Tom Tancredi

Outnumbered about 7 Billion to 1.....

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Humans are “beings”; not Human “beens”, or Human “will be’s”

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Lives are verbs. Humans are being, like rivers are being, like anything that moves and grows and suffers the spectrum of life are beings

We live too often thinking that a milestone, or a collection of milestones, will build us into a monolith of adulthood. As if all wisdom, knowledge, and experience can be encompassed in a life. I once conceited that the best approach to experiencing life was to suffer, celebrate, be destructive and cruel as well as kind and creative. Why not know how it all works?

I think when people approach their jobs, they view it as an end-all-be-all to their growth. They hope to find fulfillment through something that requires you to commute 2 hours/day; work 8 hours/day; and think about more than appropriate on something that ultimately is perhaps a distraction from their true interests and vision. But it’s not so. We’re beings. We need to recognize what is our work and what is our distraction, and being our work means that we’re making the concerted effort to live.

Buckminster Fuller says it best.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

This may be a bit scattered, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Perhaps, like all other things in life, it’s a work in progress. And perhaps that’s apropos for this entry.

 

This is what all jobs look like, for people who have 50,000 ft optics

Post #3 Why civil unrest is inevitable if we don’t create jobs

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So here’s the quick sketch of reality in America:

13 million people without jobs (including the low participation rate)  – 8.1% unemployment rate in America

2 Trillion Dollars of Corporate and Private Sector earnings,  sitting on the sidelines, collecting no interest.

If you invested all 2 Trillion dollars into creating 13 million jobs, you’d have average salary/benefits of $153k/person. But better yet, the majority of the investment will bring back a higher return on investment that 0.1%. So the rich get richer! But not by much – perhaps on average 5-8% of their investment, while the middle and lower classes can see their lifestyle and salaries rise 1.5-3x whatever it is now.

Okay, so perhaps it’s unrealistic to invest all the money. But what about just 25%? $500 billion injected in startups, new projects, new technologies….which will beget others to take the plunge and pull in their sweat equity. Once the pump is primed there’s no stopping: innovation spurs competition, and in order for companies to stay current and not get left behind they’ll have to spend $$. Or they’ll end up like Kodak. Really, we just need a few industry leaders to make a few big splashes and show how “easy it was” to make the rest of the pack follow. We – the entrepreneurs, the corporate managers, the people – just need to say “yes” to unlock all that frozen capital.

Well, we also need good ideas,  well-educated specialists and a host of morally-sound leaders with long-term views.

So what will happen if we DON’T do this? If the capital just stays frozen, and the unemployed stay unemployed, and the gulf continues to widen? Well, then the incentives to do good work will be misaligned. The American Dream is about social mobility, and with capital locked in the 1%, social mobility stops being possible. It’s as simple as that. The social cohesion in the country will fray even more; being able to relate to each others’ viewpoints will dwindle, political parties will continue to polarize, and we will be facing some sort of civil unrest (potentially an escalation to civil war). It’s a historical cycle – every time in history the haves vs the have-nots gets too strained, there’s a revolution and it gets messy. Think  of France in the 18th century, Russia in the 19th (and 20th) – the only way China avoided a civil war in the past 20 years is that they have a HUGE emphasis to discourage dissent, by whatever means possible.

That’s what I think. I don’t think anyone can honestly say we should keep lurching from crisis to crisis, and putting on the band-aids on society. If anyone plans on living in America for the next 20-45 years in relative peace, we need to step up the initiative and create jobs, together.

 

USA is in the top right corner.

HOW TO CREATE JOBS {POST #1 “The Current Landscape in America”}

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Post #1: The current landscape in America (or anywhere in the modern world, really)

In 2009 New York was going to hell in a handbasket. Century-old firms were gone within a few weeks – Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros, etc., the stock market was in a free-fall, people were talking about the end of world, MSNBC was on a doom orgy for 11-months straight.  I don’t have to tell you, you were there. So in the middle of all this catastrophe, Dom and I decided to quit our jobs and start a new company.

Why?

Because here’s the thing: in the recession of 2008-2009 in NYC had very peculiar characteristics. For one, a lot of the people who got fired were highly-skilled, high net-worth professionals saddled with debt and unable to move away for a variety of reasons. So all these highly-skilled, high net-worth people, concentrated in a dense city, had nothing to do…

Cue in boredom.  And with the idle hands, came out an explosion of start-ups and meet-ups. Gilt Groupe, Thrillist, AOL, Wanderfly, a sh*tload of financial data-mining products, so many weird e-commerce platforms and products (what the heck is Kickstarter?!)  And then social media, which was ramping up in popularity, came on big-time right around 2007 – 2009. Media giants found a disgustingly-cheap way to get engagement with their customers. Why spend $150k on a billboard on a highway that may or may not get conversion, when you can spend $20k and DEFINITELY get engagement with thousands of Facebook/Twitter fans, all who are talking and all whose behavior is trackable? App creators like Zynga jumped into the platform and made millions. And then..mobile dropped, and with mobile (iOS, Android, HTML5) the market surged again. Everyone saw iPhone apps as a new market to make money – again, people with some vision and a bit of code made millions.

So if you look at the tech landscape as a Yukon gold rush, think about this: who makes all the money in the gold rush? A few lucky prospectors (entrepreneurs), the mining giants (Big Media, gaming companies), and the general stores that sold picks, axes, and all the equipment (re: digital studios).

Hey, DOM & TOM’s a digital studio…at a time when social and mobile spiked, and all the talented highly-skilled people had the freedom to dream about making new wealth other than finance and consulting. But all gold rushes end eventually, right?

Well, there’s another set of clients who have missed out on the massive tech surge, who are now (2011 and onward) coming back to the marketplace, and who have deeper pockets than anyone before them. For the sake of broad strokes, let’s call them “Corporations.” All the major corporations out there have massive marketing and tech budgets, and departments whose teams had their budgets slashed to nothing. All this time they’ve basically sat on the sidelines while social and mobile surged by them. Don’t get me wrong – Priceline, Hearst Media, Viacom did dip a toe in the markets. But it’s nothing compared to what they WILL be doing in the next 5 to 10 years.

Think about it: what happens to the VP of Marketing, or the VP of IT, who used to generate and implement their ideas yearly? Well, they didn’t stop having those great ideas. They shelved those ideas, year after year, implemented the smaller ones, and waited for the day that they’d get their budgets back….

And that time has come. Corporate profits are higher than ever. They’re sitting on piles of cash and they want to start getting more on their investments. The people who can create jobs in this country will have to do so by convincing all the money that sitting on the sidelines (roughly $1.5 Trillion in private funds in America alone!) to jump back in and invest in America Inc. Those people will be visionary, they’ll be tech-savvy, and they’ll be young.

More to come on Wednesday, when we go into the nature of these people, the true job-creators, and the employees that they’ll hire.

As always, please feel free to comment or share. Please note that this is Post #1 of a 3-part post “HOW TO CREATE JOBS”. For more information please click on the link http://www.tomtancredi.com/2012/05/05/how-to-create-jobs-preamble/.

 

Woops - as of Mar 2012, it's more like $2 Trillion that corporations are sitting on, getting a 2% return on their money...

HOW TO CREATE JOBS! {Preamble}

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Hi friends,

I’m working on a series of posts that I’m going to tentatively title:  How to Create  Jobs. 

It’s a 3-part post that will be published next Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Post #1: The current landscape in America (or anywhere in the modern world, really)

I’m going to do a cursory dive into what I saw happening in 2009, when I first coFounded my company with my brother , where we are now in 2012, and what we’re facing in the next three-to-five years. Disclaimer: I’m looking into a tech-specific sector of the economy, but I have a theory that by 2020 most of what we consider “the tech industry” will be so pervasive in the other industries that it’ll be  meaningless to distinguish the “true” tech industry from any other industry. But that’s for another post.

Post #2: What it takes to create a job, and keep them

I’m going to talk about the talent pool we have right now, what it takes to actually create a job, and how to make sure that job will last. I’m focusing on people in their 20s and 30s, and not worrying about skilled/unskilled labor in their 40s-60s.

Post #3: Why it’s the #1 priority for EVERYONE to job-create immediately

I’m going to make the claim that the inequalities of modern society, specifically in America with the 1% pitted against the 99%, can be solved by radical job-creation in the marketplace, which will better re-distribute wealth  than any other tax or stimulus program from the government. And why if we fail we’re probably heading towards severe civil discord the likes which we have not seen in 175 years.

This is a topic I am sincerely passionate about. I encourage as many of you reading in the next few days to comment, share and participate in any other way you deem fit.

 

We are on the right track, but we can do better

What little I know about Leadership…

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This is all I know about leadership

1.) Leadership has a sense of gravity to it. If you think of Leadership as an element, think of it as one of the denser elements like Tungsten or Gold (or Osmium!). If placed at the top of an organization leadership will flow downward throughout the company. If it’s stuck at the base, or somewhere in the middle, the odds of getting this element to the top of the organization is going to take massive amounts of effort.

2.) Leadership can’t be delegated, like a role or new job assignment.

3.) If there’s a lack of Leadership people will try to fill that void as best they can, and if they can’t they’ll leave for somewhere else where Leadership exists.

4.) Leaders generally have a lot tough choices but most of the time they’re making a lot of boring choices.

5.) Leadership is based in trust, clarity of purpose, discipline and imagination (sometimes humor)

6.) Leadership is essential to running anything for any duration of time.

7.) Leadership is a lonely trade and the best leaders in history were very lonely people. Ironically, they were also very empathetic to people around them.

8.) Leaders will be criticized no matter what course of action they take.

9.) Leadership is encouraged in sports and business, and rarely in theater, writing, or music. No wonder the Arts suffer systemic problems with programs, particularly in funding.

10.) There is no unified plan to raise, train, and prepare tomorrow’s Leaders in America. I wonder if that’s the marketplace working at its finest or if we’re screwed.

 

Tools of the trade for anyone trying to make friends and influence people....