Split (1)

train · 730k rows

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.

id stringlengths 32 32	url stringlengths 31 1.58k	title stringlengths 0 1.02k	contents stringlengths 92 1.17M
e86f054ca7f930d37ec04f263a773884	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/05/31/the-cities-taking-finance-jobs-from-wall-street/	The Cities That Are Stealing Finance Jobs From Wall Street	The Cities That Are Stealing Finance Jobs From Wall Street By Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires Over the past 60 years, financial services’ share of the economy has exploded from 2.5% to 8.5% of GDP. Even if you believe, as we do, that financialization is not a healthy trend, the sector boasts a high number of relatively well-paid jobs that most cities would welcome. Yet our list of the fastest-growing finance economies is a surprising one that includes many “second-tier” cities that most would not associate with banking. To identify the cities making the biggest gains, we ranked metropolitan statistical areas’ employment growth in the sector over the long-term (2001-12), mid-term (2007-12) and the last two years, as well as momentum. Gallery: The Cities Winning The Battle For Finance Jobs 11 images View gallery New High-Fliers Tops on our list among the 66 largest metro areas is Richmond, Va., where financial sector employment has grown an impressive 12% since 2009. This reflects the presence of large banks such as Capital One Financial , the area’s largest private employer with 10,900 jobs, and SunTrust Banks , which employs 4,400. The insurer Genworth Financial is based in Richmond, and Wells Fargo and Bank of America also have sizable operations there. Along with the Northern Virginia metropolitan statistical area (an area encompassing the state's suburbs of Washington, D.C., including Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun and Prince William counties), which is No. 7 on our list, the Old Dominion is quietly becoming a major financial power. In once-gritty Pittsburgh, which places second on our list, financial services is now the largest contributor to the regional GDP, according to the Allegheny Conference. Long seen as a backwater, the area has begun to lure the kind of highly trained workers used by financial firms, leading local analyst Jim Russell to joke, “Pittsburgh is becoming the new Portland.” Financial employment there has grown nearly 7% since 2009. The strongly reviving local economy spans everything from energy to medical technology. Like Pittsburgh, some of the areas doing well in financial services are also thriving generally. These include such Texas high-fliers as No. 3 Ft. Worth-Arlington, where financial services employment has expanded over 12% since 2007, as well as No. 4 San Antonio-New Braunfels. And it is not real estate that is driving this boom—in Fort Worth, for example, the “real estate and rental and leasing” sub-sector of financial services shed jobs over the last five years while the “finance and insurance” subsector expanded almost 20%. Some metro areas that aren't exactly setting the world on fire are scoring in the financial job sweepstakes. Jacksonville, Fla., ranks fifth on our list and St. Louis, MO-IL ranks eighth. In St. Louis, financial sector employment is up 6.4% since 2007 by our count, and the number of securities industry jobs has increased 85% to 12,000 over that span, according to the Wall Street Journal. Full List: The Cities Winning The Battle For Finance Jobs What’s Driving Dispersion of Financial Services? The largest traditional financial centers appear to be losing their edge. New York, home to by far the largest banking sector with 436,000 jobs, places a meager 52nd on our list of the cities winning the most new jobs in the sector. Big money may still be minted in Gotham, but jobs are not. Since 2007 financial employment in the Big Apple is down 7.4%. The next four biggest financial centers are also doing poorly. San Francisco-San Mateo ranks 37th – remarkably poor given that San Francisco placed first overall on our 2013 list of The Best Cities For Jobs. Meanwhile Boston-Cambridge-Quincy ranks 44th (despite notching a strong 17th place ranking on our overall list), Los Angeles-Long Beach is 47th, and Chicago-Joliet-Naperville is 57th. So what gives here? A key factor is cost-cutting. As firms look to move back office and some sales functions to less expensive locales, the traditional financial centers are losing out. Between 2007 and 2012, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco lost a combined 40,000 finance jobs. In addition to lower rents in the cities that rank highly on our list, workers come cheaper, too: the average annual salary for securities industry jobs in St. Louis is $102,000, according to the Wall Street Journal, compared with $343,000 in New York. (Please continue to the next page) This trend is not just limited to the high-profile investment banks and brokerages. Insurance, the quieter and tamer part of the financial services sector (it has roughly the same number of jobs today as it did in 2001 and 2007), has seen an exodus of jobs into these lower-cost regional markets as well. Illinois-based insurance giant State Farm, for example, recently signed mega-leases in Dallas, Phoenix and Atlanta. Manufacturing And Energy Drive Changes The manufacturing revival in the Rust Belt and the Midwest is creating financial sector jobs in midsized cities (those with overall employment totaling 150,000 to 450,000). Tops on that list is Ann Arbor, Mich., followed by Green Bay, Wisc., No. 16 Grand-Rapids-Wyoming, Mich., and No. 19 Madison, Wisc. Among small cities, Owensboro, Ky., ranks first, followed by No. 3 Kankakee-Bradley, Ill., No. 5 Clarksville, Tenn.-Ky., No. 11 Bloomington-Normal, Ill., and No. 13 Michigan City-La Porte, Ind. With low commercial and industrial market costs and available workforces, these regions could prove attractive to manufacturers re-shoring U.S. operations. The top of the financial services rankings for midsized and small cities is also liberally sprinkled with places where hot energy economies are driving employment in all sectors. The midsized list features Bakersfield-Delano, Calif., in third place, the Texas towns of El Paso and McAllen-Edinburg-Mission in fifth and ninth place, respectively, and No. 10 Lafayette, La. Our small cities ranking includes the Texas towns of Odessa (2nd), Midland (fourth) and Sherman-Denison (10th), and Cheyenne, Wyo. (14th). More economic activity will continue to flow to these regions both as they grow and as their suppliers move closer to reduce costs. What The Future Holds Historically financial services clustered in big cities, but increasingly cost is leading financial institutions to focus on smaller metropolitan areas. With the connectivity of the Internet and growth of educated workforces in many smaller metros, it has become increasingly possible for financial firms to locate many key functions outside of the traditional money centers. Some places can boast advantages beyond just lower costs. Jacksonville, and Miami-Kendall (No. 13 on our big cities list) benefit from the huge demand for financial advisers in Florida. The Sunshine State ranks fourth in the number of financial advisors, and this seems likely to grow as at least some of the expanding ranks of down-shifting boomers --- some with decent nest eggs-- head down south to retire or start second careers. This demographic trend could also benefit Phoenix, which already hosts substantial operations of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Perhaps no low-cost metro area has greater long-term advantages than Salt Lake City, 12th on our list. The unique linguistics skills of the largely Mormon workforce have attracted big financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, who need people capable of conversing in Lithuanian, Chinese or Tagalog. Salt Lake City, with 1,400 employees, is the investment bank’s sixth largest location in the world. “We consider Salt Lake a high leverage location,” notes Goldman managing director David W. Lang. “There’s a huge cost differential and you have a huge talent-rich environment.” As we saw in manufacturing and information sectors, the financial services industry appears to be undergoing a profound geographic shift. Once identified largely with such storied locales as Wall Street, Chicago’s LaSalle Street or San Francisco’s Montgomery, the financial sector -- like much of the economy -- is dispersing, perhaps even more rapidly. Over time, this could accelerate the process of economic decentralization that has been occurring, fairly steadily, for the better part of a half century. Full List: The Cities Winning The Battle For Finance Jobs
17f927b53e3014f5e467fa4bc3cae7df	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/09/26/americas-fastest-growing-counties-the-burbs-are-back/	America's Fastest-Growing Counties: The 'Burbs Are Back	America's Fastest-Growing Counties: The 'Burbs Are Back For nearly a half century, the death of suburbs and exurbs has been prophesied by pundits, urban real-estate interests and their media allies, and they ratcheted up the volume after the housing crash of 2007. The urban periphery was destined to become “the next slums,” Christopher Leinberger wrote in The Atlantic in 2008, while a recent book by Fortune's Leigh Gallagher, The End of Suburbs, claimed that suburbs and exurbs were on the verge of extinction as people flocked back to dense cities such as New York. This has become a matter of faith even among many supposed development professionals. “There's a pall being cast on the outer edges," John McIlwain, a fellow at the Urban Land Institute, told USA Today. "The foreclosures, the vacancies, the uncompleted roads. It's uncomfortable out there. The glitz is off." Yet an analysis by demographer Wendell Cox of the counties with populations over 100,000 that have gained the most new residents since 2010 tells us something very different: Suburbs and exurbs are making a comeback, something that even the density-obsessed New York Times has been forced to admit. Of the 10 fastest-growing large counties all but two -- Orleans Parish, home to the recovering city of New Orleans, and the Texas oil town of Midland -- are located in the suburban or exurban fringe of major metropolitan areas. Gallery: America's Fastest-Growing Counties 10 images View gallery Not surprisingly several of these fast-growth areas are in burgeoning Texas metro areas. The population of Williamson County, on the outskirts of Austin, has expanded 7.94% since 2010, the strongest growth in the nation over that period. Far from turning into a slum, over the past 25 years the county’s residents have enjoyed the Lone Star state’s fastest rate of income growth and the sixth-highest in the nation. With a strong tech scene – Dell is headquartered in the Williamson town of Round Rock -- the county has increased employment by 73% since 2000, the third highest rate in the country. Another Austin outer suburb, Hays County, ranks third on our list, with population growth of 7.6% since 2010 and 67% since 2000. Also impressive has been the growth of another Texas exurb, Fort Bend County, to the west of Houston. Since 2010 the county's population has grown 7.2%, and since 2000 employment has increased 78%, in part due to the expansion of energy companies outside Houston. Fort Bend County is now home to 625,000 people, considerably more than the total population of most major core cities, including Atlanta, Cleveland, Baltimore and Portland. Like many of the boom counties, Fort Bend is also increasingly diverse, with a rapidly growing Asian population that is approaching 20% of the total. It is now the unlikely home to one of the nation’s largest Hindu temples. In second place is Loudoun County, 25 miles from Washington, D.C., where the population has expanded 7.87% since 2010 and the number of jobs has grown 83% over the past decade. Much of this has come from tech and telecommunications companies, as well as growing numbers of jobs tied to Dulles Airport as well as the nation’s capital. They are not on the road to “next slum” status: Loudoun is one of the nation’s wealthiest counties. Another D.C. exurb on our list in ninth place, Prince William County, Va., ranks among America's 10 wealthiest counties in terms of per capita income. Most of the other fastest-growing counties have a similar profile, attracting large numbers well-educated residents to the fringe of urban regions. What these findings demonstrate is that more people aren't moving “back to the city” but further out. In the last decade in the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, inner cores, within two miles of downtown, gained some 206,000 people, while locations 20 miles out gained over 8.5 million. Although the recession slowed exurban growth, since 2011, notes Jed Kolko at Trulia, suburbs have continued to grow far faster than inner ring areas as well as downtown. Americans, he concludes, “still love their suburbs.” Rather than an inevitable long-range shift, the post-crash slowdown of suburban growth seems to have been largely a response to economic factors. The retro-urbanist dream of eliminating, or at least undermining, suburban alternatives depends very much on maintaining recessionary conditions that discourage relocation, depress housing starts, as well as lowering marriage and birthrates. Where incomes are growing along with rapid job growth , suburban and exurban growth tends to be strong. The metro regions that contain our fastest-growing counties -- Austin, Houston, Nashville and Northern Virginia -- all epitomize this phenomenon. For example, nearly 80% of all housing growth in greater Houston takes place in the areas west of Beltway 8 (the outer beltway). A similar pattern can be seen in the D.C. area, where the number of units permitted in Loudon has more than doubled since 2007. In 2012 permit issuances were the highest since 2005, and the vast majority were for either detached or attached single-family houses. This doesn’t mean the central areas of thriving Washington or Houston are in decline; both core areas enjoy modest population growth not seen in many more hard-pressed cities. But this highly visible and relentlessly promoted growth has not altered the fundamental pattern of faster development on the fringes. As the economy strengthens, these trends will become evident in other areas. It now seems clear that the preference for single-family houses did not change in the recession, but was just stunted by it. With construction starts up again -- more than two-thirds single family -- this trend is beginning to re-assert itself. Mortgage lending is now at the highest level in five years. Full List: America's Fastest-Growing Counties Indeed suburbia -- or sprawl to use the perjorative term -- is back even in the anti-suburban stretches of the San Francisco area, where suburban and exurban developers are once again pushing plans to develop new housing for the area’s expanding workforce. In long-suffering areas such as the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, there has been a steady housing recovery, leading to talk of new development. Other signs suggest that the widely predicted dense city nirvana may need to be put on hold. For example, car sales -- automobiles dominate transportation in most suburbs and exurbs -- have been on the upswing, hitting a record in August. And despite predictions that the size of new homes would shrink, the median home size in the country has continued to rise, reaching a record high in 2012.Even shopping malls, long seen as doomed, are experiencing something of a resurgence. Demographic forces should accelerate suburban and exurban growth. As the economy has improved, we are starting to see an uptick in the birthrate, and household formation. Given the tendency of families to move to suburbs, this should spark further growth there in the future. High-density neighborhoods and the densest U.S. cities may be good for many things, and certain individuals, but not so much for families. During the last decade, suburbs and exurbs accounted for four-fifths of all household growth, a pattern that does not seem likely to change. Indeed, what we are seeing now is not the “end of suburbs” but the end of a brief period in which peripheral development was quashed by the severity of the Great Recession. With the return of even modest economic growth, we can expect that most demographic growth will continue to favor suburbs and exurbs, as has been the case for the better part of the last half century.
d294f1200dc9d95228b07fdc2c71a6bb	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/10/17/where-are-the-boomers-headed-not-back-to-the-city/	Where Are The Boomers Headed? Not Back To The City.	Where Are The Boomers Headed? Not Back To The City. Diana Sun Solymossy and her husband Robert were featured in a Washington Post story claiming baby... [+] boomers and empty nesters are moving to more urban settings. (Photo by Maddie Meyer/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that “empty nesters” are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Both stories, citing research by the real estate brokerage Redfin, maintained that over the last decade a net 1 million boomers (born born between 1945 and 1964) have moved into the city core from the surrounding area. “Aging boomers,” the Post gushed, now “opt for the city life.” It’s enough to warm the cockles of a downtown real-estate speculator’s heart, and perhaps nudge some subsidies from city officials anxious to secure their downtown dreams. But there’s a problem here: a look at Census data shows the story is based on flawed analysis, something that the Journal subsequently acknowledged. Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier. If boomers change residences, they tend to move further from the core, and particularly to less dense places outside metropolitan areas. Looking at the 51 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents, areas within five miles of the center lost 17% of their boomers over the past decade, while the balance of the metropolitan areas, predominately suburbs, only lost 2%. In contrast places outside the 51 metro areas actually gained boomers. Only one city, Miami, recorded a net gain in the boomer population within five miles of the center, roughly 1%. Much ballyhooed back to city markets including Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco suffered double-digit percentage losses within the five-mile zone. Where the boomers move is critical to the real estate industry, as well as other businesses. This is a large and relatively wealthy generation. Boomers account for some 70% of the country’s disposable income, and their spending decisions will shake markets around the country. Given the importance of this market, why has the analysis of it proved so wrong? One factor may well be that most boomers generally do not really want to move if they can help it. Three out of four boomers want to “age in place,” according to a recent AARP study. Part of the problem is one found commonly in press reporting on demographic trends; reporters only tend to know what they see, and mostly they work almost exclusively in urban cores. They encounter empty nester who moves to Manhattan or even downtown St. Louis, but not the ones who moves to the desert, lake, the mountains, the woods or into an adult-oriented community on the urban fringe. Out of the core, these people often fade into media oblivion. However, as people age, they turn out to be not, as one developer suggests, “more hip hop and happening” than more likely to seek remaining not only close to home, but attached to the workforce and the neighborhood. A recent series in the Dallas Morning News tracked where local empty nesters were moving -- largely to low-crime, well-maintained suburbs and exurbs. What were they looking for? The paper found the biggest concern by far to be safety, followed by affordability and quiet. So if boomers aren't flocking to inner cities, which of the 51 biggest metro areas are gaining the largest share of them? The top gainers are all relatively low-cost, low-density Sun Belt metropolises, led by Las Vegas. Its boomer population expanded 20.2% from 2000 to 2010, with a 12.2% decline in the five-mile inner ring and 36.3% growth outside it. In second place, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., up 11.5% (-8.3% in the five-mile zone, +13.5% outside); followed by Phoenix, whose boomer population rose 11.3% (-22.8%, +15.0%). In contrast, more expensive, denser cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif., saw the worst boomer flight, suffering double-digit percentage losses. Gallery: The Cities Boomers Are Moving To 10 images View gallery What are the implications of these findings? For cities, time to forget the long-anticipated “back to the city” trend among seniors as something that can save their downtowns. To be sure, there may be some ultra-affluent urban districts that may attract wealthy older investors and buyers, many of them part-time residents, such as Chicago’s Gold Coast and parts of Manhattan. In some elite Manhattan buildings, full-time residents constitute as little as 10% of the total. A little further out from these hot spots, boomers are fleeing. The five-mile zone around the City Hall of New York lost about 20% of its boomer population in the past decade, while in Chicago the corresponding area lost 26%. Ultimately, some downtown places might be a “wonderland,” as The New York Times puts it, for a small group of highly affluent residents. But for most they are outrageously expensive. At an age when capital preservation if often paramount, in New York, the senior best positioned is one living a long time in a rent-controlled apartment. Cities need to understand that, for the most part, their appeal remains primarily to young, largely single people, students and couples before they have children; cities' real challenge, and opportunity, lies in trying to keep more of this youthful cohort in the city as they age and expand their households. Boomers and seniors may be able to support luxury apartment developers in parts of Manhattan, but not in most cities. The boomer population in the five-mile radius of the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan areas fell by roughly a million from 2000 to 2010, out of a 2000 population of nearly 6 million, or 17%. The boomer population outside the five-mile zone in these metro areas also fell, but at a much lower rate: 2%, or 800,000 people out of a population of 39.5 million in 2000. Away from the major metros, smaller metropolitan areas and rural areas gained nearly 450,000 boomers. However, there was an overall loss of about 1.3 million boomers, principally due to deaths. Given the trends, suburbs will likely persist as a primary arena for aging populations. This suggests these communities will have to ramp up services to accommodate them, such as shuttle buses and hospitals. They should cultivate downshifting boomers as new consumers for local stores, and particularly on Main Streets, and as sources for capital and expertise. Perhaps the biggest impact, however, may be on smaller metropolitan areas and the less expensive Sun Belt communities. As more boomers achieve “empty nester” status they could bring investment capital, and broader connections to smaller cities that could much use them. One early sign of this trend may be the recent rise in migration to Florida. After a brief recession-driven hiatus a net 200,000 people have moved to Florida in the last two years. New Census numbers also suggest a large number of people continue to leave the Northeast, the Midwest and California. Also likely to benefit will be some emerging boomer magnet communities in Idaho, Arizona, Utah, the Carolinas and Colorado. For real estate developers and investors, the ones often most entranced by the “back to the city” story, the lessons are very clear. It makes more sense to follow the numbers, and understand the logic of senior migration, than swallow the snake oil so many have been carelessly imbibing. There are great opportunities in the expanding senior market, including in some uniquely attractive urban districts, but the bigger plays are in outlying areas, and, increasingly, smaller towns.
453ca460f56dd90318aca73d8235f7c0	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/10/24/the-cities-creating-the-most-middle-class-jobs/	The Cities Creating The Most Middle-Class Jobs	The Cities Creating The Most Middle-Class Jobs Perhaps nothing is as critical to America's future as the trajectory of the middle class and improving the prospects for upward mobility. With middle-class incomes stagnant or falling, we need to find a way to generate jobs for Americans who, though eager to work and willing to be trained, lack the credentials required to enter many of the most lucrative professions. Mid-skilled jobs in areas such as manufacturing, construction and office administration -- a category that pays between $14 and $21 an hour -- can provide a decent standard of living, particularly if one has a spouse who also works, and even more so if a family lives in a relatively low-cost area. But mid-skilled employment is in secular decline, falling from 25% of the workforce in 1985 to barely 15% today. This is one reason why middle- and working-class incomes remain stagnant, well below pre-recession levels. Over the past three years, high-wage professions have accounted for 29% of new jobs created, while the lowest-paid jobs (under $13 an hour) have grown to encompass roughly half of all new jobs. Net worth-wise, as a recent Pew study notes, the wealthy -- the top 7% -- are thriving due to the rebound of the stock and bond markets; the bottom 93%, whose wealth is more tied up in their homes, is still feeling the hangover from the cratering of housing prices in the recession. No surprise then that about a third of all Americans now consider themselves lower class, according to another Pew study, up from a quarter before the recession. But middle-income employment has not vanished everywhere. An analysis of the distribution of new jobs since 2010 by Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc. found a wide disparity among the states. Between 34% and 45% of all new jobs have been mid-wage in Wyoming, Iowa, North Dakota, Michigan and Arizona. The worst performers: Mississippi where only 10% of new jobs have been middle-income, followed by New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Virginia, all with 14% or less. (Note: I use the terms "mid-skill" and "middle-income" interchangeably; recent research suggests pay is a reasonable proxy for skill.) Gallery: The Cities Creating The Most Middle-Class Jobs 11 images View gallery Generally speaking mid-skilled employment is expanding the most in states with strong overall job growth, and less in high-cost, high-tax states, with the notable exception of Mississippi. The EMSI data also suggest that states with expanding heavy industries such as oil and manufacturing generate more positions for mid-level workers such as machinists, truck drivers, welders and oil roustabouts. At the same time, the states with a bifurcated combination of low-wage industries, like hospitality or retail, and high-paid professions, like software engineers or investment bankers, tend to have fewer opportunities for middle-income workers. This pattern becomes clearer if we look at metropolitan areas, the level at which most economic activity takes place. Mark Schill at the Praxis Strategy Group crunched the data for us on employment trends over the five years since the recession in the 51 metropolitan statistical areas with over 1 million people. It’s not a pretty picture. Three years since employment hit bottom, the U.S. still has 2 million fewer mid-income jobs than at the onset of the financial crisis in 2007; half of that deficit is in the largest metro areas. But the pain is not evenly distributed. There are eight metro areas that boast more mid-level jobs today than in 2007. The list is dominated by Texas cities, led by Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, which has added 17,000 mid-skill jobs -- an increase of 7.6% -- among the 95,000 new jobs generated in the region. The largest numeric increase is in Houston-Sugarland-Baytown, which has 60,810 more mid-skilled jobs, up 7.4%. The Houston metro area also has easily led the nation in overall job growth since 2007, adding a net 280,000 positions. Texas metro areas also come in third and fourth: in San Antonio-New Braunfels, middle-income employment rose 3.4%; in Dallas-Ft. Worth-Arlington , 3.1%. Nearby Oklahoma City comes in fifth with 2.1% growth in middle-income employment, sharing the merits of relatively low costs and a strong energy economy. Full List: The Cities Creating The Most Middle-Class Jobs The working class and the endangered middle class may be favored topics of discussion in the deepest blue regions, but for the most part these metro areas have failed to bolster their middle-skilled labor forces. Los Angeles-Long Beach leads the league with the biggest net loss of mid-skilled jobs since 2007, down by 112,300, or 6.1%. Chicago had the second-largest numerical decline, some 102,100, or 7.6%, followed by New York, which lost 82,350 such jobs, 3.4% of its total in 2007. In contrast, notes economist Tyler Cowen, Texas has not only created the most middle-income jobs, but a remarkable one-third of all net high-wage jobs created over the past decade. The loss of manufacturing jobs is clearly part of the problem here; despite the recent resurgence in the industrial sector, the U.S. still has 740,000 fewer middle-skill manufacturing jobs than in 2007. Chicago and Los Angeles remain the nation’s largest industrial regions, but they are also among the most rapidly de-industrializing areas in the country. New York City, once among the world’s leading industrial centers, with roughly a million manufacturing workers in 1950, is down to around 75,000. In contrast, industrial employment has been expanding in the Houston, Seattle and Oklahoma City metro areas, and recently even Detroit. In contrast , New York, Chicago and L.A. have seen job gains in such low-wage areas as hospitality and retail, as well as a smaller surge in high-end employment -- notably in information and business services. But the welcome growth in these positions is not enough to make up for the big hole in middle-class employment. Since the recession, for example, New York has lost manufacturing and construction jobs at a double-digit rate while hospitality employment grew 18% and retail 10%. Los Angeles and Chicago showed similar patterns, but actually did worse in higher-wage sectors, like professional business services. Another major area of lost middle-class jobs has been construction. The U.S. is still down 1.2 million middle-skill construction jobs since 2007 and 125,000 in real estate. These losses have inflicted the most pain in the boom towns that grew fastest in the early 2000s. The biggest loser of mid-skill jobs in percentage terms is Las Vegas-Paradise, Nev., which has suffered a staggering 16.1% loss in such jobs since 2007. It's followed by Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif. (-10.6%); Sacramento-Arden-Arcade-Roseville, Calif., (-10.4%); Tampa- St. Petersburg- Clearwater, Fla. (-9.7%); and Phoenix-Mesa- Scottsdale, Ariz. (-9.3%). Whether in the biggest cities, or Sun Belt boom towns, the issue of increasing middle-income employment should be as much of a priority for policymakers as attracting glamorous high-wage jobs or helping the poor. America’s identity has been built around the idea that hard work, particularly with some study for a particular skill, should be rewarded with decent pay. Boosting employment in mid-skill professions, from construction and manufacturing to logistics and energy, is critical to achieving this goal. If we fail to stem the erosion of middle-income jobs, we will be faced with a continued descent into a Latin American style society divided largely between an affluent elite and multitudes of the poor, with a thin layer in the middle. This promises miserable consequences for most Americans and the future of our democracy. Full List: The Cities Creating The Most Middle-Class Jobs
d46c90b96499d72697e1c03609f7855b	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/12/09/the-geography-of-aging-why-millenials-are-headed-to-the-suburbs/	The Geography Of Aging: Why Millennials Are Headed To The Suburbs	The Geography Of Aging: Why Millennials Are Headed To The Suburbs One supposed trend, much celebrated in the media, is that younger people are moving back to the city, and plan to stay there for the rest of their lives. Retirees are reportedly following suit. Urban theorists such as Peter Katz have maintained that millennials (the generation born after 1983) show little interest in “returning to the cul-de-sacs of their teenage years.” Manhattanite Leigh Gallagher, author of the dismally predictable book The Death of Suburbs, declares that “millennials hate the suburbs” and prefer more eco-friendly, singleton-dominated urban environments. The environmental magazine Grist envisions “a hero generation” that will escape the material trap of suburban living and work that engulfed their parents. Less idealistic types on Wall Street see profit in this new order, hoping to capitalize on the growth of what Morgan Stanley’s Oliver Chang dubs a “rentership society”; in this scenario millennials remain serfs, forking over rent all their lives to the investor class. But a close look at migration data reveals a more complex reality. The millennial flight from suburbia has not only been vastly overexaggerated, it fails to deal with what may best be seen as differences in preferences correlated with life stages. The telling evidence: The first group of millennials are now entering their 30s, and it turns out that they are beginning, like preceding generations, to move to the suburbs. We asked demographer Wendell Cox to crunch Census data for us on where Americans moved from 2007 to 2012, focusing on different age groups. The data reveal the obvious: People do not maintain the same preferences all their lives; their needs change as they get older, have children and, finally, retire. Each stage leads them toward somewhat different geographies. As it turns out, the vast majority of young people in their late teens and 20s – over 80 percent -- live outside core cities. Roughly 38 percent of young Americans live in suburban areas, while another 45 percent live outside the largest metropolitan areas, mostly in smaller metro areas. To be sure, core urban areas do attract the young more than other age cohorts. Among people aged 15 to 29 in 2007, there is a clear movement to the core cities five years later in 2012 -- roughly a net gain of 2 million. However, that's only 3 percent of the more than 60 million people in this age group. Surprisingly, most of this movement to the urban centers comes not from suburbs, but from outside the largest metro areas, reflecting the movement of people from areas with perhaps lower economic opportunity. It also is likely reflective of the intrinsic appeal of metro areas to young, single people, as well as the presence of many major universities and colleges in older “legacy cities.” Here’s how the geography of aging works: Americans are most likely to move to the core cities in their early 20s, but this migration peters out as people enter the end of that often tumultuous decade. By their 30s, they move increasingly to the suburbs, as well as outside the major metropolitan areas (the 52 metropolitan areas with a population over a million in 2010). This pattern breaks with the conventional wisdom but dovetails with research conducted by Frank Magid and Associates that finds that millennials prefer suburbs long-term as “their ideal place to live” by a margin of 2 to 1 over cities. Based on past patterns, by the time people enter their 50s, the entire gain to the core cities that builds up in the 20s all but dissipates, as more people move to suburbs and to outside the largest metropolitan areas. Similarly millennials have not, as some hope, given up on home ownership, something closely associated with suburbia. Magid’s surveys of older, married millennials found their desire to own a home was actually stronger than in previous generations. Another survey by the online banking company TD Bank found that 84 percent of renters aged 18 to 34 intend to purchase a home in the future, while another, by Better Homes and Gardens, found that three in four identified homeownership as “a key indicator of success.” These attitudes, particularly among the older edge of the millennials, is particularly critical, as these are the first of this largest generation in American history to enter full adulthood. Indeed the peak of the millennial generation is already in their mid-20s, and by the end of the decade, the vast majority of the roughly 42 million millennials will be entering their 30s, with some approaching their 40s. This group of mature millennials (adding in the 20-24 cohort) is expected to expand by 22.5 million in the next 10 years. They are likely to prove wrong the argument that, with boomers entering their sunset years, there will be no one to buy their houses. In contrast, the next wave of young people -- now under 10 -- will be about 1.7 million less numerous. These “plurals” are likely to stay in the suburbs for the next five to 10 years, and some will start moving into core cities as they enter their 20s, but in decidedly fewer numbers. Perhaps the most salient fact driving these migratory patterns is family formation. Our analyses of cities around the world have shown definitively that people with children tend to avoid urban cores, even in the most gentrified environments. Manhattan, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Seattle tend to have the lowest numbers of children per capita. These trends can be seen on a nationwide basis. Among the cohort of children under 10 in 2007, the number who lived in core cities as of 2012, when they were 5 to 14 years of age, was down by 550,000. Families are the group most likely to move either to the suburbs or smaller towns. This movement, plus the high degree of childlessness in large urban cores, suggests that many of those who are leaving the core cities in their early 30s are parents with young children. And what about the older cohorts, notably the baby boomers, who, along with millennials, dominate the nation’s demography? The shift out to the suburbs and to outside the larger metropolitan areas does not stop with the child-bearing years but gains more traction with age, peaking in the early 60s. At this stage, only half as many seniors, on a percentage basis, live in core cities compared to people in their early 20s. Overall, the core cities are home to approximately 15% of the U.S. population, but that falls to under 12% of the population in the 64- to 79-year-old demographic. This is not to say that most older people leave the suburbs. Almost 40 percent of seniors remain in suburban areas. Nevertheless there is some movement among the senior population, and among aging boomers, not “back to the city” as common alleged but actually towards the non-metropolitan areas, where costs are often lower and the pace of life slower. Among those now in their 60s, nearly half live outside the major metropolitan areas, four times as many as live in the urban core. What do these finding suggest about the geography of aging? First, it makes clear that many people’s preferences change as they age: In aggregate there is a slight tendency toward core cities in the late teens and 20s, and then, to suburbs and outside the major metropolitan after that. Second, it seems clear that older Americans leave core cities all the way to their 70s rather than cluster there, as is often maintained in the media. The demographic picture that emerges is complex, but suggests the best way for metropolitan areas to “lure” people -- and companies -- may be to encourage a wide range of housing lifestyles, ranging from inner city to suburban and exurban/rural. The urban pundit class may never change their preferences or abandon their claims of a secular “back to the city” trend, but in aggregate, people, it appears, do tend to change preferences as they age, something rarely acknowledged but certain to shape our geography for decades to come. Next week: An examination of generational trends by major metropolitan area. Leading the Next Industrial Revolution \| March 26-28, 2014 \| J.W. Marriott \| Chicago, Illinois Forbes will host the Reinventing America Summit in Chicago from March 26-28, 2014, bringing together 300 top industrial executives, entrepreneurs, academics and elected officials leading the country’s next Industrial Revolution. Please join us (information on how to apply is here).
0b613461d35b3877235362c2708042a9	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/12/19/where-working-age-americans-are-moving/	Where Working-Age Americans Are Moving	Where Working-Age Americans Are Moving Barrels of ink and money have been devoted to predictions of where Americans will migrate, particularly younger ones. If you listen to big developer front groups such as the Urban Land Institute or pundits like Richard Florida, you would believe that smart companies that want to improve their chances of cadging skilled workers should head to such places as downtown Chicago, Manhattan and San Francisco, leaving their suburban office parks deserted like relics of a bygone era. A close look at recent migration data shows that a significant number of younger people do indeed prefer urban life and can endure, temporarily at least, the high housing costs that go with it. However, the data also show that as they age, Americans continue, in general, to shift to suburbs, and later smaller communities, looking to buy homes and start families. Last week we explored an expert analysis of these trends by demographer Wendell Cox that showed distinctly different migration patterns from 2007 to 2012 among different age groups. (See: "The Geography Of Aging: Why Millennials Are Headed To The Suburbs") In this article we will look at the metro areas that they went to. Our analysis is based on 15-year age cohorts of the working-age population: people who in 2007 were 15-29, 30-44 and 45-59. We looked at the changes in the population numbers of these cohorts five years later in 2012 in the 51 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas with a population over 1 million. Gallery: Where Working-Age Americans Are Moving 31 images View gallery Youth Magnet Cities Most attention tends to go to the youngest of these cohorts, which aged from 15-29 in 2007 to 20-34 in 2012. It includes students, the unmarried and childless -- people in the earliest stages of their careers. This is historically the age group most likely to move from one region to another. Although the vast majority of this cohort live in suburbs or smaller towns, our research does show sizable increases in their numbers in many of the larger, expensive cities, particularly those with strong economies. From 2007 to 2012, tech-heavy cities generally saw the biggest growth in numbers in this age group. The San Francisco metro area placed first among the largest U.S. metro areas with a 20.7% increase in its population in this age group. Young people, it should be expected, tend to be less sensitive to ultra-high rents (particularly if they work for a successful company or their parents subsidize them). It was followed by Seattle (20.3% growth), Washington, D.C. (18.1%), and Austin, Texas (18.1%). But tech centers were not the only gainers. Some up-and-coming metro areas, notably Orlando, Las Vegas and New Orleans, also registered high levels of youth migration. In contrast many of the country’s large “hip and cool” cities did not fare nearly as well. Despite its endless self-promotion as a youth magnet, New York placed 19th (8.6% growth, though in absolute numbers it gained the most in this demographic, 323,000), while Los Angeles was 31st and Boston 22nd. Chicago, the much hyped (and hoped for) magnet for the young promoted by the Urban Land Institute in a recent Wall Street Journal article, places 41st – its population in this demographic actually dropped 0.6%. The lowest rungs are dominated by the traditional Rust Belt hard-luck cases: Cleveland (47th), Buffalo (48th), Rochester (49th), Detroit (50th) and last-place Riverside-San Bernardino, which lost 9.4% of its population in this age cohort from 2007 to 2012. But Where Do They Go After 35? As we explained in the last article, perhaps the most important group to watch is the one that aged from 30-44 in 2007 to 35-49 in 2012. This is the group just ahead of the millennials, and the one most likely to provide hints of where the millennials will move as 20 million enter their 30s over the next decade: the dreaded (at least for some) age of marriage, settling down and, in most cases, starting families. This group has shown remarkably different proclivities than the younger cohort. For one thing, they are not going to San Francisco, which drops to 30th place in this cohort – the city lost a net 0.7% of the age group from 2007 to 2012. Other high-cost urban areas also did very poorly with this demographic, including Boston (40th, -2.3%), New York (45th, losing a net 3.9%, or 161,000 people), San Jose (46th), Los Angeles (47th) and Chicago (49th, -5.2%). Who wins this group may be critical, since these are people entering their prime who earn more than younger cohorts, particularly in this economy. Census Bureau data indicates that average household incomes are 28% higher where heads of households are 35-45 years old than those in the 25-34 cohort. The gap grows to 34% against householders who are 45 to 54. This group seems very sensitive to both job markets and housing prices. With the exception of the Washington, D.C., area (No. 6), whose government-driven economy continues to flourish, virtually all the top 10 cities enjoy strengthening private-sector economies and relatively low housing prices. At the top of the list is the New Orleans area, whose population in this age group rose 19.3% from 2007 to 2012. The Big Easy’s gains are related, at least in part, to the return of people who fled after Katrina, but it also reflects a newfound demographic vitality backed by substantial economic improvements. It is followed by Miami, San Antonio and Raleigh. Houston and Oklahoma City also did well. Gallery: The Top 10 Cities Where Workers In Their Prime Are Moving These are the cities that will appeal most to aging millennials, suggests generational chronicler Morley Winograd. Older millennials, he notes, tend to be very interested in home ownership, family and being good parents. The tough economic times they face, plus often crushing college debt, will force many of them to move not to “luxury cities” where they could never afford a home suitable for child-raising, but to places that are, as he puts it, “less expensive and certainly downscale from the places where they grew up.” Mature Adult Markets The migration patterns are similar, although not uniformly so, in the next cohort, aged between 50 and 64 in 2012. Mostly still working, and earning close to peak wages, this generation tended to move to less expensive cities as well. New Orleans also ranks first, with a 7.9% gain in this cohort from 2007 to 2012. Low housing costs are another factor in New Orleans’ rebound. You can say much the same for other Sun Belt metro areas, such as San Antonio (third in this demographic with a 7.3% gain), No. 4 Tampa-St. Petersburg (5.0%), No. 5 Austin and No. 7 Oklahoma City. Interestingly, the California rankings in this cohort are almost the mirror image of the youth brigade. Riverside-San Bernardino, last in the youth list, for example, ranked second, while Sacramento, 43rd on the youth list, seems to get more appealing as people age. In the 30something group, the area rises to 32nd, and boasts a strong ninth place ranking in growth in the 50-64 cohort (+2.0%). Gallery: The Top 10 Cities Where Older Workers Are Moving Editorialists at local papers, such as the Sacramento Bee, are obsessed with increasing density and luring hipsters. Yet the California capital region, while not drawing many younger people, does very well in luring adult migrants from the far more expensive, and denser, Bay Area and Los Angeles-Orange County. In contrast, in this cohort, San Francisco ranks 40th with a 4.4% decline in population, Los Angeles-Orange County 44th (-5.6%), and San Jose 49th (-7.3%). The Upshot For Investors And Companies A look at these three working-age cohorts suggests a far more complex, and possibly perplexing, challenge to both companies and regions. Our demographic analysis suggests the movement of the youngest workers to “hip, cool” cities that is so celebrated by ULI and other professional urban boosters faces some serious time constraints, particularly as workers age. High-profile companies such as Google (itself located in very suburban Mountain View) seek outposts in places like downtown Chicago or New York, where youthful labor, often less expensive, is readily available. But most companies in technology -- particularly those with an engineering focus as opposed to social media -- depend heavily on older, skilled workers, most of whom live in suburbs. Much the same can be said of professional services, and finance and industrial companies. This may explain in part why, despite the claims made by urban boosters, office space construction and absorption is currently considerably stronger in suburbs than in the core cities. A recent Costar report says suburban San Jose, Sacramento, San Jose, Austin, Kansas City and Charlotte are enjoying particularly strong net office absorption. This trend, largely ignored in the media, may accelerate in the future. The key again is millennials as they enter their 30s. Like previous generations, many will end up either living in suburbs, or moving to less expensive cities as they get ready to buy homes and start families. The notion that “everyone” wants to move, and more importantly stay, in expensive core cities no doubt appeals to journalists based in places like Washington, D.C., San Francisco or Manhattan. But the actual reality is far more complex and more favorable to the continued dispersion of the workforce. Banking on the shifting tastes of 20somethings only works for so long; in the end, only a minority of workers remain Peter Pans, living their youthful urban dreams well into their 40s and 50s. Leading the Next Industrial Revolution \| March 26-28, 2014 \| J.W. Marriott \| Chicago, Illinois Forbes will host the Reinventing America Summit in Chicago from March 26-28, 2014, bringing together 300 top industrial executives, entrepreneurs, academics and elected officials leading the country’s next Industrial Revolution. Please join us (information on how to apply is here).
5a3dd385ac7b56f7f3b0e608d8f51d6a	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2014/01/09/how-silicon-valley-could-destabilize-the-democratic-party/	How Silicon Valley Could Destabilize The Democratic Party	How Silicon Valley Could Destabilize The Democratic Party President Barack Obama holds up a Facebook hoodie sweater that was given to him by Facebook CEO Mark... [+] Zuckerberg, right, during a town hall meeting to discuss reducing the national debt, April 20, 2011, at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) Much has been written, often with considerable glee, about the worsening divide in the Republican Party between its corporate and Tea Party wings. Yet the Democrats may soon face their own schism as a result of the growing power in the party of high-tech business interests. Gaining the support of tech moguls is a huge win for the Democrats -- at least initially. They are not only a huge source of money, they also can provide critical expertise that the Republicans have been far slower to employ. There have always been affluent individuals who backed liberal or Democratic causes, either out of conviction or self-interest, but the tech moguls may be the first large capitalist constituency outside Hollywood to identify almost entirely with the progressives. This alliance of high tech and Democrats is relatively new. In the 1970s and 1980s the politics of Silicon Valley’s leaders tended more to middle-of-the-road Republican. But the new generation oligarchs are very different from the traditional “propeller heads” who once populated the Valley. More media savvy and less dependent on manufacturing, the new leaders have less interest in the kind of infrastructure and business policies generally favored by more traditional businesses. They also tend to have progressive views on gay marriage and climate change that align with the gospel of the Obama Democratic Party. In the process, the Bay Area, particularly the Silicon Valley- San Francisco corridor, has become one of the most solidly liberal regions in the country. The leading tech companies, mostly based in the area, send over four-fifths of their contributions to Democratic candidates. This tech alliance is creating a pool of potential business-tested candidates for the party, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has said he wants to run for mayor of New York someday, even if he now resides in San Francisco. The tech oligarchs are also poised to reinforce the media dominance enjoyed by the Democrats. Over the past two years we have seen one tech entrepreneur and Obama ally, Chris Hughes, take over the venerable New Republic, while another, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, bought the Washington Post. More important, pro-Democratic tech firms such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google now dominate the online news business, while others, such as Netflix and Amazon, are moving aggressively into music, film and television. Yet for all the advantages of this burgeoning alliance with tech interests, it threatens to create tensions with the party’s traditional base -- minorities, labor unions and the public sector --- as the party tries accommodate a constituency that combines social liberalism and environmentalist sentiments with vaguely libertarian instincts. The fact that this industry has a pretty awful record on labor and equity issues is something that could prove inconvenient to Democrats seeking to adopt class warfare as their primary tactic. Indeed, despite its counter-cultural trappings and fashionably progressive leanings, Silicon Valley has turned out to be every bit as cutthroat and greedy as any gaggle of capitalists. Leftist journalists like John Judis may rethink their support for the Valley agenda once they realize that they have become poster children for overweening elite power and outrageous inequality. Privacy is one issue that should divide liberals from the tech oligarchs. Historically liberals have been on the front line of the battle to protect personal information. But now tech interests have worked hard, with considerable Democratic support, to block privacy protections that would damage their profits in Europe, and closer to home. Another inevitable flashpoint regards unions, a core progressive constituency. Venture capitalist Mark Andreesen recently declared that "there doesn't seem to be a role" for unions in the modern economy because people are "marketing themselves and their skills.” Amazon has battled unions not only in the United States, but in more union-friendly Europe as well. Avatars of equality? Valley boosters speak of the “glorious cocktail of prosperity” they have concocted, but have been very slow to address, or even seek to ameliorate, the vast social chasm that exists under their feet. Many core employees at firms like Facebook and Google enjoy gourmet meals, childcare services, even complimentary house-cleaning in an effort to create, as one Google executive put it, “the happiest most productive workplace in the world." Yet the reality is less pleasant for other workers in customer support or retail, like the Apple stores, and even more so for contracted laborers in security, maintenance and food service jobs. Indeed over the past decade the Valley itself has grown almost entirely in ways that have benefited the affluent, largely white and Asian professional population. Large tech firms are notoriously skittish about revealing their diversity data, but one recent report found the share of Hispanics and African-Americans, already far below their percentage in the population, declined in the last decade; Hispanics, roughly one quarter of the local workforce, held 5.2% of the jobs at 10 of the Valley’s largest companies in 2008, down from 6.8% in 1999, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The share of women in management also has declined, despite the headlines generated by the rise of high-profile figures like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg. The mostly male white and Asian top geeks in Palo Alto or San Francisco should celebrate their IPO windfalls, but wages for the region’s African-Americans and Latinos, roughly a third of the local population, have dropped, down 18% for blacks and 5% for Latinos between 2009 and 2011, according to a 2013 Joint Venture Silicon Valley report. Indeed as the Valley has de-industrialized, losing over 80,000 jobs in manufacturing since 2000, some parts of the Valley, notably San Jose, where manufacturing firms were clustered, look more like a Rust Belt city than an exemplar of tech prosperity. Overall, most new jobs in the Valley pay less than $50,000 annually, according to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress, far below what is needed to live a decent life in this ultra-high cost area. Part-time security workers often have no health or retirement benefits, no paid sick leave and no vacation. Much the same applies to janitors, who clean up behind the tech elites. The poverty rate in Santa Clara County has climbed from 8% in 2001 to 14%, despite the current tech boom; today one out of four people in the San Jose area is underemployed, up from 5% a decade ago. The food stamp population in Santa Clara County has mushroomed from 25,000 a decade ago to almost 125,000. San Jose is also home to the largest homeless camp in the continental U.S., known as “the Jungle.” As Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, admitted: "Silicon Valley is two valleys. There is a valley of haves, and a valley of have-nots." These realities suggest that the tech oligarchs, despite their liberal social views, are creating an environment for the “one percent” every bit as stratified as that associated with Wall Street. Google maintains a fleet of private jets at San Jose airport, making enough of a racket to become a nuisance to their working-class neighbors. Google executives touts its green agenda but have burned the equivalent upwards of tens of millions of gallons of crude oil, which seems somewhat less than consistent. At the same time, the moguls have a record of tax evasion -- a persistent progressive issue -- that would turn castigated plutocrats like Mitt Romney green with envy. Individuals like Bill Gates have voiced public support for higher taxes on the rich, yet Microsoft, Facebook and Apple have all saved billions by exploiting the tax code to shelter profits offshore. Twitter’s founders creatively exploited various arcane loopholes to avoid paying taxes on some of the proceeds of their IPO that they set aside for heirs. The set of differing rules for oligarchs and everyone else extends even to the most personal issues. Yahoo’s Mayer, a former Google executive, banned telecommuting for employees -- particularly critical for those unable to house their families anywhere close to ultra-pricey Palo Alto. Yet Mayer, herself pregnant at the time, saw no contradiction in building a nursery in her own office. This model of economic development seems it would be more appealing to those who believe in “the survival of the fittest” than people with more traditional liberal values. The alliance with tech may well be a critical boon to the progressive cause and its champions for the time being, but at some time even the most deluded progressives will begin to realize with whom they have chosen to share their bed.
2892f85b187d4dff758051b4aadcea36	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2014/04/28/the-best-cities-for-jobs-2014/	The Best Cities For Jobs 2014	The Best Cities For Jobs 2014 By Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires As the recovery from the Great Recession stretches into its fifth year, the locus of economic momentum has shifted. In the early years of the recession, the cities that created the most jobs -- sometimes the only ones -- were either government- or military-dominated (Washington, D.C.; Kileen-Temple-Fort Hood, Texas), or were powered by the energy boom in Texas, Oklahoma and the northern Great Plains. Now the recovery has shifted to a new group of cities that have benefited from the boom on Wall Street and the parallel IPO surge in Silicon Valley -- call them asset inflation cities. Last year the S&P 500 clocked its biggest rise since 1997, helped by aggressive monetary easing by the Federal Reserve and a return to the stock market by investors who had retreated to the sidelines after the financial crisis. The high times have brought on a surge in IPOs: 2013 was the busiest year for public offerings in over a decade, and the pace has if anything quickened this year, with healthcare and technology offerings leading the way. M&A has also surged, with some very impressive valuations in the tech sector, such as Facebook’s $19 billion purchase of 50-person What’s App. The biggest beneficiaries employment-wise: the Bay Area, Silicon Valley and New York City. Gallery: The Best Big Cities For Jobs 2014 16 images View gallery Our rankings are based on short-, medium- and long-term job creation, going back to 2002, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. So the top of our list includes both cities that have had the most striking comebacks since the Great Recession as well as those that have consistently created jobs over the long haul. We have compiled separate rankings for large cities (nonfarm employment over 450,000), which are our focus this week, as well as medium-size cities (between 150,000 and 450,000 nonfarm jobs) and small cities (less than 150,000 nonfarm jobs) in order to make the comparisons more relevant to each category. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.) Small cities, as a rule, show more volatility than their larger counterparts since the decision of one major business to expand or contract can have an enormous effect on a relatively tiny employment base. (See also: The Best Small And Midsize Cities For Jobs 2014). Big Money, Big Gains Yet even among the largest metropolitan areas, shifts in the economy can have a dramatic impact. This is clearly the case with the two metro areas that top our list this year, first-place San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif. (aka Silicon Valley), where the number of jobs surged 4.3% last year, and San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, where employment expanded 3.6%. Before the current tech boom, largely centered on social media companies, these metro areas were lagging badly. In 2010, San Jose ranked 47th on this list out of the 66 metro areas with more than 450,000 nonfarm jobs and San Francisco was 42nd. The information sector has driven this remarkable change in fortunes. Since 2008, the number of information jobs in the San Jose area has risen 37% to 60,800, while in San Francisco, employment in that category has grown 28% to 52,300 jobs. This has been accompanied by strong increases in such high-wage fields as professional and business services, where Silicon Valley has clocked 10% growth, and San Francisco twice that, adding 42,500 jobs, since 2008. The housing bubble helped to launch New York City from its doldrums a decade ago (it rose from 54th on our list of the Best Cities For Jobs in 2005 to 22th in 2008). In recent years, New York has been well served by Washington's bailout of the financial sector, which accounts for roughly 15% of the metro area GDP -- the Big Apple climbed to 10th place in our ranking in 2010 and to seventh this year. This is in good part a result of asset inflation; the number of finance jobs in New York has actually declined in recent years, but with a lot of extra spending money in the pockets of the city's relatively high concentration of wealthy people, some jobs are being created. Most of the growth has been in hospitality, health and education and retail, fields that do not generally offer top salaries. New York City has also seen steady growth in information jobs -- although at only a third the rate of Silicon Valley -- as well as professional and business services. Bring On The Usual Suspects Many of the other metro areas at the top of our 2014 list have been adding jobs consistently over the past decade. Some are also beneficiaries of the high-tech boom, though mostly as a result of big West Coast companies deciding to site new offices in these attractive locations. In third place is perennial high-flyer Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Texas, where the number of jobs grew 4.1% last year, and 13.7% since 2008. Raleigh-Cary N.C. places fourth (3.9%/7.2% over the same time spans). These metro areas routinely attract people and companies from California and the Northeast with lower taxes and real estate costs that, on an income basis, are as much as half those in the asset-rich areas. Unlike the asset-based economies, which ebb and flow with the markets, these and the other usual suspects have a record of consistent growth not only in jobs but also population. This reflects the more blue-collar economic foundation of many of these cities, based on energy, manufacturing and logistics -- sectors that tend to create higher-paid blue- and white-collar jobs. Growth has continued in these areas throughout all the changes in the economy, which has encouraged long-term migration and investment. Viewed over the last five years, for example, fifth-place Houston has expanded its total employment by 218,000 jobs, growing at the same rate as both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas—an impressive feat given that it is almost 20 percent larger than the two Silicon Valley cities combined. But an arguably bigger difference can be seen in demographics. The Houston metro area’s population has grown over 50% faster since 2010 than the Bay Area regions, and roughly twice as fast as New York. Houston is on track this year to build more new housing units than the entire state of California. This combination of rapid population and job growth – the former itself a major source of jobs in construction and services -- can be seen in places such as No. 6 Nashville-Franklin-Murfreesboro, Tenn.; No. 10 Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, Colo.; and No. 14 Charlotte-Gastonia-Round Hill, N.C. Full Lists: The Best Big Cities For Jobs \| The Best Midsize Cities For Jobs \| The Best Small Cities For Jobs The Sun Belt Bounces Back Perhaps the biggest surprise on this year’s list is the resurgence of the Sun Belt metro areas that were hardest hit by the housing bust. Ever since, the Northeast-centric pundit class has been giddily predicting these cities' demise. Strangled by high energy prices, cooked by record droughts, rejected by a new generation of urban-centric millennials, the Atlantic proclaimed this vast southern region to be where the American dream has gone to die. But the data show that many of these metro areas are in the midst of a powerful comeback. Take Orlando-Kissimmee, Fla., ranked eighth this year, up 23 places from last year. Similarly Phoenix has risen 17 places from last year to 22nd and is way up from its 51st place ranking in 2010. Perhaps even more surprising is the resurgence of 17th-place Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., which ranked near the bottom of the big city table at 63rd in 2010. Now foreclosures have dropped and job growth has picked up. In fact, the Inland Empire is now doing considerably better in job creation than Southern California’s older urban regions, including Los Angeles-Long Beach (37th), Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine (34th) and San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos (32nd). Bringing Up The Rear Many large cities continue to lag. Philadelphia, despite being close to New York and its considerable urban amenities, ranks 51st, with paltry 0.9% job growth since 2008. Not much better off, despite its connections to the Obama White House, is Chicago, which places 47th. Not only is the Windy City not adding many jobs (0.5% growth since 2008) but every county in the area, according to recent Census numbers, is losing migrants to other parts of the country. But Chicago is certainly doing better than the host of old industrial cities that continue to dominate the nether reaches of our survey. These include last-place Camden, N.J.; second to last Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Mich.; Cleveland-Elyria- Mentor, Ohio (62nd), Kansas City, Mo. (61st), Newark-Union, N.J. (60th), and St. Louis (59th). All these cities, apart from Kansas City, have occupied the bottom of our list for nearly a decade now, and seem unlikely to move up in the immediate future. What's Next It seems clear that as long as the tech and financial sectors retain their momentum, New York and the Bay Area should continue to fare well. But if asset growth slows, these areas could slip quickly. The Texas cities and the other usual suspects are probably a better bet to continue to generate new jobs, but they too face challenges. If the economy slows down energy prices will follow, hampering growth in energy meccas like Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. A surge in interest rates could undermine the comeback of the Sun Belt cities, which remain highly dependent on housing and construction-related economic activity. But overall, for reasons ranging from housing costs to business climate, we expect the usual suspects to remain high on our list of the best cities for jobs for years to come, in part due to their growing populations. What remains unknown is how the evolving industrial structure of the economy will affect the slower-growing cities along the coasts whose fortunes have tended to ebb and flow in recent years. Full Lists: The Best Big Cities For Jobs \| The Best Midsize Cities For Jobs \| The Best Small Cities For Jobs
f229a5ad0dbc3e50531d9c0b683d6dcf	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2014/11/17/americas-smartest-cities/	America's Smartest Cities	America's Smartest Cities By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill In this difficult recovery, many of the strongest local economies have been those with a high share of educated people in their workforce, particularly areas where technology companies and other knowledge-based industries are growing most rapidly. To determine the metro areas that are gaining brainpower in the 21st Century, we scored the nation’s 380 metropolitan statistical areas based on three criteria. We started with the growth rate in the number of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree from 2000 through 2013 (25% weighting in final score). But since the places that post the highest growth rates tend to be those starting with low levels of educational attainment, we gave greater weight to the percentage point increase in the share of the population that is college-educated over that span (50%), and we factored in the share of educated people in the population in 2013 (25%). We also separated out results for the 51 MSAs with over a million residents. For the most part, the top 10 on our list of the 51 largest metro areas is dominated by places with large concentrations of colleges, and those that long ago made the transition from industrial to information-based economies. Gallery: America's Smartest Cities 10 images View gallery In the Boston-Cambridge-Newton metro area, 44.8% of the population has bachelor’s degrees or above, the fourth-highest concentration of brainpower in the nation, up 7.8 percentage points since 2000 on the strength of a 32.2% jump in its college-educated population. That places Boston No. 1 on our large cities list. It’s followed in second place by Pittsburgh, which logged the largest percentage point increase since 2000 in the proportion of its population that is college-educated, 8.8 points, to 32.2%, on the strength of 37.3% growth in raw numbers. Perhaps the biggest driver in increasing the concentration of educated people in a population lies in the composition of local industry. Silicon Valley has done very well, making heavy additions to an already high concentration of educated residents. The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area places third on our list with a population in which 46.7% hold a bachelor’s degree or above, the second highest share in the nation, a 6.8 percentage point jump over 2000. Its urban annex, San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, places eighth, with a population that is 45.2% college-educated, an increase of 6.4 percentage points. To some extent, this reflects the area’s deindustrialization and high price structure; you do not want to come to the Bay Area today without a high-paying job requiring a good college degree if you expect to live a middle-class lifestyle. Another big employer of educated people is government, and with Washington in expansion mode over the past decade, it’s no surprise that our nation’s capital features in the top 10 -- twice. The proportion of the population of Washington-Alexandria-Arlington that is college-educated has risen 6.2 points to 48.7%, the highest concentration in the nation, on the back of a 45% increase in the raw numbers. It ranks fifth on our list, followed in sixth place by neighboring Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, Md. Full List: America's Smartest Cities The Small Smart Set Looking at the full set of the nation’s 380 metropolitan areas, the 51 biggest added far more people to their college-educated populations than the other 329 -- a net 12 million since 2000, compared to 4.8 million for the smaller metro areas. But the growth rates were actually fairly similar, 43% vs. 41%, which highlights that the largest cities are no longer the only places attracting educated workers. Some of the most dramatic growth is taking place in two kinds of small-scale geographies: college towns and what might be best described as amenity regions. At the turn of the millennium, college towns already had a decent base of educated people; now they seem able to attract and nurture tech companies as well. This is the case for the second-ranked metro area on our overall list of all 380: Bloomington, Indiana. Home to Indiana University, the metro area has logged a dramatic 11.7 percentage point increase in the proportion of its population that is college educated since 2000. The share of its population with BAs is now 40.6%, putting it in range of places like Boston and the Bay Area. Much the same pattern can be seen in several college towns, including No. 4 Auburn-Opelika, Ala.; Hattiesburg, Miss. (sixth); Lawrence, Kan. (seventh), and Burlington, Vt. (10th). The other big growth areas are attractive small towns that have lured many down-shifting, but often well educated, boomers. Placing first on our overall list is St. George, Utah -- its college-educated population increased by 167% from 2000 through 2013, making for a hefty 11.1 percentage point jump in the proportion of its population that’s college educated to 32.0%. Other areas with similar patterns of growth include Ocean City, N.J. (third), Wilmington, N.C. (fifth), Asheville, N.C. (eighth), and Redmond-Bend, Ore. (ninth). Looking Forward The rapid growth in the concentration of residents with bachelor's degrees in these smaller cities suggests that the geography of brainpower is likely to change in the years ahead. For decades the Southeast and Midwest have lagged behind the Northeast and the West Coast in education, but this gap is closing somewhat, at least in the smaller cities. Save Burlington, Vt., not one small metro area in the Northeast or California ranked within the top 65 of our overall list. A plethora of places in the Southeast dot the top part of our overall list: in addition to the previously mentioned Wilmington and Asheville, Durham-Chapel Hill (15th); Charleston-North Charleston, S.C. (17th); and Savannah, Ga. (20th). The Intermountain West is well represented as well in addition to St. George, with Boulder, Colo., in 13th place, and Provo-Orem, Utah, in 22nd. These areas are all likely to emerge as top tech and professional centers as their ranks of educated workers swell. An equally compelling view of the future would be to concentrate on the locations of relatively recent college graduates. A recent study by Richey Piiparinen and Jim Russell for Cleveland State University looked at college-educated people between the ages of 25 and 34 in 2011-13. It found that many of the metro areas with the most rapid growth of this population were in the South, led by Nashville, Tenn., Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, Fla.; and Austin, Texas, all of which experienced growth in this cohort of between 15% and 25%. More surprising, however, was the strong growth in some Rust Belt cities, including Cleveland-Elyria (+20%), and Pittsburgh (12%). Piiparinen and Russell suggest this is, in part, due to the lower costs in these regions, which allow young people to live far better than they would in a pricier city on either coast. Clearly high costs could shift the nature of future educated migration. It already has caused millennial populations to stagnate in some traditional magnet cities for the educated, such as New York and San Francisco, and actually drop in the core areas of Chicago and Portland. Another factor could be the availability of high-paying jobs; Portland, for example, has an inordinate proportion of college-educated young residents working at lower wages than the national average. In contrast Houston, where high-paying jobs are being created at a healthy clip, the young educated cohort grew five times as fast. Full List: America's Smartest Cities Of course many factors could shift this geography of education in the years ahead. An extended slide in oil prices, for example, could slow growth in places like Houston and Dallas, while a shift in the terrain of social media could have a devastating effect on the Bay Area. Yet looking ahead, it’s clear that the map of America’s brainpower is likely to continue changing. The leaders, particularly talent-producers such as Boston, should remain at the top for years to come, but other regions -- notably the South, the Intermountain West and perhaps also the Rust Belt -- could be making bigger gains in the years ahead. Mark Schill is an economic development strategy and community process consultant with Praxis Strategy Group.
dd6393d9810a6fbeb51fffc90c70aaea	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2015/01/30/the-u-s-cities-where-hispanics-are-doing-the-best-economically/	The U.S. Cities Where Hispanics Are Doing The Best Economically	The U.S. Cities Where Hispanics Are Doing The Best Economically By Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox Since 1980, the percentage of Americans who claim Hispanic heritage has grown from 6% to 17%. By 2040, Latinos will constitute roughly 24% of the population. Many Democrats no doubt see President Obama’s executive actions on immigration as a step not only to address legitimate human needs, but their own political future. But perhaps a more important question is how these new Americans will fare economically. We decided to look into which of America’s 52 largest metropolitan areas present Hispanics with the best opportunities. We weighed these metropolitan statistical areas by three factors — homeownership, entrepreneurship, as measured by the self-employment rate, and median household income — that we believe are indicators of middle-class success. Data for those is from 2013. In addition, we factored in the change in the Hispanic population from 2000 to 2013 in these metro areas, to judge how the community is “voting with its feet.” Each factor was given equal weight. Our findings parallel our recent study of the economic fortunes of African-Americans, but with some important differences. Gallery: The U.S. Cities Where Hispanics Are Doing The Best Economically 10 images View gallery Surviving Hard Times The recession was particularly tough on Hispanics, who suffered a 44% drop in household wealth from 2007 to 2010, compared to a 31% decline for African-Americans and 11% for whites. Lower home values are to blame for much of this – many young Hispanic families bought homes just before the recession hit, explains the Urban Institute, but because they generally had higher debt-to-asset ratios than other ethnic groups, the steep drop in housing prices resulted in a sharper decline in their wealth. Hispanics’ home equity dropped 49% over those years. The recession and the weak recovery have contributed to a change in the demographics of the U.S. Hispanic population – immigration has slowed while the U.S.-born Latino workforce has continued to expand at a brisk clip. In 2013, for the first time in almost two decades, the U.S.-born accounted for the majority of Hispanic workers in the country (50.3%), up from 43.9% in 2007, according to the Pew Foundation. During the recovery, U.S.-born Hispanics have made strong job gains, adding 2.3 million to the ranks of the employed from the fourth quarter of 2009 through the fourth quarter of 2013, compared with a loss of 37,000 jobs in the recession. But that has only slightly outpaced growth in the Hispanic working-age population. Hispanic unemployment has come down to 6.5%, but wages have been stagnant – Pew reports a slight gain in earnings of full-time Hispanic workers through the end of 2013, but that came as a result of the retreat of lower-paid illegal immigrants from the workforce. The Unexpected Place Where Latinos Have Done Best The prime U.S. cities for Latinos have long been New York, Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Los Angeles metropolitan area alone has more than 5 million Latinos, including an estimated 1 million undocumented immigrants. Yet it no longer is necessarily the best place for them, ranking only a middling 32nd in our survey. L.A.’s once thriving industrial economy has been in a secular decline, and in the process thousands have lost employment. At the same time, construction work has been slow, another traditional source of employment. High housing costs have also put homeownership out of reach. A 2013 Fannie Mae study found that Latinos place greater emphasis on homeownership than the rest of the population. Given the diminished possibilities of buying a home or finding a decent job in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, Latinos have been flocking to the suburban periphery that encompasses much of adjacent Riverside and San Bernardino counties, also known as the Inland Empire, which ranks second in our survey. From 2000 through 2013, the Latino population in the area soared 74%, compared to a 15% population gain for Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, given its substantially lower home costs, roughly half those of Los Angeles, the Inland region has a relatively high Latino homeownership rate of 55.3%, compared to 37.7% in Los Angeles. Rates of self-employment are also higher than in L.A. (23.5% to 21.3%) and so too are median household incomes ($47,200 vs. $45,200). The metro area was devastated in the housing bust, but it’s coming back faster than the coastal economy. Although total employment is some 30,000 jobs below its 2007 level, California Lutheran University economist Dan Hamilton notes that Riverside-San Bernardino’s 2.2% job growth over the past year compares well with the 2.0% increase in Orange County and 1.3% in L.A. Latinos also fared middling in California’s other high-cost metro areas. San Jose ranks 22nd and San Francisco-Oakland ranks 25th. Full List: The Cities Where Hispanics Are Doing The Best The same factors that make Riverside-San Bernardino a good place for Hispanics -- lower housing costs and decent job growth -- characterize most of the metropolitan areas that lead our list. That is particularly true of our No. 1 metro area, Jacksonville, Fla., which is just 40 miles north of St. Augustine, founded by the Spanish in 1565, making it the longest continuously settled city in what is now the United States. The metro area’s Hispanic homeownership rate of 55% is notably higher than the 43% average in the 52 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. The median household income of $50,170 is also well above the major metro average of $41,740. Like many Florida cities, Jacksonville was hard-hit by the recession, but over the past year, the region has added close to 22,000 jobs. Jacksonville’s Hispanic population has grown 148% since 2000. Other Florida metro areas where Hispanics are prospering are Tampa-St. Petersburg (12th), Orlando (13th), and Miami (16th). Not surprisingly, Latinos are also doing very well in a number of Texas cities. Like Florida, the state has relatively low housing prices, as well as a generally more buoyant economy, with strong growth in blue-collar fields such as construction, manufacturing and energy. The Lone Star State’s four big metro areas all place in the top 10, with Houston ranking fourth, followed by Dallas-Fort Worth (seventh), San Antonio (eighth) and Austin (ninth). They all are above average in terms of homeownership rates, self-employment and median household income. Like African-Americans, Latinos have done relatively well in No. 3 Baltimore, where their numbers have increased since 2000 by 175%, with a median household income of $59,940, second highest in the nation behind the adjacent Washington, D.C., area (No. 5), where the median household income for Hispanics is $65,736. Shifting Patterns In recent years, immigration overall has shifted to the Southeast away from many of the traditional “gateway” cities. Today the largest growth in foreign-born Americans is in the Southeast and Texas; since 2010 the old Confederacy attracted over 1.5 million foreign-born residents, more than the Northeast and Midwest together. None of the traditional gateway cities rank in the top 10 on our list. After Miami, the highest ranking of them is Chicago, at 18th, thanks to relatively lower home prices and a high Latino homeownership rate (51.4%). In contrast, New York, home to the country’s second largest Latino community after Los Angeles, ranks a poor 42nd. This reflects one of the lowest rates of Hispanic homeownership in the country, 26.5%, and modest population growth of roughly 29% since 2000, compared to an average of 96% for the 52 largest U.S. metro areas. New York Latino households earn a median of $42,980. That’s slightly above the 52 major metro median of $41,740, but given the sky-high housing costs in the Gotham area, it doesn’t go very far. In the Bronx, where the population is 55% Hispanic, roughly 30% of households are below the poverty line, the highest rate of any large urban county. As was the case with African-Americans, the metro areas at the bottom of our list are all faded industrial centers. Milwaukee ranks last, preceded by Providence, R.I. ; Hartford, Conn.; and Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y. Forging The American Future Identifying where Latinos are going, and doing well, is critical not just for them but the future of the country. One out of every four American children are Latino and since 2000 they have accounted for two-thirds of all net job gains made in the country. Latinos are also playing a key role in the recovery from the housing bust, accounting for 56% of all new owner households created between 2010 and 2013. What our research and migration trends suggest is that the geography of Latino opportunity is rapidly changing. The Latinization of America is gathering strength in parts of the South that offer a better deal for new Americans and their offspring than New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. You want a little salsa on those grits? Full List: The Cities Where Hispanics Are Doing The Best
069d45e1daa3c2f08344c2cd721685ae	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2015/04/14/cities-creating-the-most-tech-jobs-2015/	The Valley And The Upstarts: The Cities Creating The Most Tech Jobs	The Valley And The Upstarts: The Cities Creating The Most Tech Jobs By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill No industry generates more hype, and hope, than technology. From 2004 to 2014, the number of tech-related jobs in the United States expanded 31%, faster than other high-growth sectors like health care and business services. In the wider category of STEM-related jobs (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), employment grew 11.4% over the same period, compared to 4.5% for other jobs. The Commerce Department projects that growth in STEM employment will continue to outpace the rest of the economy through 2018. But all the new tech jobs have not been evenly distributed across the country. To determine which areas are benefiting the most from the current tech boom, Mark Schill, research director at Praxis Strategy Group, analyzed employment data from the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan statistical areas from 2004 to 2014. He looked at the change in employment over that timespan in companies in industries we associate with technology, such as software, engineering and computer programming services. (Note that this includes everyone at these companies, such as non-tech employees like janitors and receptionists). He also looked at the change in the numbers of workers in other industries who are classified as having STEM occupations (science, technology, engineering and mathematics-related jobs). This captures the many tech workers who are employed in businesses that at first glance may not seem to have anything to do with technology at all. For instance just 7% of the nation’s 1.5 million software developers and programmers work at software firms — the vast majority are employed in industries as disparate as manufacturing, finance, and business services. Our list features some well-known outperformers, but also some surprising metro areas usually not associated with venture capital and Silicon Valley. We also found that some high-profile metro areas that like to tout themselves as the “next Silicon Valley” are actually at best the middle of the pack in terms of tech and STEM job growth. Gallery: The Cities Creating The Most Technology Jobs 2015 12 images View gallery The Strongest Engines At the top of our list is a group of cities that have long been identified with tech growth. Our No. 1 city, Austin, Texas, boasts the strongest expansion in tech sector employment of any of the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas from 2004 to 2014, 73.9%, as well as 36.4% growth in STEM jobs, the fourth-highest growth rate in the country. Coming in a close second is Raleigh, N.C., part of the renowned Research Triangle region, home to outposts of multinationals like Bayer, BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM and Cisco. The Raleigh metro area posted a 39% increase in STEM jobs from 2004-14, the fastest growth in the nation, albeit from a smaller base than many of the other biggest metro areas. However, the Bay Area continues to reign as the tech center with the most momentum. San Jose, which covers most of Silicon Valley, ranks third with 70.2% growth in tech sector employment since 2004 and a hefty 25.8% increase in STEM employment. The San Francisco metro area, which includes San Mateo to the south, ranks fifth with a 67.4% jump in tech industry employment as well as a STEM jobs increase of 27.5%. There may be more tech industry employees and workers in STEM occupations in the New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles metro areas, but San Jose has the strongest concentration of tech horsepower in the nation, with by far the highest per capita concentration of people in engineering professions. San Jose’s tech industry is responsible for 14.1% of all jobs, almost five times the national average of 2.9%. The share of STEM workers is 15.5% of its total workforce, three times the 5.0% proportion in the overall U.S. population. Both figures are easily the highest in the nation. San Francisco clocks in at second nationally with 7.6% of its jobs in tech industries and is fifth in STEM representation, at 8.7% of all workers, behind San Jose, the nation’s capital, Seattle, and our No. 1 city, Austin. Silicon Valley’s thick concentration of titans like Intel, Apple, Oracle, Google and Facebook has created an innovative ecosystem, which, as Pando Daily’s Michael Carney describes, supports a “systematic irrationality and a feedback loop” that encourages many tech entrepreneurs to turn down the easy early exit of selling out to a bigger company and make the commitment to grind for a decade or more in the hopes of joining the afore-mentioned standouts as a massive success. No other area apart from Seattle (No. 7 on our list) comes close in this regard to nurturing tech giants. The success of the Bay Area and Valley also attracts outsiders who want to be close to the action, including foreign players like Samsung, and old economy stalwarts that need a tech infusion like Wal-Mart. The Surprise Tech Upstarts Some of the others in our top 10 are not as renowned as tech centers, but have experienced rapid growth over the past decade. The biggest surprise may be No. 4 Houston, which enjoyed a 42.3% expansion of jobs in tech industries and a big 37.8% boost in STEM jobs from 2004-14. Much of the growth was in the now sputtering energy industry, but also medical-related technology, which continues to grow rapidly. Houston is the home to the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest concentration of medical facilities. It also ranks second to San Jose in engineers per capita. Full List: The Cities Creating The Most Tech Jobs The Mountain West metropolises of Salt Lake City (sixth) and Denver (11th) also have posted impressive growth, and now boast considerably higher share of tech and STEM workers in their populations than the national average; in Salt Lake City 5.9 percent of jobs are in tech industries and 4.1% are in STEM. Denver is even more impressive with 7.3% of jobs in tech industries and 5.1% working in STEM. Salt Lake City’s gains are linked to a continued migration of tech firms, largely from Silicon Valley, whereas Denver is making waves as a start-up incubator. The other top cities on our growth list all tend to be emerging tech centers. These include No. 8 Nashville, where strong growth in data centers and systems design firms is at least partially tied to its strength in the health sector, No. 9 Jacksonville, driven by IT and computer programming services firms, and, perhaps most surprising, No. 10 Memphis, whose 35% tech growth since 2012 is due mostly to significant recent growth in engineering services. However, the tech sectors in these cities are still very small -- Memphis had only 7,800 tech industry workers last year -- and all three still trail the national average for the share of tech workers in the population. More Hat Than Cattle? Some journalists and pundits believe tech is moving from its suburban roots and towards dense, large cities. And there’s some truth to the fact that the social media boom, and some tech-driven services, appeal naturally to the same creative and culturally minded workforce concentrated in core cities. But this shift is not too evident in terms of job creation. High-tech growth in city centers may have more to do with tech sector expansion in general occurring in every type of geography. Suburban Silicon Valley, for example, has nearly twice the concentration of tech jobs as San Francisco; even amidst the social media boom, the Valley since 2012 has greatly outpaced the City and its immediate suburbs in terms of both new tech and STEM employment. The largest tech projects going up in the Bay Area -- new headquarters for Google, LinkedIn and Apple -- are being built in the Valley, not the city. Unlike San Francisco, cities located far from tech centers have not done nearly as well as often reported. Chicago has been desperate to portray itself as a major tech center, developing elaborate facilities for companies, while promoting its own high-tech icon, Groupon, and crowing over the high-profile names its lured to open up offices in the city, like Google. Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has even proposed expanded bike lanes as part of his plan to lure tech-savvy members of the “creative class” to his city. Yet despite all the noise, Chicago ranked a mediocre 33rd on our growth list, with 20.3% tech industry employment growth from 2004-14 and a mere 3.8% growth in STEM jobs. Both numbers are below the national average, as is the region’s percentage of employees in tech and STEM. How about Los Angeles, with its fabulous weather, elite universities (Caltech, University of Southern California, UCLA, Cal Poly Pomona and Harvey Mudd College) and close ties to the creative engine of Hollywood? Local boosters like to claim that the metro area is undergoing a full-scale “tech boom” focused on the west side in its so-called “Silicon Beach.” To be sure, the region still boasts the second largest pool of STEM workers in the country, in part due to its legacy of manufacturing, led by its shrunken but still sizable aerospace industry (63,000 jobs, down by 90,000 since the end of the Cold War). But Los Angeles’ large STEM numbers are to a great degree a function of the massive population of the metro area – the percentage of STEM employees in the workforce is 4.9%, a hair below the national average of 5%, while 2.5% of its workforce is in tech industries, trailing the national average of 2.9%. Los Angeles lands a poor 38th on our growth list, with an 18.7% expansion in tech industry jobs since 2004 and a 4% increase in STEM jobs, a shade below the national average of 4.2%. Full List: The Cities Creating The Most Tech Jobs But perhaps the biggest surprise is New York, whose boosters are now claiming it to be the No. 2 tech center in the nation and the Valley’s chief rival. However, on our job growth list New York sits in a mediocre 35th place, with 24.3% growth in tech industry employment over the past 10 years, and only 4% in the last two. In STEM, New York still has the largest number of jobs of any metro area in the nation at 428,000 as of 2014, but that’s up a paltry 2.7% since 2004, and, as in the case of L.A., is a function of its large population. The percentage of STEM employees in the local workforce falls short of the national average at 4.4%. New York has gained about 51,000 technology industry jobs since 2004 and 12,000 since 2012, giving it a total of roughly 265,000 tech jobs. But that’s some 70,000 fewer than the Bay Area, an economy about one third the size of New York’s. Critically, most New York “tech” seems more linked to media than actual physical products, essentially replacing many of its old media jobs with newer ones. Part of the problem for New York is that it’s profoundly weak in engineering talent, ranking 78th out of 85 metropolitan areas in engineers per capita. The Bay Area Versus The Rest The current social media bubble will surely pop, but as Michael S. Malone and others have noted, the Bay Area’s preeminence will likely continue, fueled by its unique concentration of engineers, entrepreneurs, and risk capital. Instead of losing out to New York, Silicon Valley and San Francisco are luring many top performers from Wall Street. Google alone has 1,200 employees who formerly worked for large U.S. investment banks, and migration from the Big Apple to California is now at its highest level since 2006. In the coming years the engineering-centered Valley seems better positioned to seize on the challenges posed by the “Internet of things,” including systems for heating and cooling and autonomous cars, as well as biotechnology. In the long run, the Valley’s hegemony is threatened not by any one place, but by several that offer significant technical expertise, with far lower housing costs. San Francisco is already by far the nation’s least affordable metro area. Only 11% of residents making the median annual income can afford to buy a home, according to the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index – and the median income is in the San Francisco area is a hefty $100,400. The Valley is not far behind at 21.8%. The high prices throughout the Bay Area has become a concern of tech executives, who fear they will have troubles attracting more experienced engineers and managers. No matter the headlines, the reality is that future tech growth is more likely to be created by the less sexy business services sectors than by Internet media or software publishers. In the last decade three often-ignored industries -- engineering services, systems design and custom programming – added nearly 750,000 jobs, while software providers and Internet properties added less than 200,000. The decentralizing force of these boring sectors is what’s driving growth in the second- and third-tier tech cities. But despite these trends, don’t expect the landscape of American technology, particularly at the high end, to change dramatically in the near future. Inertia is a powerful force, as is the enormous concentration of venture funds and expertise around the Bay Area. But if no one area can hope to challenge Silicon Valley’s lead position, it is likely tech growth will continue to flow to other areas that could collectively take the tech capital of the world down a notch or two. Full List: The Cities Creating The Most Tech Jobs
470cebafb9336febe7ff88418ee48e37	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2015/06/04/methodology-for-2015-best-cities-for-jobs-list/	Methodology For 2015 Best Cities For Jobs List	Methodology For 2015 Best Cities For Jobs List The methodology for our 2015 ranking, which seeks to measure the robustness of metro areas’ growth both recently and over time, largely corresponds to that used in previous years, with a minor addition to mitigate the volatility that the Great Recession has introduced into the time series. It allows the rankings to include all of the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports monthly employment data. They are derived from three-month rolling averages of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics "state and area" unadjusted employment data reported from November 2003 to January 2015. The data reflect the North American Industry Classification System categories, including total nonfarm employment, manufacturing, financial services, business and professional services, educational and health services, information, retail and wholesale trade, transportation and utilities, leisure and hospitality, and government. We used five measures of growth to rank MSAs over the past 10 years. "Large" areas include those with a current nonfarm employment base of at least 450,000 jobs. "Midsize" areas range from 150,000 to 450,000 jobs. "Small" areas have as many as 150,000 jobs. This year’s rankings reflect the new Office of Management and Budget definitions of MSAs for all series released after March 2015. As a result, the MSA listed in this year’s rankings do not necessary correspond directly to those listed in prior years. In some instances, MSAs were consolidated with others -- for example Pascagoula, MS, was combined with the Gulfport-Biloxi, MS, MSA to form the new Gulfport-Biloxi-Pascagoula, MS, MSA. Others were separated from previously consolidated MSAs and in still other instances individual counties were shifted from one MSA to another. The bottom line is that this year’s rankings are based on good time series for the newly defined MSAs but may not be precisely comparable to those listed in prior years. The total number of MSAs included in this year’s rankings has risen from 398 to 421. This year’s rankings reflect the current size of each MSA’s employment. The index is calculated from a normalized, weighted summary of: 1) recent growth trend: the current and prior year's employment growth rates, with the current year emphasized (two points); 2) mid-term growth: the average annual 2009-2014 growth rate (two points); 3) long-term momentum: the sum of the 2009-2014and 2003-2008 employment growth rates multiplied by the ratio of the 2003-2008 growth rate over the 2009-2014 growth rate (one point); 4) current year growth (one point); and 5) the average of each year’s growth rate, normalized annually, for the last 10 years (two points). This methodology corresponds exactly to that used in last year’s rankings. The goal of our methodology is to capture a snapshot of the present and prospective employment outlook in each MSA, and these revisions allow the reader to have a better sense of the employment climate in each.
3c400472320e2ec9929da70995c3e2a7	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2015/06/18/the-cities-winning-the-battle-for-information-jobs-2015/	The Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs 2015	The Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs 2015 By Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires We are supposed to be moving rapidly into the “information era,” but the future, as science fiction author William Gibson suggested, is not “evenly distributed.” For most of the U.S., the boomlet in software, Internet publishing, search and other “disruptive” cyber companies has hardly been a windfall in terms of employment. As jobs in those areas have been created, employment has shriveled in old media like newspaper, magazine and book publishing (these industries lost a net 172,000 jobs from 2009 through 2014). In the 52 largest metropolitan areas that we studied, information employment declined for roughly half from 2009 through 2014. Overall, in information industries (a sprawling sector that also includes movie and TV production, radio and another big job loser, telecom) employment has shrunken 4.2% since 2009 to 2.7 million jobs, while total nonfarm employment in the U.S. grew by 5.1%. Yet looking at the information sector give us an important picture of how these changes have shifted jobs to certain regions and away from others. Our rankings are based on employment growth in the sector over the short-, medium- and long-term, going back to 2003, and factor in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.) Gallery: The Big Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs 10 images View gallery By far the biggest winners in the information sweepstakes are areas that developed a strong engineering base before the rise of the Internet. This has provided the platform for the rapid growth of web-based businesses, including in fields such as entertainment, media, hospitality and transportation (like Uber). It’s not surprising then that the metro areas that have posted the strongest information job growth over the past 11 years are San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara and San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco. The growth in these hot spots has been nothing short of spectacular: information employment rose 60.2% from 2009 through 2014 in the San Jose area to 70,900 jobs, 6.9% of total employment in the metro area, while the San Francisco area has seen a 51.3% surge over the same time span to 55,800 jobs, representing 5.4% of the total workforce there. After the dot-com bubble burst, Silicon Valley tech employment declined consistently until 2010, since which the rebound has been dramatic. While San Francisco and areas in the northern end of Silicon Valley have not yet reached the peak employment levels seen during the bubble era, the southern end centered in San Jose and Santa Clara has easily outstripped its peaks of the early 2000s. And with information employment continuing to surge, it’s too early to say these areas have hit their “information” peak. Last year, the number of information jobs jumped 16.0% in San Jose while San Francisco experienced an 8.3% jump. Other traditional tech centers that have thrived in the new era include No. 9 Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash., where information employment has grown a healthy 9.2% since 2009 and No. 14 Boston, where employment is up 5.1% since 2009. Compared to the Bay Area, these regions appear less at the center of the web-based media and services industries, but their overall tech economies remain very strong. The Rise Of Sun Belt Information Hubs Some of the most rapid growth in information, however, is taking place not in the older established tech hotbeds but in the lower-cost metropolitan areas of the Sun Belt. Five of our top 10 ranked metropolitan areas are located in the belt that stretches from the Atlantic coast to Arizona, led by No. 3 Austin-Round Rock, Texas, where information employment has risen 30.8% since 2009 to 25,800 positions. Some of this reflects a gradual movement of companies, notably from Silicon Valley, to the Texas capital. Smaller Bay Area firms such as digital advertising firm Marin Software have expanded there while Apple is expected to add 3,600 jobs there over the next few years. Several other Sun Belt tech hubs also are high on our list. In fourth place is Raleigh, N.C., on the strength of a 13.8% jump in information employment since 2009. It’s followed in fifth place by No. 5 Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, N.C., which boasts significant sources of venture capital, and No. 8 San Antonio-New Braunfels, Texas, which has seen the rise of locally based companies such as Execupay as well as large scale expansion of Bay Area firms such as Oracle that are flocking to the region. One big advantage these economies have compared to the ultra-pricey Bay Area is lower home costs, something that matters to tech workers as they enter their 30s. But the biggest challenge for some of these up and coming areas, such as Phoenix, is the dearth of large locally headquartered companies that can help create a management talent base and some tech street cred. The Battle Of The Bigs One key battleground for information supremacy is in the country’s media centers. The clear winner has been No. 7 New York, which has recorded a 13.0% jump in information jobs since 2009 to 185,200 jobs – second most in the country behind the Los Angeles metro area. That came amid an 11.8% decline over the same timespan in all publishing jobs not involving the Internet (note that we don’t have the level of detail at the local level to separate out software publishing from that figure, but it’s safe to assume the bulk of the decline was in newspapers and book and magazine publishing). The 13% jump reflects strength in new media as well as motion pictures, TV and radio, more so than technology, a field in which New York remains very much an also ran, right in the middle of the pack in terms of creating STEM and tech employment. But boosters claim this is changing, pointing out that there are now 7,000 tech firms employing 100,000 people in the area. Although New York is well behind the Bay Area in pace of growth, it is clearly outperforming its traditional media rivals in the rush towards digital media. Its growth dwarfs that of No. 29 Chicago, where information employment has ticked up 0.4% since 2009. The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale metro area, still home to the largest number of information workers, has managed lackluster growth of 3.5% since 2009, including a 2.0% decline last year, which puts it 28th place on our list. For all the talk about L.A.’s emergence as a new media rival to the Bay Area, the numbers suggest this is more hope than reality. Over the past five years motion picture and television employment has not been hard-hit like traditional publishing but is only experiencing slow growth. No Facebook, Google or Apple equivalent has emerged in Southern California, although some hold out hope for L.A.-based Snapchat. A decade or two ago there was talk about the nation’s capital challenging New York’s media dominance. But as has become evident over the past year, the Beltway’s appeal is dropping, even when it comes to producing sound-bites and punditry. The core Washington D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria metropolitan division places a mediocre 43rd, with a 3.9% decline in information employment since 2009. Other areas around the capital did poorly also, including 41st-ranked Northern Virginia and 46th-place Silver Spring-Frederick-Rockville Md. which also have lost information jobs since 2009. Surprises And Up And Comers Generally speaking manufacturing, energy and logistics-oriented economies do not do well in terms of information jobs. As of now there’s no Rust Belt version of Facebook or Google, and most factory towns do very poorly. But there’s one outstanding exception to this rule: Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich., which places 10th on our list. This area, sometimes referred to “automation alley,” is Michigan’s premier tech region. It is where software meets heavy metal, with a plethora of companies focusing on factory software and new computer-controlled systems for automobiles. It is home to engineering software firms like Altair, which has been expanding rapidly, and also where General Motors recently announced plans for a $1 billion tech center, employing 2,600 salaried workers. If we are looking for future information hubs, one place to look would be our small and mid-sized metro area lists. Here the top ranks are dominated by college towns, including Baton Rouge, La., home to Louisiana State University, where information employment has surged 28.6% since 2009. It places third on our mid-size cities list, which also features such high-flying college towns as fourth place Provo-Orem, Utah (Brigham Young), No. 5 Durham-Chapel Hill (Duke, University of North Carolina), No. 6 Madison (University of Wisconsin), and No. 7 Ann Arbor (University of Michigan). Full List: The Big Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs The information sector may not be a big job generator, but it does play a critical role in several of our most important economies, including the San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Austin metro areas. The clear shift we are seeing towards consolidation of media with tech – a la Apple, Netflix and Google -- will likely underpin a movement of these coveted jobs from traditional media centers to the Bay. But given the unfriendly business atmosphere in California, and the super-high prices for houses, it also makes sense to look at secondary information centers, both in the Sun Belt and among college towns, which may attract even more of these jobs in the years ahead.
6f35073187688ad35c1ade109558cfde	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2017/10/03/where-americas-highest-earners-live/	Where America's Highest Earners Live	Where America's Highest Earners Live Crowds gather on the polo field after a polo match at the Bridgehampton Polo Club, a weekly social... [+] event during the summertime in the Hamptons. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images The mainstream media commonly assumes that affluent Americans like to cluster in the dense cores of cities. This impression has been heightened by some eye-catching recent announcements by big companies of plans to move their headquarters from the ‘burbs to big cities, like General Electric to Boston and McDonald’s to Chicago. Yet a thorough examination of Census data shows something quite different. In our 53 largest metro areas, barely 3% of full-time employed high earners (over $75,000 a year) live downtown, according to Wendell Cox’s City Sector Model, while another 11.4% live in inner ring neighborhoods around the core. In contrast, about as many (14.1%) live in exurbs while suburbs, both older and new ones, are home to 71.5% of such high earners. New county-level research by Chapman University researcher Erika Nicole Orejola also sheds light on the geography of wealth. Orejola ranked the nation’s 136 largest counties by the proportion of full-time workers in the population who earned over $75,000 in 2015, which represented the 77th percentile of incomes then, and by the share of households earning over $200,000. She found that 16 of the 20 counties with the largest share of full-time employed residents earning over $75,000 were functionally suburban, with most people driving to work and living in low to moderate density environments. The other four, interestingly enough, are among the most urbanized parts of the country, including Manhattan and San Francisco. Gallery: Where America's High Earners Cluster 21 images View gallery Where The High-Wage Earners Are The very top of this pyramid consists largely of two archetypes, elite “superstar” cities, but more so well-located suburbs, often near the most dynamic cores. Many are areas that have benefited the most from the post-Great Recession boom in technology as well as in the much larger business and professional services sector. Ranking first is New York County, otherwise known as Manhattan, where a remarkable 49.2% of all full-time workers earn over $75,000. That’s up from 40.2% in 2006. Other big counties with high concentrations of high earners include No. 3 San Francisco (49.1%), No. 7 Washington, D.C. (44.9%, up sharply from 29.5% in ’06), and No. 14 King County, Wash. (41.3%), which includes Seattle and its closer in suburbs. Virtually all the rest are counties that are primarily suburban, usually close to high-wage core cities. These include, not surprisingly, the California counties of Santa Clara (fourth place) and San Mateo (ninth), which make up Silicon Valley. (In Santa Clara, a whopping 21% of households have annual incomes over $200,000, tops in the country.) Several New York suburbs make the top 20, including Monmouth, N.J. (eighth), Westchester, N.Y. (10th), Fairfield, Conn. (11th), and Nassau County, N.Y. (Long Island) (13th). There are also strong pockets of high-wage workers in suburban counties surrounding Boston, including Norfolk (fifth) and Middlesex (12th). Washington, D.C., is flanked by wealthy suburban Fairfax County, which ties with Manhattan for the highest percentage of resident full-time workers making over $75,000 (49.2%) – we gave Manhattan the top ranking for its greater population (1.63 million vs. 1.13 million for Fairfax). Another D.C. suburb, Montgomery County, Md., ranks sixth. And outside Philadelphia, Chester County ranks 17th. The pattern holds away from the East and West coasts. The Houston suburb of Fort Bend County ranks 18th and the Dallas suburb of Colin County ranks 19th. Near Chicago, DuPage County ranks 24th and Lake County 27th. Oakland County outside of Detroit ranks 25th, and 29th-ranked Johnson County, Kan., is the most dynamic part of the Kansas City regional economy. Counties housing some of the nation’s largest cities don’t fare well in this ranking, but that isn’t necessarily because the wealthy aren’t there. The nation’s largest county, Los Angeles, ranks a mere 74th, with 24% of the full-time employed population earning over $75,000; in nearby suburban Orange County the proportion is 33.8%. But that’s because L.A. is much larger– L.A. County has more than double the number of high earners as Orange Country, 808,000 vs. 360,000. Similarly Cook County in Illinois, which includes Chicago and its closer in suburbs, places 55th with a 27.7% share of high earners, but it’s still home to 499,350 people making over $75,000, 2.3 times as many as live in higher-ranked DuPage and Lake County combined, and the high earner population in Cook County has been growing faster. Kings County, N.Y., aka Brooklyn, comes in 66th with 25.4% of the full-time working population making over $75k, but that’s still 221,000 high earners, and it’s had the second fastest growth rate in its high earner population of any large county since 2006. The Bronx, long a poster child for urban poverty, clocks in 132nd, fourth from the bottom, but it ranks 11th for the growth rate in the proportion of its population that earns high incomes, up from 7.2% in 2006 to 12.3% in 2015. Households Over $200,000 Income: The Suburban Connection Much the same pattern applies to households with incomes over $200,000 annually. The same four urban core counties rank highly: San Francisco is third with 20.4% of households making over $200,000 a year, more than double the proportion in 2006, New York County is fifth, Washington, D.C., ranks 16th and the mixed suburban-urban core of the Seattle area, King County, Wash., places 20th. All the rest of the top 20 are firmly suburban, led by Santa Clara, where 21% of households earn $200,000 a year, followed closely by the D.C. suburb of Fairfax County, Va. So what gives here? The Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University just completed a national survey, fielded and tabulated by The Cicero Group, of 1,191 professionals aged 25-64 with household incomes greater than $80,000, and who work in education, healthcare, information technology, finance or other professional services jobs. What we found may help us understand what high income professionals are looking for in terms of location. The survey found priorities for actual high-end workers do not largely follow the “hip and cool” agenda so promoted by some urban pundits and inner city developers. In fact, the biggest factors influencing location, the respondents told us, are such prosaic factors as housing costs -- generally the number one issue -- jobs for a spouse, commute times, proximity to family, and K-12 quality. Features commonly cited as reasons for an urban revival, like cultural amenities and nightlife, are not so critical with this demographic. In our survey, nearly 40% cited housing costs and 30% commute times as reasons why they would choose not to move to a place. In contrast, barely 5% prioritized “access to culture” or “nightlife.” The needs of families seem paramount. There are certain factors that are “must haves , such as affordable housing, jobs for spouses and reasonable commute times,” notes the survey’s designer, Chapman University analytics expert Marshall Toplansky. The message for cities and counties seeking to lure professionals may be, think parks and playgrounds rather than edgy music venues -- focus on the basics that shape quality of life for families. The Future Where are these folks likely to go in the coming years? There may be some good news here for central cities. Some of the biggest increases in the proportion of high earners in the population took place in places like Kings (Brooklyn) and Queens counties, which have been prime areas for gentrification over the past decade as Manhattan has become extraordinarily pricey. Since 2006, Kings has seen its number of high income earners soar by almost 94% while Queens saw a jump of 78%. Other urban core counties have seen some impressive gains, although from a low base, including Baltimore and Philadelphia counties. But here too some suburban areas have shown strong increases, notably Snohomish County, Wash., just outside Seattle, which saw its $75k cohort grow by over 90%. Other suburban areas with strong growth trajectories including Utah County, south of Salt Lake City, Ft. Bend and Montgomery counties outside Houston, as well as several suburban counties outside Boston. What appears to be occurring are two things at the same time. There’s a strong concentration of affluent households both in select suburbs of major cities and another one, far more urban, that is beginning to spread, but in many older cities although still at a much lower concentration. Other hotspots appear to be in the newer suburbs of the Sun Belt. The geography of affluence is changing, but in ways that are as diverse as the country as a whole.
1ea8d854ac03e47e639392da16b15cb8	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joellitman/2021/03/04/wall-street-wrong-again-goldmans-non-profitable-tech-index-is-not-vindicated-by-volatility/?sh=5432075843dd	Wall Street Wrong Again: Goldman’s “Non-Profitable” Tech Index Is Not Vindicated By Volatility	Wall Street Wrong Again: Goldman’s “Non-Profitable” Tech Index Is Not Vindicated By Volatility With the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrials near all-time peaks, some recent Wall Street analysis has stoked the fear there is a massive speculative bubble in the market, one that is about to pop. This time, it’s Goldman Sachs that has created a monstrosity for bad market signaling and unnecessary headline grabbing. It’s called “The Non-Profitable Technology Index” and it’s often referred to as the “negative earnings” company index. One particular chart has been paraded around that shows a scary, exponentially rising indexed price of a basket of high-flying tech names. If the chart’s steep rise wasn’t enough to scare the investor, the basis for choosing the stocks certainly would: all of the companies in the basket have negative earnings, according to the Goldman report. That’s enough to send the financial media into a tailspin about the stock market highs being in an unsustainable bubble. The recent sell-off and volatility in many of those same stocks has helped to sound the alarms for an oncoming bear market as this supposed bubble may be coming to an end. The major problem is that Goldman’s analysis, like most all of Wall Street research, hinges completely on the published, as-reported, “official” earnings number for each company. That unfortunately-calculated number is published in every Wall Street research report, then reinforced with every quarterly earnings release and analyst estimate. Too bad it is based on GAAP accounting, or Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. That is the crux of the problem. What Would Warren Say? No investor worth their salt would ever rely on an as-reported GAAP earnings number. No investor ought to provide more than a passing glance at Goldman’s new index. The chart in particular doesn’t provide any useful insights as to what it purports. MORE FOR YOUBitcoin Hits New High Ahead Of Coinbase Listing, But 74% Of Fund Managers Think It's Just A BubbleS&P 500 Posts New Record High, Tesla Skyrockets Despite Worse-Than-Feared Inflation Data And Vaccine ConcernsCoinbase Skyrockets In Nasdaq Listing, Landing $105 Billion Valuation On First Day Of Trading Under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the basis of “profitability”, as-reported net income, simply doesn’t represent what’s really happening in the business. That last sentence almost perfectly combines and summarizes the exact comments Warren Buffett made in the first ten minutes of his opening remarks at both his 2018 and 2019 Berkshire-Hathaway shareholder meetings. Check it out for yourself in the videos of those events. Buffet is not alone in openly challenging the reliability of as-reported numbers. At one point or another, many of the greatest investors on the planet have taken similar shots including Charlie Munger, Seth Klarman, Shelby Davis, and the father of value investing himself, Ben Graham. Adding to that list, in the words of the late, great Marty Whitman, “GAAP is not truth or reality.” Wall Street research ignores the greatest stock pickers in history, in part, because it’s awfully difficult to fix GAAP’s problems. More importantly; however, it’s because fixing GAAP doesn’t support the raison d’etre of the Street. It’s hard for a banker to stay loyal to a corporate client if said banker is forced to reveal the truth about their clients’ business. GAAP-based numbers provide tremendous wiggle room for bankers to come up with whatever narrative they desire. In this case, the below chart measures the performance of the aforementioned index. From 2015 to 2020, the index had modest gains. Then, this index showed an exponential spike in 2020 and into 2021, soaring from March 2020 lows. The Goldman Sachs "Non-Profitable Technology Index" has soared since its March 2020 lows Bloomberg, Bianco Research The price of this particular basket of stocks shows growth of more than 400% from the market bottom to early February. That’s more than 5x greater than the S&P 500 return of 75% during that incredible rebound. Even after the choppiness in recent days, this return dwarfs the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite, which has recovered by over 100%. Another Dot-Com Bust in the Making? Many in the financial media have drawn a direct comparison between this chart (and thereby the current stock market) to the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s. At that time, so many “new economy” companies lacked earnings. Back then, the U.S. experienced an incredibly strong bull market, heavily fueled by the rapid growth of technology stocks. With the widespread adoption of the internet, it seemed anything internet-related, or just with a “.com” in its name, could soar in market valuation. From 1995 to 2000, the Nasdaq rose approximately 500%. During the height of the craze, in 1999, there were 457 IPOs, mostly new technology stocks. A great number of those were banked by my alma mater, CSFB, Credit Suisse First Boston, which at the time was the “800- pound gorilla” of investment banking for technology firms. Many of those dot-com firms not only lacked profit, they also lacked revenue. Valuations were being surmised and evaluated based on ethereal concepts like “multiples of eyeballs” or sheer employee growth rates. There often was no cash flow data to even consider. Firms such as Pets.com, Webvan.com, and Flooz.com were raising billions of dollars from exuberant investors desperate to get in on the action. Wall Street’s research reports on those stocks were found to be not only incredibly inaccurate, but also in violation of many kinds of securities laws. In case after case, sell-side research analysts were found publicly cheering stocks with comments like “back up the truck” to induce the purchasing of initial public offerings. Meanwhile, those exact same analysts were privately telling co-workers, junior analysts, and friends not to touch said IPO with a ten foot pole. Companies with no revenue, no earnings, and sometimes mountains of debt, skyrocketed in price while, in reality, they did not and could not warrant their hundred million-dollar and billion-dollar valuations. There were a few notable winners such as Amazon. It actually did have positive earnings... when GAAP distortions were removed using Uniform Accounting numbers. However, most of these firms were shown later to be next to worthless. The stock market collapse was swift and severe and many investors still remember and feel that pain to this day. Now, the blistering performance of this set of supposedly non-profitable technology firms in the Goldman Sachs index has some investors fearing an imminent repeat of the tech bust twenty years ago. Unfortunately, poorly constructed indexes and sorely lacking research are supporting that fear. The Economic Reality of Some Supposedly Negative Profit Firms Today is a different situation as shown by the economic reality of these firms. The high-flying tech companies today not only have revenue and earning potential, many are showing current and strong earning power. Power that GAAP-based, as-reported numbers, and Wall Street fail to reflect - and maybe don’t even comprehend. Note the following firms that are included in the non-profitable technology index. A list of the top 25 Non-Profitable technology index constituents by weight Valens Research GAAP distortions are misleading some research analysts into thinking all the stocks in the index are start-up-esque, money-burning, “.com-like” companies. It suggests that they are all hemorrhaging investor money. It’s a totally different picture when these companies are viewed using Uniform earnings and other UAFRS-based performance metrics. In other words, what is the real earning power of these firms when the as-reported, GAAP accounting distortions are removed? There is a stark difference between as-reported earnings and economic reality. Shopify (SHOP), Spotify (SPOT), Roku (ROKU), Peloton (PTON), Pinterest (PINS), and Teladoc (TDOC) have all been posterchildren of the “non-profitable tech” run. In reality, these firms have positive earnings and earning power trends which GAAP and Goldman fail to capture. Comparison of as-reported vs Uniform EPS data for selected "Non-Profitable" Technology Index ... [+] constituents Valens Research Under Uniform Adjusted Financial Reporting Standards (UAFRS), investors see the reality of a business’s corporate performance. To “get to Uniform,” more than 130 adjustments are made to GAAP-based financial statements. These adjustments clean up highly distorted GAAP-accounting issues like stock-based compensation, R&D investments, and terribly misguided lease capitalization rules. A Few of the Profitable “Non-Profitable” Technology Firms The father of value investing, Professor Ben Graham, spoke of the importance of “earning power” throughout his books, Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis. This concept is seldom, if ever, mentioned in Wall Street research. Earning power, as represented by return on assets (ROA), provides a far more accurate view of the health or a business. As-reported ROA, as seen in almost every financial database from Bloomberg to Factset to Yahoo Finance, provides a GAAP-based metric, shown in the table below. This is compared against the same metric based on Uniform Accounting. Comparison of as-reported vs Uniform ROA data for selected "Non-Profitable" Technology Index ... [+] constituents Valens Research Once the consistent rules of Uniform Accounting are applied, companies’ true colors are revealed. Highlighting one example from above, Teladoc Health (TDOC) is a telemedicine and virtual healthcare pioneer. On an as-reported basis, Teladoc Health appears to have no earning power at all, supposedly a highly negative number, over recent years, as shown by the orange bars below. This early stage company actually did show a negative return on assets in 2017. That is not uncommon for start-ups. The real concern is how fast the firm can shift its profitability upward and enter positive earnings territory. Uniform Accounting metrics, the blue bars, highlight how the firm has ramped up operational performance incredibly, generating an impressive 26% return on assets in 2019. Chart of as-reported vs Uniform ROA data for Teledoc (TDOC), a "Non-Profitable" Technology Index ... [+] constituent Valens Research, CapitalIQ Teladoc’s stock has risen from $37.50 to well over $200 per share since 2018. It’s a significant contributor to the rise of the questionably developed Goldman index. The Uniform-based performance metrics show this is entirely justified. This impressive inflection in profitability, coupled with massive growth in the business, demonstrates that markets are not baselessly investing into a fad. There is fundamental value driving exuberance in Teladoc and many other current tech stocks. Another point is the trend and trajectory. Firms that are ramping up their investments could appear to have decreasing earnings. A multi-year comparison of earnings is even more telling under Uniform Accounting. While valuations may still seem extreme for some, these recent stock price movements are not a repeat of the dot-com bubble from 20 years past when bad companies were getting worse. Certainly, some of the players in the Goldman basket have issues in generating a positive return as of right now. For instance, Uber Technologies (UBER) and Lyft, Inc. (LYFT) seem to have a long runway to traverse before they start demonstrating healthy earning power. Even then, these companies are a far cry from the non-revenue generating dot-coms of decades past. In the late 1990s, I never bought a toy from etoys.com nor any groceries from Webvan. Yet year over year, I’ve used Uber and Lyft more often than I could possibly count. The Devil is in the Details This is a detailed earnings calculation discussion that Goldman and most Wall Street analysts and bankers fail to cover. However, any investor relying on earnings per share or price to earnings has to grasp these issues. Otherwise, that investor ought to just buy a real index, like Vanguard’s VOO for the S&P 500, and stay away from the individual stock game. One major adjustment made under Uniform Accounting is the treatment of R&D, research and development expenditures. Here, GAAP fundamentally violates its own most basic and foundational “matching principle” which is taught in every college student’s Accounting 101 class. In the U.S., R&D is treated as a current cost against revenue. In reality, it is an investment in the long-term cash flow generation of a firm. Of course it should be capitalized and expensed over time, just like a machine or any other capital expenditure. That’s the matching principle. More novice or misguided proponents of GAAP will often pose the question, “What if management is spending R&D on bad or useless innovations? Should it then still be capitalized?” Yes, of course. Companies make bad investments all the time. At least we as investors can see it characterized as such in the financial statements and then draw our own conclusions as to management’s prowess or lack thereof. If the investment in research is recorded as an expense, then earnings can go up or down simply because of a change in a company’s investment levels. Imagine if a company reports that EPS has risen, and later the investor finds that the sole reason was management reduced spending in research. It sounds silly, yet, that exact distortion can happen in any given earnings period. It ought not be the job of accountants to predict and determine the quality of a particular machine, or a plant, or a plot of land, or research spend. In fact, accountants are particularly bad at those tasks because it’s not their job. Accountants ought to stick to accounting - i.e. record-keeping - not valuation. Valuation is the job of the investor. On the buy-side, and specifically at the top investment management firms in the world, there is widespread use of performance and valuation metrics which adjust for all of the distortions of GAAP. This framework for adjustments is also known as Uniform Adjusted Financial Reporting Standards, Uniform Accounting. (Our reports alone are read by investors at 200 of the top 300 money managers.) Meanwhile, Uniform Accounting metrics are almost non-existent in research analyst reports and missing from investment bankers’ pitch books. Wall Street has proven that it is good at neither accounting nor valuation. Another big issue for the firms included in Goldman’s basket of “non-profitable” companies is stock-based compensation. Right now, imputed stock compensation is interpreted under GAAP to be an operating cash outflow for the firm. In other words, GAAP-calculated operating cash flow includes a theoretically-calculated non-cash item, concocted by GAAP. It is not now and never will be an operating cash outflow. Companies issue stock in lieu of cash for the very purpose of conserving operating cash. It ought not be reported as the very opposite of what the company is actually doing! Even worse, the GAAP-approved calculation of said expense is based on the wildly fluctuating results of methods like Black Scholes. The computed, imputed cash compensation, which is not actually cash spent, is based partly on share price volatility and the time until stock award expiration. It goes up and down every quarter. In my management consulting past, I remember advising a very nice and capable CFO who was ultimately fired for providing a bad estimate of earnings to the Street. Too bad for him, a large part of the miss in reported earnings was not because of unexpected operational missteps. Instead, his team had not correctly forecasted how the imputed stock-based compensation would fluctuate under the Black Scholes calculation model. High stock volatility and an increasing stock price led to an imputed compensation cost for options which caused earnings to fall below guidance. Of course, this increasing stock price did not increase the cash cost to the company for compensating employees. The increased GAAP-expense had no impact on the cash generating ability of the firm. The volatility piece of the Black-Scholes model simply skyrocketed far beyond what the CFO could have estimated. Today, as-reported earnings completely distorts one’s understanding of an early stage company’s real “burn rate.” GAAP rules shove non-cash expenses into earnings that could otherwise be better and more sensibly calculated simply as dilution for earnings per share. Does any accountant or everyday investor really understand the limitations of Black Scholes for calculating the value of stock options, a model which Fischer Black himself later cited as problematic? On the other hand, the Uniform Accounting alternative, to calculate dilution on earnings for its impact on earnings per share is straightforward. It requires nothing more than an estimate of shares that will be outstanding for which earnings will have to be shared over a greater shareholder base. That method distorts neither cash flows nor earnings from non-cash items. In combination, these distortions can materially understate or overstate the true profitability of a firm. For these tech companies in particular, GAAP and Goldman have completely missed the mark. Some of the firms have negative earnings because they are truly unprofitable. Others have very positive earnings and are using those earnings to reinvest into the company… and so they look bad when they actually are not. Fundamentals Have Not Gone Away Solid companies have high returns or trajectories headed for high returns. Extraordinary companies have high returns accompanied by high reinvestment rates. GAAP earnings distorts investment growth, particularly in early stage companies. Wall Street and followers of GAAP accounting can easily misinterpret those firms as bad businesses, as Goldman’s new index does. Many of the companies in this particular index seem to be taking greater shares of their respective industries, and the economy as a whole. Their Uniform metrics show that. On the other hand, great companies aren’t always great stocks. Valuations fluctuate daily from the ongoing voting machine and sentiment of short-term market trends. On any given day, a company can be trading well over or well below its intrinsic value. The valuations of early stage firms fluctuate widely, as do their prospects for future earning power, so one ought not simply run out and buy them, even if Uniform-based metrics show something better than expected. The point is, this new Goldman index is another reason to relinquish any faith in Wall Street research and recommendations, if you haven’t already. It tells us nothing about the real valuation levels of the firms or the market as a whole. It’s just a basket of high-flying stocks, of which many companies fully deserve to be.
03b95c54631684065f1aafaa862d1a7c	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelmoser/2015/10/28/private-investment-in-infrastructure-american-style/	Private Investment in Infrastructure - American Style	Private Investment in Infrastructure - American Style Just before the Global Financial Crisis, Goldman Sachs and Macquarie, along with Spain’s Cintra, brought a pair of large public-to-private transportation infrastructure assets to market. The Chicago Skyway and Indiana Toll Road transactions were like alarm bells for the primarily European and Australian cast of experts—advisors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, financiers and others—who flew to the United States with the thought that the world’s largest economy had just become an “emerging” infrastructure investment market, expecting to teach the Yanks all about public private partnerships called “PPPs” based upon the UK Private Finance Initiative, Australia’s aggressive pension scheme’s historic appetite for long-dated assets and the expertise of Spain’s mighty road builders, fresh out of new routes back home in the Iberian Peninsula. Americans were instructed to study best practice models promulgated by multilateral institutions such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD. Wall Street took notice and the idea of infrastructure investment in the United States became a “thing” as billions of dollars were capitalized in investment funds before the market tried to figure out what private American infrastructure investment would actually look like, many presuming that the global PPP model would become the established norm. The financial downturn may have even fueled this enthusiasm as investors swore off “products” and sought refuge in real assets, infrastructure seeming to be the realest of all. But while American cross-border investors are always admonished to learn the culture and business practices of the country into which they are trying to invest, foreign players coming into the US somehow missed that lesson, expecting 50 various states and thousands of regional and local governments and agencies to somehow all march to the same tune, even though that has never been the way things have worked here. There was much that sleepy civil servants and caffeinated elected officials around the country learned from their global counterparts, and “leveraging private investment” became a talking point for many American infrastructure investment initiatives, but the pure PPP model, which is the gold standard worldwide, has been slow to take in the US for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being the generous federal tax subsidy long provided to the robust municipal bond market, the historic source of American infrastructure funding. Another reason may be that the business culture of the land of free enterprise and entrepreneurship may not entirely hue to the top-down government controlled investment model that the global experts were promoting. Perhaps they could have made a greater effort to learn how private investment in civil infrastructure had already been happening in America for decades—to learn the local culture and customs of the country. Perhaps they should have had a chat with James Cohen, the grandson of the founder of Hudson News, as I had the opportunity to do recently, to understand how private enterprise can and has effectively intersected with major civil infrastructure in the United States. James’ grandfather Ike Cohen founded a local newspaper deliver company in Hudson County New Jersey in 1918, carrying papers for William Randolph Hearst, and grew it to become the largest wholesale distributor of newspapers in the New York City metropolitan area by the time his son Robert took over the business and expanded to magazines, growing the business from a $5 million a year company to $100 million a year to become the largest wholesale magazine distributor in the United States. When James joined the business in 1980, he took notice of the fact that terminals--bus, rail and air--were among the biggest retail customers of the business, so in an effort to stimulate growth in the increasingly low margin magazine wholesale business, he spearheaded a move to vertically integrate into retail distribution, and won a bid to take over the news concession at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The Hudson News retail brand, well known to air travelers around the world, was born. By focusing on nuts and bolts retail issues, including investing in showcases and increasing the variety of offerings in the stores, business grew 2x in the first year and soon Hudson News became a profitable retail business on its own, with Love Field in Dallas being the first location out of the New York Metropolitan area. An acquisition of W.H. Smith’s US operations brought them LAX, O’Hare and Terminal 4 in JFK where they increased sales by 20% in the first year. By 2008, when the family sold a majority interest in the company to Advent International, a private equity firm, annual revenues were over $650 million. Today Hudson News is part of Dufry AG, which is publicly traded in Switzerland with gross annual sales of about $8 billion. Hudson News flourishes as a “duty paid” outlet while other divisions run duty free stores. James Cohen remains as a director of the company. James and his family’s story is quintessential American entrepreneurship. It is also a story about how American private enterprise can invest in the most basic civil infrastructure, building a business model, improving service to the public, and generating revenue to help offset the cost of the public service. Hudson News didn’t build airports, but they applied deep industry knowledge about their specialty sector, retail panache and private risk capital to a business opportunity which was presented within a government owned and operated facility. As we listen to the presidential candidates talk in the coming months about leveraging private investment in infrastructure, let’s hope that the advisors to whomever lands in the White House will be studying the Cohen family model and not just the OECD model. Keywords: xdomesticcollectionx xeventcollectionx
ce25c4edb9cee19bf262b0eaaa0b4c75	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelpeterson/2012/12/11/miserable-meetings-no-more/	Miserable Meetings No More	Miserable Meetings No More Do you spend your life in meetings? If you do, chances are that many or even most of them are boring, off-point, and too long. In other words, they get in the way of real work. But don’t take my word for it -- many a wise man has weighed in on bad meetings: “Meetings are indispensible when you don’t want to do anything.” John Kenneth Galbraith “People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” Thomas Sowell “Meetings move at the speed of the slowest mind in the room.” Dale Dauton “The world is run by those willing to sit until the end of meetings.” Hugh Park The good news is you can usually avoid a bogus meeting by answering a few simple questions before you send an invitation. The payoff of doing that is bigger than you expect – improving your meeting culture can transform the work life of everyone on your team, including you. Meeting nieuwe leden (Photo credit: Voka - Kamer van Koophandel Limburg) 1. To meet or not to meet?: No matter the business you’re in, your team’s time is valuable, so you should have clear sense of what you expect to get out of calling people together. And if you can’t figure that out, don’t hold the meeting. If you do, force yourself to begin with a one-sentence statement on what the group needs to do for the session to be successful. Avoid mushy verbs like “consider”, “assess”, “inform” or “evaluate.” What you want to do is “decide,” “plan” or “choose” -- outcomes that mean action and follow-up assignments. At the end of the meeting, take a minute to summarize what you’ve accomplished in terms of actions and decisions. This will force everyone to think about whether the meeting’s original objective has been met, and to give participants a sense of closure. At jetBlue, our own version of this came from Board member General Stanley A. McChrystal, who asked that we hold a 15-minute executive session prior to each board meeting. It’s a chance for each Director to share what he or she is looking to get out of the board meeting, so we can be sure to cover that topic or move it to a follow-up. This keeps the meeting focused and intentional. 2. Keep it lean: Working meetings shouldn’t have “audience members” who aren’t participating. Large working meetings are rarely productive, so invite the smallest group that is necessary to achieve the goal of the meeting. And, make sure everyone participates – even if you have to “cold call” them to express an opinion. The energy and productivity of meetings generally expand geometrically with broad and active participation. 3. Run a tight ship: Make sure everyone knows the rules, including for confidentiality and conflict resolution. Keep the number of items you pass out to a minimum, and see that they’re formatted consistently and distributed in the same way at the same time. Get participants to speak in headlines so they don’t bury the lead or meander when they talk. Keep to the schedule: Everyone will appreciate a leader who drives the discussion forward. 4. Early is better: Hold meetings early enough in the day that people can do immediate follow-ups if necessary. End-of-day meetings or just-before-holiday meetings are rarely as productive as those held early in the week and in the morning. Keep in mind Herbert Hoover’s test for a good meeting: “When the outcome of a meeting is to have another meeting, it’s been a lousy meeting.”
9ce126969ac50e224db561c110cc2572	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelrush/2020/11/30/the-denver-nuggets-have-seven-new-players-and-many-more-questions-as-training-camp-opens/	The Denver Nuggets Have Seven New Players And Many More Questions As Training Camp Opens	The Denver Nuggets Have Seven New Players And Many More Questions As Training Camp Opens The roles Michael Porter Jr. and Bol Bol will play for the Denver Nuggets are among the team's ... [+] looming questions as they enter training camp. Getty Images With training camp set to start December 1, the Denver Nuggets are putting the final touches on completing a 2020-21 roster which features seven new players. As Nuggets players converge in Denver at the newly-renamed Ball Arena, president of basketball operations Tim Connelly and his front office staff are dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s of their offseason, with the team announcing the official signings of several free agents who recently agreed to new deals with the Nuggets. Celebrated Argentinian guard Facundo “The Magician” Campazzo signed a multiyear deal with Denver, finally making his official leap to the NBA after years of professional basketball in Argentina and Europe. Seven-foot, 22-year-old center Isaiah Hartenstein, who has been something of a project big for the Houston Rockets since they drafted him in the second round two years ago, also signed a multiyear contract with Denver. And the Nuggets signed undrafted rookie guard Markus Howard, the NCAA’s leading scorer in 2019-20 with 27.8 points per game, to Denver’s second two-way contract after signing 27-year-old forward Greg Whittington, who most recently played in Turkey, to their other two-way slot last week. MORE FOR YOUJake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Predictions And Odds: Fighters Make Their PicksThe World’s Most Valuable Soccer Teams: Barcelona Edges Real Madrid To Land At No. 1 For First TimeWWE Releases Billie Kay And Mickie James Amid ‘Spring Cleaning’ Rounding out their seven new roster additions, Denver acquired young, athletic talents Zeke Nnaji and R.J. Hampton in the first round of the draft, and landed free agent JaMychal Green, previously of the Los Angeles Clippers, as a capable Plan B replacement for Jerami Grant, whose surprising decision to abandon Denver for the Detroit Pistons blindsided the Nuggets in their offseason planning. With the addition of so many new players, and the departure of key rotation fixtures like Grant, Torrey Craig and Mason Plumlee – not to mention the continued development of some of their returning young players – the Nuggets enter training camp with an abundance of unanswered questions and X-factors, many of which revolve around the potential impact of Denver’s newest arrivals both in terms of position battles and, more broadly, the directions that management and the coaching staff will take the team. Some of the largest looming questions, on the other hand, involve the Nuggets’ returning players, especially with respect to how the development of young talents Michael Porter Jr. and Bol Bol will influence their roles in Denver’s rotation, but also regarding the health of Will Barton III, the durability of Paul Millsap, who will be 36 in February, and the reliability on offense of Gary Harris. Below, then, are only some of the many questions head coach Michael Malone and his staff, and the Nuggets organization as a whole, will be facing as they head into training camp. Mason Plumlee Is Gone. Who Plays Backup Center? The Nuggets have seen many rotational fluctuations over the past few seasons, but two roles have been firmly locked into place: Monte Morris as backup point guard (more on this follows) and Mason Plumlee as backup center. But with Plumlee using his free agency to join Grant in Detroit, the Nuggets now have a vacancy at backup center, and a number of directions they could go. Although Bol Bol, whose deal Denver recently converted from a two-way to a standard contract, might ostensibly appear to have a leg up here as a returning player, Hartenstein and Nnaji – in that order – seem more likely to actually perform the backup center role as Bol has not yet developed the strength and musculature to really be able yet to hang with the league’s bigger bigs. While Hartenstein has so far been more of an offensive than defensive big, he is also an energy guy who can crash the boards and is big and strong enough to bang down low. With two years of G League and NBA experience, Hartenstein presumably would begin training camp above less-experienced rookie Zeke Nnaji on Denver’s frontcourt depth chart, but the differing set of tools Nnaji brings, such as his athleticism, bulkier frame and potential for developing a perimeter shot, should put him into serious contention for at least having a chance to fight for minutes. Facundo Campazzo Has Arrived. Who Plays Backup Point Guard? To even consider there being any chance Monte Morris might not automatically slot in as the Nuggets’ backup point guard behind Jamal Murray would have been shocking just weeks ago. But after years of Campazzo spurning the NBA, for him to finally agree to cross the pond, and for the Nuggets to agree to a two-year, $6 million deal, all signs point to an agreement being in place that he will get playing time. And while it’s entirely possible – if not probable at this point – that both Morris and Campazzo spend some time sharing the court together, only one will likely emerge as the primary ball handler for Denver’s second unit. And as one of the most gifted and creative passers in the world of professional basketball, Campazzo has every chance to make a real contest of this if Malone opens it up to a legitimate position battle. What seems perhaps more likely is that Morris slides over to backup shooting guard, playing more off the ball but taking his turns at bringing it up the court with Campazzo at the one. And all of this has yet to even account for P.J. Dozier, who more than held his own when thrust into action last season, arguably earning his right to fight for a spot in the rotation as well. Will Michael Porter Jr. Be A Permanent Starter? And Is Will Barton III Okay? After calling for Michael Porter Jr. to get more minutes throughout last season, I wrote last August (soon after NBA bubble games began) that it was time for Malone and the Nuggets to permanently install Porter into the starting lineup. That actually happened, which worked great in the short remainder of the regular season, but not quite as well when the playoffs began, opponents started hunting and exploiting Porter as a defensive liability, and Malone rightfully replaced him with Grant at small forward. With Grant now gone, however, the Nuggets will need Porter to develop – quickly – into the more consistent, more defensively aware player he must become as a starter. And while the growing pains may cause bumps in the road and some sleepless nights for Malone along the way, the bottom line is that the Denver Nuggets need Michael Porter Jr. to reach his All-Star-caliber upside in order to move up to the tier of perennial title contention (or in the less fortunate alternative, at least learn that he is unlikely to reach those heights). There has been very little information forthcoming on the condition of Will Barton III since he left the bubble to rehabilitate his knee, complicating the question of who will start at small forward. The job may go to Porter by default if Barton is not yet ready to go, but if Barton is healthy then Malone could face the tough choice which could potentially alienate a valued veteran who’s given his all to the team, but would likely be more beneficial to the organization in the bigger picture. Can JaMychal Green Leapfrog Paul Millsap At Power Forward? The Nuggets were arguably fortunate to land JaMychal Green, who they signed to a two-year, $15 million contract after playing against him in their second-round series against the Clippers. He was arguably the best-remaining free agent big still available, and his deal fit into the mid-level exception, allowing Denver to sign him while over the salary cap. As a 30-year-old veteran, not too much should be expected from Green in terms of development, although to his credit he did add a three-point shot in the latter half of his career. But the real question is the extent to which Millsap’s game and body will hold up, along with Denver potentially wanting to manage his minutes to save him for the playoffs. Millsap should ostensibly get the start here, but circumstances could position Green well to take over the role at some point during the season. And as a player who doesn’t need the ball to be effective and is a solid defender with size, he should slot well into a lineup where Murray, Jokic and Porter are soaking up most of the usage. Will Bol Bol Play? And What Do The Nuggets Think Bol Bol Is? There have been various indications that Bol should indeed get a chance at some rotation minutes this season, but what position Malone will slot him into, and in what lineup configurations, will be one of the most interesting Nuggets scenarios to keep an eye on. Many consider Bol to be more of a power forward or even small forward than a center due to his slight frame, which could lead to some tall and interesting lineups. And if Bol can consistently hit his three-point shots at the high percentage he looks capable of, he should give the Nuggets a unique and potent offensive weapon. Will R.J. Hampton Play? With the aforementioned log jam at the guard positions, and at least four if not five players presumably above him on the depth chart, R.J. Hampton, Denver’s rookie guard who’s still a bit raw but was a top high school prospect and has tantalizing athleticism, talent and upside, is highly unlikely to start the season getting minutes in the Nuggets’ regular rotation. That said, he possesses a distinct skill set that sets him apart from other Nuggets players (see my recent piece for Forbes here on how Hampton and Campazzo could help Denver’s bench unit push the pace), and if injuries, garbage time or other factors produce opportunities for Hampton to get on the court, he should have chances to distinguish himself in ways that make a case for being worthy of earning rotation minutes.
0c5ca4b6beb6c2bfab554096265046db	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelrush/2020/12/07/in-new-denver-nuggets-guard-facundo-campazzo-michael-malone-sees-a-top-five-pick-and-roll-player-in-the-world/	New Nuggets Guard Facundo Campazzo Is ‘A Top-Five Pick-And-Roll Player,’ Michael Malone Says	New Nuggets Guard Facundo Campazzo Is ‘A Top-Five Pick-And-Roll Player,’ Michael Malone Says Denver Nuggets head coach Michael Malone considers newly-signed guard Facundo Campazzo to be not ... [+] only one “of the best passers in the world" but also “a top-five pick-and-roll player in the world.” Euroleague Basketball via Getty Images As the Denver Nuggets wrapped up their first full practice of training camp, head coach Michael Malone took the virtual podium to speak to the press. Countless questions and narratives emerging from the day were in the mix for potential topics on the docket – from who will start alongside Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic, to bench rotations and team chemistry, to how the organization will navigate the NBA’s coronavirus protocols. But there was one subject, one player above all that Malone seemed the most eager to talk about. “When I get depressed, I might just put on Facu highlights, because it puts a smile on my face,” Malone shared with an almost giddy expression that backed up his words. For the uninitiated, the “Facu” of whom Malone speaks is 5-foot-11, 29-year-old veteran Argentinian point guard Facundo Campazzo, an international basketball star with a celebrated professional career playing for Real Madrid and his Argentinian national team. The Nuggets succeeded in wooing Campazzo – known as “The Magician” for his near-otherworldly playmaking skills – across the pond as one of their key offseason free agent acquisitions, signing him to a two-year, $6 million contract. Malone may not exactly be known for being bubbly, but his excitement and enthusiasm for Campazzo positively brimmed over and poured out through the screens of the media members on the post-practice Zoom call. “What I love about Facu is this: You cannot judge him by his size,” Malone said, explaining that the guard’s short stature might cause some to underestimate him as a player. “His heart is huge; he plays with a great amount of passion and pride.” MORE FOR YOUWith Jose Mourinho Fired By Tottenham Hotspur, Here Are The Candidates To Replace HimWhy Paris Saint-Germain And Bayern Munich Bailed On The Super LeagueThe World’s Most Valuable Soccer Teams: Barcelona Edges Real Madrid To Land At No. 1 For First Time Both Malone and president of basketball operations Tim Connelly have lauded Campazzo’s gritty toughness and supercharged competitiveness, traits that Denver will be hoping balance out his size disadvantage when he goes up against NBA-level opposition. And a veteran with Facu’s experience, pedigree and high quality of character snaps perfectly into place as a fit within the Nuggets’ highly culture-oriented organizational ethos. But Facu’s crafty and technically adroit playmaking, his high basketball IQ and vision, his ability to quickly push the ball in transition and other such skills on the court will be where the rubber really meets the road in terms of his viability as an NBA player. And on those counts, Malone seems to have zero doubt that Campazzo is ready. “On offense, I think he has to be a top-five pick-and-roll player in the world,” Malone pronounced in an unequivocal manner that suggested he was not being hyperbolic. “The guy is not a good passer; he’s a great passer. He makes all of his teammates better, he’s extremely unselfish, and that’s why I think he is a seamless fit into our culture.” And if you think that description sounds like another notable international Nuggets playmaker you can think of, you’re not alone. “He makes plays that most people don't think about or see,” Malone said of Campazzo. “He's like Nikola in that regard.” How much like Nikola? “We have in Nikola Jokic and Facundo Campazzo two of the best passers in the world.” Consider the implications: Malone, and by extension the Nuggets organization as a whole, considers Campazzo to be one “of the best passers in the world.” And “a top-five pick-and-roll player in the world.” Setting aside for a moment the questions of whether he is actually right, or even if so whether his game will translate to the NBA, it is a reality that Denver considers him to be such an elite-caliber player, and that combined with the fact the Nuggets used one of their two major exceptions – the other, larger mid-level exception being used to sign forward JaMychal Green – speaks volumes about the team’s plans for Campazzo. If there were ever any questions about whether or not Malone and his coaching staff were going to carve out meaningful playing time for Campazzo in Denver’s jam-packed backcourt depth chart, those have been completely obliterated. Facu is going to play, and play significant minutes at that. Denver’s interest in acquiring Campazzo dates back years, with both Malone and Connelly stating that they’ve long followed the guard’s career overseas. And the organization spent the second-largest chunk of its free agency capital (outside of returning players) in the effort to convince him to finally make his leap to the NBA. The Nuggets don’t invest so much to acquire Campazzo, and he does not likely in turn accept terms on a deal, if there is not an agreement in place that he will indeed be a part of Denver’s rotation. How many minutes Campazzo will receive, what positions he will be slotted into, and what his role will be relative to the other players in the lineup all remain open-ended questions, the most pressing being whether longstanding backup point guard stalwart Monte Morris will retain that position, or get bumped over to reserve (or even starting) shooting guard. And with the severely time-crunched offseason, training camp and preseason schedule, rotations will surely be a work in progress through the first weeks and months of the regular season. But one thing is unmistakably clear: Michael Malone absolutely loves Facu Campazzo, he’s “thrilled that he's here,” and he can’t wait to get him out on the court. Much like the reliable player Morris has always been, and before him Jameer Nelson, who was the extension of the coach’s eyes and ears on the court, Malone will undoubtedly place a great deal of trust in a player of Campazzo’s experience, depth of understanding of the game, elite skill level and fierce competitiveness. Facu is a Malone guy, and whatever role he ends up playing, Nuggets fans should expect it to be meaningful and prominent. And his new coach is confident that Campazzo will soon become a fan favorite as well. “When he gets a chance to get on the floor and play,” Malone said, “I think our fans – I don't see how you can not fall in love with a young guy like Facu." That’s easy for Malone to say. He clearly already has.
c20651bffd8aef426dd9f553bfd76e0b	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelrush/2021/02/25/denver-nuggets-guard-facundo-campazzo-is-stealing-the-show-film-study/	Denver Nuggets Guard Facundo Campazzo Is Stealing The Show: Film Study	Denver Nuggets Guard Facundo Campazzo Is Stealing The Show: Film Study With his pesky, aggressive defense, Facundo Campazzo of the Denver Nuggets has a steal percentage of ... [+] 2.6%, placing him in the top 3 percent among NBA point guards. Getty Images Facundo Campazzo earned the nickname “The Magician” on account of the jaw-dropping playmaking skills he showcased throughout his acclaimed pre-NBA professional basketball career. But now after entering the league this season as an unusually experienced rookie for the Denver Nuggets, Facu could just as easily be called “The Thief.” After Denver signed Campazzo to his first NBA contract on an accolade-packed resume that spans over a decade, head coach Michael Malone heaped some lavish praise on the Argentinian point guard, calling him not only one “of the best passers in the world," but “a top-five pick-and-roll player in the world,” and thereby signaling a strong likelihood that the somewhat surprising Nuggets offseason acquisition would get a meaningful role in the regular rotation. That has indeed come to pass, as Facu has stepped into increasing prominence as the season has progressed, in part due to finding his footing in the NBA as he’s adjusted to the faster pace and flow, and also as Denver’s slew of injuries has opened up more playing time not only for Campazzo, but also his fellow rookie teammates R.J. Hampton and Zeke Nnaji. But even before the start of the season, while Campazzo’s “magical” playmaking may have generated the most excitement about what he might bring to the Nuggets’ table, the more intriguing buzz coming from Argentinian and international basketball fans – who on the whole were far more familiar with his game than the NBA-centric fan and media base – was about his defense. To many, present company included, this came as a surprise, as the biggest concern regarding the portability of Campazzo’s game to the NBA was (and really, still is) his limited height of five-foot-eleven, which by most accounts is a generous measurement. MORE FOR YOUJake Paul Vs. Ben Askren Predictions And Odds: Fighters Make Their PicksThe World’s Most Valuable Soccer Teams: Barcelona Edges Real Madrid To Land At No. 1 For First TimeWWE Releases Billie Kay And Mickie James Amid ‘Spring Cleaning’ Both the Nuggets franchise and its fans are very familiar with Campazzo’s physical prototype, as the team has had a history of cycling through diminutive guards from Earl Boykins to Ty Lawson to Nate Robinson to Isaiah Thomas. And the consistent thread running through the lot of them was that they all, for the most part, presented liability for Denver on the defensive end. But while Facu’s reputation for being not only decent on defense, but far beyond that a tough, feisty, fearless and pesky defender, can be counterintuitive considering the track record of his height cohort, his defensive game is proving to at least in some ways translate to the NBA, and most notably in the area of steals. Campazzo’s outright production in steals does not exactly jump off the stat sheet – his 0.9 steals per game places him 77th among the 142 NBA guards who have played at least 20 games and 15 minutes per game, according to NBA.com. But considering the fact that Facu himself has barely cracked the 15-minute threshold at 15.4 minutes per game, this basic counting stat belies Facu’s actual high efficiency in picking opposing team’s pockets. Facu Campazzo is in the 97th percentile in steal percentage among point guards at 2.6%, per Cleaning the Glass. For those uninitiated in the ways of percentiles in basketball statistics, this means that Facu’s steal percentage is better than 97 percent of the league’s other point guards, with only three percent above him, placing him in elite territory in this category. This puts Facu’s steal rate right in the territory with highly-skilled thieves such as Jrue Holiday, T.J. McConnell, LaMelo Ball and Dejounte Murray, all guards who a re in the top 10 in the NBA in steals this season. Film Study: How Facu Campazzo Gets His Steals Turning to the film to take a look at just exactly how Facu Campazzo is forcing opponents to turn over the ball, the most obvious place to start is what I call “attack mode.” Campazzo is frequently called a “pest” for good reason: He is an extremely aggressive bundle of energy on the defensive end, relentlessly burrowing into the space of the players he guards, hounding and bothering them to no end. This disruptive style of defense is one of the primary ways Facu picks his guy’s pockets. Facu’s aggressive style tends to catch opponents off guard, as in the first two plays Campazzo simply seems to say, “You won’t be needing this anymore” and takes his leave with the ball. Campazzo’s anticipation of how the players he guards will move with the ball combine with the quickness and accuracy of his hands to produce both great reads and execution. This can be a particularly potent weapon when Facu gets switched onto bigs, as seen in the fourth play where he wraps around Dean Wade to poke the ball away. Facu’s hand work is so speedy that if you blink you can miss it, so it’s useful to slow things down to see just how fast and precise he really is when going after the ball. In addition to “attack mode,” the other broad category of Campazzo’s steals is grounded in his years of experience as a veteran, and the elite ability he has honed to read the floor and disrupt passing lanes. At times, Facu almost plays a role analogous to free safety in American football, ostensibly assigned to a player to defend, but simultaneously dropping back a bit and scanning and patrolling the court for opportunities to play the passing lanes and force turnovers. This can be seen in most of the play clips here, as quite often Campazzo generates steals by seeing the play unfold when he’s away from the ball and anticipating his best angle of attack to deflect, intercept or rotate and help to force the turnover. Whether from “attack mode,” disrupting passing lanes or any other play type, one of the most valuable aspects of Campazzo’s steals comes once he gets the ball in his hands and puts his playmaking skills to use in generating transition scoring, and doing one of the things Malone loves best: creating offense from defense. Widely regarded now as the best passing big man in the NBA, if not the best passer in the league, period, Nikola Jokic has a new teammate to “rival” his playmaking prowess, as some of Denver’s most electrifying passing and assisting highlights this season have come from Campazzo, the first clip above being perhaps the most impressive of them all, as Facu leads the fast break after stealing the ball and feeds Monte Morris for the layup with a ridiculous bounce pass backwards between his own legs while running at full speed. Like Jokic, the instant Campazzo gets the ball on a turnover he is looking down the court for quick scoring opportunities, sometimes leading the break, sometimes finding long-range outlet passes to set he teammates up as he does with Will Barton III in the second clip. Campazzo puts a kind of pressure on opposing offenses unlike many players in the league, and specifically on the Nuggets’ roster, which adds defensive value that helps to offset some of his liabilities that arise from his lack of size, like struggling to contain dribble penetration or having opponents shoot right over him. Facu’s nonstop hustle and energy have proven to be impactful, and his extreme aggressiveness even in sometimes unexpected moments helps keep opposing offenses honest. The next question will be whether Campazzo’s defensive game will translate to the postseason, when playoff series matchups will afford opposing teams the chance to more thoroughly scout and prepare for his pesty, disruptive style of play. But so far, especially in such an injury-ravaged season, Facu has gone far in alleviating some of the concerns based mostly on his size that he would be a complete minus on defense. The fact that he has held his own this well to this point has allowed Malone to keep him on the floor in high leverage situation, and even if the Nuggets return to full health, fans should expect to continue to see Campazzo playing a significant role in Denver’s rotation, and robbing opponents of the ball at every opportunity he gets.
8cbf4edfddc94e4cf660266dec646665	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelshapiro/2021/03/12/how-to-hire-a-data-scientist/?sh=3570a6325f95	How To Hire A Data Scientist	How To Hire A Data Scientist getty Given the highly technical nature of data science, most professionals in the field are hired based on their expertise in statistics and modeling, as well as their ability to use machine learning and other cutting-edge tools and technologies. Often, high-performing data scientists have software engineering and computer science backgrounds—they know how to program and code. Even the best technical knowledge and methodological expertise, however, will not suffice for tackling today’s business problems. Acceleration of digital strategies and greater innovation are requiring companies to be more nimble and agile. As organizations reevaluate and change their business strategies, data scientists will need to draw on a variety of skills as they work closely with business leaders. Certainly, technical skills are important and should be prioritized. But when data scientists are hired simply because they meet or exceed a technical ability threshold, the data team will likely underperform. Instead, hiring strategies should strive to create high-performing, high-functioning teams that are flexible, adaptable, and savvy, not merely technically adept. A Myopic Approach Today’s hiring strategies for data scientists often fail to reflect this reality. Typically, the people conducting the interviews are, themselves, technically inclined data scientists who are tasked with ensuring that the candidates possess strong technical skills. As part of the interview process, candidates are given technical assessments and asked to explain the details of models and platforms. Success in interviews then becomes an exercise in risk aversion, of making sure the candidate doesn’t fall below the required technology knowledge threshold. Rarely is the approach to ensure the candidate is the best fit for the organization’s current needs. As a result, too many companies end up hiring data scientists who possess expertise across technologies and platforms but lack key skills around communication and collaboration that augment their technical skillsets and drive value. MORE FOR YOUBonds. Corporate Bonds.Leading With DE&I In The Finance FunctionAlibaba’s $2.8 Billion Mistake—What CFOs Should Know About Antitrust Regulations I observed the importance of “softer” skills among my MBA students as they worked in teams with companies on data-driven, business analytics projects. While none of the students qualify as PhD-level data scientists, each team brought a combination of solid technical and coding skills, layered with an ability to listen deeply, distill a problem to its essence, and persevere through setbacks. They also were able to clearly communicate what the management team should do next. The feedback from the senior business teams was extremely positive and it highlighted the importance of truly listening to and communicating about the problems that impact some aspect of the current or future strategy. It is difficult to train technical talent to be more communicative, to collaborate with people from different disciplines (for example, the product development or marketing team), or to use critical thinking. Therefore, it is more advantageous for business leaders to look for and assess candidates who already have these softer skills and then further develop them. Such diverse skills may reside within one individual (a rare find) or across a team. The goal should be to create well-rounded teams with members from different backgrounds, who exhibit the following traits and characteristics, as well as strong technical skills: Beyond Technical Expertise: Skills Your Data Team Must Possess · Problem-spotting: All data scientists are expected to be “problem solvers,” but data science teams, as a whole, must help identify problems across the organization. Otherwise, data teams will tend to work only on those problems and solutions using existing technologies, limiting their ability to drive the organization forward. · Critical thinking. Data teams must be able to draw parallels to their prior work and identify how approaches used in the past might apply to a new problem. For this to happen, their technical prowess cannot override their critical thinking skills. · Flexibility, adaptability, patience, perseverance. Data technologies, systems, and tools change continuously—just as new platforms are constantly being built. Therefore, personal traits that help anticipate and adapt to these changes are crucial. More important than broad knowledge of technology is the ability to learn and adapt to new environments. · Know the stakeholders. Data science teams must be able to identify the different stakeholders for any given project. In addition, they must articulate how a data analytics project would be run and the results communicated, based on the stakeholders involved. · Listen and communicate. Listening to the needs of the stakeholders and communicating clearly with them increases the impact of data science projects. Otherwise, data teams will likely struggle to reach their potential. While technical knowledge is an important threshold when hiring data scientists and building a team, it cannot be the only criterion. Creating and maintaining a high-value data science team requires a holistic, long-term strategy for ensuring a variety of valuable skills are present among and within the members of the team.
d830550a3477dcf967a212a33fdadda1	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeltrammell/2013/05/21/how-to-make-company-employees-think-like-their-ceo/	How To Make Company Employees Think Like Their CEO	How To Make Company Employees Think Like Their CEO Walmart’s company-wide goal is to create zero waste. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Have you ever had one of those “big company” customer service experiences that make you wonder how the company stays in business? One year when I was CEO of a software company, I had an aggravating experience with the hotel we booked for our staff during a Las Vegas trade show. We negotiated a very low rate with an off-strip hotel to minimize our costs. We booked more than 30 rooms for an average of three+ nights and used the conference rooms to meet and entertain customers. At the last minute, I decided to go a day early but forgot to call the hotel ahead of time. Luckily the hotel had a room available, but as the desk clerk reached for my credit card she said the rate for the night would be $199, which was the full-price rack rate at the hotel. I explained that I was with the large group checking in, and that we had negotiated a rate of $129 per night. She said that because I hadn’t reserved the room early I would have to pay the full price. Thinking that maybe her tune would change, I pulled the “do you know who I am?” card. I explained that I was the CEO and the one who had specifically chosen this hotel. She was not impressed. She repeated her mantra: Because I hadn’t reserved the room ahead of time, their policy was that I had to pay the full rate. I decided to give it one more try and explained that we were unlikely to use this hotel in the future if she couldn’t change my rate to the negotiated price. I asked if I could speak to a manager. This didn’t help my cause, and she adamantly said that she was the manager on duty. At this point I knew I wouldn’t win the argument, so I resigned myself to find another hotel for the night. Some of you are probably thinking that the problem was just a bad employee. And that hiring good employees to what is a relatively low paying job is almost impossible. My reaction was totally different. This employee actually impressed me as being quite capable. She was patient and courteous in dealing with me. She was efficient checking people in and greeted everyone with a welcoming smile. She just made a really bad decision. This experience and many others have led me to realize that most of my frustrating experiences in dealing with companies are not because of anything unique about the particular employee I am engaged with at the time. Instead, I have come to believe that the cause is almost always a lack of alignment between the goals of the company and the goals of the employee and his or her direct workgroup. I can just imagine how such a misalignment happened at this hotel. I bet the hotel manager’s number one goal was to increase revenue. This is an obvious and worthy goal. After analyzing the situation, someone probably decided that their average price per room was lower than their competitors, and that they should focus on increasing their average. This was translated down to the next level as a policy of no discounts for walk-in customers. Voila! In three easy steps you go from a perfectly appropriate goal to a policy that can actually work against the higher goal of customer satisfaction and repeat business. Each step in the process was a reasonable decision, but it led to a bad outcome. Because the employee I dealt with didn’t understand the reason for the policy and the higher-level goals, she could not see that her action was probably not in the best interest of the hotel. The situation where employees take actions that they believe are totally correct but works against the broader interests of the business have led me to my definition of a “big company.” A big company is one where otherwise perfectly competent and productive employees consistently make decisions that are opposed to the success of the company. This is because their goals are not aligned with the high-level goals of the organization. Understanding that these problems are alignment problems and not employee problems is critical to maximizing productivity. How do you avoid the “big company” problem? Make sure that you have a clear system in place that aligns the goals of each employee with the goals of the organization as a whole. It is possible to get alignment no matter how large the organization. Just look at Walmart, the largest civilian employer in the country. With Walmart’s ad match guarantee, you can walk up to any register and say this item is a dollar cheaper down the street at Target. Unlike most stores where the cashier would have to call over management or go through a big process, the cashier will just take the money off the purchase price. The goal for a CEO should be to get every employee to make the same decision the CEO would make given the same situation. This can only occur if each employee is aligned with the goals of the organization.
2b3d0b640ee7c3648b586eb04b79a8e2	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeltrammell/2013/06/18/the-resource-allocation-dilemma-faced-by-ceos-every-single-day/?sh=639a811c4978	The Resource Allocation Dilemma Faced By CEOs Every Single Day	The Resource Allocation Dilemma Faced By CEOs Every Single Day (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Capital Quandary One Friday afternoon years ago I was sitting in my office as the CEO of a young software company, when my department heads of software development and finance came in separately to each request an additional $125,000 in funding. My software development director wanted new product testing equipment and my CFO wanted to upgrade our accounting and business systems software. Both were legitimate requests that would help move the business forward. I couldn’t help but laugh: In the span of 10 minutes I was being asked to approve two unplanned expenses of $125,000, and they were as different as apples and oranges. Framing the Problem This story captures the dilemma faced by CEOs every day and is unique to the job. How do you compare two expenses that have almost no relation to each other? This allocation of resources between competing and dissimilar parts of the business is a great challenge. For most executives, allocating resources is fairly simple, because you have a set of narrowly focused goals: If you are the Sales VP, you are trying to maximize revenue for a budgeted expense level. When you have to decide between two expenses, you choose the one that you think based upon your experience will generate the most revenue. While making the correct decision may be difficult, framing the problem is easy. For the CEO, framing the problem is often not so easy. Is the goal of the company as a whole to maximize revenue or is a certain amount of profitability needed? Even if we simplify things and say that the goal of the company is to achieve long-term shareholder value, it is often unclear how that is best achieved. Different companies will have different answers to this question. Know your Financial Goals It is critical for the CEO to make a clear decision about what the financial goals of the company are and communicate those to every member of the team. This should include not only a one-year plan but also a high-level three to five-year plan that allows the team to understand the inevitable tradeoffs between growth and profitability. Human Capital Management While balancing capital is hard, dealing with people is even harder. Success as a CEO will depend more on your ability to acquire and maximize human talent than any other skill. Many CEOs don’t make the necessary investment to make the people side of the equation as productive as possible. It is extremely important that CEOs own recruiting and ensure that it is that is closely monitored and measured. Once employees are on board, the CEO needs to realize that each person is a unique individual with differing strengths, weaknesses and expectations.Spending time wearing the coach hat will help CEOs get the maximum performance from everyone on the team. This includes spending time weekly with direct reports to discuss overall performance, identify where additional talent is needed, and determine which employees need improvement or can be groomed for future leadership positions. Capital Quandary Solved via Prioritization (and People Skills) What decision did I make on the two unplanned $125,000 expenses? I used a tactic I learned about managing executives: I asked each one what they would cut out of their existing budget to fund the request if I didn’t approve the additional spending. Both answered that they wouldn’t cut anything; they would just do without the requested expense. That told me that each item was a lower priority than all of the existing spending in their areas. So I passed on both proposals. It is easy for people to ask to spend money. When they do, make sure you (and they) understand their priorities. Balancing Resources on the CEO Tightrope Being good at making these decisions requires a deep understanding of all aspects of the business combined with the vision and goals. Many CEOs take the easy way out when it comes to balancing resources. Instead of making specific tradeoffs, they make blanket decisions like a corporate hiring freeze or travel ban and hurt the company as a result. Balancing resources is hard work and will often leave you comparing apples and oranges, but it is a key role that only the CEO can perform. How do you balance conflicting resources as a CEO?
eaa954522476d623564806673c85017e	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeltrammell/2014/02/25/the-one-question-every-ceo-needs-to-answer/	The One Question Every CEO Needs to Answer	The One Question Every CEO Needs to Answer It can be lonely at the top, especially for CEOs. Most CEOs have no way to systematically gather the right information from all levels of the business. While they may be drowning in data, it is almost always historical in nature and provides little help in answering the key question of “How likely is my company to meet its corporate goals?” It seems like such a simple question, but for many CEOs it is very difficult to answer, especially as companies grow. Once a company reaches about 25 employees, CEOs no longer have a direct influence on the day-to-day work and priorities of every employee. Without a clear vision and an effective system of two-way communication, CEOs are steering a ship without any timely feedback. They are unable to guide employees in the right direction or in turn, receive the information from employees that they need to make course corrections. The information that CEOs do receive is often tactical, outdated and/or simply irrelevant to the future of the business. Photo Credit: Instant Vantage via Compfight cc Employees who see no direct tie between the corporate goals and their work will still perform tasks, but their guiding principles may lead them astray. They will make decisions based upon the priorities of their manager, their department or themselves, which may or may not line up with the CEO’s priorities. With no understanding of the company’s overall goals, employees may blindly follow company policy without regard to how it impacts customers or the business. Then, they will report on individual or departmental metrics that don’t help the CEO determine how well the company is tracking towards the future. In addition, unfortunately in some companies the only guiding factor that drives decision-making is the static budget that was created six or nine months ago. This tyranny of the annual budget makes it difficult to adapt to changing business conditions, since the information is often woefully out of date when decisions are being made. If the only goal the CEO has communicated is to stick to the budget, then that may be achieved, but at the expense of business opportunities that could lead to growth. Outdated information also prevents CEOs from understanding if the company is meeting its goals. Sometimes a CEO discovers an issue only to find out that a lower-level employee knew about it six weeks ago. Without an effective process to consistently gather information from throughout the organization, surprises become the norm. By the time the problem hits his or her desk, it’s often too late to do anything about it. The answer is to have a clear vision and a set of corporate goals that the CEO owns and manages every quarter. Unlike yearly goals (that are often driven by HR), quarterly goals enable the CEO to drive company priorities, adapt to changing business conditions, and engage employees. CEOs should ensure that every employee understands the goals and how his or her daily job contributes to them. Weekly two-way feedback mechanisms will help continually align employees to the goals and give them a chance to report on any issues. The CEO should be able to see status updates on every corporate goal, with alerts to issues as they arise. Translating strategy and priorities to the individual employees will help knowledge workers be more productive and engaged. Engaged employees who understand how their jobs support the corporate goals will in turn communicate timely, relevant information about how they are actively contributing to the company’s success. CEOs with a system to collect and analyze this information will have more influence in the organization, with fewer surprises and the ability to act on issues before it’s too late. They’ll have an informed answer to the question that keeps them up at night: “How likely is my company to meet its corporate goals?”
e2edd3bffbb1c0b55898eb1001967cfa	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemaddalone/2012/02/22/21-quotes-jeremy-lin-and-steve-jobs-followed-to-success/	21 Quotes Jeremy Lin and Steve Jobs Followed To Success	21 Quotes Jeremy Lin and Steve Jobs Followed To Success There is no substitute for persistence, ambition, and hard work. Jeremy Lin and Steve Jobs epitomize this ideology, which is why they both reached the top of their profession. They did not let obstacles stop them, and never accepted “NO” for an answer. Loquiveri has compiled a list of 21 quotes that reflect this attitude that is required for success. Let us know the quotes we missed! The question isn’t who is going to let me ; it’s who is going to stop me.” – Ayn Rand Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” – Jonathan Swift “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.” – Henry Ford “Yes, I sometimes fail, but at least I’m willing to experiment.” – Bono “Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson “Ambition is the path to success, persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.” - William Eardley “Energy and persistence conquer all things.” – Benjamin Franklin “Paralyze resistance with persistence.” – Woody Hayes “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” – John W. Gardner “Fortune favors the audacious.” – Desiderius Erasmus “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill “Never give up. Never, never give up!. We shall go on to the end.” – Winston Churchill “Victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop fighting.” - Napoleon Hill “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde “The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.” – Dale Carnegie “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” – Vince Lombardi “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.” – Dale Carnegie “The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.”- Ayn Rand “I’d rather regret the things that I have done than the things that I have not done.” – Lucille Ball “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison For more advice, as well as articles on tech, culture, and politics..head over to our website loquiveri.com
22dcdbd56d2a38fa1dd4ca1170450d12	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2011/09/19/cloud-computing-may-be-a-shot-in-the-arm-our-economy-needs/	Cloud Computing May be a Shot in the Arm our Economy Needs	Cloud Computing May be a Shot in the Arm our Economy Needs Economists and pundits have long feared the emergence of what they called “hollow corporations,” or businesses that don't actually produce actual goods or services themselves, but instead act as brokers or intermediaries relying on networks of suppliers and partners. But now, thanks to technology, successful businesses surprisingly are often brokers of services, delivered via technology, from providers and on to consumers. Where are these services coming from? Look to the cloud. Yes, cloud computing enables cost savings -- as companies can access technology and applications on-demand on an as-needed basis and pay for only what they use. And yes, this fosters greater agility, with less reliance on legacy IT assets. But the changes go even deeper than that. Consider the ways cloud computing is altering our business landscape: "Loosely coupled" corporations: I don't think anyone should fear that our corporations are becoming "hollow." Rather, "loosely coupled corporations" may be a better way to describe what is happening. The term "loosely coupled" came into vogue with service-oriented architecture a few years ago, meaning an entity or system stands fine on its own, but when linked to other like systems, the magic happens. Cloud computing is paving the way for the loosely coupled company - which may be an entity that exists purely as an aggregation of third-party services, provided on an on-demand basis to meet customer demands. Most of these services will be passed through as cloud services, both from within the enterprise and from outside. Blurring of IT consumers and providers: In the IT world, the divide has been very clear cut: there were the vendors who provided technology products and services, and there were customers that purchased and used them. Cloud computing is blurring these distinctions. There's nothing stopping companies that are adept at building and supporting their own private clouds from offering these services to partners and customers beyond the firewall. In fact, many already do. Amazon was an online retailer that began to offer its excess capacity to outside companies. Even non-IT companies are becoming cloud providers. Cloud computing may finally mean a way for IT to finally become a profit center. Startups on a dime: Let's face it, there's no point in investing $50,000 or more in servers and software when everything you need is right in the cloud. I like the story of GigaVox, a podcasting provider, that launched off of Amazon Web Services a few years back. Their startup IT costs? About $80 a month, for everything from storage to back-end processing. As Chris Sacca, a software startup investor and former Google executive, put it: “The biggest line item in [software startup] companies now is rent and food... A decade ago, I don’t think you could write a line of code for less than $1 million." As we ponder unemployment and underemployment in our economy, the availability of cheap cloud computing may be laying the groundwork for a startup boom, the likes we have never seen before. This applies to departments of larger organizations as well, by the way. Designing new products, without the need to go through corporate finance and IT approvals definitely is a great way to instill entrepreneurial spirit. More software innovation: Even the smallest software firms -- say a one or two-person shop -- can sell services, or apps, and build a business on micropayments -- earning a few cents or dollars per sale. We see this in action at the app stores, in which software authors can post their offerings for a wide audience and receive about 70% of the proceeds, with the app store taking the rest. A 16-year-old may be putting apps in the cloud that will be used by Global 1,000 companies, and, conversely, enlightened developers in those same companies may be distributing and selling their own apps to the rest of the world. Rise of "micro-outsourcing": Cloud computing is essentially is a form of micro-outsourcing. The old model of outsourcing -- in which multi-million-dollar contracts to run data centers or build platforms are awarded -- is giving way to a much more fine-grained, incremental approaches. Companies from around the globe can quickly tap into services needed at the time they are needed. Again, cloud provides amazing opportunities for entrepreneurs or startups looking to support businesses that need additional support. Cloud computing isn't revolutionary because it's changing the mode of technology delivery. The real revolution that is underway is that it is opening up new lines of business in information technology or service delivery -- even among non-IT businesses. (Photo by the author.)
9449875992c5506796b1bb31c3f8dab5	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2011/10/03/cloud-computings-hidden-green-benefits/	Cloud Computing's Hidden 'Green' Benefits	Cloud Computing's Hidden 'Green' Benefits Cloud computing energy consumption is a source of much debate. On one side, some see a massive new form of industrialization gobbling up resources; with large cloud and social networking sites consuming megawatts of power to feed insatiable computing needs. Photo: Joe McKendrick Greenpeace called attention to the growing, power-hungry data center footprint, citing estimates that cloud computer sites could consume up to 622.6 billion kWh (kilowatts per hour) of power. Jonathan Koomey, Ph.D., consulting professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, estimates that the cloud is already responsible for 1-2% of the world’s electricity use. On the other hand, there is also a view that cloud adoption, by moving companies to share pooled resources and facilities, is helping to contain what could be relentless, viral growth of duplicate data centers across every enterprise. Two recent industry-funded studies make the case for cloud as energy-saver. A report issued this summer by the Carbon Disclosure Project, supported by AT&T, finds that a company that adopts cloud computing can reduce its energy consumption, lower its carbon emissions and decrease its capital expenditure on IT resources while improving operational efficiency. By 2020, the group estimates, large US companies that use cloud computing can achieve annual energy savings of $12.3 billion and annual carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil. In another study released at the end of last year, Accenture, Microsoft and WSP Environment and Energy estimated that that a 100-person company with applications deployed in the cloud can reduce energy consumption and emissions by more than 90 percent. Koomey also recently observed that computer energy efficiency appears to be doubling every 18 months, much in the fashion of Moore's Law, in which raw computing power increases every 18 months. Efforts to green up data centers and cut consumption – especially at the larger cloud and social networking facilities – are the right things to do. However, I have to agree with my friend Dave Linthicum, author of the seminal work Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise, who points out that IT managers and companies don't necessarily put green first on the top of their IT strategy agendas. Cost savings and competitiveness drive decision making about resource consumption. Perhaps there's a broader perspective that needs to be taken as well. As a result of our move to an online economy, it's possible that we're saving more resources than we give ourselves credit for. As many businesses are now digital, and operate virtually versus physically, there's a potentially a significant degree of resource consumption that no longer takes place, that hasn't been tracked. Perhaps, we'll realize, for every kWh computers and data centers consume, they give back x number of kWhs. Consider e-commerce, something that has been around in force for well over a decade now. How many physical retail stores have not been built, and do not operate, due to e-commerce? (For purposes of this argument, I'm using the term “online economy” fairly broadly, to cover all types of computing that invokes services from someone else' servers, including cloud computing, e-commerce, Internet computing, and social networking.) Or consider other potential hidden benefits of the online economy. How many automobile trips and additional office space is no longer necessary due to telecommuting and remote work? How much travel is no longer necessary because of online college courses? How many trees are no longer cut down because of electronic documents, PDFs, and collaborative solutions? How much drilling and digging is no longer required to find resources, due to better data on seismic formations and simulations? How much travel among insurance claims adjusters has been saved because of mobile and Internet technologies? The list could go on and on. Part of the challenge is the complexity of measuring all this. I spoke with John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, to get his take on this question. He points out that sometimes, consumption is shifted, rather than moderated. “If you’re just looking at overall power consumption, in some ways cloud computing has pushed consumption up overall, on a per-unit-of-valuable-work basis,” he says. “We're much more efficient than we were five, 10, or 20 years ago, but we're doing more computing.” Engates also points out that e-commerce has shifted patterns as well – individual deliveries are shipped directly to consumers, requiring courier services, versus bulk deliveries to stores. Still, Engates believes that many of the groups that are warning about data center power consumption may be taking too narrow of a view and the efficiencies and innovation that computing has delivered back to the economy. “They’re not really looking what what's being done in data centers necessarily; they’re just saying, power is power,” he points out. “But I don’t think that's fair, because there’s a lot of innovation, things we couldn’t do before that are only possible because of IT and computers.” For example, he illustrates, computing has delivered significant productivity increases in the agricultural sector. There are Rackspace customers who are employing online monitoring solutions to address energy management across facilities, he adds. Koomey, who has also led studies on data center power consumption with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said as much at in the prelude of a landmark 2007 study that calculated the scope of the great energy drain by data centers in the first half of the last decade (gulping down about 45 billion kilowatts per hour – equivalent to the amount of power used by the entire state of Mississippi in 2005). He indicated that his study “only assesses the direct electricity used by servers and associated infrastructure equipment. It does not attempt to estimate the effect of structural changes in the economy enabled by increased use of information technology, which in many cases can be substantial.” Yes, the energy consumption of our rapidly expanding cloud services needs to be managed. But it would be worth it to see more studies on the hidden green benefits the online economy is delivering. (Photo by the author.)
7c84997952828b7ac0bafa595c970682	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/01/27/cloud-computing-fueling-global-economic-growth-london-school-of-economics-study/	Cloud Computing Fueling Global Economic Growth: London School of Economics study	Cloud Computing Fueling Global Economic Growth: London School of Economics study The development of cloud computing will promote economic growth, increase productivity and shift the type of jobs and skills required by businesses, according to a new study by the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE study selected two industries, aerospace and smartphone services, and examined the impact of cloud computing on these industries across the UK, USA, Germany and Italy between the years 2010 and 2014. The LSE study was underwritten by Microsoft. Investing in cloud computing is contributing to growth and job creation in both the fast-growing, high-tech smartphone services industry as well as the longstanding and slow-growth aerospace sector, the study claims. In addition, cloud is directly creating employment through the construction, staffing and supply of data centers, which will host the cloud. Using cloud computing enables businesses of all sizes to be more productive by freeing managerial staff and skilled employees to concentrate on more profitable areas of work. There will be a new range of employment opportunities opening up as a result of the shift to cloud as well. As the study points out, "as firms shift from proprietary application servers towards virtualization and cloud computing, related skills will be in demand among employers. New direct hires and upskilling for public cloud enablement result in higher-than-average salaries." Of the countries analyzed in the study, the US is leading the way in terms of cloud job creation. US cloud-related jobs in the smartphone sector are set to grow to 54,500 in 2014. This is compared to a projected 4,040 equivalent jobs in the UK. The authors of the study say that this can be attributed, in part, to lower electricity costs and less restrictive labor regulation compared to Europe. Small to medium-size businesses will benefit as well. In the smartphone sector alone, "cloud computing will form the basis for a rapid expansion and high-start-up rate among SMEs 2010-2014 in all four markets in services," the study says. The study also shows that there is in fact little risk of unemployment from investing in the cloud, as companies are more likely to move and re-train current staff. This would be alongside the hiring of new staff, likely to be in a higher salary bracket, who have the necessary skills for using virtual data-handling systems. But researchers found that the level of impact the cloud has on a business or department’s growth and productivity depends on a number of factors, primarily the type of sector in which the business is involved and the regulatory environment in which it operates. Unsurprisingly, the cloud has a much greater effect on the web-centred smartphone services industry than traditional high tech manufacturing, with expansion and a high-start-up rate among small and medium size businesses in 2010-2014 forecast. For example, in the UK from 2010 through 2014, the rate of growth in cloud-related jobs in the smartphone services sector is set to be 349%, compared to 52% growth in aerospace. German, Italian and US equivalent growth rates will be 280% vs 33%, 268% vs 36% and 168% vs 57% respectively. The study's authors, Jonathan Liebenau, Patrik Karrberg, Alexander Grous and Daniel Castro, also talk about the direct and indirect employment and business opportunities that will stem from cloud, which may not be apparent at first. "Our analysis shows jobs shifting from distributed data processing facilities to consolidated data centers, resulting in a drop in data processing jobs overall as efficiency gains occur especially through public cloud services," they write. "We see a reduction in IT administrators within large firms in smartphone businesses (and most likely in many other similar sectors) compared to their level of employment otherwise expected by taking into account overall IT spending." They add that direct and indirect employment gains will be seen in the construction of new data centers needed to accommodate the public cloud businesses, and an "unanticipated effect is in job creation of site maintenance, janitorial staff and security guards in newly built data centers. Overall, more than 30% of short-term new employment in cloud services originates from the construction of data centers and outfitting them accounts for around another third." Almost 25% of new jobs accrue from direct employment in public cloud services firms, they add. Then there's the "cloud dividend" that enterprises will see as the cloud infrastructure develops. These gains will be "in the form of shifting the work of existing IT staff towards general administrative responsibilities and strategic management rather than exploiting short-term payroll reduction opportunities. Herein lies one of the main new skills challenges to the existing labor force." (Full PDF of the study, Modelling the Cloud: Employment Effects in Two Exemplary Sectors in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy, available from the LSE Website.)
97699f07f42b609dc0e2a9540d410b7b	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/03/05/cloud-will-generate-14-million-jobs-by-2015-thats-a-good-start/	Cloud Will Generate 14 Million Jobs By 2015: That's A Good Start	Cloud Will Generate 14 Million Jobs By 2015: That's A Good Start Cloud computing will potentially generate at least 14 million new jobs across the globe within the next three years. Moreover, these new jobs may likely be in many areas outside of IT. Those findings come from new research conducted by IDC and sponsored by Microsoft Corp., looking at the economic benefits of cloud computing in the years ahead. A couple of months back, a Microsoft-underwritten study by the London School of Economics projected substantial job growth in two industries, smartphones and aerospace. Fourteen million new jobs is a significant number to be sure, but when compared against the size of the global workforce (more than 3 billion), it's in the neighborhood of half a percent, or a small drop in the bucket. And only 1.17 million of these jobs will be seen in North America. A majority of these jobs will be found in emerging markets -- 10 million will arise in China, India and the Asia-Pacific region. This is mainly due to the immense size of these country's workforces — 1.2 billion workers in China and India alone, the study report observes. Still, it's a good start. And any level of job creation is a good thing. Cloud is clearly a positive force, creating more opportunities than it takes away. As the study's author, John Gantz, put it: "A common misperception is cloud computing is a job eliminator, but in truth it will be a job creator — a major one. And job growth will occur across continents and throughout organizations of all sizes because emerging markets, small cities and small businesses have the same access to cloud benefits as large enterprises or developed nations." A big question, of course, is what types of jobs will actually be created as a direct result of cloud. It's natural to assume many will be IT -- cloud developers, integration specialists, and so on. And there are many areas made possible by cloud formations. Recently, for example, TechNet, a consortium of tech business leaders, issued a report that estimated that the "App Economy" -- the industry creating apps for smartphones and tablets -- has already created 466,000 jobs in the United States alone.Many of these would be app software creators and developers. This is a career and entrepreneurship area that leverages cloud to make things happen. But IDC points out that since jobs are being created as a result of increased business revenue from cloud, the jobs will be across the breadth of enterprises, in areas such as marketing, sales, finance and administration, production, and service. We may not have even imagined yet what job titles may emerge. And many non-IT people may have the cloud to thank, at least indirectly, for their opportunities. I'll bet it will be more than 14 million that have career opportunities tied to the cloud. IDC's research also predicts revenues from cloud innovation could reach $1.1 trillion per year within the next 36 months. The analyst firm estimates that last year alone, IT cloud services helped organizations of all sizes and all vertical sectors around the world generate more than $400 billion in revenue and 1.5 million new jobs. In the next four years, the number of new jobs will surpass 8.8 million. IDC's approach was fairly rigorous, calculating including available country workforce, unemployment rates, GDP, IT spend by industry and company size, industry mix by country and city, technology infrastructure by country and city, regulatory environment, and other factors. Not clear from the report is how much job creation will be tied to new, innovative startups that will be made possible because of the cloud. This is hard to predict, and government employment statistics always miss the possibilities new innovations bring to the scene. Remember, in the early 1990s, nobody predicted the dot-come boom about to hit, which helped fuel a full-employment economy for a few years. Nobody could have predicted startups such as Amazon.com or Google or Yahoo! So we don't know exactly how far this new model of application delivery will take us. And, tellingly, the study says there's another entirely new dynamic -- companies becoming cloud providers themselves. This may also turn bring many existing portions of workforces into the cloud economy as well. "Beyond this, and not measured in this study, is the use that cloud computing can be put to beyond mere capital cost avoidance," the report observes. "Organizations large and small can host their own cloud services for their own customers."
4cf9cd1ad1a646a2f4695c1347458e20	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/07/19/fastest-growing-category-of-cloud-computing-business-intelligence-and-analytics/	Fastest-Growing Category of Cloud Computing: Business Intelligence and Analytics	Fastest-Growing Category of Cloud Computing: Business Intelligence and Analytics Will the cloud push business intelligence and analytics to a whole new level? Since cloud-based services can support massive amounts of data and provide it in a consistent manner across enterprises, there's reason to believe that even the most technology-averse organizations will have a way to compete on analytics, just as the big players do. Photo by Joe McKendrick To be sure, we're still only in the early stages cloud-based BI and analytics. A new survey report from Saugatuck Technology concludes that, as of year-end 2011, only about 13% of enterprises worldwide – including all industries and all sizes of enterprises – indicated that they had cloud-based BI/advanced analytics solutions in place and in use. But this is about to change. Saugatuck's survey also shows that cloud-based BI and analytics will be among the fastest-growing cloud-based business management solution types through the next two years. Cloud-based BI and analytics will see an 84% compound annual growth rate over this period. This is based on a survey sample of 200 user enterprise IT and business leaders, along with input from about 30 vendors. BI and analytics -- whether on-premises or in the cloud -- has long been the hottest area of software. Even when the economy and IT spending are down, companies still keep spending on BI, because it helps provide data-driven clarity and some predictability in market trends, and therefore quickly pays for itself. The report's authors, led by Saugatuck's Brian Dooley, note that however beneficial the solutions are, BI and analytics have often been cumbersome or expensive to implement, since implementing a complete BI suite based on data warehousing has been a formidable and expensive project, and many BI toolsets and solutions have been limited to a small handful of business analysts or executives. Cloud changes all that, Dooley says. "Inevitably, cloud is opening up business intelligence and analytics to more users -- non-analysts -- within organizations" he opines. There already is a drive to make BI more ubiquitous, and the cloud will accelerate this move toward simplified access. On one level, cloud providers can handle all the complexities required for BI -- assembling the analytics components, networking and storage; plus data normalization through ETL, management of data sources, and finally, achitecting of an analytic solution by data scientists and analysts. Big Data also looms large, and many organizations simply aren't equipped or staffed to handle it. How many organizations are ready to bring on data scientists to work with Big Data projects? Ultimately, many enterprises may leave it up to cloud-based providers to worry about hiring and staffing this new breed of high-level professional. Dooley and his fellow researchers also predict that virtually all categories of cloud-based business software will experience substantial growth in adoption and use for the foreseeable future. However, the pace of growth among some of the early category leaders -- CRM, collaboration, customer service -- will naturally slow due to the rule of increasing numbers. The growth of cloud-based BI and analytics will only accelerate, they add. Not only do cloud-based BI solutions have advantages over on-premises BI for the usual reasons (rapid deployment, low upfront cost; quick and cheap scalability for processing, storage, operations and accessibility), but there are advantages specific to BI applications. For example, cloud-based BI enables the instant propagation of updates and changes, "of particular importance due to changes in data sources, and need to include new types of analysis," but it also more cost-effectively supports a wider variety of initiatives, including one-time analyses, experimentation, trial deployments, broadening of the usage base, and agile development/deployment." Cloud also offers a way to better share data with business partners and the supply chain. The downside of all this? Security continues to be a great concern, the report states. still an area that needs work.
b446b7071753bf4877c4a0cd16fa1e87	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/07/30/small-and-mid-size-businesses-see-productivity-in-the-cloud-surveys/?goback=.gde_4212639_member_140748023	Small and Mid-Size Businesses See Productivity in the Cloud: Surveys	Small and Mid-Size Businesses See Productivity in the Cloud: Surveys For small to mid-size businesses, the cloud represents opportunities to level the playing field with larger companies with tremendous IT assets. Cloud computing is a natural solution for smaller businesses that can't make the investments in rooms full of servers, development teams, and data center infrastructure. Are SMBs jumping on the opportunity yet? Two recent surveys suggest they are embracing cloud for both end-user applications at a rapid clip. And they love the productivity potential cloud-based applications offer. But it's still uncertain how deeply they are employing cloud solutions for more enterprisey applications. In a survey of 323 SMBs just released by Spiceworks, a social business site, and sponsored by storage management vendor EMC, 62% report they are using some type of cloud application, up from 48% at the beginning of the year and 28% a year ago. Most of this growth is coming in online file-sharing services (such as Dropbox), but haven't moved into online productivity offerings in a big way just yet. When it comes to moving productivity suites to the cloud, which include word processing, spreadsheet and calendar applications, adoption is slow among SMBs. Cloud-based productivity suites have the lowest adoption rate among the three applications reviewed in this study. Nearly two out of three businesses have no plans to use cloud-based productivity suites. Only 14% of those surveyed are currently using cloud-based productivity suites, and another 22% are thinking about adopting these services sometime in the future. For those that have deployed or are planning to deploy a cloud-based productivity suite, Google Apps (48%) and Microsoft Office 365 (43%) are the clear favorites. Accessibility from anywhere is the most-often cited reason (by 69%) for moving to a cloud-based productivity suite. Another 54% look to such approaches for collaboration and sharing capabilities, while 37% are attracted by the lower cost per user these cloud-based solutions potentially offer. Over half of respondents, 52%, state they’re using cloud-based file sharing services in their organization today. Much of this is under the radar, however -- 33% of respondents state they know their employees are using these services "on their own and without approval." Another 5% are not sure what their employees are doing. IT departments are mixed on how to manage this behavior with 31% of companies allowing employees to use any provider they wish and another 32% discouraging the behavior at some level. The report surmises that cloud-based file-sharing has a powerful pull that may be hard to manage: "This reluctance to implement policy indicates that employees and businesses want so badly to see the productivity benefits of file sharing that they might loosen their standard around security, access control and data management. Overall, the findings show that productivity is a powerful lure. Cloud apps are in demand that reduce burdens on internal IT management while simultaneously enabling access to data and applications wherever and whenever users want.” While accessibility, collaboration and convenience are the top advantages gained from cloud-based file sharing, businesses often feel insecure about the data that’s being passed through these services. This is why the lack of control over data security (cited by 73%); legal liabilities and compliance issues (49%), and reliability (48%) are the top three concerns businesses harbor over file sharing. When it comes to the selection of cloud-based file sharing providers, employees play an essential role. Employees have a clear preference for Dropbox with 87% of IT pros stating this is the vendor their employees are using on their own. But vendor preference among IT pros isn’t quite as clear. While Dropbox leads the way with nearly 30% of companies stating they use or plan to use them as their approved vendor, nearly 40% are using a file sharing provider in the “other” category. This fragmentation among IT pros indicates that there’s no one solution that’s accurately addressing the concerns of the IT department. Another recent survey also finds that mid-size businesses – those with annual revenues between $50 million and $1 billion – also are getting cloud religion. The survey of 528 executives, conducted by Deloitte, found that 40% –- up from 29% last year – recognize cloud computing and Software as a Service (Saas) as one of the top three technology investments for 2012. The survey on business growth strategies found mid-size companies continue to prioritize automation of business processes, data analytics, and business intelligence as triggers to increase productivity and areas where they are most likely to make investments in 2012. Cloud computing ranked higher on the list of growth drivers than its was in Deloitte's previous survey, conducted by September 2011. At that time, cloud was recognized as a distant fourth as a means to increase productivity. In this survey, it nearly equaled data analytics and business intelligence in terms of likely investments. When asked what type of investments companies were likely to make in technology, cloud computing, at 40%, had emerged close to automation of business processes (46%), and data analytics (41%), as an investment priority. (Photo: Joe McKendrick.)
dd4bcad45f39b31c1f550b8a3cc7aba0	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/09/10/18-solid-justifications-for-cloud-computing-and-10-situations-where-it-doesnt-work/	18 Solid Justifications for Cloud Computing -- and 10 Situations Where It Doesn't Work	18 Solid Justifications for Cloud Computing -- and 10 Situations Where It Doesn't Work These days, vendors and analysts alike are telling us everything and anything can, or should, be moved into the cloud. Indeed, there are certain areas of the business that are ripe for cloud engagements. But there are other areas that are best left alone, at least for now. Photo: Joe McKendrick In his new book, Cloudonomics, Joe Weinman explores many of the areas being impacted by the cloud computing phenomenon, offering compelling value propositions. He spells out, extremely thoroughly, the business cases and cost justifications that go behind cloud computing efforts. He also provides 28 business areas where cloud does and doesn't make business and financial sense. (And, amazingly, manages to categorize all points in terms starting with the letter "C.)" A senior VP at Telx and formerly with A&T, Weinman is highly regarded as a thought leader on the emerging art and science of cloud economics. Here are 18 areas where cloud computing makes sense: Complementary capabilities and competencies: “The cloud may offer a competency that you or your firm doesn’t have," Weinman writes. "This may be at the infrastructure layer – for example, data center operations, at the software layer – for example, specific algorithms encoded and optimized but available only via the cloud, or at multiple layers – for example, security operations skills." Examples include tax preparation algorithms embedded in an online tax service, search algorithms and an indexed web, information regarding flight schedules and prices but also expected delays, and stock market ticker data. Communications: Whether it's email, video, collaboration, or anything else, it's all possible on the cloud. “Any type of communication is enabled or optimized via a cloud based architecture, for the simple reason that a hub, or a meshed network of hubs, generate efficiencies over point-to-point communications." The alternative, Weinman states, is construction of a direct physical network. Conversations, connections and communities: The cloud can play a key role here, since it "helps discover communities, discover members of those communities, and maintain connections within the community through directories and ongoing conversations.” Congregations, commons and collections: Cloud-based systems can provide shared, common access to resources, as well as enable end-users with common interests to meet and exchange information. Consolidation: De-duplication is a killer app for the cloud, Weinman notes. “Rather than tens of millions of people all maintaining an exact copy of the same content.,only one – or perhaps a handful – of copies would need to be maintained in the cloud, subject to legal and regulatory constraints.” Collaboration, competition, and crowdsourcing: These three business approaches all rely on cloud computing to reach a maximum number of people. Commerce and clearing: The physical market has been supplanted by digital markets – which run on cloud applications. Collaborative consumption: The cloud model supports an emerging system based on “communal economies and redistribution markets,” says Weinman. “The cloud plays a role as a market entity, connecting people who have goods with the people who want them, as well as an advertising entity.” Coordination, currency, consistency, and control: With a single reference copy of a document in the cloud, “there is no doubt as to what the current version is, and changes can be rolled back.” With Software as a Service (SaaS), “any major software upgrades need to be applied only once, in the cloud. They are then instantaneously available to all users.” Cross-device access and synchronization: Call it the “personal cloud,” Weinman states. The cloud plays an active role in the emerging mobile space, and “can help to synchronize content or applications across a single user with multiple devices.” Cash flow: For a large, cash-rich enterprises, any gains from turning parts of IT from a capital expense into an operating expense may not make a dent. "However, for cash-strapped startups, small and medium size businesses, and even larger enterprises that are trying to conserve cash, the cash flow benefits of cloud can be substantial," Weinman notes. Capacity: “Capacity is a fundamental use case for Infrastructure as a Service," says Weinman. "Cloud capacity can complement existing, owned capacity within an enterprise data center or colocation facility.” Continuity: Few homeowners maintain “another house lying idle as a spare, just in case something happens to their primary house.... The cloud is enabling a new type of business continuity/disaster recovery, where data is replicated but the compute capacity is not.” Checkpoints: Just as national borders are protected, “the cloud can effectively filter out everything from viruses and spam to distributed denial of service attacks.” Chokepoints: Just as air traffic controllers can regulate arriving and departing flights to keep airports running smoothly, “the cloud can accomplish the same thing – throttling, policing, shaping, limiting, and managing data traffic.” Context: Core activities -- such as product design -- should remain within the enterprise , but "context" activities can be easily moved to the cloud, Weinman says. Examples of context activities include generic business functions that offer no competitive business advantage, such as expense reporting, funnel management and billing. Celerity: Celerity, or speed, is an advantage offered by cloud, since applications can be stood up in a matter of days, or sometimes hours. Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) reduce development time, while Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) avoids the need to “un-crate equipment, turn it up, and test it.” Customer experience: "Reduced time equals improved customer experience,” Weinman states. Cloud helps in several ways, including the increased celerity noted above. Plus, there's advantages in having widely distributed systems: “In the same way that having a Starbucks on every corner reduces the time needed to grab a cup of coffee, having a content delivery or application delivery node on every corner reduces the amount of time required to interact with an application," Weinman writes. And here are 10 cases where cloud is not appropriate: Constant demand: If demand is relatively flat and predictable, there's not much of a business case to be made for moving an application. A perfectly viable strategy can be to bring or keep the application in house, Weinman writes. Custom environments: Customized environments -- which often are a source of business advantage -- are impossible to replicate in more plain-vanilla cloud environments. Of course, if they do not offer business advantages, it may be worthwhile to consider a cloud move, Weinman adds. Classic legacy: The cost of migration is high, and “the effort to migrate [legacy] code to newer scale-out architectures and modern programming paradigms just may not be worth it.” Close coupling of applications: Legacy applications tend to be tightly bound to existing on-premises infrastructure, such as storage or networks -- and thus may be difficult and expensive to break off. Constant capture, creation, and consumption of content: Managing content is something that happens at the end-user level. “The cloud can't do capture and display [of content], only edge devices can.” Cryptography: The point of data encryption is to protect it before it goes out to the cloud. “Sending unencrypted data to the cloud for encryption would be like sending a five-year-old through the woods with a paper bag full of cash to the bank for safekeeping,” Weinman says. Compression: Data compression offers enormous efficiencies in storage and reduced requirements for network bandwidth. It makes it cheaper to get data out to the cloud -- it just doesn't make sense to gobble up network bandwidth simply to get the data out to the cloud for later compression. “Data compression for more efficient transmission should be done at the point of origin, in the same way orange juice is concentrated near the citrus grove, not at the point of sale,” says Weinman. Caching: The ability to temporarily store data to speed up access has been mastered quite well within on-premises systems, and it may be counter-productive to attempt to move this to the cloud. “Caching can be and is done at the edge of the network very effectively," says Weinman. "If the cost to access remote data increases, you may want to keep the data nearby. Covert: Don't go to the cloud if you have trade secrets or proprietary information you don't want anyone to see. “The legal status of your data held at the cloud provider is still uncertain," says Weinman. "Someone worried about a secret fried chicken recipe falling into the wrong hands may want to keep it on premises.” Continuity: While continuity seems like a natural use case for the cloud, “the reverse is also true,” Weinman reminds us. “A local copy under your control can help avoid loss of data in the cloud, and local processing capability can ensure continuity of processing.”
bd9b3e21be04aaa4e8c313c821b87e1a	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/09/13/9-ways-well-be-purchasing-or-not-purchasing-cloud-computing/	9 Ways We'll be Purchasing (or Not Purchasing) Cloud Computing	9 Ways We'll be Purchasing (or Not Purchasing) Cloud Computing Can the "freemium" model ultimately work with cloud computing? Perhaps, in some cases. But there are many other ways revenues and value will be generated through the cloud services model. Photo: Alyssa McKendrick In his new book, Cloudonomics, Joe Weinman makes a series of cogent arguments related to the business value of cloud computing, as established through various economic models. There are, and will be, many ways cloud services will be delivered, Weinman says. One approach does not fit all needs and motivations, and cloud service providers will likely be employing a range of tactics to generate or support their businesses. Here are the most likely pricing models that will be seen (with an additional point I added): Pay-per-use: The most common model seen today, advanced by all the major cloud vendors. This is the most rational model, Weinman says, since it most “correctly aligns usage with investment and economically and correctly allocates resources.” Flat rates: This is the most preferred option among both enterprises and consumers, “due to simplicity and loss aversion.” Free, freemium or advertiser supported: The cloud provider gains revenues from a single or just a few sources, versus attempting to collect payments from thousands of end-users every month. Free services also may be monetized outside the technology domain as well, Weinman observes – consider the lucrative brand that has developed around Angry Birds, a for-free app. There is a debate over the value of freemium services to cloud providers, though. On one hand, it is argued that freemium helps build a critical mass of end-user customers. Others, however, argue that the freemium model doesn't work for specialized or enterprise applications. Supported through selling consumer preference and analytics to third parties: Data is today's corporate goldmine, and many providers either already or will offer free online services in exchange for the end-user agreeing to provide some data about themselves. It's that adage of the Internet age in action: “If you are not paying for a product, then you are the product.” “Pay what you like:” Wikipedia – not to mention many open-source software projects – is an example of this approach, in which revenues are delivered via voluntary donations. Dynamic pricing and nonuniform (differential) pricing: "Different resources are priced differently based on location or time of day, or price of a given computing time slot varies based on the level of demand." Pay for quality or priority: This is also a plan being advanced in the telecom and ISP space for service delivery. End-users would be able to select – and be priced accordingly – for the network or service that provides the best performance for their applications. Congestion pricing: The supply-and-demand rule in action, digitally. Cloud services being hit with a lot of requests will require more capacity, which costs more, and the congestion-pricing model passes theses costs onto the consumer. One proposal mentioned by Weinman is “auctioning off Internet capacity each moment through a Vickrey Auction, where the price(s) paid by the winner(s) is that bid by the highest nonwinning bidder.” There's also the approach in which similar resource pools are sold at differing prices. "Because fewer people want to pay the higher price, there are fewer users for a given quantity of resource and thus lower congestion.” Business partnerships: Not mentioned by Weinman, but important to mention, is the use of cloud-based services via business partners, which may likely be non-cloud, non-IT companies. For example, a company may provide services that enable customers to check inventory levels, do online product configurations, or engage in a collaborative setting. The cloud provider may simply want to offer a value-added service -- such as an insurance company providing data on auto safety testing. Such services would not cost anything directly to the end-user (though they certainly wouldn’t be “free,” since they are part of the cost of doing business), and would be maintained and paid for by the providing company. Weinman also provides guidelines on which parts of the business lend themselves to cloud computing, and which shouldn't. See my previous post for Weinman's 18 Solid Justifications for Cloud Computing -- and 10 Situations Where It Doesn't Work.
798b1120b6de62d98b3d12223c6a8c1e	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/10/28/two-thirds-of-the-worlds-data-centers-going-to-cloud-cisco/?ss=cloud-computing	Two-Thirds of the World's Data Centers Going to Cloud: Cisco	Two-Thirds of the World's Data Centers Going to Cloud: Cisco Within four years, two-thirds of all data center traffic across the world -- as well as workloads -- will be cloud based. That's the prediction of Cisco's second annual Global Cloud Index, which forecasts global data center traffic to grow fourfold between 2011 and 2016, reaching a total of 6.6 zettabytes annually. The company also predicts global cloud traffic, the fastest-growing component of data center traffic, to grow sixfold – a 44% combined annual growth rate (CAGR) – from 683 exabytes of annual traffic in 2011 to 4.3 zettabytes by 2016. That means that two-thirds of all data center traffic will be cloud-based, the report states. Cisco's predictions from last year about data centers and cloud traffic appear to be on track, then. In its latest report Cisco points out that most Internet traffic has originated or terminated in a data center since 2008. “Data center traffic will continue to dominate Internet traffic for the foreseeable future, but the nature of data center traffic is undergoing a fundamental transformation brought about by cloud applications, services, and infrastructure,” the report states. Cisco doesn't distinguish between private and public cloud in its measurements. The move to cloud means a different type of economics is emerging, the report explains. “With increasing server computing capacity and virtualization, multiple workloads per physical server are common in cloud architectures. Cloud economics, including server cost, resiliency, scalability, and product lifespan, are promoting migration of workloads across servers, both inside the data center and across data centers (even centers in different geographic areas).” And the cloud is taking on more and more of traditional data center workloads. In 2011, 30% of data center workloads were processed in the cloud, with 70% being handled in a traditional data center, but this is shifting very rapidly, Cisco says. In fact, 2014 will be the first year when the majority of workloads shift to the cloud, Cisco predicts. About 52% of all workloads will be processed in the cloud versus 48% in the traditional IT space. By 2016, 62% or nearly two-thirds of total workloads will be processed in the cloud. Over the five-year period being reported, data center workloads will grow 2.5-fold; cloud workloads will grow 5.3-fold. Often an end-user application can be supported by several workloads distributed across servers. This can generate multiple streams of traffic within and between data centers, in addition to traffic to and from the end user. The average workload per cloud server will grow from a little over four in 2011 to eight and a half by 2016. In comparison, the average workload per traditional data center server will grow from one and a half in 2011 to two in 2016. In 2011, North America generated the most cloud traffic (261 exabytes annually); followed by Asia Pacific; (216 exabytes annually); and Eastern Europe (156 exabytes annually). By 2016, Asia Pacific will take the lead, generating the most cloud traffic (1.5 zettabytes annually); followed by North America (1.1 zettabytes annually); and Western Europe (963 exabytes annually). The Middle East and Africa as having the highest cloud traffic growth rate (79 percent CAGR); followed by Latin America (66% CAGR); and Central and Eastern Europe (55% CAGR). The Cisco Global Cloud Index was developed to estimate global data center and cloud-based Internet Protocol (IP) traffic growth and trends. Its conclusions are derived from modeling and analysis of various primary and secondary sources, including 40 terabytes of traffic data sampled from a variety of global data centers over the past year; results from more than 90 million network tests over the past two years; and third-party market research reports. Related on Forbes: Gallery: World's Largest Data Centers 6 images View gallery
9862944f276c7ce5aa3a94f16a0efecd	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/11/07/think-twice-three-times-before-moving-existing-apps-to-the-cloud/	Think Twice, Three Times, Before Moving Existing Apps to the Cloud	Think Twice, Three Times, Before Moving Existing Apps to the Cloud If you're thinking about migrating enterprise applications to the cloud, think again. The cloud doesn't work out well as a re-hosting platform for existing systems and applications. In fact, very few enterprise applications as written today actually perform well on a cloud platform. But cloud bring new – and often unexpected – sources of value to the business. Photo: Joe McKendrick That's the view of Forrester analyst James Staten, who debunks the notion that leveraging cloud services will save money and provide higher availability. Public cloud platforms achieve a lower cost basis by leveraging commodity infrastructure and economies of scale that come through multitenancy, automation, and standardization, he writes in a new post and report. He says he often gets questions about which apps should be migrated to the cloud. However, he says this is the wrong question, which "shows that we have a lot to learn about true public cloud environments." As Staten explains it, “you shouldn't be thinking about what applications you can migrate to the cloud. That isn't the path to lower costs and greater flexibility. Instead you should be thinking about how your company can best leverage cloud platforms to enable new capabilities. Then create those new capabilities as enhancements to your existing applications.” Essentially, cloud is best suited for greenfield projects that can move organizations in new directions. Too many organizations fall into the trap of going to the cloud for cost-savings and high availability, Staten says. They're likely to be disappointed. In the report Staten co-authors with several other Forrester analysts, he points out that “traditional enterprise applications weren't designed for clouds. If your traditional applications are an architectural mismatch with cloud platforms, it’s an expensive and costly route to try and rearchitect them for the cloud. However, you can gain the benefits of the cloud by extending these applications with cloud-native enhancements, a lesson born in the early days of the World Wide Web.” Winning in the cloud means exploring and opening up new possibilities for the business, he states. “Don't think migrate. Think transform instead.” Staten and his Forrester colleagues urge organizations and IT leaders to “throw out the old rules for application design... They no longer apply. Scale-out, commodity cloud platforms are the future of your virtualization implementations, and over time, you will build more and more code on these type of deployments.” Cloud applications should be built from the ground up for cloud. Cloud is moving technology design to a point in which business users can quickly, on demand, map interconnected but discrete services to business processes as they are needed, then being able to quickly disassemble and redeploy those services as business needs change. That's the kind of flexibility and agility needed in today's intensely competitive and unforgiving economy.
7d83f6130dd43c9ffc31cc2eb392822d	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/12/09/7-predictions-for-cloud-computing-in-2013-that-make-perfect-sense/	7 Predictions for Cloud Computing in 2013 That Make Perfect Sense	7 Predictions for Cloud Computing in 2013 That Make Perfect Sense Every year at this time, analysts, prognosticators and pundits alike try to size up the year ahead in technology. And -- no surprise -- cloud computing is this year's hottest topic. Cloud is already a force to be reckoned with on the business technology scene -- IT executives, vendors and analysts alike are trying to keep up to determine what it all really means and where it is taking us. Photo: Joe McKendrick To that end, I culled analysts' prediction lists for 2013 and identified some practical predictions that are likely to come to pass, if they haven't done so already. (UPDATE: I also just put together a list of 7 predictions that may or may not pan out in 2013, but we'll see evolve over the longer run.) In the meantime, here are some analysts' current predictions for the year ahead: 1) More hosted private clouds: They're not on-premises, but they're not public shared services either. Over the coming year, there will be a movement to private clouds manged by someone else, off-premises, says IDC's Chris Morris. It will be more cost effective as well, IDC says. “For critical applications, only a secure, non-shared private cloud will pass all compliance requirements. Initial enterprise strategies for on-premises private cloud environments have been limited by cost and time overruns and while [virtual private cloud] solutions have provided an effective solution for some organizations.” 2) Cloud and mobile becoming one. This is an interesting one from Forrester's John Staten. Many cloud projects are driven by the need to mobile access to back-end applications. "More often than not, we are finding mobile applications connected to cloud-based back-end services (increasingly to commercial mobile-back-ends-as-a-service) that can elastically respond to mobile client engagements and shield your data center from this traffic. Nearly every software-as-a-service (SaaS) application has a mobile client now, which is proof of the model as well.” 3) The new PCs -- personal clouds. Gartner predicts the personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location where individuals "keep their personal content, access their services and personal preferences and center their digital lives." (And still can be called PCs, by the way.) “The personal cloud will entail the unique collection of services, Web destinations and connectivity that will become the home of computing and communication activities." And, Gartner optimistically predicts, "no one platform, form factor, technology or vendor will dominate. The personal cloud shifts the focus from the client device to cloud-based services delivered across devices.” (See "cloud and mobile becoming one, above.) 4) More cloud services brokerages. Gartner predicts that IT organizations will increasingly be assuming internal "cloud services brokerage" roles -- overseeing the provisioning and consumption of heterogeneous and often complex cloud services for "their internal users and external business partners.” 5) The rise of industry-specific and community clouds. Look for "clouds that are purpose-built to serve specific vertical markets, such as healthcare, finance, retail, and manufacturing," says Dave Linthicum, CTO & founder of Blue Mountain Labs in Cloud Computing Journal. This will provide for the demands of the "specialized security, processes, and compliance requirements for each vertical market.” Brian Patrick Donaghy , CEO of Appcore, (also quoted in Cloud Computing) says specific industry regulations will increasingly be addressed through what he calls "community clouds." A prime example are those arising in response to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations around standards for health-related data protection and storage. Another example is a telco community cloud provided specifically for telco disaster recovery to meet specific FCC regulations. 6) Cloud talent shortages looms. IDC warns of impending talent shortages that will emerge as a major differentiator for innovation and potentially as a constraint to enterprise technology adoption. Complicating this challenge is the factt hat cloud engagements are coming from all different directions across businesses. “The unavailability of appropriate IT talent is being exacerbated by an expansion of technology procurement from IT to business units and consumers," the consultancy warns. "The IT team is no longer just a team of system administrators, DBAs, network managers and application developers but must also include service delivery managers, contract managers, relationship managers and business analysts.” 7) "Cloud" as a defining term fades. Forrester Research's James Staten predicts that “we’ll finally stop saying that everything is going 'cloud,' and get real about what fits and what doesn’t." Sam Johnston , Director of Cloud & IT Services at Equinix , agrees, adding that “anyone with 'cloud' in their company and/or product names will scramble to rebrand... how many companies do you see with generic terms like 'internet' or 'client/server' in their names today?” As an added bonus, he says in Cloud Computing Journal, “there will also be a merciful fading out of the clunky-sounding 'as-a-Service" or 'aaS' monikers, which “will also go the way of the dodo.” Related on Forbes: Gallery: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2013 10 images View gallery
9e441b5bf021363eba5aa2407e951a67	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/12/20/it-executives-not-worried-about-finding-cloud-computing-expertise-survey/	IT Executives Not Worried About Finding Cloud Computing Expertise: Survey	IT Executives Not Worried About Finding Cloud Computing Expertise: Survey Cloud computing may introduce new processes and technology challenges, but organizations appear to be ready to handle them, a new survey suggests. An overwhelming majority of IT executives, in fact, say they're having no problems finding the skills they need to move forward with cloud engagements. But will this confidence be sustainable as organizations move deeper into cloud? Photo: Joe McKendrick This is one of the results of a new survey of 327 CIOs, business executives and other stakeholders, conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Host Analytics. More than eight out of 10 CIOs (81%) and IT managers (81%) in the survey say they are "easily able to find employees or contractors" who can help customize Software-as-a-Service applications. This appears to validate the public cloud service vision of simply being able to subscribe to services as needed, leaving the nitty-gritty technical details to providers. But I'm not sure how long the confidence expressed in this survey will be sustained. We are still in the early stages of cloud, and the challenges of moving large, core applications such as enterprise resource planning and financials to more virtualized or cloud settings are still ahead of us. The actual coding and underlying systems development work may be once-removed, but there will be a growing need for skilled people who can help address configurations, data models and process flows, as it all fits into the enterprise. Those organizations adopting private cloud likely have trained and skilled IT departments that are overseeing the effort. The skills and staffing issues in these environments will likely be the same as they have been over the years, and not necessarily exacerbated or improved by the move to cloud. IT executives also seem to have different motivations for engaging cloud than their business counterparts. Business-side executives overwhelmingly agree that the purpose of moving to cloud computing is to realize greater value, the survey finds. However, IT executives say being better able to meet compliance requirements is the greatest advantage in cloud engagements. While value was the one priority for business executives (80%), it was less so for CIOs (53%), who were more inclined to see meeting compliance requirements (58%) as a good reason to go to cloud.
8301c7a81fb0e1cb4bf5aa9136721256	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/12/21/almost-1-7-million-cloud-related-jobs-went-unfilled-in-2012-estimate/	Almost 1.7 Million Cloud-Related Jobs Went Unfilled in 2012: Estimate	Almost 1.7 Million Cloud-Related Jobs Went Unfilled in 2012: Estimate Demand for "cloud-ready" IT workers will grow by 26% annually through 2015, with as many as 7 million new cloud-related jobs to be available worldwide by that time, says a new IDC report sponsored by Microsoft. However, IT hiring managers report that there were 1.7 million open cloud-related positions that opened up over the past year that went unfilled. The problem was a lack the training and certification among jobseekers, they say. While there has been modest growth of IT jobs, cloud-sector jobs are increasing far more swiftly, the report states. With the workforce unprepared to take on these jobs, "there is an urgent need to retrain existing IT professionals and encourage students to pursue cloud-related IT training and certifications, " says the report. As Cushing Anderson, author of the report, IDC put it: "Unlike IT skill shortages in the past, solving this skills gap is extremely challenging, given that cloud brings a new set of skills, which haven't been needed in the past. There is no one-size-fits-all set of criteria for jobs in cloud computing. Therefore, training and certification is essential for preparing prospective job candidates to work in cloud-related jobs." The IDC study also confirms that almost two-thirds of enterprises are planning, implementing or using cloud computing, and lack of training, certification or experience are the top three reasons why cloud positions are not filled. However, cloud-related skills represent virtually all the growth opportunities in IT employment worldwide as demand for cloud-related positions grows. Although the growth of IT jobs in the United States is slow, the growth picture is better outside the U.S. The overall number of IT positions in end-user organizations globally will grow at a 4.3% compound annual growth rate between 2011 and 2015 and reach 29.3 million in 2015, according to IDC. Anderson identified the following skill areas key to building and maintaining cloud within organizations: Management: Serve as "internal advocate" for cloud computing, and "be able to articulate the business value and opportunity of cloud computing and select alternatives when appropriate," Andersen says. (794,945 openings worldwide by 2015.) Project and program managers. "Systems designed for agility and responsiveness, such as cloud and cloud-related technologies, rely heavily on project and program managers to ensure that interdependencies are identified and accommodated." (555,591 openings by 2015.) Business analysts.Business analysts need to be conversant "in both the business requirements and the technical options while being aware of the key service-level requirements and even the principles of service-oriented architecture." (502,692 openings by 2015.) Application development and maintenance. "Increased expectation of anytime, anywhere computing will require development of services that can be accessed by any device. Demand for professionals who can build and deliver applications that reside in the cloud yet take appropriate advantage of particular device capabilities will expand." (525,829 openings by 2015.) IT systems and operations. With cloud, high availability is the norm, along with the integration and controlled movement of data between highly dispersed systems and providers. (630,414 openings by 2015.) Network, telecom, security, and web management. "In addition to successful 'management' of networks, telecommunication, and Web systems, successful IT organizations will need to be conversant in the vulnerabilities of both malicious and accidental activities on the performance of those systems. This will also include understanding compliance with appropriate legal, financial, and business requirements to ensure the underlying reliability of the information along with its availability." (481,411 openings by 2015.) Help desk and end-user support. "While end-user support is often considered a necessary evil in legacy environments, it becomes the core function of a cloud-enabled environment." (549,241 openings by 2015.) Here are some selected examples of actual, real-life cloud-related job openings, culled from the Dice.com site: Director, Private Cloud Data Center: "Lead and fulfill strategic initiatives by working with the various in-house and external consultants, facilities operation personnel, clients, and management. The Director will partner with the senior IT leadership team to develop innovative design solutions to complex engineering issues." Required skills: "BS degree in Mechanical Engineering or related, MS in Engineering or related and/or PE is a plus, 10+ years of experience in the design, management, and troubleshooting of data centers systems. Business acumen to understand and map cost drivers representing a software defined data center/private cloud." Cloud Services Principal Manager: "Provides business and technical leadership and direction for delivery of cloud services and utilities for IT infrastructure. Will direct a team responsible for standardizing Cloud computing technical designs, technical project management, and delivery of cloud services. This position will partner with application and technical teams to extend their usage of cloud services. The leadership position will visualize, articulate, mobilize, design, and product-manage infrastructure solutions in data centers to foster shared cloud services and utilities usage, as it relates to infrastructure, platform, database, storage, analytics, and software as-a-service (Iaas, PaaS, DBaaS, STaaS, AaaS, and SaaS, respectively)." Required skills: "BA/BS degree in computer science or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience, must have at least one year of experience using cloud services or virtualized platform services in the delivery of infrastructure services, must have experience in managing middleware platforms." Cloud Engineer: "Responsible for deploying, managing and maintain our next generation cloud based applications. Creation and maintenance of complex systems for cloud offerings. Constantly reassess and improve the cloud infrastructure. Work with cloud development group to support their current & future needs. Perform system monitoring, verifying the availability and integrity of all servers, systems and key processes." Required skills: "Expertise in industry leading cloud services such as: Amazon AWS, Rackspace Open Cloud and Microsoft Windows Azure. Experience with open source configuration management software is a big plus. Cloud experience, going past just the virtualization layer SaaS creation, maintenance and troubleshooting."
acdcff2a4bb46917cfde7929fafdfd89	https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2013/06/05/google-glass-is-only-the-beginning-of-cloud-powered-wearable-technology-survey-suggests/	Google Glass Is Only The Beginning Of Cloud-Powered Wearable Technology, Survey Suggests	Google Glass Is Only The Beginning Of Cloud-Powered Wearable Technology, Survey Suggests There's been quite a brouhaha over Google Glass, from proponents seeing the cloud-enabled glasses as a new way to navigate through the world, to detractors concerned about the potential invasion of privacy, not to mention the fact that it might be literally too much in-your-face technology. But Google Glass may be just one of many initiatives toward wearable clouds for everyone, says a new study commissioned by Rackspace, conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Creative and Social Technology (CAST). The research was based on in-depth profiling of 26 individuals using wearable technology, along with a more general survey of 4,000 US and UK adults. Along with cloud-enabled headgear, wearable technology may also include fitness monitors, smart watches and wearable cameras (examples listed at the bottom of this page). The study's authors, Drs. Chris Brauer and Jennifer Barth, both with CAST, report key findings from the research: Cloud-powered wearable technology is already enhancing people’s lives: This technology may be new, but adoption rates are substantial with 18% of surveyed adults already using wearable devices. A majority of the device users (82% in the US and 71% in the UK) believe that these cloud-powered devices have enhanced their lives. "The appeal of wearable technology is down to the rich data generated by the devices, which is stored and analyzed in the cloud," Brauer and Barth state. "The ability to access these insights from the cloud - anywhere, anytime -enables wearable technology users to boost their intelligence, confidence, health, fitness and even their love lives." The study found that 47% of the wearable technology users felt more intelligent, and 61% cent felt more informed. Another 37% stated that wearable technology helped with career development, while 61% claimed that their personal efficiency improved. Data capture and analysis needs to improve: The study of 26 technology-wearing individuals found frustration with the quality and accuracy of data provided by wearable technology devices. For example, Brauer and Barth relate, a 42- year-old web strategist who trialed a wristband app that tracks sleep, movements, and eating habits, "was originally impressed with the device because it looked good, had a simple design and was light to wear. However, frustration set in once he starting monitoring the data tracked by the device. He found analysis around his calorie consumption inaccurate." In addition, the device did not track all of the fitness activity he engaged in, the researchers report. Privacy concerns abound: There remain serious concerns about privacy, with over half (51%) of respondents citing it as a barrier to adoption. Almost two thirds (62%) think Google Glass and other wearable devices "should be regulated in some form," while one in five (20%) say these devices should "be banned entirely." Yet, some users will be willing to share their data with government agencies and insurers: "The research revealed that citizens may be willing to share the data generated by wearable technology with central or local government, enabling authorities to crowd-source insights which can be used to enhance public services," say Brauer and Barth. About one-fifth of the survey respondents would be willing to use a wearable device that monitors location for central government activity. In addition, one-third would be willing to use a wearable health and fitness monitor that shares personal data with government healthcare agencies or healthcare providers. "We are already seeing wearable technology being used in the private sector with health insurance firms encouraging members to use wearable fitness devices to earn rewards for maintaining a healthier lifestyle," say Brauer and Barth. "It is likely that the public sector will look to capitalize on the wearable technology trend with a view to boosting tele-health and smart-city programs.” The data generated by wearable technology will form part of a "human cloud": "Wearable technology will form an integral part of the ‘Internet of Things’ – a growing network of devices – from wearable tech and smartphones to road traffic sensors - that connect to the internet to share data in real time," Brauer and Barth predict. Wearable technology is also of interest to some enterprises: The research revealed that a small number of ‘early adopter’ businesses (six percent) are already providing wearable technology devices for their employees. In addition, one-third of the survey respondents say "that they would be willing to wear devices offered by their employers." The survey also finds one out of five respondents with wearable devices have even grown extremely attached to the devices -- 13% never remove the device with another seven percent "admitted to checking the device at least once every five minutes." Examples of wearable, cloud-connected technology: Health and fitness monitors: Fitbit, Nike+ Fuelband, Jawbone UP, Fitbug, Basis, Polar Heart Monitor. Smart glasses and video glasses: Google Glass, Oakley AirWave Goggles, Smith I/O Recon Goggles, Vuzix devices. Smart watches: Pebble Watch, I'm Watch, MetaWatch, Sony SmartWatch. Wearable cameras: Autographer, Memoto, Looxie, GoPRO. People-tracking devices (e.g. for parents to locate their children): PocketFinder, LOK8U. Smart clothing or e-textiles: Motorola Wearable Technology Jacket, 3rd Space Gaming Vest. Smartphones with a personal monitoring app: Nike+, Sleep Cycle. Related on Forbes: Gallery: In Photos: Google Glass 10 images View gallery
a70784887024aa082f1154cfe89ecf94	https://www.reuters.com/article/ousivMolt/idUSKBN2BU3EF	Analysis: White House, U.S. companies could agree on 25% tax rate, officials, business groups say	Analysis: White House, U.S. companies could agree on 25% tax rate, officials, business groups say By Jarrett Renshaw5 Min Read (Reuters) - President Joe Biden has championed raising the U.S. corporate tax rate to 28% from 21% as the main way to fund his $2 trillion infrastructure plan, but few people in Washington, including inside the White House, really think the rate will land there. U.S. President Joe Biden speaks about jobs and the economy at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 7, 2021. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque Biden made it clear on Wednesday that he is open to compromise, after a reporter asked if he would be willing to agree on a tax rate below 28%. “I’m willing to listen to that, I’m wide open to it,” Biden said. Reuters interviewed more than a dozen corporate and White House officials engaged in the infrastructure push. Most expect the White House and business groups to compromise on a 25% corporate tax rate - a level neither side would have chosen, but both can live with. “We don’t like it, but we expect to be at 25 percent,” a lobbyist at a top U.S. energy firm said, requesting anonymity. “If so, we are going to consider that a win.” The U.S. corporate tax rate dropped to 21% from 35% after the 2017 tax cut pushed by former President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans, but many big U.S. companies pay much less. Increasing what companies pay into the more than $4 trillion federal budget is an important part of Democrat Biden’s plan to restructure the U.S. economy to reduce inequality and try to counter China’s rise. U.S. multinational companies including Alphabet Inc’s Google, Facebook Inc and Merck & Co are among several that have been adept at reducing their taxes, tax and legal experts said. Amazon.com Inc supports a hike in the corporate tax rate here as part of an infrastructure overhaul, Jeff Bezos, chief executive of the largest U.S. retailer, said on Tuesday. Biden said last week that Amazon was one of 91 Fortune 500 companies that "use various loopholes where they pay not a single solitary penny in federal income tax," in sharp contrast to middle class families paying over 20% tax rates. Biden’s infrastructure and investment package includes roads and bridges and funding for affordable housing and elder care workers, among other items. In addition to raising the corporate tax rate, the White House is pushing a minimum U.S. and global tax for companies, and increasing enforcement of tax laws, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Wednesday. OPPOSITION Trade groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia who is a moderate on some issues, have said the 28% rate is too high. However, Manchin, whose support is crucial to any bill passing in the 50-50 Senate, said he could support a rate of 25%. The White House knew that proposing an increase to 28% would face opposition, including from some Democrats. It is prepared to discuss alternatives - including setting the rate to 25%, three administration officials familiar with the discussions told Reuters. Unlike the coronavirus pandemic relief bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Biden in mid-March, where expiring unemployment benefits created a sense of urgency, the White House believes the infrastructure plan can be debated, and expects Congress will play a more pivotal role. In 2013, then Vice President Biden and President Barack Obama proposed cutting the corporate tax rate to 28% from 35% and to 25% for manufacturers, but Republicans in Congress blocked the plan here. So far, Republicans have voiced no support for raising corporate taxes, and criticized the plan for being too large. “Debate is welcome. Compromise is inevitable. Changes are certain,” Biden said during a speech at the White House on Wednesday. He said he would soon invite Republican lawmakers to the White House and that the administration is “open to good ideas and good-faith negotiations.” Increasing the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21% is expected to generate $850 billion, a significant chunk of Biden’s proposal, according to the non-profit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget public policy organization. At 25% a little under $500 billion would be generated, the committee said, forcing Democrats to search for additional revenue streams or cut spending. That effort will be made more complicated by Biden’s campaign pledge to not raise taxes on any American earning less than $400,000, making items such as raising the gas tax or establishing a per-mile tax politically toxic. “It’s a very difficult tax pledge and promise,” said the committee’s president Maya MacGuineas. Reporting By Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Heather Timmons and Grant McCoolOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.