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and services that make others more comfortable, more productive, better educated, more entertained, healthier, and more secure—and finding ways to make these goods and deliver these services in America. American cities and towns cannot just sit around hoping Ford, Boeing, or Intel will come and build a five-thousand-worker factory there. Those big plants are scarce already, and they are going to be even scarcer in the age of robotics. What a town needs to thrive today is a hundred people starting companies that employ twenty-five people each, and twenty people starting companies that employ fifty people each, and five people starting companies that employ three hundred people each.

In short, we need as many people as possible to be creative creators and creative servers. Some can do that by inventing a new product, others by reinventing an existing job, and others by delivering a routine service with some extra passion, a personal touch, or a new insight. This is what every employer is now looking for. If you have any doubts about that, just ask them. Or just turn the page.

FIVE

Help Wanted

“What are you looking for in an employee today?”

We put that question to four employers: one who employs low-skilled white-collar workers in India; one who employs high-skilled white-collar lawyers in Washington, D.C.; one who employs green-collar workers all over Afghanistan and Iraq (the U.S. Army); and one who employs blue-collar workers all over the world (DuPont). No matter what color the collar, all four employers gave nearly identical answers. They are looking for workers who can think critically, who can tackle nonroutine complex tasks, and who can work collaboratively with teams located in their office or globally.

And that’s just to get a job interview.

That’s right. The employers we interviewed consider all those skills “table stakes” today—merely the conditions of entry for a new job. Now they also expect all the workers they hire to think of themselves along the lines of what we’ve called “creative creators” or “creative servers”—people who not only can do their assigned complex tasks but can enhance them, refine them, and even reinvent them by bringing something extra. By listening to what these employers say, and what they are seeking in employees, we can understand the urgency of the need to adapt our education system to compete and thrive in the hyper-connected world.

“We have never asked so much from people as we are going to now—leaders and led,” argues Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, advises executives on leadership. “Today, we are asking every American to climb his own Mount Everest and make that cell-phone call from the peak: ‘Mom, guess where I am.’ In today’s hyper-connected marketplace, to be a leading company, now a company has to be a company of leaders—every individual has to contribute significant value and impact.”

Herewith, the new help-wanted section.

White-Collar Indian

In February 2004 Tom went to Bangalore, India, to make a documentary program on outsourcing for the New York Times–Discovery Channel. Part of the documentary was filmed at the outsourcing company 24/7 Customer and its call center, manned by hundreds of Indians doing what were then relatively low-wage white-collar service jobs via long-distance phone lines. Late at night—daytime in America—the room was a cacophony of voices, with young Indian men and women trying to fix someone’s Dell computer or straighten out a credit card account or sell a new phone contract. It was a cross between a coed college dormitory and a phone bank raising money for the local public TV station. There were 2,500 twentysomethings, some with college degrees, some just out of high school, working either as “outbound” operators, selling credit cards or phone minutes, or “inbound” operators, tracing someone’s lost luggage or dealing with computer glitches.

Seven years later, the company’s founder, PV Kannan, told us that we would not recognize his office today. “To begin with, it’s a lot less noisy,” he explained. That is because much of