Off Topic: Honest Slogans

It's Friday, you're beat, probably slacking off a bit at the office today (it's ok, I won't tell anyone).

It's a grind for sure. If I really wanted to I could make us all more depressed about work by running some charts showing corporate profits continuing to reach new all-time highs, while wages and median family incomes remain at about 1983 levels. 

But I won't bum you out about that today. It's almost the weekend.

Instead, I want you to have a laugh or two courtesy of Honest Slogans, an amazingly simple and funny site that re-imagines many of the most famous and iconic corporate logos and taglines with what people really think about the companies and brands.

I will embed a few of these 'fake but ring pretty true' logos below, but you really should head over to Honest Slogans and have some chuckles do some competitive research.

I have to lead with what is seemingly every HR and Talent Pro's favorite company, LinkedIn:

How about a blast from the past but is still, shockingly still breathing, The Yellow Pages:

And one more before I close up for the weekend. You know that Motel 6 will always 'leave the light on for you'. Did you ever wonder why?

Good stuff.

Have a great weekend all!

It's a good time to be a truck driver, (until the self-driving trucks take over)

And when I say 'good time' please do accept that as a relative comparison to say burger flipping, making lattes for annoying customers, or working the graveyard shift at the Kwickie Mart.

I caught this really interesting piece on Forbes, DOT's New Curb on Driver Hours Is Hurting Productivity, Truckers Charge, that while seemingly a dull piece about changes in Federal work rules governing working hours for commercial truck drivers that would only be interesting to say actual truck drivers and trucking company operators, actually to me reveals much about the future of work and the automation of work here (and likely everywhere).

First, take a look at the main point of the piece in Forbes, then a take from me on why this matters more generally, (and why robots are involved, naturally).

Rules limiting the number of hours that commercial drivers can be on the road are resulting in a marked drop in productivity, trucking companies claim.

The latest Hours of Service (HOS) rules were put into place on July 1, 2013 by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. They state that drivers of commercial motor vehicles can be on the job for a maximum of 11 hours, following 10 consecutive hours off duty. They must take a minimum 30-minute break during the first eight hours of a shift. Their maximum average work week is capped at 70 hours, down from the previous limit of 82 hours.

The trucking industry fiercely opposed the tighter rules during public hearings, but to no avail. Today, a trucking company whose driver exceeds the limit by more than three hours can be fined $11,000 per offense, and the individual driver faces civil penalties of up to $2,750.

During the public comment period, truckers warned that the rules would cut deeply into their productivity. Now, they say, that is precisely what has happened.

Schneider National, one of the nation’s largest truckload carriers, predicted back in February of 2011 a productivity drop of between 3% and 4%. Four months after implementation of the HOS rules, Schneider is reporting declines of 3.1% on solo shipments and 4.3% on team shipments.

Pretty straightforward, right?

The Feds tighten up the rules around how long in a day and for a week that commercial truck drivers can be behind the wheel, thus creating an artifical constraint on labor supply, (I am not going to even try to get in to the debate about whether or not this change in rules was needed or makes sense, because I simply do not know), and the trucking companies begin to feel the pinch in lost output and productivity.

The simple solution, and the reason this story was interesting to me, would be for the operators to simply hire more drivers. But it turns out, this would not be an easy solution at all.

From a related Bloomberg piece on the changes in truck driver working hours regulations:

Adding more drivers to payrolls will be a difficult undertaking. The industry was 158,000 drivers short of what it needed to meet demand in the second quarter, according to (trucking industry analyst firm) FTR Associates.

The shortfall probably will widen by the end of this year to 251,000 truckers, the biggest deficit in nine years, and reach a record 338,000 by the end of 2015, according to FTR’s Driver Shortage Surplus gauge. The economic expansion and higher turnover help explain the industry’s labor shortage.

“Every cost gets passed down,” said Sean McNally, a spokesman for the ATA, an Arlington, Virginia-based industry group. “As the labor market tightens and as demand for drivers goes up, typically wages go up as well. The competition is already fierce for good drivers. This is only going to increase that competition.’

An industry and job function that had been already been facing labor shortages, (Mama's don't let your babies grow up to be truck drivers), and now feeling even more of a pinch from a forced reduction in labor capacity (in the name of safety, at least according to the Feds). In the short term, it seems like wages are going to have to rise at least some in order to get more people recruited into becoming commercial truck drivers. Of course the operators, (and their downstream customers), don't like to hear that. Increased wages means lower profits.

But longer term, it seems like while we have read lots and lots over the last two years or so about self-driving cars, the real 'killer' application of the self-driving technology is going to be for commercial trucking.

If the big trucking companies are looking at labor shortfalls that estimates say will increase to over 300,000 in a couple of years, then something is going to have to break. And applying the self-driving technologies to a very real and growing economic problem will provide the necessary incentive to push the development of these technologies into higher gear (apologies for the very unfortunate pun).

It will probably be a pretty good time for the next few years to be an experienced commercial driver. But after that, probably not so much, as automation or self-driving or whatever it ends up being called will eventually put 'truck driver' on the list of careers that end up being displaced by technology.

Which of course will make it even more difficult for the trucking companies to find the human drivers they need today, who will begin to sense their days are numbered from the first moment they get behind the wheel.

Happy motoring.

I'm comfortable not knowing

About a thousand years ago I was a newbie consultant working for a large, (actually quite large), implementation services arm of a equally large software company. As the software products that our consulting and implementation services group were responsible for implementing numbered in the dozens (if not more), and they were each one reasonably complex technologies, the company enrolled all newly hired implementation consultants in an extensive 8-week training program that was affectionately known as 'bootcamp'.

The bootcamp consisted of 8 hour days, for 8 weeks, taking all of the new consultants through the details and inner workings of the most commonly purchased of the company's applications, giving us a reasonable facsimile of 'real-world' problems that needed to be solved via case studies, and took us through what life as a traveling software consultant was actually all about. Aside - the job and lifestyle was equally better and worse than we all anticipated, but that is a topic for another time.

But even over an 8-week period, the amount of technical, functional, business, process, and project management material that was presented to us was immense and fast-paced, and truly, there was almost no way to actually remember I'd estimate more than about half of it. The rest, and certainly the more important parts of the knowledge needed to become a good consultant would take more time to acquire, and work in the field with real customers to reinforce.

All of this setup is to get to the point of this post. I don't really remember anything specifically from the content of the 8-week training bootcamp save for one sentence that was uttered not from one of the excellent instructors or experienced consultants that led our training, but rather from one of my fellow bootcampers.

At the end of a long week of intensive work on some complex application and technology concepts, our instructor was making a final point about some detail or another, and she noticed a look of confusion on the face of a student in the front of the class. She paused, explained the point once more, and then asked him point blank, "Do you understand what I mean by configuring setting ABC in order to allow the customer to do XYZ?" , (the specifics don't matter, and I don't remember what they were anyway).

The student thought about the question for a second then replied, "No, I really don't understand. But I'm comfortable not knowing."

The instructor was a little taken aback, tried to re-state the concept, and hammer it home so that it clicked with the student, but she missed the real point of his response. It was not that he didn't care about understanding the point she was making, or that he would never understand it, but rather in that setting, with that specific point competing with about 3,000 other ones we'd all been exposed to in the last few weeks, that is was ok to not understand. He was comfortable (his word), with his ability to access reference material, draw on his network of colleagues, do some of his own testing, etc. in order to understand the key point when confronted with the problem in the future.

He was comfortable not knowing because he was comfortable in his ability to think about the problem, access relevant resources, and apply what he'd learned more generally in order to solve this specific problem. He didn't need to know everything, Heck, no one needs to know everything.

I like people that don't claim to have all the answers. I especially like people that are willing to admit that they don't have all the answers, but know how to find them. 

And are comfortable with that.

ECON 101: Comparative Advantage: Or, why it still can be ok to be worse at everything

I was talking with a friend recently, the kind of person who is just good (and often really darn good), at just about everything. Successful in their career, well-respected in their industry, good-looking, model family life, knows how to cook/fix/find just about anything.... you get the idea.

We probably all have a friend or colleague that fits that description, maybe even going back to childhood perhaps where the memory of our high school nemesis that was just a little better than us at sports and in class and with the ladies (or guys), always just ticked us off to no end.

No matter what the activity or subject or context, this person was just better.  At everything. And it can easily be pretty annoying.David Ricardo - 'He amassed a considerable personal fortune'

Until you recall (or learn for the first time as in the case of the high school me), the Law of Comparative Advantage. Let's do a quick ECON 101 review:

In economics, comparative advantage refers to the ability of a party to produce a particular good or service at a lower marginal and opportunity cost over another. Even if one country is more efficient in the production of all goods (absolute advantage in all goods) than the other, both countries will still gain by trading with each other, as long as they have different relative efficiencies.

The idea of comparative advantage has been first mentioned in Adam Smith's Book The Wealth of Nations: "If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage." But the law of comparative advantages has been formulated by David Ricardo who investigated in detail advantages and alternative or relative opportunity in his 1817 book On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in an example involving England and Portugal. In Portugal it is possible to produce both wine and cloth with less labor than it would take to produce the same quantities in England. However the relative costs of producing those two goods are different in the two countries. In England it is very hard to produce wine, and only moderately difficult to produce cloth. In Portugal both are easy to produce.

Therefore while it is cheaper to produce cloth in Portugal than England, it is cheaper still for Portugal to produce excess wine, and trade that for English cloth. Conversely England benefits from this trade because its cost for producing cloth has not changed but it can now get wine at a lower price, closer to the cost of cloth. The conclusion drawn is that each country can gain by specializing in the good where it has comparative advantage, and trading that good for the other. 

This Business Insider piece from the weekend spurred me to think about Comparative Advantage (and what can happen when really powerful and attractive companies like Google are powerful enough to essentially ignore the 'law' in many respects), a look at some of the worst aspects for working for such a desirable employer.

Among the chief complaints raised about life at Google was that their hiring standards are so high and that fact, combined with seemingly everyone wanting to work for them, that many, many sort of mundane positions are staffed with over qualified, exceptional, and often wasted talents. 

Here is an example of how that plays out:

There are students from top 10 colleges who are providing tech support for Google's ads products, or manually taking down flagged content from YouTube, or writing basic code to A|B test the color of a button on a site."

Adam Smith's law of Comparative Advantage, if Google cared about such things, would probably tell them that it was relatively inefficient for them to try to be the best at everything, that more or less, they should focus on those elements where their advantage in the market (for talent in this case), was the greatest compared to their competition, and let the wanna-bees fight it out over the rest.

But I don't really care about Google, I care about you, (I am a giver that way). We both know what it's like having to deal with that person who is just better at everything than we are.

It is tiring.

It is frustrating.

And often, we will simply give up and move on to something else when we really should have stuck with what we loved.

Everything is comparative. If you get a job at Google you are probably going to feel dumb much more often than you are accustomed to feeling.

Note: I had a recent piece over on Fistful of Talent that looks at this topic a little more as well. 

Have a great week!

FOLLOW-UP: More on Home Ownership and Employment

Yesterday, I posted about the downward trend in home ownership rates in the United States, coupled with the sharp rise in 'all-cash', primarily investment-driven home purchases, (which almost always are converted into rental properties), and the implications these trends might have on work, employment, and mobility.

So it was really interesting to me that this morning more on the topic of the relationship between home ownership and employment was posted on Business Insider in an article called 'High Home Ownership Is Strongly Linked To High Unemployment [STUDY]", a look at some recent research out of Warwick University on this very subject. 

The piece is relatively short, but I will pull out the most pertinent points below:

High levels of home ownership are strongly linked to subsequent rises in unemployment because labor mobility becomes reduced, according to new research.

Using data going back to 1950 across all U.S. states except Alaska and Hawaii, Warwick University economics professor Andrew Oswald finds that the lag from ownership levels to unemployment rates can take up to five years to show up.

But he said the linkage, established using data on millions of randomly sampled Americans, was extraordinarily robust.

Doubling home ownership in a state can lead to more than a doubling of the jobless rate.

"I have become convinced that by boosting home ownership we have ruined our labor market," Oswald said.

Oswald said the research may go some way to explaining why Spain, with a home ownership rate of 80 percent, has unemployment above 25 percent, whereas Switzerland, with a 30 percent ownership rate, has a jobless rate of just 3 percent. Germany, another nation of renters rather than home owners, also has relatively low unemployment.

Home ownership unwittingly impairs the labor market by deterring people from moving in search of work, a process that is time-consuming and expensive; long commuting times might also discourage a householder from taking a particular job, his research suggests.

A nation of renters, if indeed that is where America is moving towards, might not be all that bad for the future of work and employment, if this study has any truth and validity.

And aren't we seeing and hearing from pretty much every front that surely one element of the nature and future of work is that it will be, for many more people that before, more fluid, more temporary, more 'project-based' and not 'employer-based'. 

A future where many more people will bounce around from assignment to assignment, from 'employer' to employer, and from city to city even, as they chase the much more transient opportunities to ply their trade and earn a few bucks.

Many of us have tales we like to tell about the 6 crappy apartments we lived in after college before we 'settled' somewhere and maybe bought a house, got married, or at least decided to live with a significant other, and maybe even had some kids.

But that 'settling' process almost always came after the steady, 'permanent' jobs were landed. Maybe they were not the jobs or companies you saw yourself staying in forever, but they would be secure enough to save up some dough, prove to the mortgage company that you could in fact afford your new house, and even convince skeptical in-laws to be that you would be a suitable partner for their child. 

But in a economic climate where 'permanent', (if there was really ever such a thing), work is fast-becoming a relic of the past, then too, it seems like some of the follow-ons that came from landing those jobs, (getting married, buying houses, having 2.2 children), are also naturally going to be impacted.

If there are far fewer permanent jobs than it stands to reason that more and more workers will end up living like many of us did in our twenties - bouncing around from one place to another, living out of a few suitcases and boxes, only staying until the next job takes us somewhere else, since no 'job' is going to last too long.

It is a great deal for the companies that want to engage with labor and talent in this manner, but I am not at all sure that as a society we are prepared for a much more transient, less-rooted, nomadic population of professionals, wandering from place to place, and rental house to rental house, chasing a dream that is receding further away all the time.

But think about it, if we were all willing/able to move much more freely in pursuit of work and opportunity, how many of us would stay right where we are and how many would pick up and find something better?

Happy Weekend all!