Slipping on the green collar

Some time ago, there was a lecture rocketing around the Internet about the pace of change. An interesting point it made was that something like half the jobs in 2010 didn't exist in 2005.

I thought of it when I recently found an analysis that said the renewable energy and energy efficient industries would provide an astonishing 40 million jobs in the U.S. by the year 2030. There were only about 8.5 million of these “green-collar” jobs in the U.S. in 2006.

Now, while these numbers are eye-popping, they actually aren't surprising. The trend toward “green-collar” jobs has been emerging for a while, but it's really ramped up worldwide as realism about energy prices and global warming have taken root.

Heck, even here in B.C., the cleantech industry, which is really a subset of the general technology industry, is estimated to employ around 16,000 people. There are probably thousands more working in environmental operations that don't involve pure technology.

So what's a green-collar job? The definition is fuzzy, since it could involve anyone who touches energy or environmentalism. But colleges and universities—in the U.S. and even at Royal Roads and BCIT in B.C.—have an idea. They're cranking out specialized degree programs in areas like eco-commerce, environmental accounting, green and social marketing, and ecological economics.

And, according to headhunting firms, other popular jobs include urban planners, forestry professionals and environmental lawyers. There is also a growing demand for architects and engineers with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

But that’s right now. There will be countless other new jobs springing up in a few years that haven’t even been dreamed of yet.

So, all you parents out there who are pressuring your kids to become lawyers, doctors, and accountants – the traditional professions – you might want to think about letting them follow their hearts and feed their environmental passions.

There’s apparently a future there.

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New MBAs don't know jack

I've helped several people in MBA programs before, and so have been contacted by a slew of recent MBA grads in recent months inquiring about opportunities in the B.C. business scene. After congratulating them for completing the rigorous program, I had to give them some deflating advice.

Get over yourself, I tell them. You still don't know anything about today's business.

This is my standard view of MBAs. They've bought the whole package that the training confers on them a kind of priesthood status, and they can move right in and run or manage a business.

This is the underlying message in b-school marketing: Shell out 50 to 80 Gs a year for our program, and you'll instantly become a high-level manager earning bundles.

In some cases, that's true – if you work for any arm of government, which automatically raises your pay grade for any advanced degree. But in most cases it isn't.

Big companies – especially banks – usually hire MBAs because they know they've been trained in the best practices of big companies and so make good functionaries and maybe even analysts – some day.

But business is changing, and today, more and more companies want strategic or innovative or entrepreneurial thinkers who can see the big picture as well as individual details. I'm thinking of the chief of one of the biggest business intelligence operations in the world who bluntly told a consulting firm he kept his company private because he didn't want some "know-nothing 25-year-old investment banker with an MBA" running his company.

BC especially is an entrepreneurial business scene. But I haven't met too many MBAs who were pleased with the entrepreneurial training they received, if they had any at all.

So if your aim is to be a cog in a big company, and fight your way up, great, go for it.

If you want to work with entrepreneurial businesses, you're going to have to start learning all over again.

Am I alone in this kind of thinking?

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The myth of pixelheads

David Jordan is associate editor of BCBusiness.

I can’t help but respond to Susan Hollis’s post of August 6: “A bookish balance.”

Thanks, Susan, for speaking up on behalf of those of us who still find time for the printed word. Your suggestion that maybe the Internet hasn’t done away with the printed word is a refreshing correction to all the blather about how the Internet has set the globe spinning in a new orbit.

But you write as though the printed word is a historic relic to be preserved as a museum curiosity, as though pre-Internet research was akin to scratching glyphs on a cave wall. Yes, it’s hard to comprehend today, but we did manage to do research in the dark ages, 10 years ago, before the proliferation of personal computers and Web browsers. I worked in a pre-Google newsroom way back in 1998, and it was a little inconvenient at times, but turnaround time was hardly “Paleolithic.” We somehow managed to meet our daily deadlines. (Yes, newspapers actually came out every day—not every eon.)

Rather than suggest that today’s reader may be a hybrid of pre-Internet troglodyte and modern pixelhead, I’d go even further, and suggest that this "new generation of readers and writers addicted to the immediacy and interactivity of the Internet” is entirely mythical. Attention deficit disorder has always been with us, just as there has always been a time to browse for quick entertainment, and a time to read for more substance. These aren’t unique phenomena spawned by the Internet.

I can understand why talk of this “new generation” has gained such traction. Primarily, it makes the new generation feel important. It also makes for entertaining reading and keeps talk-show hosts in business. But ultimately, it’s just fluff spun out of nothing. Yes, the Internet marks a milestone in the history of mass media. But no, it hasn’t spawned a new species of human, unlike any that preceded it.

So here’s to you, Susan, for putting a damper on talk about the death of print. But let’s take it a step further; let’s call a moratorium on talk of this “new generation of readers.”

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Still can't make the big show

The recent sale of Xantrex Technology is an indication that the B.C. clean technology scene is finally reaching a maturity level that has eluded it until recently.

Unfortunately, it's also an indication that the scene still has some way to go before it becomes a player.

Xantrex, along with Ballard Power, the big kahuna of the cleantech and powertech cluster in B.C., agreed in late July to being acquired by French electrical engineering group Schneider Electric SA, in a deal worth close to $500 million.

The deal certainly showed that the B.C.'s emerging cleantech cluster is getting on to the world's radar as almost every industry in every country struggles to realign its energy supplies and usage. Schneider is a global specialist in energy management, and clearly sees Xantrex's leadership in advanced power electronics for the delivery of electricity, especially electricity generated from renewable sources, as a much needed addition to its service and product lineup. This in turn will help it fend off bigger fish who are intent on gobbling it up.

But amid all the congratulatory blather over the deal – and growing a company from $10 million to $500 million is quite a feat – was an interesting commentary about the B.C. situation.

Xantrex chairman Mossadiq Umedaly, who's also chairman of BC Hydro, said his company had to find a buyer to take advantage of opportunities in the global market. Xantrex helped create the renewable power industry and certainly knows it, he explained. But it needed to increase to global weight its supply chain and its sales and service network.

In other words, it was still too small to really make it in a marketplace that's huge and getting much bigger as energy becomes top of mind among the world's big companies.

So while B.C. spawned what we thought was a major league power company, we're really still just minor leaguers.

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A knight goes into the night

A few years ago, I was working with Dr. Geoffrey Ballard on a couple of books that would help explain why he was such a visionary with a magnificent obsession to make the world a better place.

Ballard, who is best known for starting Ballard Power Systems, which introduced a working fuel cell to the world, died recently at 75.

When we talked, we mostly discussed the operation of a science business that earned him these accolades. But we also talked about what made Ballard into a scientific rebel who went against established research methodology and created breakthrough, game-changing innovation.

Ballard was a dreamer who grew up as an only child with aging relatives in Southwestern Ontario. A lonely boy, he spent many hours wandering the fields, imagining himself as an ancient knight duty bound by God to make the world a better place.

It was a mental model he nurtured while performing routine oil exploration tasks around the world and which he held on to during subsequent attempts and failures at starting his own alternative energy companies.

Ballard was a gentle soul who loved to talk to all and sundry about how science and society should work together. But he was was no tilter at windmills: he was a tough, driving man who dragged naysayers along the innovation curve when they (and even he) didn't really know where they'd end up.

In his later years, much of the world forgot about Geoff Ballard's dreams. Due to ill health, he had to retire from the company he started and, after a brief period as a stock market darling, it eventually crashed back to earth. Even Ballard's automotive fuel cell division has now been sold off.

Our discussions became part of a book, Everything I needed to know about business...I learned from a Canadian, by local tech investors Leonard Brody and David Raffa Another book went nowhere. All the agents and publishers who were so interested in the visionary energy hero, had moved on to other trendy subjects.

But, while you might not yet see the results of his dreams in your everyday life, you will. In about 20 years, the old knight's vision of a world without polluting internal combustion engines will become real.

And we'll all be the better for it.

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