Big Skill: Applying and Maintaining the Right Governing and Economic Structure

I have suggested that there are Big Skills out there, the most important skills for all of us. (The inability of traditional formal learning programs to spread these big skills should be considered a canary in the coal mine both for educators and trainers, but that is a different issue.)

Big skills share a lot of interesting properties. One is that they are simultaneously relevant for individuals, work groups, organizations, even industries, states, and countries.

One big skill is the ability to apply the right models, including governing, economic, and value. This includes an intellectual componenet, understanding different options, and a doing component, successfully implementing it. Think of the following lists, in the context of your career, your role in a given project, the training function as a whole, what your entire organization is doing, and what you did yesterday.

Economic (how do you get paid for it)

• pay-per-use

• commons

• sales tax

• income tax

• buy

• rent

• confusopoly

• high end

• low end

• license

Value (what one gets from you)

• infrastructure

• high innovation/ research

• low cost

• high service

• relationship-based

• path of least resistance

• power-based

• addictive

• mold to customer

• mold to vendor

• delighting customers

• problem-solving

• sales or other paths

• trains-run-on-time

• distribution

• high customer satisfaction

Governing

• democracy

• communism

• dictatorship

• franchise

• public company

• private business