New Work. New World. New Education. The

Three Must Meet

Tom PetersFoundation for Excellent Schools/11.09.2001

All Slides Available at …

tompeters.comNote: 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.

Ambiguity: We no longer know what “normal”

means.

“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 years1000: 100 years for paradigm shift

1800s: > prior 900 years1900s: 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, computer-

generated 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 5vs.

8 X 1** 540 vs. 8 (-98.5%)

Automation+

75% of what we do: 40 “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-25MTemps: 3M (incl. CEOs & lawyers)

Microbusinesses: 12M-27MTotal: 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?

26.3

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]?

Conclusion: “We” are not

serious! (about

education)

4. Losing the War to Bismarck

J. D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board

(1906): “In our dreams people yield themselves with perfect docility to our

molding hands. … The task is simple. 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] parent-teacher 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 low-

level 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

entirely dogmatic. Answers are ‘right’ and answers are

‘wrong,’ but mostly answers are short.”

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 …

WHY?

9. Tom’s Edu3M

Manifesto**Manifesto for Education in the 3rd Millennium

Education3MLearning 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 imparters-of-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 anti-learning 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.

Education3MThe “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.]

The Horror: We get it all wrong. We know how to do “it” right!

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

DO!

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!

“Are there enough weird people in

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 dangerfor most of us

is not that our aim istoo high

and we miss it,but that it is

too lowand 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

am here to live my life out loud.”

Emile Zola