If you are a manager and despair at the quality of people that fill your entry level positions, not their attitude, but their skills and basic education, prepare for it to get worse.

Perhaps instead of ranting and whining about America’s loss of global leadership we should look closer to home for the real cause—US education.

The ethnic groups with the worst outcomes in school are African-Americans and Hispanics. The achievement gaps between these groups and their white and Asian-American peers are already large in kindergarten and only grow as the school years pass. These are the youngsters least ready right now to travel the 21st-century road to a successful life.

By 2050, the percentage of whites in the work force is projected to fall from today’s 67 percent to 51.4 percent. The presence of blacks and Hispanics in the work force by midcentury is expected to be huge, with the growth especially sharp among Hispanics.

No, whites and Asians aren’t smarter, but they do have socioeconomic advantages that are lacking for these minorities.

Advantages that our educational system and politicians at all levels are doing little to address.

It’s not always about money, although that is a part of it, nor is it about standardized tests that do little to improve true education, it’s about innovation and educating outside the box.

Harvard Graduate School of Education is creating a new doctoral degree to be focused on leadership in education. It’s the first new degree offered by the school in 74 years. The three-year course will be tuition-free and conducted in collaboration with faculty members from the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The idea is to develop dynamic new leaders who will offer the creativity, intellectual rigor and professionalism that is needed to help transform public education in the U.S.

Creativity, intellectual rigor, professionalism; this leadership isn’t just about visions and influence, it’s about creating people who will roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty often toil in relative obscurity on the biggest problems facing this country.

Kathleen McCartney, the graduate school’s dean, explained one of the dilemmas that has hampered reform. “If you look at people who are running districts,” she said, “some come from traditional schools of education, and they understand the core business of education but perhaps are a little weak on the management side. And then you’ve got the M.B.A.-types who understand operations, let’s say, but not so much teaching and learning.”

Will it work?

Can the program make a difference quickly enough to change the current downward trajectory of our future?

Will other schools step up to the plate now or will they wait a decade or so and see how the Harvard program fares?

Does anybody care enough about what will happen in 20, 30, 40 years to accept a little discomfort now or should we just build more prisons?

Leadership Turn is ending; its last day is December 29. I’ve enjoyed writing it and our interaction since August 16, 2007 and I hope we can continue at my other blog where Leadership’s Future will carry on.

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Image credit: dbking on flickr

Two weeks ago I wrote about the M3 Foundation and its success turning around at risk black boys.

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing M3’s founder KG Charles-Harris.

Why did you start M3?
I started the M3 Foundation when I became aware of the plight of black boys in school.  In the San Francisco Bay Area, 73 percent of black boys drop out of school (nationally the average is 54%).  These statistics places one of the wealthiest areas of the world on par with war torn areas like the Congo or very impoverished nations like Laos.  The statistics, along with meeting some of these kids, shocked me into action.

Another issue was that I wanted my own children to receive a good public school education.

To ensure that this happened, it was necessary to put a structure in place that enabled teachers to do what they were supposed to, i.e. teach students who were performing at or above grade level.

Sadly, most teachers and schools are unable to do this because of the significant portion of students lagging several years behind grade level; that results in remedial teaching and a lower level of education for all.

How did you come up with the approach?
The approach was based on common sense.  We cannot expect people who are lagging behind to work less and still achieve the same results as those who have worked more in preceding years. Also, we have to make a fundamental decision.  Are these boys unintelligent, or is it their environments that are affecting them negatively?

We put together a program which used sports and hip-hop as a carrot and focused on providing homework assistance, extensive mathematics tutoring and surrounded the boys with role models (UC Berkeley male students) as tutors and team leaders.

The program is intense; we work with the boys three times per week for 4 hours in the afternoon and 4-6 hours on Saturdays.  One of the keys to the program is our excursions; it is difficult to have vision and dreams when one never has been exposed to something beyond the few blocks of inner-city where one resides.

What have been the most difficult roadblocks?
We are encountering road blocks all the time.  We are still a startup, though we have proven that black low-income boys can perform well.  We now have an average GPA of above 3.0 across all the school sites where we are active.

The most difficult roadblock we encountered was being shut down by the school district because of a perception that we discriminate.  We have created a model for the most difficult student population, African American boys from low-income backgrounds, and have proven it works.  Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions, it is difficult to serve this population since we are unable to select students based on race, gender or other characteristics.

Luckily, thanks to the assistance of one of our Board members, we were able to move beyond this with the school district and are now experiencing them as good partners.

Of course, we are always experiencing challenges of hiring strong team members, retaining and motivating students, working with parents, and many other issues.

Is M3’s approach scaleable?
When I started M3, one of the goals was to create a scalable and cost-efficient model.  Because these were some of the founding thoughts, we constructed the program around these objectives and are managing to have a cost per student that is significantly lower than other programs working with these types of students.  In fact, we have lower costs and better results (in most cases).

We have managed to accomplish this by leveraging the resources we have through partnerships with other organizations and also measuring everything we are doing to ensure we get the results we desire. If we fail to achieve the results, we are able to evaluate our performance from an objective perspective.

This has been difficult to engender since most non-profit organizations are more “touchy-feely”; we want to ensure that we are both empathetic and results oriented.

A personal note from KG.
I cannot have this opportunity to speak to all of you without appealing to your generosity.

Since more than 50% of US African American males fail to graduate high school, and 64% of those who drop out end up in the penal system, one of the strongest ways to lower crime is to ensure that these boys receive a good basic education.

The absolute proof is that less than 1% of college educated black males end up in prison while 64% of drop-outs end up there.

Please feel free, whether to fight crime, enhance education or because of racial pride, to donate to M3. Please visit our website; click to donate or send a check to M3 Foundation, 832 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94710

Thank you.

KG Charles-Harris

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Did you know that six out of ten of the boys who could help build our future drop out of school and end up in jail?

That’s a full 60% and that is one scary number.

These boys are just like your sons—only without the same opportunities.

These boys are black.

The M3 Foundation is changing that one small step at a time.

M3 was started three years ago by KG Charles-Harris, CEO of Emanio, who I met first as a client and now count as a good friend.

The following is from this year’s M3 year-end report.

“M3 has had tremendous success during the past 3 years. We started with 10 underperforming boys at King Middle School in Berkeley in 2006 and expanded to all three middle schools in Berkeley with more than 30 students in the program during the past school year.

The boys achieved an average GPA of 3.0 during the past school year, some starting as low as 0.6 GPA. The average GPA was raised from 2.7 to 3.0 during the last semester.

All our boys are from low-income families, many with single parent or guardian backgrounds. Since 54 percent of black boys drop out of school on a national level, and 73 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area, these results are a tremendous boost. We expect to improve these further during the coming year.”

Take a good look at the numbers. That’s the kind of improvement that No Child Left Behind was supposed to achieve—but didn’t.

M3 accomplished it by working directly with the boys, not by teaching them to take tests or drumming rote memorization into their heads, but by showing them the value of education and providing the attention needed to appeal to their pride.

Instead of being told they could not they were told that they could.

Not just told, but supported and encouraged.

And they succeeded.

Finally, M3 packs a lot more bang for the buck than most programs do—check it out.

Come back next week for an interview with KG Charles-Harris.

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Image credit: M3 Foundation

My second day here at the Stanford Summit confirmed my initial impressions from the cocktail party last Thursday. I have found that the age trend I noted in my earlier post has strengthened after interacting with a much larger cross section of attendees.

The cocktail party last week was for the AO 250, i.e., the companies selected as the 250 hottest emerging technology companies in the world for 2008.

At the conference I interacted with CEOs and venture capitalists from about 700 companies—a significant number of them with graying hair, confirming my initial impression.

After a day filled with excellent presentations and speakers and then chatting with various participants during the evening reception, I was truly impressed by the savvy and innovative ideas being brought to life by the “old timers.”

One of the most fascinating is Wyndstorm, lead by 54 year Marian Sabety. That very innovative technology companies are founded and led by women is an anomaly. That the woman is mature is even more unusual.

In Wyndstorm’s case, Marian is a long time innovator who has brought to the market a solution to the web advertising crisis.

Understanding that at the present moment only 7% of advertising budgets are spent online, advertising agencies and corporate chieftains are desperately searching for proven solutions that reach core and targeted audiences in an interactive environment.

Wyndstorm’s social frames pull targeted customers from other sites they frequent directly into an interactive, virtual place where the marketer controls the content, reinforcing image, brand and messaging on a one to one, razor targeted basis. Very impressive.

I believe that the graying of the executive suite in startups has everything to do with the need for execution, reliability and monetization in addition to innovation of technology. Companies need people who are not new to the game to succeed in this market.

Younger people may have many ideas, but they lack the experience to execute in a manner that allows ideas to be monetized rapidly in a variety of economic situations and enables the industry to execute from a strategic perspective.

Thinking about it, even the Google guys needed to bring in seasoned executives to grow the company from an idea to industry power player.

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

In attending the AO 250 cocktail party last night, I was struck by something that differed significantly from the first ones I attended after moving to the US and getting involved with Garage Technology Ventures. Guy Kawasaki was a powerful force (he still is), as were the exuberance of youth in driving new technology and investment dollars.

This time around the surroundings were less lavish, as could be expected since we have all learned that spending money is not the same thing as making money. However, a significant difference was also the graying of the participants at the party.

Other than many of the people working at AlwaysOn (the conference co-host), most of the participants were over 35 years of age. Gone were the 22 year old CEOs that were the mainstay of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now, the CEOs and management teams seemed seasoned and focused on clear drivers of value creation.

Not that I have anything against young CEOs; today they are creating significant value for investors—Facebook is just one example. However, the management teams are different today in that they are very business savvy, rather than having lofty concepts, ideals or delusions about how to create value.

Now, perhaps it is my perspective that has changed.  I’m 10 years older than the last time I participated in events like this and during that time I have been active in the investment banking, entrepreneur and venture capital arena in Europe and the US and consequently have matured slightly. At present, I’m running my fourth startup; Emanio is actually a restart from a European company I co-founded and brought from Scandinavia to the US in 2000.

Along the way I’ve learned a few lessons, especially during the past 5 years during which I not only raised money, but also did acquisitions in a difficult market. Doing this while bootstrapping the company (building it up without any outside investors) has taught me these lessons through considerable pain. Bootstrapping is definitely not for the faint of heart—everything takes longer and is more difficult than when one is well funded—but it does force one to possess a certain discipline.

Having become one myself, it warmed my heart to interact with all these entrepreneurs, as well as with Tony Perkins, Marc Sternberg and the others at AlwaysOn, and sharing in their stories. It was truly inspirational.

Come back for more of KG’s impressions tomorrow.

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

Post from Leadership Turn  Image credit: Liquid Scenarios

I was unable to attend the Stanford Summit this year, so I prevailed on Emanio CEO and M3 Foundation founder KG Charles-Harris to go and share a story or two about the people he met.

From KG:

At the Stanford Summit I met a Lorenzo Carver, who impressed me quite a bit.  He’s 40 years old, plays base and studied music at Berkeley as a film score major.  His working to pay for school was affecting his playing and studies and as a consequence he started a business that did well and sold it after 18 months, then started another one that tanked.

Lorenzo’s entrepreneurial zeal didn’t end and when he returned to school to study finance he put together a leveraged buyout for a company in bankruptcy and used his portion of the profits to pay for graduate school. He ended up with a MS in Accounting, plus and MBA and CPA; all received while he was working.

During those times Arthur Andersen was the premier firm, but after a short stint there Lorenzo wanted to return to his entrepreneurial roots.  His new business was advising entrepreneurs; he wrote more than 200 strategic plans for biotech and software and assisted in raising more than a billion dollars in funding for these companies.

Then came the dotcom collapse, which gave him the seeds for his present company, Liquid Scenarios.  They are now 14 people and self funded, growing from the profits they produce.  The strange thing is that, instead of coming to the conference to seek investors, he came seeking investors as customers. (Liquid Scenarios’ tagline— “Because Time is Money”)

Liquid Scenarios is based on his having developed complex algorithms for calculating funding scenarios, especially for high-growth companies.

Anyone who has spent time calculating scenarios for more than one class of stock realizes the value of this tool for real estate, venture capital, private equity, and private investors.

The problem he solves is one that faces many investors (and entrepreneurs) in disparate industries—how to calculate funding structures that reduce uncertainty.

Previously there has been no simple-to-use software that helps reduce uncertainty for investors, entrepreneurs and creditors in financing situation by enabling modeling of complex scenarios and outcomes.

After reviewing his software, it is clear that it reduces the calculations from dozens of hours and days to just a few minutes.

(Pretty cool! Check out the product demo to really understand why this is so hot. Miki)

The reason I’m excited is because I’ve been on all sides of the table, as a venture capitalist or private equity investor, investment banker and entrepreneur and I know that calculating all this is so tedious and difficult that only experts can do it.

Liquid Scenario’s tool creates equality between the people on different sides of the table and is especially useful to entrepreneurs who may not have the training to work complex spreadsheets.

But what I found most interesting was Lorenzo’s comment on the most important lesson he’s learned as a manager or entrepreneur.

“This startup is the easiest one I’ve done of twelve where half were started by me.  The difference this time is that I’ve been exceedingly careful about the people I work with—I’ve only chosen the ones that are passionate and competent.  There is no B-team this time.”

(For more of KG’s impressions click here.)

Do you “settle” when you hire or do you slog on until you find an A-team member?

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