BOOK: Winner Take All: How Competitiveness Shapes the Fate of Nations by Richard Elkus Over the past thirty years, the United States has lost commanding leads in business after business. We no longer make cameras, TVs, MP3 players, cell phones, or DVD players, and we have become the world’s largest debtor nation. Everyone thinks this is because of cheap labor costs, but in fact Asian leaders have a fundamental and different way of thinking about business. They are playing a different game. If the U.S. wants to regain its competitiveness and preserve its global power, it must play the game as it’s played in the rest of the world. Winner Take All tells us what it takes to be competitive, and how we need to reform our thinking to regain what we have lost. Richard Elkus isn’t afraid to bring a few sacred cows to the slaughter. This is the essential primer for any policy maker, business leader, or general reader interested in knowing how America can regain the economic clout it once had. Comments at Amazon by Donald Hsu: for the success of US Technology future. The book does make a valid point. But it is very difficult because education is the main avenue for the tech success. As of July 2008, there are very few college students that majored in Computer Science, IT, or Engineering. The total for all of them are less than 7 percent. Young people love IPod, Iphone, sidekick, Samsung cell.. They surfed on MySpace, YouTube and FaceBook all the time. But major in CS, IT, or Engineering? No way! We want to get the easiest degree so we can get out. College is for sport, fun, games, girls, party, party... It turned out, Business is still number one (25%) and Social Science #2 (13%). What do they do when they graduate? Back to jobs paying minimum wages. See him at CSPAN: http://www.c-span.org/search.aspx?For=winner take all No wonder...America is going down ....fast....
The reason America is going down is very simple: they don't do what works, but run around in cycles of futility. Americans are entrepreneurs, not imperialists. They fail miserably at "spreading democracy" and excel at innovation. And yet, they continuously give up their advantage to engage in what they cannot succeed at.
I watched the interview. This guy was asking stupid questions. Bottom Line: American innovation disappeared when Lawyers and bureaucrats took over the country.
Americas innovation is being supressed by people who see greed and manipulation as their primary goals.
It is easy to make money cheating people than coming up with innovation for the benefit for everyone. Besides, cheater do not have to be educated.
Back when I thought / hoped it might be possible to turn US arround, I wrote a book trying to interest more students in the hard sciences, by scaring them. See more about it at web site under my name.
We have lost a generation of techologists, retired or otherwise did not come up the corporate ladder (how many physicists you know that run Fortune 500 companies?) In early 80s I worked for several major companies where I learned how Japanese did their business, then I went to China and told them. When I came back, no one in USA listened to me even backed by a large technology company (perhaps because I was in the technology sector and the decision makers were in finance, accounting, law and MBA sector) I did not think anything at the time, and blamed myself for unable to articulate the coming serious threat.... Rest will soon be history....as they say, "stupid is as stupid does" Take your worst nightmare and triple it.....
As long as the US forces students to not only put in the work and the time but pay the costs of education up front, it will have to supply its need for well-educated people from elsewhere. And as long as Americans regard the well-educated as elitists trying to be better than regular Americans by mastering useless arcana, their children will continue to value education the same way. Look at the reaction to the slightest sign of anything that could be interpreted as arrogance or elitism in Obama, for example. There are a lot of people in the US who regard algebra, say, as a silly waste of time - because they don't use it to make money, as adults. These people's children are unlikely to become interested in algebra, fascinated by it, focus their curiosity on it - or learn it very well.
Why get a degree in any of those fields, fields which are being constantly farmed out to cheaper locations(India, East Europe, even Africa)? Waste of money. Get the MBA and make 6 figures! But yes the west is headed for a day of reckoning. Will be fun.
Well, in India the parents decide that their kids be engineers or computer scientists. Parents in the United States aren't about to go forcing their kids into technology jobs. The United States will be forced to change eventually, which will be very interesting.
In America, everybody wants to be a mini-king (manager?). So, they will hire all the engineering talent in the H1-B program. We will let the Indians innovate, Japanese design, Chinese build stuff and then Indians maintain the back office. We all will live happily ever after. Except that in about 10 years, no one will sell us anything...so we become like Mexico running for the Canadian border....that will be fun....Life circa 1800s?
