Where are the High Paying Jobs?
The big complaint in all the industrialized nations is they’re losing high paying jobs. But where are those jobs going? The quick response is the high paying jobs are going overseas or foreigners are coming in and “stealing” jobs. This is an easy explanation but it’s totally false.
High paying jobs aren’t moving overseas or somehow being stolen. The high paying jobs are gone. No one is getting the old high paying jobs, those jobs don’t exist.
There is a fundamental rule of human nature. We always want More, Better, For Less, with Less Hassle. That continuous drive to get more for less has caused tremendous increases in productivity. 100 years ago it took thousands of people to do what one person does today.
As recently as 50 years ago telephone companies had operators manually connecting calls. This person’s job was to plug wires on a board of connectors to make the connection between telephones. It could take 15 minutes for a call to be connected across the country. Today a device that costs $100 can make thousands of connections a second. Only a few years ago telephone companies charged extra for long distance calls. Today almost every cellular plan offers free long distance.
The job of telephone operator wasn’t stolen, or shipped overseas. That job is gone. If someone did want to do that job today they wouldn’t get paid very much. Plugging and unplugging wires isn’t valuable. No one wants to pay for a manual telephone operator.
The creation of automated switches led to new high paying jobs managing the switches. As the switches became more reliable and easier to manage even those jobs went away. Now one person can manage thousands of switches that connect thousands of calls every second. Today one person can do the work of millions. That one person does have a high paying job. But that will go away as well. It will get easier and easier to do the job and it won’t require special training.
I don’t think anyone wants people to spend all day unplugging and plugging in wires to connect telephone calls. I don’t think anyone wants to go back to paying for long distance either.
How to Solve Impossible Problems
I love impossible problems. Am I insane? That is hotly debated. But the reason I love impossible problems is there are so many possible innovations in every impossible problem. In fact there are at least 225 possible solutions to most seemingly impossible problems.
That’s a lot of innovation.
Very little is truly impossible. Most seemingly impossible problems result from assumptions that hide the solutions. The typical impossible problem is the result of two competing goals. If you improve one feature the other suffers. The goals compete. You want to improve both but can’t so it seems impossible.
How do you solve impossible problems? Break the problem in two and solve each part separately.
For instance electric vehicles solve a lot of problems. Electric cars are very efficient and don’t produce any point of use toxic emissions. The problem with electric cars is they can’t drive very far on a single charge.
Even with a lot of improvements in battery technology electric cars just haven’t gained the type of range most people would like. Recharging takes a long time so an electric car isn’t good for long trips.
How do we solve it? Break the problem in two and solve separately.
The goals are low point of use toxic emissions, and long range. If we break out long range we can solve that a number of ways.
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Breaking Out of Average
Creating Passionate Users: Attenuation and the suck threshold. A great article on the mindset needed to be an innovator. Most people and the businesses they work in are good enough. They got past the “I don’t suck” threshold but really don’t move much beyond that.
The article talks about being the best in the world. I prefer to be the best possible. Being the best in the world is a scarcity mindset, just another way of dividing up a limited pie. If the world stinks then being best doesn’t say much.
Read the article, its lively and challenging and touches on neurology, a subject I’ve spent a lot of time studying.
Predictive Innovation Training
Predictive Innovation: Core Skills Book
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