Business does not exist in a vacuum. So while my purpose may be to build better businesses on a better business and economic model, there is no part of how businesses exist in a larger ecosystem that isn't worth examining. Take the education system for example. It's not just that the modern western education system is destroying something of incredible value to the businesses of the future (imginiation and curiosity), it is also that the system is creating massive structural inequalities that will eventually shrink potnetial markets for goods and services. Our education system is driving a massive wedge between the upper and lower classes in America, splitting the middle class between those willing to mortgage their futures to get into the right school district and those who either can’t afford, or think it is imprudent, to take that kind of risk. The fault line that is being created by a lack of corporate recruiting competence is leaving the poor completely behind. They can’t afford to move into the right school districts, to get access to an education and supportive peer group that will ensure that they will get into the right college so that they can get the right job. And since the poor are disproportionately people of color, the corporate system is blasting away at it’s foot in two ways: first, by ensuring that the possible pool of talent it can draw from is always scarce and reinforcing behaviors that are antithetical to sustaintable advantage in the creative age, and second, because diversity of background, opinion, perspective and thought are critical to the creative process. But since corporations are ensuring that every nervous parent in America is obsessed with homogenizing the unique perspectives, thoughts, opinions and backgrounds from their kids as they move in droves to exclusive gated communities, the talent pool needed to sustain competitive advantage is shrinking at a rate that is inversely proportional to the overall value of talent to the enterprise. That’s right: the corporate system of selection based on experience and education ensures that as the possible talent pool grows due to immigration and globalization, and as the potential value of that pool grows relative to the needs of the organization, that corporations will actually have an ever smaller pool from which to pick.

I have never met a two year old that lacked imagination and curiosity. I have met very few 40 years that still posses either.There is this little voice in a parent's head that tells them that seven million years of biology can't be all wrong, that perhaps the very reason we have schools and jobs is because human beings are just naturally curious and inventive. We have this sneaking suspicion that seeking to normalize thoughts and feelings, begging all the while for external validation and the warm embrace of group-think may not be the right way to go. It's not just all the counter examples to the conventional wisdom: the Curries, the Sanders, the Einsteins, the Kings, the holy writings and yes, even the Gateses. Its the feeling that we are all just going to Abilene, that someone, somewhere started all this with a rather silly (and perhaps even sinister) notion and that now we are all just feeding upon the group's validation of something that may be very wrong. And like the paradox shows, the group think effect has to start somewhere. People far smarter than I have developed almost as many theories around this as there are children struggling in school. But my purpose here is to link building a better business on a better economic model with the lack of talent to make that happen. And therefore, I propose that the problem starts with us. We are doing it. Recruiters and HR people. We can’t put together a job description or a reliable method for improving performance, but we sure as hell know that if someone went to Harvard they are going to be right for the job. Corporations can’t tell you exactly how they built a culture that fostered creativity and innovation, but they know for sure that if you finished a project at Cisco you must be a high-tech titan. It is our own incompetence, our own ability to decipher and describe reliable criteria for success, our own inability to look at an individual’s past and figure out whether they will be successful in our future that drives us to this incredibly destructive behavior. Am I saying that because we can't write a good job description we are strip mining our most precious natural resource for the most mundane and common ore? Yes... I am.