitte Consulting are coauthors of this article. O’Brien is principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Managing Principal, Deloitte University; Kwan is principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and U.S. Talent Services Leader.

There are actually two recessions:

The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There’s plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and also indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.

The other recession, though, the one with the loss of “good factory jobs” and systemic unemployment–I fear that this recession is here forever.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

There’s a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world’s cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win…

Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, insurance policies and organ transplants–these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiences are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?

No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that’s what’s going to happen.

It was the inefficiency caused by geography that permitted local workers to earn a better wage, and it was the inefficiency of imperfect communication that allowed companies to charge higher prices.

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It’s a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.

I’m not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn’t look like a job, not a full time one anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a ‘real’ job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping. In the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.

The future feels a lot more like marketing–it’s impromptu, it’s based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people–and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

This means we may need to change our expecations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it’s better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing…

Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.

Nellie Akalp is CEO of CorpNet.com. Since forming more than 100,000 corporations and LLCs across the U.S, she has built a strong passion to assist small business owners and entrepreneurs in starting and protecting their business the right way. To learn more about Nellie and see how she can help your business get off the ground quickly, visit here or “Like” CorpNet.com on Facebook.

The U.S. economy has been on shaky ground for several years. Whether it’s news from Greece or Capitol Hill, it doesn’t take much to send serious shock waves throughout Wall Street, and ultimately down to Main Street. People are nervous, and for the American worker, that means staying with a stable job until the economy turns around.

According to the Bureau of National Affairs, only 0.5% of the American workforce voluntarily left their jobs in 2009. In 2010 and Q1 2011 it rose to 0.7% (for context, the reported voluntary turnover rate was 1.1% each year from 2005 to 2007). When approximately 14 million Americans are looking for work, many consider themselves lucky to be bringing home a paycheck at all. In a world full of uncertainty and delicate economies, it’s easy to see why people want to play it safe.

But just how many brilliant entrepreneurs are waiting on the sidelines for the market to come around? After all, how logical is it to jump ship when the economic picture remains precarious? According to a recent study by business consultancy MBO Partners, approximately 14% of employees hope to go independent in the next two years by starting their own business or freelancing.

Many employers have been coping with the economic downturn by cutting salaries and bonuses and reducing the number of new hires. This leads to anxious, demoralized and overworked employees on the lookout for something better. Some employees will remedy this by starting their own business.

Do you have dreams to start your own business, but aren’t quite sure if this is the right time? If so, here are a few things to think about.

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Funding in This Economy

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If you’re involved in the tech/social scene, there’s good news that some venture capital opportunities are returning. However, traditional bank funding for Main Street businesses is still tight. As part of the American Jobs Act, President Obama plans to ask the SEC for ways to reduce the “regulatory burdens on small business capital formation,” perhaps via crowdfunding and mini-offerings.

What this means is that many aspiring business owners will need to start small and self-finance. After all, it’s more than possible to start a successful business with just a small investment. Keep in mind, however, that only you and your family can truly assess how much risk is appropriate, and for how long you can forgo a salary.

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Market Opportunities in This Economy

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As a result of this recession/recovery, businesses everywhere are looking for ways to cut costs and be more efficient. While the idea of leaner operations doesn’t translate positively for the majority of the American workforce, it can be advantageous for some enterprising small businesses. For instance, if your business idea can help companies reduce costs or increase productivity, look forward to a receptive audience. This is particularly true for freelancers and contract professionals and developers of collaboration tools and other “streamlining” technology.

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The Advantage of Starting When the Economy Is Down

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It may seem counter-intuitive, but many experts think an economic downtime is the perfect time to start a business. If you wait for the economy to be in full swing, you’ll be too late.

Right now real estate prices and low interest rates are attractive. You have an opportunity to get the wheels in motion now, so that your product or service/business are ready to take advantage of a return in consumer confidence.

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Be Honest About Your Motivation

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Sit down and ask yourself, “Do I really want this business, or am I just trying to escape something else?” If you’re truly passionate about your business idea, get a move on. But workplace disillusion is not a good enough reason to become an entrepreneur. Starting a business takes tremendous sacrifice and hard work; you’ve got to love what you’re doing to keep at it.

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Starting a business in a down economy can be a scary endeavor, but isn’t the idea of abandoning your dreams even more terrifying? No one can advise you whether starting a business is right for you, or whether the timing is right, but sometimes a challenge can be an opportunity in disguise.

Image courtesy of Flickr, timsnell

Over 700,000 American households have no car and no access to public transit, and transit advocates say those households are also less likely to be able to find and keep a job.

“We knew there were pockets of households who are economically hampered by the fact that they own no car and have no access to transit, but we didn’t fully understand the true scope of the problem until now,” said Adie Tomer, who authored the report for the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

It’s no surprise to public transit advocates, who have watched low-income families get priced out of transit-dense urban cores and move to older, car-centric suburbs where housing is more affordable but vehicle ownership is a must. In fact, the Brookings report shows that 42 percent of suburban residents without cars don’t have transit access. Employers have suburbanized, too, moving out of city centers for far-off office parks.

“Folks have followed the affordable housing, followed the jobs, but if they lose a job or lose a little bit of income, or if the car breaks down and they can’t afford to fix it, they’re stuck,” said David Goldberg, communications director at Transportation For America, a public transportation advocacy group.

“You want to hang on to that job at all costs and you want to be seen as a good employee, but if there’s no alternative, you’re in a world of hurt,” he said.

Even where transit access is strong, many employers lie outside the reach of buses and trains. The Brookings report found that most households could only access 40 percent of total nearby jobs in under a 90 minute ride on public transit.

Metropolitan Atlanta residents without cars are worst off when it comes to access to public transit. Nearly a third of carless Atlantans live in areas that can’t be reached by public transit. Not far behind were Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Phoenix and St. Louis. Surprisingly, car-loving Los Angeles came in tops for transit access for no-car households, with fewer than 1% of the carless not served by transit. New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Miami-Fort Lauderdale rounded out the top metro areas for transit.

Where transit access is low, it’s not all because of broken-down cars and spread out cul-de-sacs. Faced with strained budgets, transit authorities are raising fares, trimming routes and cutting back on frequency. “We’ve seen this large surge in transit ridership in the past few years, but we’ve seen corresponding cuts in service,” said Goldberg.

And though the majority of individuals stranded without public or private transit are low income, it’s a problem that affects anyone who leaves the house. “These days, people are really looking for flexibility,” Goldberg said. “People are looking for ways to save money, avoid traffic congestion, and they are increasingly wanting to be in places where they don’t necessarily have to use a car every time they go somewhere.”

In the short term, Tomer says lack of transit access is a major economic drain on low-income families. ““If you’re going to keep afloat during the recession, you have to be able to get to work,” he said. In the long term, areas with robust public transportation may even recover faster than their car-centric counterparts. “In terms of indicators like real estate values, places that have decent transit, those places are holding their value pretty well,” said Goldberg. “The places that are utterly car dependent have not recovered.”

Photo: Flickr/Joel Mann

Twice in the same week, someone wrote the word “disappointed” with regards to their feelings about me.

For the past 30 or so years, those words (and many others) have pushed me into terrible depression. In reasonably sane people, you’d probably allow only a few people’s disappointment to let you feel this way. Maybe your mom’s utterance of that phrase (and many others) would send you into that depression. Maybe your spouse.

With me, however, I would let anyone use the words and their impact would take me down. Whoever wanted to pick up my puppet strings and alter my feelings, I’d surrender that power unto them. Not consciously, mind you, but I was always trying my best to please whoever it was who came in contact with me. All the time, I was seeking to avoid that worry of disappointing people.

We Give Others Our Strings

Now that I’ve been working so hard on figuring myself out, I’ve realized that I was running around, giving other people the strings so that they could pull me in plenty of directions. None of those people were bad. Heck, several didn’t even realize that I’d tied my strings to them. Other times, I most certainly tangled my strings around someone, thinking that maybe I’d avoid disappointing someone if I could just be whatever it was I thought they might need.

But that’s all me. I gave away my strings. I tried tying them to anyone walking by. All me.

Take Back Your Strings

The only way to bring yourself to a better functionality is to take back your strings. This requires a lot of work, for some, and just a little bit of work, for others. It also requires acknowledging that we’ve given our strings to other people.

We give our bosses our strings when we worry that our actions will cost us our jobs. If we had our own strings, we’d just do the job the way we wanted to do it, and we’d hope to accomplish the goals our jobs held for us. We’d be open to learning, but we’d move our own puppets around instead of letting other people’s moods and thoughts direct us.

We give our loved ones our strings all the time. “I’d be a better writer, if only he supported me.” “I’m trying to get more healthy, but he keeps bringing home Kentucky Fried Chicken.” Really? These other people have all this power over us? We’ve given them the ability to decide our actions and outcomes? Wow!

So, take back your strings. Agree that you’ll move your little puppet self around through life. If you’re religious, and you don’t trust yourself with your own strings, give them to God (however you see that), but don’t give those strings to humans (even those who work for God). If you’re Buddhist, you work your own strings. I can’t speak for most of the other religions.

Disappointed

The two people who were disappointed in me had their reasons to be disappointed. In both cases, I’d chosen to do something that was counter to what they wanted me to do. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of disappointing. I don’t mean to hurt anyone; instead, I’m working on taking my strings back, and doing the things that I think will grow me, and grow my capabilities to help others.

To really accept that the term “disappointed” is pretty much synonymous with “you’re not doing what I want you to do” gave me a whole new sense of joy. Because those disappointments aren’t mine. They relate to someone putting their expectations on me. I don’t own that. Those aren’t my strings.

And now that I have my strings back (at least most of them), I’m working hard on writing my own damned puppet show. How about you? Who has your strings? Are you ready to get them back?

No related posts.

Editor’s note: Air France Flight 447 was en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro when it went down over the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people aboard. It took 11 months to locate the Airbus A330-200’s black box data recorders, and French investigators offered a preliminary report on the crash last month.

Wired magazine contributing editor David Wolman recently unearthed this Metafilter thread full of armchair opining about what may have led to the crash. When we forwarded it to an Airbus captain we know who is usually understated, he offered an uncharacteristically lengthy reply. Here it is, presented almost verbatim. We have omitted the name of the pilot and his employer to protect him from reprisals.

People have a bad habit of jumping to conclusions before all the data has been analyzed, especially non-Airbus pilots, which is to say the vast majority of the pilot population. I’m amazed by how many comments there are about what the pilots should or shouldn’t have done, what they saw or didn’t see on their instruments or what they should or shouldn’t have learned in training, and whatever other suppositions people come up with.

The key ingredient most everyone seems to be overlooking: The flight control laws of an Airbus. An Airbus has flight envelope protections that cannot be overridden by the pilot. This is almost always a good thing because the airplane won’t allow the pilot to overspeed, stall, overbank or overload the airplane. In the peculiar case of Air France Flight 447, the airspeed reading was inaccurate because the pitot tubes were blocked — a very rare occurrence in a jet — almost never happens.

But when it does happen, the airspeed then acts like an altimeter: When the airplane climbs, the indicated airspeed increases, and when the airplane descends, the indicated airspeed decreases. My best guess for AF447 is that the airplane was climbing, most likely due to turbulence; I believe they were in a thunderstorm. From a pilot’s perspective, this is a bad place to be. It’s rough and difficult to read instruments. Autopilot disengages due to turbulence or ice on the airframe or pitot tubes. The airplane is climbing, and the pilot is wondering what the fuck is going on. Then, as the airplane climbs, with the false readings still indicating increased airspeed, at high altitude the margin between cruise airspeed and overspeed becomes very small, so the airplane overspeeds — or so it “thinks,” due to the false reading. And it’s at this point, provided all of this is what really happened, that they’re fucked.

Think back to the Airbus flight envelope protections I mentioned, and the fact that the pilot can’t override them. The airplane computers “think” the aircraft is overspeeding and therefore continue to increase the airplane’s angle of attack. That only makes it climb steeper, thus perpetuating this cycle of increasing indicated airspeed and increasing angle of attack. This continues until the airplane is at a ridiculously high nose-up attitude and stalls, regardless of pilot inputs.

This is why we really need to wait for a full analysis, so that investigators can figure out what the pilot inputs were and whether or not they were consistent with what the flight control surfaces were doing. In other words, were the pilots fucking up the control deflections, or were the Airbus flight computers fucking up the control deflections? Because the airplane eventually stalled, I can only surmise that it was the computers fucking up, because when the computers do their jobs correctly, they increase angle of attack in this situation — again, regardless of pilot input.

So the airplane stalled. One plausible theory is what I just described. (There are other scenarios in which the flight control laws are degraded and the airplane can stall under certain circumstances, but that’s a whole other set of seriously complex stuff. Who knows though? Maybe that’s actually what happened.) Even if this guess doesn’t explain precisely what took place, it constitutes a design flaw in the Airbus that needs to be fixed in that the flight envelope protections need to be disabled if they’re receiving inaccurate information.

And here’s where the pundits really don’t get it. A so-called Transport Category airplane like an Airbus is not required to be recoverable from deep stalls like the one that may have occurred with AF447. They’re supposed to be difficult to stall, and pilots are trained to avoid stalls. In fact, we train to recover from “approaches to stalls,” not “full stalls” or “deep stalls.” So even if the pilots did everything they were supposed to do to recover from a stall, the airplane still may not have been recoverable once it entered a deep stall and exceeded the critical angle of attack.

That’s my best take. In any case, let’s not throw blame at the pilots before the engineers and investigators can sort out what really happened.

Photo: Associated Press via Brazil Air Force. Brazil’s Navy sailors recover debris from Air France Flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean.