Jobs.
Politicians talk about them. Some own businesses that created jobs.
The trouble is, it’s not just any-old-job that needs creating.
According to author Richard Florida, 45% of US jobs today are service-sector jobs. In other words, often low-paying jobs as retail sales clerks, customer service staff, food prep workers, personal health aides, and so on.
If you think back, these are the same jobs that Americans supposedly “didn’t want to do”.
Rhetoric aside, the problem with these jobs is that the prevailing wage requires 2 or 3 of them to support a single household, sometimes more.
This isn’t a blog about humanities and social science, so we won’t pursue that here.
And those service jobs?
Florida comments on his blog about a portion of the working population that he calls the “Creative Class”. He refers to expanding creativity well beyond this so-called “class” in this comment about nationwide jobs strategy:
At bottom, a jobs strategy needs to start from a fundamental principle: That each and every human being is creative and that we can only grow, develop, and prosper by harnessing the full creativity of each of us. For the first time in history, future economic development requires further human development. This means develop a strategy to nurture creativity across the board – on the farm, in the factory, and in offices, shops, non-profits, and a full gamut of service class work, as well as within the creative class. Our future depends on it.
It might be easy to discard this as a bunch of touchy-feely junk that’s of no use to anyone.
Before you do that, look around in your own community.
Who’s rocking?
Which employers are rocking, despite the average condition of businesses in today’s economy? Why is their situation is so different from everyone else’s?
Have you ASKED?
It’s easy to say “well, they aren’t in the construction, building materials or real estate business”, but that’s the lazy answer.
First off, they might be in those industries and doing something differently than everyone else.
If so, they probably observed, reacted, planned, strategized, took action and maybe got a little lucky.
Are they also innovative? Creative? What processes are used to create new products, nurture new ideas and change their market, much less their business?
How’d they get that way? I suspect part of it comes from observing others and from experience on prior projects. There might be a key employee who drives the entire company’s creative process, or transformed how they look forward and how fast they take action.
Finally, they might exhibit…
Habits
Australian Innovation, an innovation-focused group of representatives from the private sector as well as Australian Federal and State agencies, identified 7 key habits of innovative/creative organizations:
- A deep understanding of the customer and market needs: Engage with customers; Understand industry trends and competitive environment; Big picture perspectives
- A “Culture” of innovation: Vision; leadership; Executive support; Openness to new ideas; supportive/encouraging of innovation; commercial imperative to innovate; Flexibility.
- An Open Innovation model: Open collaboration model and having global partnerships
- An appropriate funding model for innovation activities: Willingness to invest in R&D activities; Balanced investment in future versus current needs.
- Ability to execute: Commitment of resources dedicated to innovation; Continuous development/improvement processes; Benchmarking; Clear goals/deadlines/strategy; Best practice evolves over time (dynamic); Flexible and quick to move.
- Human intellect/creativity: Development of skills; Knowledge base; Talented Educated individuals; Willingness to learn/change.
- Management of Intellectual Property: Ability to manage/protect IP that is generated through the innovation process in a practical manner.
If you let yourself get past the touchy-feely, can you develop these habits?
What works for the rockers?
Make a list of the rockin’ businesses in your community. Ask all of them to get together as a group and speak about their strategies.
Ask them what they do differently. Ask open-ended questions. Yes/No questions don’t often contribute to breakthroughs.
You might also look nationally to see who the creative employers are. Apple and Facebook are obvious, but not all creative employers are in the tech sector. In fact, they’d better not be.
Finally, ask yourself at least one question per day that confronts and challenges the status quo in your market.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a business, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site or contact him via email at mriffey at flatheadbeacon.com.