Love Reading Books

If you consider yourself to be highly organized, I’m wondering if you got that way on your own or did you have some help? maybe you follow the “Covey method” as many do. It’s the outgrowth of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” the famous book written by Stephen R. Covey (famous in that 20 million copies have been sold worldwide).

The Wall Street Journal has called it “the most influential book of the century.” the focus is on management of our time – important to all of us, including our students.

Those attending Veterans Memorial Elementary School know the importance of it thanks to “The Leader in Me” program that’s in place there. Principal Tim Ferguson calls it “a process of teaching students personal leadership development and 21st century life skills such as goal setting, teamwork, problem solving, respecting diversity and life balance, and of course, time management.”

The Leader in Me involves everyone at the North Naples school community – all students, teachers and staff members, and parents, according to Ferguson.

“Founded in ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,’ the program uses principles of leadership development to support the academic and emotional development of all students,” Ferguson said.

Students learn to be proactive, to begin with the end in mind, to put first things first, to think “win-win,” to seek first to understand before being understood, and to synergize. they learn to assume responsibility and to practice collaboration and cross-cultural skills while engaging in meaningful work. they learn to be creative and have fun while paying attention to body, mind, heart, and spirit. so what does all of this mean for Veterans Memorial students?

“Students gain confidence from learning new skills,” says Ferguson. “Their self-confidence comes from being given leadership responsibilities and from frequently being recognized as unique and important.”

This program or project, if you will, turns the school environment into a leadership development environment.

“The end result,” Ferguson stresses, “is that we will see increased student learning and achievement in all academic areas, and our students will be prepared to be successful in the 21st century.”

All classrooms have developed classroom mission statements that are aligned with the school and district missions. and the next step in all of this for the Veterans Memorial school community – student-led conferences set for Oct. 11. then students will share their individual personal mission statement and leadership plans with their parents or guardians.

Ferguson welcomes visitors to his school to see this leadership development program in action, and he’s currently looking for business partners who will support the development of tomorrow’s leaders today. To learn more about Veterans Memorial Elementary’s Leader in Me initiative and how you can get involved, go to the school website at collierschools.com/vme or just call the school at 377-8800.

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Joe Landon is the executive director of the Communications Services department for the Collier County School District.

NEW YORK — maybe it was the concurrence of the two articles, or their disparate views, that got me thinking about how little progress we’ve made. I’m not referring to the lack of progress in restoring the U.S. economy to health, but to the failure to reach a consensus on what exactly drives growth and fosters economic well-being.

Robert Lucas, a Nobel-winning economist from the University of Chicago, was the subject of the Wall Street Journal’s Sept. 24 weekend interview. Lucas is known for applying rational expectations theory — the idea that people make economic decisions based on past experience and expectations about the future — to demonstrate why government intervention doesn’t have the desired effect.

The next day, Christina Romer, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, proffered the Keynesian view in the New York Times’ Sunday Business section. Romer, who stepped down last year as chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, was arguing for an even larger jobs bill than the $447 billion one Obama proposed. she said policymakers need to determine “which measures will be most effective in putting people back to work.”

How exactly do they do that? The determination of effectiveness is a number spit out by an econometric model that is only as good as the assumptions that go into it. Remember Romer’s 3.5 million jobs “created or saved” by 2009′s $830 billion fiscal stimulus? tell that to today’s 14 million unemployed Americans.

If Lucas is right, the government’s best intentions may be fraught with disappointment. Obama’s jobs plan, with its temporary tax cuts for employees and employers, won’t lead to more spending if workers are afraid of losing their jobs. nor will it nudge businesses to assume a long-term expense for a one-time tax credit — unless they are planning to hire anyway.

EconStories.tv used a rap video to pit the ideas of John Maynard Keynes against those of Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian (by birth and belief system) free-market economist. The refrain of “Fear the Boom and the Bust,” released last year and viewed by 2.7 million people, says it all: “We’ve been going back and forth for a century.”

(Keynes) “I want to steer markets.”

(Hayek) “I want them set free.”

Authors Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw chronicled the ebb and flow of the two schools of thought, one interventionist, the other laissez-faire, throughout the 20th century in their 1998 book, “The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy.” PBS turned the book into a superb six-hour series.

The battle still rages. In the 21st century, it was evident in the ex-post analysis of the financial crisis, as the blame for the housing bubble, bust and financial fallout was assigned alternatively to capitalism (greedy bankers) or government policy.

Why are we still at this juncture? Hasn’t macroeconomics advanced to the point where, before we prescribe medicine for what ails the economy, we can know with a relative degree of certainty whether it helps?

Economists’ responses, filtered through my own prism, are encapsulated below.

1. Flying blind -”There’s a lot we don’t know about macroeconomics and particularly about business-cycle theory,” says Harvard’s Greg Mankiw.

That’s why he begins his “Ec 10″ class on the principles of economics — still Harvard’s most popular course — with microeconomics: “the stuff we do know,” such as supply and demand, the utility function and profit maximization — and if you tax something more, you get less of it.

2. Inexact science — Economics is considered to be a social science. unlike the natural sciences, where one can conduct a controlled study, it’s impossible to hold everything else constant in something as complex as an economy. there are too many moving parts to isolate the effect of any single variable, such as infrastructure spending or targeted tax cuts. Economists have a simple way of dealing with this issue. They publish their findings with the default caveat of “ceteris paribus” (other things being equal), which never exists.

3. Math as science — Econometricians have tried to make economics appear scientific by dressing it up with mathematics. Models have replaced logic. Economists tell us with a straight face that a specific dollar amount of government spending will generate 1.9 million jobs.

“Stop using decimal points,” says Russ Roberts, professor of economics at George Mason University and co-creator, with producer John Paploa, of EconStories. “Get rid of the grandiose claims. go back to first principles.” (See no. 1 above.)

4. Good politics, bad policy - It’s no coincidence that conservatives tout Hayek’s government-do-nothing philosophy while liberals advocate Keynesian stimulus, the bigger the better. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is the driver: the policy or the politics. often the ideas seem to provide the ammunition for advocating certain policies.

Suddenly it’s not so hard to see why macroeconomics doesn’t have all the answers.

Caroline Baum, author of “Just what I said,” is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

The last time I spoke to Steve Jobs, he was screaming at me over the phone, "I’m not a failure! I’m not a failure!" His shouts got so loud, I put him on speakerphone so that my editor could hear him.

With Apple among the most valuable companies in the world because of its immensely popular products, the notion of Jobs as a failure seems ridiculous. but less than 20 years ago, in the mid-1990s, when Jobs was struggling to keep his forgettable NeXT computer company afloat, the idea of him failing—the possibility I’d raised in The Wall Street Journal that spurred his furious phone call—terrified him.

As he steps down as Apple’s CEO, I’d hardly call him a failure now, but the reasons for his success aren’t always properly understood.

Better than any of his peers, Jobs blended an understanding of technology and society, business and economics, markets and corporate power. In leading Apple past Microsoft on its way to becoming the most valuable technology company on the planet, Jobs repudiated four pillars of business and technology wisdom.

First, Jobs refused to accept that software and hardware were best designed and engineered separately. for him, the venerable insight summarized by Thomas Hughes, the grand historian of American technology, as "the system must be first" became a lodestar. Jobs understood that Apple was fundamentally a builder of technological systems, not a generator of products. As a young man, he watched IBM lose its central role in computing by handing off the PC’s basic operating system to an outsider (Microsoft). when in the 2000s Microsoft struggled (and largely failed) to persuade cellphone makers to adopt a variant of Windows, Jobs turned the industry upside down by building a cellphone with an Apple OS at its core. In embracing what traditional industrialists called "vertical integration," he propelled Apple to first place in smartphones.

Second, Jobs denied what is perhaps the most closely held article of faith of the information age: that openness and the wisdom of crowds are essential for successful technological systems. Under his leadership, Apple produced "closed" systems—devices whose basic functions could not be altered—and consumers loved them. "It’s not the consumer’s job to know what they want," Jobs once famously said. though an ex-hippie, he proved to be a throwback to an earlier age of top-down leadership: A direct line runs from Henry Ford’s Model T to the iPad. to Jobs, Apple’s systems are always open—in the sense that their uses can be adapted to an owner’s needs and desires. but as iTunes demonstrates, Apple’s ability to control the content, the applications, and the purchase opportunities on its mobile devices is far greater than anything carried off by its rivals.

Third, Jobs found a way of selling Apple’s products directly—through company-owned stores or online—which was perhaps his greatest and mostly unlikely business triumph. Makers of computers and consumer electronics had always offloaded the task of reaching customers to a motley crew of retailers, who provided no consistent purchasing experience or brand loyalty while shredding the manufacturer’s profit margins. again, going against convention, Jobs created the most valuable retail stores in the world (outselling Tiffany’s on a per-square-meter basis). He then sold the inimitable iPhone through those stores and via one other channel (AT&T), in what was a daring business tactic that paid enormous dividends.

Fourth, Jobs found a way to dominate consumer electronics, an arena that the United States seemed to have irretrievably lost to Japan, Korea, and China. The iPod, first released by Apple 10 years ago, marked a stunning shift in global competitive dynamics in consumer electronics. No longer did U.S. firms need to presume they couldn’t compete with Canon, LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and other Asian powerhouses in miniaturized digital appliances. to be sure, Jobs relied heavily on Asian production networks—Apple reportedly employs 10 times as many people in China as in the United States—but the style, engineering, and interactivity of Apple’s devices are classically American.

How long Apple will be able to hang on to that domination is an open question. some say that in Apple, Jobs built a company with his own way of thinking, so it will go on just fine without him at the helm. but whether this is true doesn’t really matter in the near term: Apple has a pipeline of good products and about US $75 billion in cash.

What then is the elusive genius of Steve Jobs? Despite his infamous bad temper, his impatience, and his penchant for tantrums, Jobs is the ultimate human-centered technologist—even while he is the ultimate digital autocrat. No democracy either internally or externally, Apple has proved the merits of enlightened dictatorship, at least in realms technological. Jobs once summed up his method as "trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing." This simple credo should long motivate designers and engineers who will inevitably walk in the footsteps of this singular master.