Jim Clifton Quotes

Humans used to desire love, money, food, shelter, safety, peace, and freedom more than anything else. The last 30 years have changed us. Now people want to have a good job, and they want their children to have a good job. This changes everything for world leaders.

As Gallup CEO Jim Clifton puts it in his book The Coming Jobs War, “The primary will of the world is no longer about peace or freedom or even democracy; it is not about having a family, and it is neither about God nor about owning a home or land. The will of the world is first and foremost to have a good job. Everything else comes after that.”10

Strong leadership teams are already in place within cities. A natural order is already present, in governments and local business and philanthropic entities. Every city has strong, caring leaders working on numerous committees and initiatives to fuel their local economic growth — let’s call it the city GDP — and to create good jobs.

if the image of free enterprise and entrepreneurship is going up among your youth, you will experience job creation. If it is trending down, may God be with you.

The primary will of the world is no longer about peace or freedom or even democracy; it is not about having a family, and it is neither about God nor about owning a home or land. The will of the world is first and foremost to have a good job. Everything else comes after that. A good job is a social value. That is a huge sociological shift for humankind. It changes everything about how people lead countries, cities, and organizations.

Currently, it takes about three workers paying Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) taxes to support one retiree, and the system works as long as there is a ratio of three workers to one retiree. But it crumbles as the ratio of workers to retirees becomes, say, two to one. With fewer jobs, there are fewer workers

What the whole world wants is a good job.

 Public school superintendents and university presidents need to think beyond core curricula and their graduation rates. Students don’t want to merely graduate; they want an education that results in a good job.

Today’s explorers migrate to the cities that are most likely to maximize innovation and entrepreneurial talents and skill. Wherever the most talented choose to migrate is where the next economic empires will rise. That’s why San Francisco, Seoul, and Singapore have become such colossal engines of job creation.

So while America experiences a decline in GDP, it’s also experiencing a decline in a term you will start hearing a lot: gross national wellbeing (GNW). GNW is driven primarily by hopefulness or hopelessness.

What if the whole world is wrong about how jobs are created?

Innovation is essential, and we need it. But the real magic starts with entrepreneurs — with people who are born with the rare gift to build successful businesses.

We’re so seriously misguided in our thinking about how jobs are born that we’re running the risk of putting our country on a course of permanent decline.

It’s absolutely critical that leaders understand this: An innovation has no value until an ambitious entrepreneur builds a business model around it and turns it into a product or service that customers will buy. If you can’t turn an innovative idea into something that creates a customer, it’s worthless.

Jim Trelease: Until the "Call of the Wild", I'd always been aware I was reading a book; that is, I'd yet to be "lost" in one. Jack London gave me my first dose of "virtual reality" decades before the phrase was coined. I went immediately to his "White Fang" and then Jack O'Brien's "Silver Chief" series. For years afterwards I believed the whole experience was peculiar to me. It wasn't until I was in my fifties and read an old essay by Clifton Fadiman that I discovered the experience wasn't peculiar at all, that nearly all lifetime readers experience it with a singular book at some point. Fadiman explained that such a book is like one's first big kiss or first home run - they're unforgettable, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to duplicate or surpass them. In recent years, when my friend Stephen Krashen, the reading researcher, explored Fadiman's theory, he found it to be firmly grounded: teenagers who were avid readers could almost always name their "home run" book while unenthusiastic or reluctant readers could not.

We can list more than 20 dimensions we’ve found in successful leaders: the ability to create a vision, thinking strategically, building influential internal and external networks, courage to make tough decisions, and so on. Successful leadership is multidimensional for sure. But most of the traits of successful leaders can be distilled down to two elements. They know how to: bring multiple teams together make great decisions And these two elements have a lot to do with whether organizations are agile.