By Steve Dust, CEO, Greater Cedar Valley Alliance & Chamber
I’m on vacation the next few days, but that means there will be more time to pick up a book or report or dig into a blog that looks interesting. What follows are some of the item’s I’ll read.
One: Talent Gap –Small Businesses Perspective
There is a lot published about how the talent and skills gap is viewed and acted on by larger businesses. This a July 25, 2017 article from CNBC features how some smaller businesses are working to find productive people.
Incentives rise as war for workers continues to plague Main Street
Two: Talent Gap – Large Business Perspective
And here’s a July 19 article from Chief Executive Magazine with the larger firm’s perspective.
Closing the Skills Gap Involves Matching the Right Person to the Right Job
Three: Put Publically-controlled Assets in an Urban Wealth Fund?
An urban wealth fund? Business relies on various governmental entities for the infrastructure and amenities of our place where we do business and live. We also are burdened by their regulations, taxes and fees, and decisions associated with that infrastructure and amenities. Imagine if the government entity could be put in the same position (sort of) as their private commercial/industrial property owners, to their taxpayers’ benefit as well as service.
This short post on Dr. Tyler Cowan’s Marginal Revolution blog is thought-provoking. It plants a seed — with more links to the deeper thinking — about what it would look like if a place put all government real assets in single, privately managed portfolio. A primary outcome would be a different management goal — efficiency for the taxpayer, not the government entity — while maintaining the essential public purposes.
How about an “urban wealth fund”?
Four and Five: Books
I have a couple of books to finish and start the next few days. The first is “Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything,” loaned to me by Dave DeVault a couple months ago, so I’d better get it done.
In typical Covey fashion — this is co-written by Stephen M. R. Covey and Rebecca Merrill with a forward from Covey’s father Stephen Covey — this book teaches as it provides practical useable tools for business and personal use. The waves they feature include self-trust, relationship trust, and three important stakeholder trusts. I’m up to the stakeholder chapters. Of course, every Covey book is a how-to in some form. However, this book is also a deep dive on a characteristic that can be methodically improved internally without a rote following a list of laws, etc. I’ve found this book to be very good for this type of writing, and very valuable for team leader, manager, committee chair or exec leader. This book is available at Barnes & Noble locally.
Next on my book reading list is “Making Vision Stick” by Andy Stanley. I haven’t started it yet – I’ll let you know. I’m reading it on the iBook app.
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