There is a power in our midst that we are failing to harness at our peril.
Nothing short of our society’s business and economic competitiveness rests on it. It holds the key to future innovation – necessary for Alberta businesses to survive and even thrive. Yet we continue to waste it.
To glimpse what I’m talking about, ask yourself this fundamental question: Where have so many young males disappeared?
That question is increasingly bothering TV advertising executives, who have seen viewership plummet among males aged 18-34 (seven-per-cent decrease last fall from the year before), and even more if you look at the 18-24 age group (down 20 per cent).
It’s a question resonating for university administrators, as the split between male and female full-time enrolment at post-secondary institutions in this country has changed from being roughly evenly split in 1990, to almost 60 per cent female today. Stats Canada says that the only subject areas that have not seen males become the minority are now the engineering and applied sciences and mathematics and physical sciences.
Basically, young men are turning away from television and non- technology-related university programs in droves.
Why is this?
The answer lies as close as your nearest 18- to 24-year-old male relative. He is probably downloading movies and music, playing computer games and having local-area-network parties with his buddies. He criticizes television and schools because the institutions are too restrictive for his restive aspirations.
How do I know this?
The evidence is everywhere, starting with that dropout, Bill Gates. My own brother-in-law, a 35-year-old physician, is still playing computer games. My teenaged nephews own all three of the big game formats, Nintendo, X-Box and Playstation, which they seem to play continuously.
But most especially, I have recently emerged from my own computer-laden phase.
For the past three months, I have been building database applications for this magazine and a separate home-based business that have reaped simply astonishing efficiencies.
My department is now circulating, some weeks, twice as many copies as it did a year ago, and yet I can still handle the entire distribution department alone, even while training people to replace me and writing columns. In the meantime, I have even found time to help our accountant understand how to create database scripts for her department.
In a world where highly trained engineers and software developers in China and India charge a small fraction of what their counterparts do here, we’d better stop taking our standard of living for granted.
Brains are cheap. Innovation is dear.
I have received some terrible advice from so-called computer experts over the past few years (and much excellent advice too, mind you). When I was first hired to manage the circulation department at Business Edge, I was asked to oversee a computer database “whiz” who was going to build the software for me. So I read some basic textbooks on database design and laid out for him the necessary tables and fields I required.
At first I thought this whiz was amazing, since a month passed with him posing not a single question about my work. He must have understood all my charts and graphs intuitively, right?
Wrong! After six weeks, he had built only two incomplete tables out of the 20 I needed. He had created only two basic forms and no reports. He had omitted dozens of necessary fields because he did not understand why I would have asked for them.
The “whiz” was incompetent.
In brief, it is easy to get hosed, as a boss, if you don’t understand your contractors’ technology. Beyond that, it’s impossible to know how to improve your operation properly if you don’t understand the limitations and potential of the tools that can take you there. In other words, computer science skill (not just knowledge of computers) is becoming one of the four ‘R’s: reading, (w)riting, (a)rithmetic and robotics.
There is almost no job, no matter how menial, that a robot or computer will not be able to assist with in the next 20 years, if not today.
Any shop owner, no matter how small the store, who is not learning barcode technology is effectively putting himself out of business. The technology is currently cheap and available; the hard part is learning to use it. The competitive disadvantage of not having one will soon be fatal, as large department stores move toward automated checkouts.
There is an army of tech-eager youth out there, primed to revolutionize our workplace. We need these kids in our shops and offices, learning real-world problems so that they can apply their computer science skills to solving them.
Unfortunately, many kids are playing too many games, ripping off media companies by stealing intellectual property, and writing malicious code.
Such kids are not just robbing record multinational conglomerates, they are robbing themselves, and all of us, of their true potential.
It portends an ominous reckoning. But there is a way out. More on that in my next column.
