Compelled by an Idea - The Un-Comfort Zone with Robert Wilson

Compelled by an Idea by Robert Wilson

I was leaving my last class for the day when I saw my friend, Ken Frankel, working out in the hallway with one of those pistol-grip label makers. I stopped and asked what he was doing.

"The Dean asked me to put the room numbers up in Braille so the blind students can find their classrooms."

As I watched Ken work, I thought of some of the blind students I knew there at Georgia State University. Suddenly the devil got into me and I asked, "Does that thing do the alphabet as well?"
"Yes." Ken replied.

"Excellent! Let's take it over to the men's restroom in the Student Center and put up some graffiti in Braille!"

So we did. The next day we made a point of running into our blind friends, and asking them if they had been keeping up with the graffiti that people were putting up in the stalls.

The typical answer was, "Come on man, why are you asking me that when you know I can't see it?"

So we replied, "Next time you're in there, feel above the toilet paper dispenser."

They did, and within 48 hours every blind student on campus had heard about it. Then they were after us to put up some more! They told us, "This stuff is great!"

Feeling obligated to get some new material, we hit the bars for inspiration. One night we found the mother lode: the men's room at Moe's & Joe's, a 50 year old pub where they never painted over the witticisms scrawled on the walls.

Several mugs of beer and several trips to the restroom later, we filled several sheets of paper with funny bathroom graffiti to take back with us. As we looked at our collection, we came to two conclusions: first that we'd had way too much beer, and second that we should keep collecting graffiti until we had enough for a book.

Little did we know how long that would take! After a few days of active searching we had little to show for our efforts. Somewhat frustrated, we made a decision to just collect new material whenever we happened upon it.

A decade passed, but it was an idea I couldn't forget. It still made me laugh every time I thought of it. I kept the idea alive, and we kept collecting. Finally, 15 years later, our collection was big enough and we found a publisher who agreed with us that it was a very funny idea.

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Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. is a motivational speaker and humorist. He works with companies that want to be more competitive and with people who want to think like innovators. For more information on Robert's programs please visit www.jumpstartyourmeeting.com

Trading Away Productivity

via The New York Times

By ALAN TONELSON and KEVIN L. KEARNS
Washington

FOR a quarter-century, American economic policy has assumed that the keys to durable national prosperity are deregulation, free trade and a swift transition to a post-industrial, services-dominated future.

Such policies, advocates say, drive innovation, which leads to enormous labor productivity and wage gains — more than enough, supposedly, to make up for the labor disruptions that accompany free trade and de-industrialization.

In reality, though, wage gains for the average worker have lagged behind productivity since the early 1980s, a situation that free-traders usually attribute to workers failing to retrain themselves after seeing their jobs outsourced.

But what if wages lag because productivity itself is being grossly overstated, especially in the nation’s manufacturing sector? Then, suddenly, a cornerstone of American economic policy would begin to crumble.

Productivity measures how many worker hours are needed for a given unit of output during a given time period; when hours fall relative to output, labor productivity increases. In 2009, the data show, Americans needed 40 percent fewer hours to produce the same unit of output as in 1980.

But there’s a problem: labor productivity figures, which are calculated by the Labor Department, count only worker hours in America, even though American-owned factories and labs have been steadily transplanted overseas, and foreign workers have contributed significantly to the final products counted in productivity measures.

The result is an apparent drop in the number of worker hours required to produce goods — and thus increased productivity. But actually, the total number of worker hours does not necessarily change.

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