I am appalled at the number of businesspeople who have their heads down, texting and checking their messages or the latest stock quotes while in meetings, attending a lecture, making a call on a customer, or interviewing a potential employee.
It would be easy to blame the economy for our blighted urban neighborhoods. True, these tough economic times have led to more vacant and foreclosed houses than we can count. But the key to revitalizing a neighborhood stretches far beyond boarded-up houses.
We might think entrepreneurs, managers and highly paid professionals would be awash in self-confidence. Yet in a 1978 paper, Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes of Georgia State University wrote that, “Despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments [many] persist in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise.”
How can we in central Indiana compete? We can build competitive regional clusters that provide what matters to businesses. An educated, affordable labor force. Dependable infrastructure. Quality-of-life amenities that appeal to today’s employees and tomorrow’s.
The
United States has shown little leadership in finding solutions to global climate change.
Our world is quite different from the one President Truman
and George Marshall faced in 1947. But the strategy for recovery and broad-based development should be built on a similar
foundation of public- and private-sector collaboration.
By 2018, 63 percent of all jobs in this country will require some form of postsecondary education
or training. That’s a huge increase since the mid-’70s.
It’s common in any business or organization that hears about an incredible success and tries to replicate it by following the same steps.
Our city is about to engage in a high-stakes gamble to avert a death spiral—or
accelerate it and make it much more of a certainty.
Just as the government built an atomic bomb during World War II, the government should spend billions of dollars to create
the energy innovations for a low-carbon economy, according to Gates and friends.
Consider these alarming statistics: More than 6,700 Marion County students drop out of school every single year. Dropouts
earn $9,200 less per year than high school graduates, and earn $1 million less over a lifetime than college graduates.
Our state needs to learn how to effectively engage with the emerging economies of the 21st century in order to be successful.
Some of the things I was warned as a young man that I should never get into arguments over
were—in no particular order—religion, politics, which hand in a card game wins, and whether there should be a
motorcycle-helmet law.
The telephone has incredible
value. It’s also among the most effective ways to destroy productivity.
One day last spring, I put on a helmet, climbed on my bike, and rode to work with a
co-worker. For a guy who had only recently gotten on a bike
after more than 15 years away from two-wheelers, it was monumental.
Time and again, communities have tried pedestrian plazas in downtown areas and have failed because, without cars, there are few people, and businesses failed.
On my most recent trip to China, it was not without some heaviness of heart that I again found myself comparing the newness
of the country’s infrastructure—and the teeming activity that seems to have enveloped this part of the world—with
much of what I see, or do not, around Indiana and the United States.
Americans are not as civil as they used to be. Daily, there are doses of uncivil behavior reported by the media. And bad behavior isn’t limited to highly visible
people.
In 2007, the Indiana General Assembly unanimously put into place the requirement for all Indiana schools to identify students
with advanced potential from all groups and provide them with appropriate curriculum and instruction needed to develop their
potential.
Recent events in the Gulf of Mexico have placed considerable focus
on the everyday contributions the men and women in the oil and natural gas industry make to help fuel and power our way of
life.
