Transcript New Work. New World. New Education. The Three Must Meet Tom Peters Foundation for Excellent Schools/11.09.2001

New Work. New World.
New Education. The
Three Must Meet
Tom Peters
Foundation for Excellent Schools/11.09.2001
All Slides Available at …
tompeters.com
Note: Lavender text in this file is a link.
“There will be more
confusion in the
business world in the next
decade than in any decade in
history. And the current pace of
change will only accelerate.”
Steve Case
Uncertainty: We
don’t know
when things will get back
to normal.
We no longer
know what “normal”
means.
Ambiguity:
“Our military structure
today is essentially one
developed and
designed by
Napoleon.”
Admiral Bill Owens, former Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
Forget>“Learn”
“The problem is never how
to get new, innovative
thoughts into your mind,
but how to get the old
ones out.”
Dee Hock
Forbes100 from 1917 to 1987: 39
members of the Class of ’17 were
alive in ’87; 18 are in ’87 F100; the 18
F100 “survivors” underperformed the
market by 20%; just 2 (2%), GE &
Kodak, outperformed the market from
1917 to 1987.
Source: Dick Foster & Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction:
Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the
Market
The [New] Ge Way
DYB.com
The Gales of Creative Destruction
+29M = -44M + 73M
+4M = +4M - 0M
<1000A.D.: paradigm shift: 1000s of years
1000: 100 years for paradigm shift
1800s: > prior 900 years
1900s: 1st 20 years > 1800s
2000: 10 years for paradigm shift
21st century: 1000X tech change than
20th century (“the ‘Singularity,’ a merger between
humans and computers that is so rapid and profound it
represents a rupture in the fabric of human history”)
Ray Kurzweil, talk april2001
Ye Gads: “Unless mankind
redesigns itself by changing
our DNA through altering our
genetic makeup, computergenerated robots will take over
the world.” – Stephen Hawking, in the
German magazine Focus
New Work. New World.
New Education. The
Three Must Meet
TP Mood
Anger.
Despair.
Hopelessness.
Objections
Focus on elite students.
Caricature education “reformers.”
Overrate schools’ & teachers’
capability for fixing themselves.
Underrate communities/ parents/
societal impact (“the schools we
deserve”).
Underrate the # of “good” reformers.
1. Work Will Never
Be the Same!
White Collar
Revolution!
108 X 5
vs.
8 X 1*
* 540 vs. 8 (-98.5%)
Automation+
40
75% of what we do:
“expert” decision rules!
IBM’s Project
eLiza!
“If there is nothing
very special about
your work, no matter how
hard you apply yourself, you
won’t get noticed, and that
increasingly means you won’t
get paid much either.”
Michael Goldhaber, Wired
New World of Work
< 1 in 10 F500
#1: Manpower Inc.
Freelancers/I.C.: 16M-25M
Temps: 3M (incl. CEOs & lawyers)
Microbusinesses: 12M-27M
Total: 31M-55M
Source: Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation
Message:
Distinct …
or
Extinct
2. EduK80
(Education, K-80)
“My ancestors were
printers in Amsterdam from
1510 or so until 1750 and
during that entire time they
didn’t have to learn
anything new.”
Peter Drucker, Business 2.0 (08.22.00)
“Knowledge becomes obsolete
incredibly fast. The
continuing professional
education of adults is the
No. 1 industry in the next 30
years … mostly on line.”
Peter Drucker,
Business 2.0 (22August2000)
REQUISITE ATTITUDE2001: “You must realize that
how you invest your human capital matters as much as
how you invest your financial capital. Its rate of return
determines your future options. Take a job for
what it teaches you, not for what it pays.
Instead of a potential employer asking,
‘Where do you see yourself in 5 years?’
you’ll ask, ‘If I invest my mental assets with
you for 5 years, how much will they
appreciate? How much will my portfolio of
career options grow?’ ”
Stan Davis & Christopher Meyer, futureWEALTH
3. Why Does
Business Abhor
Training?
3 Weeks in May
“Training” & Prep: 187
“Work”: 41
(“Other”: 17)
1%
vs.
367%
Divas do it. Violinists do it.
Sprinters do it. Golfers do it.
Pilots do it. Soldiers do it.
Surgeons do it. Cops do it.
Astronauts do it. Why don’t
businesspeople do it
[very much]?
“We”
are not
serious!
Conclusion:
(about
education)
4. Losing the
War to Bismarck
J. D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board
“In our dreams people
yield themselves with
perfect docility to our
molding hands. … The task is simple.
(1906):
We will organize children and teach them in a
perfect way the things their fathers and mothers
are doing in an imperfect way.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
“My wife and I went to a [kindergarten] parentteacher conference and were informed that our
budding refrigerator artist, Christopher, would be
receiving a grade of Unsatisfactory in art. We
were shocked. How could any child—let alone
our child—receive a poor grade in art at such a
young age? His teacher informed us that
he had refused to color within the
lines, which was a state requirement
for demonstrating ‘grade-level motor
skills.’ ”
Jordan Ayan, AHA!
“The main crisis
in school today
is irrelevance.”
Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation
5. Education: In
Need of that
“White Collar
Revolution”
Milwaukee: $6,951
per
student. Central
administration: $3,481.
Instruction: $1,647.
A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto
(Research reported in Education Update, Fall 1990)
6. An Unnatural
Way to “Learn”
“Every time I pass a
jailhouse or school, I
feel sorry for the
people inside.”
Jimmy Breslin, 07.11.2001, on “summer school”
in NYC [“If they haven’t learned in the winter, what are they
going to remember from days when they should be swimming?”]
“The time bomb in every
classroom is that
students learn
exactly what they
are taught.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“I discovered the brutally simple
motivation behind the
development and imposition of all
systematic instructional programs
and tests—a lack of trust that
teachers can teach and that
children can learn.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
Schools’ “Kafka-like rituals”: “enforce sensory
deprivation on classes of children held in
featureless rooms … sort children into rigid
categories by the use of fantastic measures such as
age-grading, or standardized test scores … train
children to drop whatever they are occupied with
and to move as a body from room to room at the
sound of a bell, buzzer, horn, or klaxon … keep
children under constant surveillance, depriving
them of private time and space …
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
Kafka-like rituals (cont.): “assign children
numbers constantly, feigning the ability to
discriminate qualities quantitatively … insist
that every moment of time be filled with lowlevel abstractions … forbid children their own
discoveries, pretending to possess some vital
secret to which children must surrender their
their active learning time to acquire.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
7. Doing Stuff
that Matters!
“Education, at best, is
ecstatic.
At its best, its most
unfettered, the moment of learning is a moment
of delight. This essential and obvious truth is
demonstrated for us every day by the baby and
the preschool child. … When joy is absent, the
effectiveness of the learning process falls and
falls until the human being is operating
hesitantly, grudgingly, fearfully.”
George Leonard, Education and Ecstasy [1968]
“Children learn what
makes
sense to them; they learn through
the sense of things they
want to understand.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
Per George Miller:
Children as
“informavores,” who
“eat up new
Knowledge.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“During the first years of
life, youngsters all over
the world master a
breathtaking array of
competences with little
formal tutelage.”
Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind
“The goal of the child is to develop,
and he is intrinsically motivated
toward that goal with an intensity
unequalled in all of creation.
… [Children] appeared immensely pleased,
peaceful and rested after the most
strenuous concentration on tasks they had
freely chosen to do. All destructive
behavior … had disappeared.”
Paula Polk Lillard, Montessori: A Modern Approach
“Learning is
never divorced
from feelings.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
8. It’s all About
Questions!
U.C. Ed Dean Walter Karp: “From the first grade
to the twelfth, from one coast to the other,
instruction in America’s classrooms is almost
Answers are
‘right’ and answers are
‘wrong,’ but mostly
answers are short.”
entirely dogmatic.
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“Actual content may not be the issue at all, since
we are really trying to impart the idea that one
can deal with new areas of knowledge if one
knows how to learn, how to find out about what
is known, and how to abandon old ideas when
they are worn out. This means teaching ways
of developing
good questions rather
than memorizing known answers ,
an idea that traditional schools simply don’t
cotton to at all, and that traditional testing
methods are unprepared to handle.”
Roger Schank, The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Mind
TP/08.2001: The Three Most
Important Letters …
9. Tom’s
Edu3M
Manifesto*
*Manifesto for Education in the 3rd Millennium
Education3M
Learning is a normal state.
Children are learnavores.
Prodigious feats of learning are common as dirt.
[Watch a H.S. QB studying game film.]
We learn at different rates.
We learn in different ways.
Boys and girls learn [very] differently.
In a class of 25, there are 25 different trajectories.
Learning in 40-minute blocks is bullshit.
Learning for tests is utterly insane.
There are numerous rigorous evaluation schemes,
of which testing is but one—and abnormal, by “real
world” standards.
Education3M
We learn most/fastest/most completely when we
are passionate about what we are learning and it
matters to us. [Salience rules!]
Think EBI/LBI: Education by Interest/Learning by
Internship.
Classrooms are abnormal places.
We need changes of pace. [Japanese recesses between
each class.]
International test scores are not correlated with
hours-per-year in class.
Big classes are slightly problematic. Big schools
suck. Period.
Education3M
“All this”—the right stuff—fits the NWW/New World
of Work hand-in-glove. [NWW = Age of Creativity.]
U.S. schools circa 2001 are a vestige of the
Prussian-Fordist model, more interested in shaping
behavior than stoking the fires of lifelong learning.
Cutting art-music budgets is truly dumb.
Learning is a matter of Intensity of Engagement, not
elapsed time. [Aargh: 11 minutes on the Battle of Gettysburg.]
Teachers need enough space-time-flexibility to get
to know kids as individuals.
Scientific discovery processes and the teaching of
science are utterly at odds. [Exploration vs. spoon-feeding.]
Education3M
Our toughest “learning achievement”—
mastering our native language—does not
require schools, or even competent parents. [It
does require a desperate need-to-know.]
Great teachers are great learners, not impartersof-knowledge.
Great teachers ask great questions—that launch
kids on lifelong quests.
The world is not about “right” & “wrong”
answers; it is about the pursuit of increasingly
sophisticated questions—just ask a ski
instructor or neurosurgeon.
Education3M
Most schools spend most of their time setting
up contexts in which kids learn not to like
particular subjects. [Evidence shows that such antilearning sticks!]
Vigorous exploration is normal … until you are
incarcerated in a school.
“Bite size” education-learning is neither
education nor learning.
Learning takes place rapidly on the cheerleading
squad, the football team, the school newspaper,
the drama club, at the after-class job--just not in
the hyper-structured classroom.
Education3M
The “official” “school reform” “movement” is a giant
step … backwards … embracing the Prussian-Fordist
paradigm with renewed vigor—at exactly the
wrong time.
There are large numbers of superb schools, superb
principals, superb teachers; sadly, they not only fail to
infect the [largely timid] rest, but are ordinarily supplanted
by wusses & wimps.
Alas, the teaching profession does not ordinarily attract
“cool dudes & dudettes.”
Schools of “education” should by and large have their
charters revoked. (I said this about B-schools in 1982.)
Education3M
Stability is dead; “education” must
therefore “educate” for an unknowable,
ambiguous, changing future; thence,
learning to learn & change is far more
important than mastery of a static body of
“facts.”
“Education” must “develop in youth the
capabilities for engaging in intense concentrated
involvement in an activity.” [James Coleman, 1974.]
[Hint: It doesn’t.] [Hint: Understatement.]
We get it
all wrong. We
know how to
do “it” right!
The Horror:
10. Leading In
Totally Screwed Up
Times:
10 in 10.
1. Leaders Cede
Control.
“I don’t
know.”
2. Leadership Is a …
Mutual
Discovery
Process.
Leaders Do Not “Transform People”!
Instead leaders-mentors-teachers (1) provide a
context which is marked by (2) access to a
luxuriant portfolio of meaningful opportunities
(projects) which (3) allow people to fully express
their innate curiosity and (4) engage in a
vigorous discovery voyage by which those
people (5) go to-create places they (and their
mentors-teachers-leaders) had never dreamed
existed. And then the leaders-mentors-teachers
(6) applaud like hell, stage “photo-ops,” and
ring the church bells 100 times to commemorate
the bravery of their “followers’ ” explorations!
3. Leaders
The Kotler Doctrine:
1965-1980: R.A.F.
(Ready.Aim.Fire.)
1980-1995: R.F.A.
(Ready.Fire!Aim.)
1995-????: F.F.F.
(Fire!Fire!Fire!)
4. Leaders
FORGET!/
Leaders
DESTROY!
“Good management was the most
powerful reason [leading firms] failed
to stay atop their industries. Precisely
because these firms listened to their customers,
invested aggressively in technologies that would
provide their customers more and better
products of the sort they wanted, and because
they carefully studied market trends and
systematically allocated investment capital to
innovations that promised the best returns, they
lost their positions of leadership.”
Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma
5. BUT … Leaders Have
to Deliver, So They Worry
About “Throwing the
Baby Out with the
Bathwater.”
“Damned If You
Do, Damned If You
Don’t, Just Plain
Damned”
Subtitle in the chapter, “Own Up to the Great Paradox: Success
Is the Product of Deep Grooves/ Deep Grooves Destroy
Adaptivity,” Liberation Management (1992)
6. Leaders HANG
OUT WITH
FREAKS!
enough
weird people in
“Are there
the lab these days?”
V. Chmn., pharmaceutical house, to a lab director (06.01)
7. Leaders Make
[Lotsa] Mistakes
– and MAKE NO
BONES ABOUT IT!
Sam’s
Secret #1!
8. Leaders Make BIG
MISTAKES!
“Reward
excellent
failures. Punish
mediocre successes.”
Phil Daniels, Sydney exec (and, de facto, Jack)
9. Leaders Out Their
PASSION!
“Soft” Is
“Hard”
Message: Leadership is
all about love: Passion,
Enthusiasms, Appetite for Life,
Engagement, Commitment, Great
Causes & Determination to Make a
Damn Difference, Shared Adventures,
Bizarre Failures, Growth, Insatiable
Appetite for Change. [Otherwise, why bother?
Just read Dilbert. TP’s final words: CYNICISM SUCKS.]
BZ: “I am a …
DISPENSER OF
ENTHUSIASM!”
10. But … Leaders Also
Break a Lot
of China
If you’re not
pissing people off,
you’re not making
a difference!
Characteristics of the “Also rans”*
“Minimize risk”
“Respect the chain of
command”
“Support the boss”
“Make budget”
*Fortune, article on
“Most Admired Global Corporations”
The greatest danger
for most of us
is not that our aim is
too high
and we miss it,
but that it is
too low
and we reach it.
Michelangelo
“Let’s make a
dent in the
universe.”
Steve Jobs
“Learn not to
be careful.”
Photographer Diane Arbus,
to her students
“If you ask me what I
have come to do in
this world, I who am
an artist, I will reply, I
live my
life out loud.”
am here to
Emile Zola