Your livelihood and your future are both in peril.
The threat you face derives not from any external factors that may affect your company. Instead, it comes from your own employees.
The deadliest business hazard of our time is the result of a sea change in the American approach to education that occurred early in the 1970s. Across the United States, conventional educational standards were tossed out the window, replaced with feel-good theories like "whole-language learning" that emphasized personal fulfillment over the accumulation of hard knowledge. As a result, we now have two generations of men and women who expect gold stars not for succeeding, but simply for trying.
And, sometimes, merely for showing up.
In Great Britain, even primary school students can name all the monarchs of England. How many American children can name the capital of their own state?
In India, the study of mathematics is practically a religion. In the United States, how many retail clerks can make change without relying on a calculator?
In Germany, vocational education is a rigorous and honorable pursuit, producing highly qualified workers and tradesmen. In the U.S.A., people actually
boast about their inability to deal with anything mechanical.
But sheer stupidity is not the greatest danger presented by the current crop of blank slates. It is the arrogance bred of ignorance that constitutes an unparalleled descent into goofiness.
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