This book serves as a "playbook" to help business leaders and educators understand, build, and adapt to the changes converging upon them from an emerging information-rich global economy. The book uses football as a metaphor to understand the obstacles to becoming successful in today's changing economy. This football metaphoric theme is…

The United States today is becoming less competitive in the world, due in large measure to short-term thinking, perverse incentives for saving and investing, and an absence of global thinking. Six issues demand high priority in order to change this situation: saving and investment, education and training, technology, corporate governance and…

This document provides materials prepared for and discussed at a workshop to analyze the problems facing Central and Eastern European countries in the management of the vocational education and training (VET) system. Part I gives an outline of the major research findings and reflects the discussions of the workshop. "Management of Vocational…

Angered by the continued worsening of public school quality despite 1980s reform efforts and growing business-education partnerships, many American business leaders claim that money and concern are not enough. Boosting teacher salaries and reducing class size have yielded poor results. Business's general dismay with public school performance has…

The Skills Standards Projects have provided further emphasis on the need for benchmarking U.S. vocational-technical education (VTE) against international competition. Benchmarking is an ongoing systematic process designed to identify, as quantitatively as possible, those practices that produce world class performance. Metrics are those things that…

To assist the Competitiveness Policy Council in drawing up this report, four of the Council's eight subcouncils were asked to provide their assessment of recent federal initiatives and to make any new recommendations that seemed appropriate. The participating subcouncils were Critical Technologies, Public Infrastructure, Trade Policy, and…

Recent literature addressing workplace learning emphasizes the production in late modernity of worker subjectivity as "enterprising self" amid the discourses of flexible specialization in post-Fordist work environments. Extensive critique of these environments has lamented the management of workers' learning and its subversion to…

The training needs of Connecticut's small businesses and their employees are not being adequately met. Small businesses face an economy placing increasing demands on them: a worsening labor shortage, an aging work force, and changing skills in the workplace. Gaps in private and public sector training programs impede small businesses from meeting…

The Special Task Force for Economic Development Planning developed a long-term strategy to revitalize Mississippi's economy and help it become globally competitive. Input was gathered through regional conferences attended by more than 500 business and community leaders, a survey of approximately 8,000 Mississippi employers, and focus group…

This document contains three papers on strategic human resource (HR) development. "Strategic HR Orientation and Firm Performance in India" (Kuldeep Singh) reports findings from a study of Indian business executives that suggests there is a positive link between HR policies and practices and workforce motivation and loyalty and…

This document reports on how key stakeholders in work force preparedness nationwide are responding to pressures of the skills race. Part 1 presents an overview of the skills challenge and the economic and social consequences of failing to meet the challenge. Part 2 examines the impact of the skills shortage on major stakeholders and explains how…