How to Become a Producer
September 24th, 2010 // 4:00 am @ Oliver DeMille
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Producers are the most important citizens, as Thomas Jefferson put it.
Actually, the word he used was farmers—specifically, “tillers of the soil.” By producing food, farmers obviously had an important role in successful society.
But Jefferson meant more than this.
Because farmers lived close to the land, they were self-reliant with respect to their own survival and received an income from providing indispensable basic needs for others.
This made them more independent than people of other occupations.
If hard times came, they tightened their belts and lived off their farms. In contrast, during the same challenges, most city dwellers and even shop owners were more likely to turn to the government or upper classes for help.
The founding generation was sensitive to the level of dependency of the European populace.
The small but incredibly powerful upper class was the only group that could live off their assets and make it through hard times like war, economic depression, or pandemic.
Because of this, the upper class was independent while everyone else was dependent on the upper classes and government.
Since the first focus of human societies is to survive, the power to survive independently was seen as true independence. Indeed, the War of Independence had this deeper meaning to founding Americans: They were finally independent of the European upper class.
Dependents versus Independents
In our day, nearly all citizens are dependent on an employer or the government.
One way to rate one’s level of independence might be to measure how long you can survive, feed your family, and live in your home after your employer stops paying you anything.
Some people are two-year independents, while others are three-year independents or two-month independents, and so on.
It is not unlikely that most Americans are absolute dependents, living paycheck to paycheck or on government support.
The triple entendre here is interesting.
At a time where the growth of political independents is helping lessen the dangers of a two-party monopoly on American politics, there is a need for more people to become true economic independents (people who can survive indefinitely without a paycheck). As both of these grow, the level of American independence will increase.
Any level of economic independence is good, including everything from two months to twenty years of non-employer-dependent financial security.
But the future of freedom may well depend on those with permanent economic independence.
3 Types of Independents
There are three groups with long-term independence whose members are permanently free from dependence on a paycheck.
The first two are made up of people supported by trust funds or equivalent, covered financially for life by wealth earned or passed down to them.
Group one lives off these funds, often spending their lives in play and leisure.
The second group spends their lives dedicated to making a difference in society through service, career, investment, entrepreneurship, or whatever path they choose to use to improve themselves and the world.
The third group has no trust fund or equivalent wealth to rely upon, but has the skill set and worldview of entrepreneurial enterprise.
This group doesn’t start with full bank accounts, but rather with emotional accounts full of faith and determination, grit and initiative, and an undying belief in the principles of abundance, hard work, and enterprise.
Whatever happens, members of this third group have an almost unshakable belief that there is opportunity everywhere.
They believe in themselves, and they believe that if they put their minds and hands to work they can build value out of opportunity and create prosperity through their energy and effort.
Together, the second and third groups are society’s Producers.
They start, build, invest in and grow businesses and organizations that create a nation’s assets, advancements, and top achievements. They employ the workers of the world.
And when hard times come, they don’t ask government or employers to provide for them. Rather, they look around, assess the situation, see opportunities amidst the problems, and get to work building value for the future.
They do, however, ask government and the big established businesses to get out of the way, to allow them the freedom to turn their initiative and work into growing profits and success.
When government increases obstacles and regulations on small business, it directly attacks freedom and prosperity.
When this occurs, entrepreneurs naturally look for nations and markets that are friendly to business. As a result, nations with free enterprise systems attract more producers and are blessed with greater wealth and prosperity.
Non-Producer Attempts to Create Producers
Nations naturally benefit from a large producer class, but how are producers created? The common answers fall short.
The liberal view is that those with credentials and advanced education—the experts—must set up a system that allows enterprise but also fairly distributes the rewards of economic success.
The conservative view is to allow big investors to get huge rewards and therefore be willing to take big risks.
The blue-collar populist approach is to make sure management treats labor fairly and humanely.
The bureaucratic view is that rules make the society and economy work.
While each of these has a place, within limits, none of them really get to the heart of what makes producers tick.
The problem is that these views are nearly always promoted and managed by employees with an employee background and an employee mentality.
Non-producers grudgingly admit the great need for more producers, and then set out to build conveyor belts which will produce more producers.
This only works insofar as a born entrepreneur sometimes breaks out of the conveyor belt and overcomes the obstacles to his or her success.
David Brooks has referred to Washington’s party politics as the PhD’s (liberals) versus the MBA’s (conservatives).
Both give lip service to small business; but their modus operandi belies a different governing worldview.
The PhD’s want government to run the economy and provide jobs, and to be the Great State Entrepreneur so that regular citizens don’t need to take risks.
The MBA’s want to appeal to big investment, and are loathe to consider small business significant or meaningful.
The average citizen-employee wants managers to treat employees better.
This is all employee thinking.
Government programs will not create many entrepreneurs, nor will most corporate ventures, bureaucratic agencies, or labor unions.
And most MBA programs emphasize employee training and measure their effectiveness by citing job placement statistics.
Entrepreneurs are the natural competitors to all these.
The Answer
How do we create more producers?
The answer, as frustrating as it is to the experts, is this: We don’t.
That is, institutionalized and standardized programs do not of themselves yield producers, except by happenstance (as noted above).
The very act of systemizing the training of initiative and innovation tends to shut down initiative and innovation.
What can be done, what actually works, is to help young people realize the importance of producers in society and reward their inclinations toward being anomalies, outliers, and disruptive innovators.
The first one is easier said than done; the second one is nearly impossible for most parents and teachers to either conceive of or accomplish.
To support the development of the entrepreneurial spirit in the rising generation, youth need to be:
- Exposed to those who highly value entrepreneurialism
- Given opportunities to earn and receive personalized mentoring from successful producers.
In short, as we elevate the honor and accessibility of being producers, we will tend to increase the number of them.
While the example may have its limitations, it is interesting to study the most successful network marketing, multi-level and other like organizations that in recent times have emphasized entrepreneurship among “regular” people.
For instance, Amway and its affiliates created more millionaires than most of the top 100 corporations combined, with each millionaire being an independent entrepreneur.
In such organizations, interested people are introduced to many who highly value entrepreneurial producers, and new affiliates work directly with a producer mentor.
Hundreds of non-traditional companies have accomplished similar results. Ironically, one criticism of such organizations by mainstream (employee) experts is that they are “pyramid schemes.”
From another perspective, the true pyramid companies are those where most of the work hours are done by lesser-paid employees while the highest salaries and bonuses go to the executives at the top.
Hands-on business schools like Acton MBA have similarly helped educate entrepreneurs by a combination of inspiring people to be producers and also providing producer mentors.
And the many bestselling books promoting this same model, from the “One Minute” series to the writings of Steve Farber and many others, show that this system is appealing to many people.
Highly successful coaching services have followed this pattern as well, including such notable businesses as those established by John Assaraf, Leslie Householder, Dennis Deaton and many of those mentioned in The Secret.
Nearly the entire self-help industry is built on this model: Promote the honor and value of successful entrepreneurialism and help would-be producers get direct mentoring from successful producers.
Thinkers like Andrew Carnegie and writers like Dale Carnegie outlined this model a long time ago.
The mainstream PhD/MBA ambivalence toward the “Success” and “Self-Help” community stems from their reliance on and loyalty to the doctrine of employeeship.
Harvard Business School once emphasized that the major changes in the world tend to come from what they called “disruptive innovators.”
These anomalous individuals produce surprising novelties from out-of-the-mainstream sources and dramatically change society, business, and other facets of life.
Disruptive innovators are disruptive precisely because they are totally unexpected by the conventional majority.
The government and big corporations spend a lot of resources trying to predict the future.
And invariably entrepreneurial producers come along every few years and change everything. Reams of articles and books are written trying to predict where the next such innovations will come from and prescribing how to help train future innovators.
But the network marketing companies and other non-traditional entities drastically out-produce government and big corporate attempts to build entrepreneurs.
3 Steps
But all of this commentary falls short of the real point. Only the individual can truly become an entrepreneur.
If there is to be a much-needed revolution that brings many more entrepreneurs to society, individuals, and families must take action and lead out.
If what we want is more independence, then we must have more independents—more producers.
If you want society to be leavened by a greater proportion of individuals with producer mojo, then you need to consider whether you should be a producer yourself, and how to become one.
To be a producer, it is up to you to make it happen.
Here are three suggestions:
1. Study successful producers.
The most important part of this is to see the power of focus, integrity, and faith in abundance that producers exemplify.
Where the media often tries to paint producers as greedy and immoral, the truth is usually very different.
Pay special attention to what great producers believe, and learn to think like them.
The habit of truly believing in abundance and principles makes one a true independent, permanently free of dependence on others and able to build, create and lead.
2. Study what the great producers study.
The material most studied by the greatest producers and leaders has been the great classics.
Producers are voracious readers, going far beyond any prescribed lists. Leaders are readers.
Read the greatest works of mankind and everything else you can get your hands on. Keep reading, studying and learning throughout your life.
3. Find and work with mentors who are successful producers.
The unwritten lessons gained from this kind of experience are invaluable, real and profound.
Coming face-to-face with greatness by working with successful producers is essential to becoming a successful producer yourself.
Our society desperately needs more producers.
We need more people who think like entrepreneurs and more people who take initiative and fulfill the needs of society without waiting for government or the people of wealth and privilege to “fix it for us.”
The future of freedom is directly and literally tied to the future of producers in our society.
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Oliver DeMille is the founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Culture &Economics &Education &Entrepreneurship &Featured &Mini-Factories &Producers
Overcoming Hamilton’s Curse: Specific Solutions that Only Entrepreneurs can Provide
September 23rd, 2010 // 4:00 am @ Oliver DeMille
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When America decided to follow Alexander Hamilton’s economic model instead of the Jeffersonian system, a number of changes occurred which now haunt our generation.
Jefferson envisioned a nation of small farm and shop owners that spread around leadership and prosperity, while Hamilton preferred a mercantile system with a few wealthy owners employing the large majority of the populace.
Hamilton felt that an increase in wealth among the leading families would make up for the reduced freedom and less-widespread prosperity under a mercantile economy.
After all, this was the model used by the most powerful nations in Europe.
Ironically, we have now reached a point where the greatest challenges we face are caused by the mercantile system and can likely only be solved by an entrepreneurial mindset.
Funny how history pulls these types of pranks.
Failed Solutions
Unfortunately, the two main sides emphasize government solutions (more government-provided jobs and stricter regulation against corporations and bonuses) versus big-business mercantilism (hire and fire as best fits company projections, and move operations abroad to less hostile regulatory environments with cheaper labor—or in other words, business as usual).
A third view comes from frustrated populists who want Washington to get its act together and fix the economy.
All three of these views miss the point.
Wall Street, Washington, and Main Street still seek Hamiltonian solutions: “Big institutions should fix things for us.”
The specific challenges we face, however, don’t lend themselves to institutional fixes. Our current problems need precisely entrepreneurial-type solutions.
This isn’t the old debate of whether public or private programs are best. The truth is, that debate nearly always promoted institutional fixes.
What we need now are patently non-institutional innovations.
Major Challenges
Consider the major problems we are facing.
Most are the natural results of too much reliance on institutional size and power and not enough initiative, innovation, and leadership from “little guys.”
Of course, the few who are entrepreneurs do an amazing job against increasing odds.
But a major shift to the Producer Mindset is needed to overcome our current challenges—and more such challenges will continue to arise as long as we stay addicted to big institutions.
Specifically, the major concerns we’re facing in the years and decades ahead include the following:
- Running out of money for social security and many other entitlements.
- The flight of many in the entrepreneurial class to Brazil, India and other places with less regulation of small business.
- The wartime economy of China that is built to thrive in times of conflict (and struggles in times of peace).
- The end of privacy as government is pressured to oversee everyone and all things in the name of security and protection from terrorism.
- The end of America’s production base as industry continues to go abroad and we continue to train the world’s attorneys instead of more engineers and inventors.
- The growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S. and globally.
Also consider the following items that will peak and commence declining in the years immediately ahead, as outlined in the book Peak Everything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines by energy expert Richard Heinburg:
- Oil availability and cheap fossil fuels to drive the economy
- Fresh water availability per capita
- Easy, cheap, quick mobility
- Available land in agricultural production
- Political stability
- Safe, inexpensive food
Only one of these looming challenges (security against possible Chinese aggression) can be effectively solved directly by government as it is now constituted.
And even this could be beyond the government’s scope if attacks are not military but cyberwar¹ on, say, America’s financial records or utility providers.²
A truly free government emphasizing a free enterprise economy would help against all of these, by empowering entrepreneurial action, wealth, and innovation to meet each challenge.
Heinburg’s solution to these problems is “fifty million farmers,” which he describes as a drastic increase in the number of small farmers.
Such people, Jefferson predicted long ago, own their own land and bring initiative and tenacity to producing food and also free citizens.
While the problems we face are clearly greater than a mere shift to locavorism will remedy, the heart and mind of the citizen farmer is a good start.
In addition to farmers, we need millions of producers of all kinds applying entrepreneurial talents and skills to overcoming our biggest challenges.
Habits & Complexes
There are at least two major roadblocks hindering this needed Freedom Shift.
The first is habit. Our society has become habituated, at times addicted, to certain lifestyles.
For example, when the recession hit, people spent more money, not less, at McDonald’s. We are habituated to eating out, and tightening our belts in hard times has come to include eating even more french fries.
Perhaps our most debilitating rut as a culture is a dependence on experts. Until we kick this dependency, how can we rise above the statistics and become a nation of entrepreneurs and leaders?
The answer, as challenging as it is, is for entrepreneurs to show us the way, and to keep at it until more of us start to heed.
The second huge roadblock is our complexity. Indeed, we have reached a level of complexity where simplicity itself is suspect.
For example, the simple reality is that jobs migrate to less difficult nations. It’s the old Rule of Capital: Capital goes where it is treated well.
In nations that have become too complex, taxes and regulation cause at least a doubling of the amount employers must spend on labor.
Many experts call this “progress,” but the natural result is that many companies respond by sending their operations and jobs to less costly nations.
When this happens, complex nations react in an amazing way: They villainize the companies (“greedy profiteers”) rather than reducing taxes and regulations to entice companies back home.
Then they take an incredible extra step: They increase taxes and regulations even more on the businesses that stayed!
The result? More money flees and recession inevitably comes.
At this point, when the need is obviously to lure businesses, capital, and jobs back home with decreased regulation and taxes, nations that are too complex actually compound the negative situation as angry workers cry out for more regulations and controls.
Freedom, prosperity and stability all suffer.
As Ken Kurson put it,
“Our bipartisan addiction to spending and borrowing pairs with a hostility toward employers that makes real recovery difficult.”³
Or, as the Governor of Minnesota said:
“I was talkin’ to people this morning who run small businesses. Where’s their bailout?”4
People who point out how ridiculous this is are often labeled extremists or radicals. Simple answers aren’t often very popular in complex nations.
Sadly, only major crisis is usually enough to get people to listen to simple solutions.
Poor Complexion
Another example is found in the issue of health care.
Health care costs consistently increase where voluminous regulations along with medical lawsuits cause huge malpractice insurance costs.
When government seeks to regulate and force the costs down, it must find a way to reduce litigation and payouts.
But in complex society, people want to have their cake and eat it too.
They want health care to cost less and also to leave doctors and insurance companies paying for incredibly expensive lawsuits.
How is it possible to get both? “The government should make it so,” is the answer of a complex society. But how? “The government should just fix it.”
This amazingly naïve view of things is the result of complexity. Far too many citizens don’t even expect to be able to understand the issue, so they leave it to the experts.
And once all is in the hands of experts, they are expected to solve everything without any pain or problem to the populace. After all, they’re the experts, right?
Those who benefit most from the costs of lower health care either need to forego the threat of so many lawsuits or be willing to pay higher prices.
But such simple answers don’t convince in complex societies.
One more example is interesting. Hamilton argued in The Federalist Papers that for society to be free the legal code would need to be long, detailed and difficult to understand.
He based this on the systems in Europe at the time. But these were the very systems the founders fought to abandon.
In contrast, Jefferson, Madison and many others taught that complex laws and legal codes were sure signs of oppression.
They agreed with Montesquieu, Locke and Hume and that laws must be simple, concise and brief, and indeed that the entire legal code must be simple enough that every citizen knows the entire law.
If a person doesn’t know the law, they argued, he shouldn’t be held liable for breaking it or freedom is greatly reduced.
In complex society, most attorneys don’t even know the whole law.
The Right Level of Complexity
The main criticism of simple societies is that they are often intolerant, controlling, and narrow-minded. This is an accurate and good criticism, and such simple societies are not the ideal.
Indeed, Madison shows the negatives of such societies in Federalist Papers eighteen through twenty.
He proposes that by establishing a large nation and a free constitution we can simultaneously establish both an open, modern, and progressive society and a free, prosperous, and happy nation.
Fortunately, we are not forced to choose between a stupidly simple nation and an overly complex one.
The ideal is a nation sufficiently complex to promote progress, toleration, cooperation, and growth and one with enough simple common sense to achieve freedom, prosperity, and opportunity.
This is the traditional entrepreneurial mix.
Whereas mercantilism values a few cosmopolitan elites employing a mass of less urbane managers and workers, in contrast the entrepreneurial challenge has always been to balance complex and intricate details with simple and effective systems and results.
In short, we need more entrepreneurs running more small, medium and large institutions in society.
Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous
The success of the next few decades will depend on certain types of people with certain skills and abilities.
The talents and habits of “The Company Man” came into vogue in the 1950s and helped create a society of professionals, experts and officials. This greatly benefited the final half-decade (1955-2005) of the Industrial Age surge.
But as the Information Age moved past infancy (1964-1991) and began its rebellious growth to adulthood (1992-2008), many became aware that change was ahead.
As the Information Age grasps maturity and takes over in the 2010s and 2020s, major alterations in society are inevitable.
The Company Man is now replaced by what David Brooks called Patio Man: Individualists who want personal freedom, enough income to pay the bills plus some extra spending money, a government that provides national security and keeps jobs plentiful, a nice house, a nice car each for him and her, a grill, a good movie tonight and friends over for the big game on Sunday.
At first, this was paid for by one working parent, then by both.
But unless something changes, this lifestyle is at an end for all but the wealthiest tenth of the population.
The thing which facilitated such a lifestyle in the first place was the prosperity generated by entrepreneurship, and the only thing that can maintain such a lifestyle and still pay off our society’s debts and obligations is a drastic increase in the number of entrepreneurs.
Period.
Specific Entrepreneurial Challenges
Let’s get specific. Either a generation of entrepreneurs will arise or the “Patio Man” lifestyle will end.
Very soon, the following must occur:
- Entrepreneurs must figure out how to cover their own retirement and that of their employees and many others so that when we run out of money for social security and other entitlements it just won’t matter.
- Entrepreneurs must figure out how to compete with the entrepreneurial classes of Brazil, India, and other places with less regulation of small business.
- Entrepreneurs must figure out how to rebuild a strong American industrial base to provide the basic foundational economic strengths of society.
- Entrepreneurs must figure out how to replace an oil-driven economy with cheaper and hopefully better and cleaner energy alternatives.
- Entrepreneurs must figure out how to provide inexpensive and quality fresh water, food, and mobility without cheap oil.
Researchers, experts, professionals, employees and governments do not have the ability to make these things happen. They will be needed to help accomplish these vital needs, but ultimately it will require the skills of entrepreneurs.
These types of changes are the arena of entrepreneurial talents and free enterprise innovations, not of legislative discussions, bureaucratic rules, or expert publications.
Legislatures, bureaucrats, and experts are important to society and are good at certain things, but initiative, innovation, taking major risks, and tenacious ingenuity are not their forte.
As significant as these challenges are, we need the best of the best solving them.
If entrepreneurs accomplish the goals listed above, we will naturally see increased political stability, a well-funded government that can protect against Chinese or other international aggression, and a narrowing gap between the rich and poor.
It will also take a widespread entrepreneurial mindset to figure out how to effectively thwart terrorism without turning the government into a secretive surveillance state, and also help the nation evolve into a less litigious and more productive society.
Government cannot wisely do either of these projects, since it is a central party to both.
And big corporations also have a conflict of interest; they would naturally use both projects to increase their own power at the cost of freedom.
Entrepreneurs are more suited to succeed in these projects than any other group, and to then share their views with the citizenry.
The most critical problems we now face are also our greatest opportunities.
We need more entrepreneurs, and we need entrepreneurs who engage more in social leadership.
Our future now, more than at any time since the founding and pioneering eras, depends on producers.
Hamilton’s ideas contributed much to American growth, but it is time for a renewal of the Jeffersonian spirit of independence and initiative—in all of us.
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Sources:
- From the article entitled, “Good for Some” in the 2/13/10 issue of The Economist: “In January Google suffered a serious attack on its infrastructure, originating in China. On February 2nd Dennis Blair, the White House director of national intelligence, went to a Senate committee to give an annual threat assessment. He used it to give a warning of a large and far-reaching threat. Sophisticated cyber-criminals are stealing sensitive government information every day, Mr. Blair explained, and state agencies often find shadowy presences on their networks—‘the hallmark of an unknown adversary intending to do far more than merely demonstrate skill or mock a vulnerability.’ An overarching concern is that in a time of crisis network infrastructure might be seriously compromised.”
- See James Fallows, “Cyber Warriors,” The Atlantic, March 2010. See Israel on its Internet Fighting Team in Harper’s Index, Harpers Magazine, November 2009.
- Ken Kurson, “A Hedge Fund for Little Guys,” Esquire, March 2010.
- Governor Tim Pawlenty, quoted by Mark Warren in “The Dark Horse,” Esquire, March 2010.
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Oliver DeMille is the founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Aristocracy &Economics &Entrepreneurship &Government &Producers &Prosperity
Entrepreneurs of the World, Unite!
September 22nd, 2010 // 4:00 am @ Oliver DeMille
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A revolution is needed.
Not just any revolution, mind you, but a specific kind of freedom shift that will make the critical difference.
In order to progress, we need a renaissance of the entrepreneurial mentality and many millions of entrepreneurs in our society.
The recession has already helped increase awareness of this need. The Information Age is naturally offering many improvements over the Industrial Age, but simple access to more information is not enough.
What we do with the increased power of widespread information is the key.
The great benefit of the Nomadic Age was family and community connection and a feeling of true belonging, while the Agrarian Age brought improved learning, science and art, and eventually democratic freedoms.
The Industrial Age allowed more widespread distribution of prosperity and social justice, and many improved lifestyle options through technological advances.
Unfortunately, during the Industrial Age many freedoms were decreased as free nations turned to big institutions and secretive agencies for governance.
The industrial belief in the conveyor belt impacted nearly every major aspect of life, from education and health care to agriculture, industry, business, law, media, family, elder care, groceries, clothing, and on and on.
Whether the end product was goods or services, these all became systemized on assembly lines—from production to delivery and even post-purchase customer service.
At the same time, we widely adopted certain industrial views which became cultural, such as “Bigger is always better,” “It’s just business,” “Perception is reality,” and many others. In truth, all of these are usually more false than true, but they became the cultural norm in nearly all of modern life.
Perhaps the most pervasive and negative mantra promoted by modernism is that success in life is built on becoming an employee and its academic corollary that the purpose of education is to prepare for a job.
Certainly some people want to make a job the focus of their working life, but a truly free and prosperous society is built on a system where a large number of the adult population spends its working days producing as owners, entrepreneurs and social leaders.
Producer vs. Employee Society
A society of producers is more likely to promote freedom than a society of dependents. Indeed, only a society of producers can maintain freedom.
Most nations in history have suffered from a class system where the “haves” enjoyed more rights, opportunities and options than the “have nots.” This has always been a major threat to freedom.
The American framers overcame this by establishing a new system where every person was treated equally before the law.
This led to nearly two centuries of increasing freedoms for all social classes, both genders and all citizens—whatever their race, religion, health, etc.
During the Industrial Age this system changed in at least two major ways.
First, the U.S. commercial code was changed to put limits on who can invest in what.
Rather than simply protecting all investors (rich or poor) against fraud or other criminal activity, in the name of “protecting the unsophisticated,” laws were passed that only allow the highest level of the middle class and the upper classes to invest in the investments with the highest returns.
This created a European-style model where only the rich own the most profitable companies and get richer while the middle and lower classes are stuck where they are.
Second, the schools at all levels were reformed to emphasize job training rather than quality leadership education.
Today, great leadership education is still the staple at many elite private schools, but the middle and lower classes are expected to forego the “luxury” of opportunity-affording, deep leadership education and instead just seek the more “practical” and “relevant” one-size-fits-all job training.
This perpetuates the class system.
This is further exacerbated by the reality that public schools in middle-class zip codes typically perform much higher than lower-class neighborhood schools.
Private elite schools train most of our future upper class and leaders, middle-class public schools train our managerial class and most professionals, and lower-class public schools train our hourly wage workers.
Notable exceptions notwithstanding, the rule still is what it is.
Government reinforces the class system by the way it runs public education, and big business supports it through the investment legal code.
With these two biggest institutions in society promoting the class divide, lower and middle classes have limited power to change things.
The Power of Entrepreneurship
The wooden stake that overcomes the vampire of an inelastic class system is entrepreneurial success.
Becoming a producer and successfully creating new value in society helps the entrepreneur surpass the current class-system matrix, and also weakens the overall caste system itself.
In short, if America is to turn the Information Age into an era of increased freedom and widespread economic opportunity, we need more producers.
How do we accomplish this Freedom Shift?
First of all, we must get past the obvious wish that Congress should simply equalize investment laws and allow everyone to be equal before the law.
Neither government nor big business has a vested interest in this change, and neither, therefore, does either major political party.
Nor does either side see much reason to change the public education system to emphasize entrepreneurial over employee training.
Either of these changes, or both, would be nice, but neither is likely.
What is more realistic is a grassroots return to American initiative, innovation and independence.
Specifically, regular people of all classes need to become producers.
A renaissance of entrepreneurship (building businesses), social entrepreneurship (building private service institutions like schools and hospitals), intrapreneurship (acting like an entrepreneur within an established company), and social leadership (taking entrepreneurial leadership into society and promoting the growth of freedom and prosperity) is needed.
Along with this, parents need to emphasize personalized, individualized educational options for their youth and to prepare them for entrepreneurship and producership, rather than cultivating in them dependence on employeeship.
If these two changes occur, we will see a significant increase in freedom and prosperity.
The opposite is obviously true, as well: The long-anticipated “train wreck” in society and politics is not so difficult to imagine as it was twenty years ago.
The education of the rising generation in self-determination, crisis management, human nature, history, and indeed, the liberal arts and social leadership in general, is the historically-proven best hope for our future liberty and success.
If entrepreneurial and other producer endeavors flourish and grow, it will naturally lead to changes in the commercial code that level the playing field for people from all economic levels and backgrounds.
Until the producer class is growing, there is little incentive to deconstruct the class system.
More than 80 percent of America’s wealth comes from small businesses, and when these grow, so will our national prosperity.
Today there are numerous obstacles to starting and growing small businesses. There will be many who lament that the current climate is not friendly to new enterprises.
Frontiers have ever been thus, and our forebears plunged headlong into greater threats. What choice did they have? What choice do we have? What if they hadn’t? What if we don’t?
The hard reality is that until the producer class is growing there will be little power to change this situation.
As long as the huge majority is waiting for the government to provide more jobs, we will likely continue to see increased regulation on small business that decreases the number of new private-sector jobs and opportunities.
The only realistic solution is for Americans to engage their entrepreneurial initiative and build new value.
This has always been the fundamental source of American prosperity.
The Growing Popularity of Producer Education
Consider what leading thinkers on the needs of American education and business are saying.
In Revolutionary Wealth, renowned futurist Alvin Toffler says that schools must deemphasize outdated industrial-style education with its reliance on rote memorization, the skill of fitting in with class-oriented standards, and “getting the right answers,” and instead infuse schools with creativity, individualization, independent and original thinking skills, and entrepreneurial worldviews.
Harvard’s Howard Gardner argued in Five Minds for the Future that all American students must learn the following entrepreneurial skills: “the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres,” and the “capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena.”
John Naisbitt, bestselling author of Megatrends, wrote in Mind Set! that success in the new economy will require the right leadership mindset much more than Industrial-Age credentials or status.
Tony Wagner wrote in The Global Achievement Gap that the skills needed for success in the new economy include such producer abilities as: critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, leading by influence, agility, adaptability, curiosity, imagination, effective communication, initiative and entrepreneurialism.
Former Al Gore speechwriter Daniel Pink writes in A Whole New Mind that the most useful and marketable skills in the decades ahead will be the entrepreneurial abilities of high-concept thinking and high-touch leading.
Seth Godin makes the same case for the growing need for entrepreneurial-style leaders in his business bestsellers Tribes and Linchpin.
Malcolm Gladwell arrives at similar conclusions in the bestselling book Outliers.
There are many more such offerings, all suggesting that the future of education needs to emphasize training the rising generations to think and act like entrepreneurs.
Indeed, without a producer generation, the Information Age will not be a period of freedom or spreading prosperity. Still, few schools are heeding this research.
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria has shown in The Post-American World that numerous nations around the world are now drastically increasing their influence and national prosperity.
All of them are doing it in a simple way: by incentivizing entrepreneurial behavior and a growing class of producers.
Unlike aristocratic classes, successful entrepreneurs are mostly self-made (with the help of mentors and colleagues) and have a deep faith in free enterprise systems, which allow opportunity to all people regardless of their background or starting level of wealth.
Entrepreneurs and Freedom
History is full of anti-government fads, from the French and Russian revolutionists to tea-party patriots in Boston and anti-establishment protestors at Woodstock, among many others. Some revolutions work, and others fail.
The ones that succeed, the ones that build lasting change and create a better world, are led by entrepreneurial spirit and behavior. As more entrepreneurs succeed, the legal system naturally becomes more free.
As more people take charge of their own education, utilizing the experts as tutors and mentors but refusing to be dependent on the educational establishment, individualized education spreads and more leaders are prepared.
With more leaders, more people succeed as producers, and the cycle strengthens and repeats itself.
Freedom is the result of initiative, ingenuity and tenacity in the producer class. These are also the natural consequences of personalized leadership education and successful entrepreneurial ventures.
For anyone who cares about freedom and wants to pass the blessings of liberty on to our children and grandchildren, we need to get one thing very clear: A revolution of entrepreneurs is needed.
We need more of them, and those who are already entrepreneurs need to become even better social leaders. Without such a revolution, freedom will be lost.
Click Here to Download a PDF of This Article
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Oliver DeMille is the founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Education &Entrepreneurship &Featured &Government &History &Information Age &Liberty &Producers
The Chemistry of Genius?
September 17th, 2010 // 4:00 am @ Oliver DeMille
New Science on What Makes Quality Education
Click Here to Download a PDF of this Article
Harvard Business School recently emphasized that the major changes in the world tend to come from what they called “disruptive innovators.”
These are surprising innovations that usually come from out-of-the-mainstream sources and drastically change society, business, and other facets of life.
Disruptive innovators are disruptive precisely because they are totally unexpected by the mainstream.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a best-selling book on the concept, showing that many and in fact most of the major societal initiators come from “outliers.”
Why are so many progresses initiated and led by unknown talent hotbeds, what Daniel Coyle called “chicken-wire Harvards”?
Indeed, Harvard, Yale, Stanford and their counterparts may lead the analysis about innovations, but “chicken-wire Harvards” produce many more innovative projects.
The Innovation “Gene”
Why is more entrepreneurial, innovative and leadership education flourishing in small, humble, usually under-funded environments than in the prestigious, elite halls of endowments and status?
And even when the mainstream and elite institutions take note and attempt to emulate such successes, why do they usually fall short of the smaller talent hotbeds?
The answer is simple. The breeding grounds of initiative and leadership believe in and implement the philosophy of individualized education.
Nearly everywhere else, the emphasis is on systemized models of learning that students must learn to navigate and “fit.”
To reinforce this point, there are many small, humble and under-funded educational models that are not talent hotbeds—almost invariably they are followers of the “systems model” rather than individualization.
Dead Poet’s Society
I well remember a visit years ago to a private school that had just received two major breakthroughs: an endowment from a wealthy parent, and a new president who promised to significantly grow the school.
As I talked to this president, however, I realized that he fully intended to turn this excellent, proven hotbed of talent into a systemized conveyor belt. He felt that this is what the wealthy donor wanted, and maybe it was.
But I could tell after a few minutes of visiting with him that he would ruin the depth, quality and excellent results the school had boasted for the past decade.
Five years later, my worst concerns were unfortunately the reality. The school was no longer a place of deep quality and excellence, but it was much bigger, more bureaucratic, and hardly distinguishable from the local public schools. Indeed, several charter schools in the area offered much higher quality.
The key to this change was teachers. In the public schools, teachers have been penalized for great teaching since 2002. As Harper’s noted:
“Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002…U.S. teachers are forced to choose between teaching general knowledge and ‘teaching to the test.’ The best teachers are thereby often disenfranchised by the improper use of education information systems.”
But in private schools, this system is not mandated. However, when such schools apply the systems approach to education, they usually obtain similar mediocre results.
In the old, under-funded days of this high school, the teachers had given their hearts and souls to provide personalized, individualized attention to every student.
As the school turned to industrial systems, these teachers were forced to move on or change their approach from individualized learning to factory-style academia.
Approaching each child with the assumption that she has genius inside, and that the teacher’s role is to help her find it, develop and polish it to improve herself and the world—this is called teaching. Anything else is something else.
Where true teaching occurs, excellence flourishes. This is applicable at all levels, from elementary to high school, undergraduate to graduate programs, and also adult learning.
Individualization of education is the first step to leadership education, and without it quality always decreases.
Seratonin, Adrenaline & Myelin
Science is now beginning to show the reasons why quality in education increases with individualization.
Studies have shown for a long time that students receiving personalized, caring and quality mentorship learn more effectively than those required to conform to a deeply structured and systemized model.
Elites have historically been successful in engaging tutors, mentors and individualizing private schools over less personal conveyor-belt schooling options.
Scientists are now discovering that the individualized method (personalized mentoring, deep practice, long hours of inspired and enthusiastic academic effort) results in drastically higher levels of the neural insulator myelin than the standardized system of education.
Students with higher levels of myelin learn more and remember it longer. It is especially valuable for gaining, maintaining and polishing skills.
As Daniel Coyle writes in The Talent Code:
“The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Here’s why. Every human skill…is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit.
“Myelin’s vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster…each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed.”
This research is in its infancy, but it is already helping us understand that there are neuro-chemical factors in our basic psycho-physiology that are impacted by our learning environment.
Montessori, Charlotte Mason and other great educators have taught this for many years.
Personalized educational models, with dedicated and caring mentors helping learners achieve depth and inspiration in their studies, achieve better results than assembly-line education.
Mentoring Matters
Quality mentors help students learn at least three key things:
- How to see their internal greatness and potential.
- How to study and practice in ways that greatly increase the flow of learning.
- How to repeat this kind of learning experience at will.
These are nearly always individualized lessons; and when they are applied, researchers are finding, the level of myelin and the resultant quality of learning increases.
To increase myelin levels and create talent hotbeds, Coyle says, mentors must create an environment of individualized coaching, be perceptive in seeing individual needs in their students, use shock or intensity to open student minds and then share valuable information, and find ways to really connect with each learner.
All of this is traditional leadership education, based on the same principles as the 7 Keys covered in my book A Thomas Jefferson Education:
- Classics, not Textbooks
- Mentors, not Professors
- Inspire, not Require
- Structure Time, not Content
- Quality, not Conformity
- Simplicity, not Complexity
- You, not Them (example)
It would be interesting to study the myelin levels of each. Say, for example, a study of myelin levels in students whose teachers emphasize the “inspire” approach versus those with more “requirement-oriented” methods. There could be many other examples.
Individualization Breeds Innovation
One thing is clear, if not yet scientifically studied: Most parents and teachers who apply the 7 Keys see significant, drastic and lasting increases in the quality of their students’ and their own learning.
Personalized education is more effective in helping students learn in their areas of interest, and it also outperforms generally in math, science and technology.
In the decades ahead, as in decades past, many of the most innovative ideas and projects are likely to come from talent hothouses outside the mainstream—places where dedicated and caring mentors help young people see their huge potential, start to discover their great inner genius, and feel inspired to do the hard and effective work of getting a great education.
Individualized, mentored, intensive learning has better results than standardized, rote and minimum-standards systems.
Click Here to Download a PDF of this Article
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Oliver DeMille is the founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Education &Entrepreneurship &Featured &Science
Mini-Factories: The Greatest Freedom Trend of Our Time
September 14th, 2010 // 4:00 am @ Oliver DeMille
The following is an excerpt from Oliver’s recent book, The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.
If freedom is to reverse the onslaught of American and global aristocracy, it will likely do so through the greatest freedom trend of our time.
This trend is revolutionizing institutions, organizations, relationships, society and even nations around the world. It is still in its infancy, and many have yet to realize its potential.
The experts tend to overlook it because it seems small. It will likely always seem small because it is a “bottom-up” trend with no “top-down” organizations, alliances, or even affiliations.
Truthfully, it isn’t even a single trend at all–it is thousands of small trends, all following a similar pattern.
Malcolm Gladwell called part of this trend “outliers,” Harry S. Dent called it the “customization” explosion, Alvin Toffler said it is the wave of “revolutionary wealth” as led in large part by “prosumers,” John Naisbitt named it the “high touch” megatrend, Stephen Covey called it the 8th Habit of “greatness,” Daniel Pink coined the descriptor “free agent nation,” and Seth Godin refers to it as “tribes.”
Others have termed it “social entrepreneurship,” “the new leadership,” “a new age,” and even “the human singularity.”
All of these touch on facets of this freedom trend, but I think the best, most accurate and descriptive name for it is the “mini-factory” model.
Modernism came with the factory–the ability to mass produce. This revolutionized the world–economics, governments, how we spend our time each day, what we eat and wear, relationships, the size and functions of our homes and cities, etc.
Today the mini-factory is changing everything just as drastically.
In ancient times the wealthy set up estates or fiefdoms to cover all their needs, and the masses worked to provide the needs of their aristocratic “superiors.”
In modern times the factory provided mass goods and services.
Imagine the impact on everything in our lives if each family could provide all, or even many, of its needs for itself–and do it better than kings or politicians ruling over working peasants or even corporations employing workers to produce goods and services.
Such is the world of the mini-factory.
How Does a Mini-Factory World Function?
For example, what if parents could educate their children better than local school factories, with the best teachers, classes and resources of the world piped directly into their own home?
What if a sick person had more time and motivation to research the cases of her symptoms than the factory doctors, and the availability of all the latest medical journals right on her computer screen?
She would also have holistic works, original studies, alternative and collaborative experts, and the ability to email the experts and get answers in less time than it would take to wait in the hospital lobby.
Ten friends would likely send her their experiences with similar illness within days of her mentioning casually online that she was sick. If she chose a certain surgeon, a dozen people might share their experiences with this doctor.
What if a mother planning to travel for family vacation could just book flights and hotels herself, without calling the “expert” travel agent? Maybe she could even choose seats on the flight or see pictures of her hotel room–all in her own home between her projects and errands.
Welcome to the world of the mini-factory. I purposely used examples that are already a reality. But they were just a futuristic dream when writers like Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt predicted them before 1990.
Technology has helped it, but the impetus of the mini-factory trend is freedom. People want to spend less time at the factory/corporation and more time at home. They want to be more involved in raising their children and improving their love life.
In an aristocracy, these luxuries are reserved for the upper class. In a free society, anyone can build a mini-factory.
What is a Mini-Factory?
A mini-factory is anything someone does alone or with partners or a team, that accomplishes what has historically (meaning the last 150 years of modernism) been done en masse or by big institutions.
If a charter school provides better education for some of the community, it’s a mini-factory. If it does it at less cost and/or in less time spent in the classroom, so much the better. A homeschool or private school can be a mini-factory.
Of course, if the charter, private, or home school does a worse job than the regular factory, it is a failed mini-factory.
If joining a multi-level company and building it into a source of real income serves you better than an employee position, it’s a mini-factory.
If downsizing from a lucrative professional job in Los Angeles to a private practice or job that pays much less but allows you twice as much time with your family and a more relaxed lifestyle in, say, Flagstaff or Durango and makes you happier, it’s a mini-factory.
Entrepreneurship, alternative education, the downshifter movement, environmental groups, alternative health, the growth of spirituality, community architecture, the explosion of network marketing, home doctor visits, the rebirth of active fathering, and so many other trends are mini-factories.
How do Mini-Factories Impact Freedom?
It all comes down to this: Big, institutional, non-transparent, bureaucratic organizations are natural supporters of aristocracy. Freedom flourishes when the people are independent, free, and as self-sufficient as possible.
I am not suggesting going backwards in any way.
Forward progress is most likely in a nation that is both well educated and highly trained, where big institutional solutions are offered wherever they are best and individuals and groups seek smaller solutions where they better serve their needs, where free government enterprise rules apply and there are no special benefits or perks of class (either conservative aristocracy or liberal meritocracy), and where government, business, family, academia, religion, media, and community all fulfill their distinct, equally-important roles.
Such a model is called freedom. It has been the best system for the most people in the history of the world, and it still is.
To adopt freedom in our time, either the aristocracy must give up its perks and voluntarily restructure society, or the masses must retake their freedoms bit by bit, day by day, by establishing mini-factories.
Mini-factories will be more successful if each person only does a few, and does them with true excellence.
Freedom will flourish best if there is no organization or even coordination of the mini-factories; if individuals, partners, families and teams identify what is needed in the world and in their own lives and set out to deliver it.
This is especially hard in a time like ours where the employee mindset wants someone to “fix” things (like the economy, health care, education, etc.), exactly when an entrepreneurial mindset is most needed to take risks and initiate the best and most lasting changes.
If real, positive, and effective change is to come, it will most likely be initiated by the people acting as individuals, small groups, and teams.
If it comes from the top, it will tend to only bring more aristocracy, and the day of freedom will be over for now.
Whatever your mini-factory contribution might be, consider that it will help determine the future of freedom.
Is it Worth the Challenge?
Mini-factories can be hard to establish and challenging to build. Many people fail once or several times before they learn to be effective.
But the type of learning that only comes from failing and then trying again is the most important in building leaders and citizens who are capable of maintaining freedom in a society.
Note that this very type of education is rejected in a training model of schooling, where failure is seen as unacceptable and students are taught to avoid it at all costs.
This mindset only works if an aristocracy is there to take care of the failures.
In a freedom model, citizens and leaders learn the vital lessons of challenges; failures and wise risk-taking are needed.
Starting and leading a mini-factory, and indeed all entrepreneurial work, is challenging.
Those who embraced this difficult path in history established and maintained freedom, while those who embraced the ease of past compromises sold themselves and their posterity into aristocracy.
In the long term, though, aristocracy is much harder on everyone than freedom.
What Will You Build?
As you consider what mini-factories you should support, start, and build, just ask what things could be done (or are being done) better by a small mini-factory than by the big organizations that try to control nearly everything in our world.
If it could be done just as well by a mini-factory, the change to the smaller entity can drastically promote freedom. If it can be done even better by a mini-factory, it is better for life itself!
The mini-factory is the new vehicle of freedom.
Take a mini-survey: What are your pet complaints? Government? Develop family government models. Health Care? Educate yourself on prevention and self-care. Education? Learn the principles of Leadership Education. Media? Start a blog. Entertainment? Develop a group of hobbyists who share your interests, whether it be Harley road trips, ice fishing, scrapbooking, etc.
You get the idea: Live deliberately, and do not wait for institutions to change to meet your needs.
Do not waste your energy or good humor on complaining.
Find a mini-factory that does it right and get behind it–or start one yourself. So many are needed, and they can bring the miracle of freedom!
The future remains unseen. It is the undiscovered country.
Many ancients felt that fate drove the future, but the idea of freedom taught humanity to look each to his/herself, to partner with others, and to take the risk to build community and take action now in order to pass on a better life to our children and our children’s children.
Today, that concept of freedom is waning–slowly and surely being replaced by a class culture.
Those who love freedom, whatever their stripe–be they green, red, blue, rainbow, or anything else–are needed. They need to see what is really happening, and they need to educate themselves adequately to make a difference.
The most powerful changes toward freedom will likely be made by mini-factories, in thousands and hopefully millions of varieties and iterations.
Aristocracy or freedom–the future of the globe–hangs in the balance…
Click here to learn more about the mini-factory trend and to purchase a paperback copy of The Coming Aristocracy. Click here to download two hour-long webinars with Oliver DeMille explaining mini-factories.
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Oliver DeMille is the founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Aristocracy &Business &Culture &Economics &Entrepreneurship &Featured &Liberty &Mini-Factories &Mission &Producers
