Remagining Business Support in the Workforce System
This week, project team members Vinz Koller and Kristin Wolff participated in a leadership conference for business support professionals hosted by the US Department of Labor Employment and Training Adminstration. Attendees convened at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Conference Center and were treated to a fast-paced series of engaging learning activities and events focused on using new technologies and improving service quality.

Importantly, however, event organizers also made space for conversation about the deeper changes occuring in thier work, their organizations, and their communities. We heard stories about how the the economic downturn explosed structural shifts in local and regional economies, causing community leaders, policy makers, and business support professionals from across sectors to reevaluate the businesses they are in and the value they create. We heard about the challenges of engaging business in the srategic way, in the context of relentless pressure to content workers and jobs immediately. And we heard about the profound changes occuring in K-12 and post-secondary education and support programs intended to keep young people learning the skills they will need for work, and for life.

Session on Workforce Leadership
In this context, our project team offered a session specifically focused on (workforce) leadership, engaging participants in a simulation and sharing preliminary highlights from the Enhancing Workforce Leadership study.

We are grateful to event organizers at the Department of Labor (Jennifer Troke & team and Gina Wells, who connected us), Maher & Maher (especially Bruce Rankin), and everyone who participated - the energy, passion, and insights shared in 90-minutes bowled us over.

Our photos are available on Flickr here (licensed under Creative Commons), and our (evolving) research materials here.

Oh, and our tweets are collected here (we put the link into Ideascale too, here).

The Strength of Weak Ties

Mark Granovetter posited the strength of weak ties in 1973, launching a field of inquiry with a 1985 update focused on the problem of embeddedness - the idea that economic relationships are embedded inside social relationships. A follow-up in 2005 called for an interdisciplinary approach to the "black box" of social relationship so that their impact on economic behaviors and outcomes could be revealed and better understood.

The Science of Social Networks Applied

Most people understand the economic power of networks intuitively - and use them for job-hunting, learning, caring for their families and communities, and a myriad of other things.

Industry has long attempted to harness the power of networks for generating sales, recruiting talent, entering new markets, and cultivating and applying innovation - inside firms and industries, and more recently, through crowdsourcing.

And at the community level, scholars like Sean Safford have been able to show that the health of social networks have a significant impact on the ability of communities withstand economic disruption.

But social networks have been difficult and time consuming to document.

Enter technology.

Today, millions of people leave digital breadcrumbs that make their networks visible - from text messages on mobile phones to updates on Facebook or Twitter.

We are creating more efficient and effective ways to map, measure (and cultivate!) healthy networks, as evidence of their economic power continues to mount.

New Netwok Finds

Last week, these gems came across my radar:

1. Network Diversity and Economic Development (Nathan Eagle, Michael Macy, Rob Claxton in Science Magazine, May 2010 - summary visible with out subscription). Researchers analyzed cell phone data (in Britain) to reveal the social networks of cell phone users. They found that communities whose residents maintain diverse networks were more prosperous than communities with less diverse networks. Conclusion?

   “On a population level, the surprisingly strong correspondence we discovered between the structure of social contacts and the economic well-being of populations highlights the potential benefit of socially targeted policies for economic development.”

   (A plain-English summary of the same study is available at Futurity here.)
2. Social Enterprise: It Takes A Network (Raj Kumar, McKinsey Digital, What Matters). The author argues that the network is (potentially) a more effective organizational structure for meeting "bottom of the pyramid" needs when the goals is to assess impact and not just commercial sales. Significantly, this changes the model for "scaling up" and implies the need for alternatives to program- or organization-based measures as the primary indicators of success.

As social network mapping and analysis becomes simpler and more accessible, more of us can invest more time and energy in network weaving - building the social networks we now know really matter.

The last two weeks offered unprecedented drama in the UK, as the general election resulted in the resignation of Gordon Brown as the head of the Labour Party on May 11, and the establishment of a coalition government lead by new Prime Minister David Cameron (Conservative) and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat). The domestic agenda? Reducing the UK's £163B deficit and addressing the highest rates of joblessness in over 15 years.

And then there's Greece, flanked (in print) by the words "austerity" and "job loss" in roughly equal measure.

Jobs Issues are Central

The jobs issue is at the heart of some of the most difficult challenges cash-strapped governments face the world over (but in particular, where the tango between the finance and housing industries wrought the greatest havoc). Some of these connections are obvious: people who lose their jobs have less money to spend, reducing the government revenue they would otherwise pay in the form of income and sales tax and increasing their need for government services - unemployment insurance, training grants, food stamps, health insurance, transport, even public libraries.

There are also less obvious "costs" linked to unemployment ranging from an increase in public school enrollment as more parents have difficulty paying for private school, to widespread declines in risk-taking on the part of entrepreneurs, consumers, lenders, and even job seekers ill-matched with their current positions but fearful of leaving them. Never mind the longterm and potentially massive social costs.

Community Perspectives on Jobs

This past March, my colleagues and I at Corporation for a Skilled Workforce captured the experiences of workforce professionals at the National Association of Workforce Boards Annual Forum - they are the community faces of workforce policy in communities across the U.S. And they are very concerned about jobs.

Policy Levers for Job Creation

We also interviewed policy professionals and thought leaders representing a wide range of perspectives about the policy prescriptions they were advocating - from Dean Baker's (CEPR) ideas on job sharing to Jagadeesh Gokhale (Cato) on loosening credit and promoting self-employment to Heidi Schierholz's (EPI) case for a second stimulus. Most focused on federal-level interventions. (The entire set of 14 videos is in this playlist.)

Communities, too, are advancing solutions:

• Investing in innovation and growing sustainable industries through collaborative ventures;
• Economic gardening, regional resilience efforts, and other locally-focused development strategies;
• Promoting upskilling among workers and those looking for work;
• Reinventing placement services and supports;
• Experimenting with new (and revisiting old) approaches to training and  placement; and
• Using technology to make information more accessible and transparent,  and to connect job seekers with  resources, information and assistance outside of government - leveraging community resources and social  networks.

Over the next six weeks, we will be looking specifically at government policies, programs, and approaches that seek to accelerate job creation and promote prosperity, in a sustainable way.