How Bad is the Drought of 2007?

More than a third of the United States is in the grip of a menacing drought that threatens to make it’s way into Illinois and other Midwestern states before the summer ends.

This has been the driest spring in the Southeast since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee are experiencing a level D4 drought, the most extreme level charted and the worst in the nation.

Experts blame the Southeast’s drought on a persistent high-pressure system that has kept rain away from the area.

After nearly a decade of drought in parts of the West, the nation’s fastest growing region wrestles with rising water demands and declining supply.

The winter snowpack in the Sierra Nevada range was only 27% of normal this year.

Severe dryness across California and Arizona has spread into 11 other Western states.

On the Colorado River, the water supply for 30 million people in seven states and Mexico, the Lake Powell and Lake Mead reservoirs are only half full and unlikely to recover for years.

Los Angeles County is on track for a record dry year with only 21% of normal rain downtown since last summer.

California ranchers are selling cattle or trucking them out of state as grazing grass dries up.

No. 6 June 2007

In a recent study of top sales achievers by Tom Reilly titled “Best Sales Practices,” he discovered that “Top salespeople spend 60 percent of the time on a sales call listening to customers.” That’s how they gain an in-depth understanding of their customers’ needs. Then, it’s easy to provide their customers products that meet their needs and solutions that ease their “pain.”

But he also said that listening is one of the toughest things for salespeople to do. He said, “Listening is tough because it means your focus must be on the other person, not on yourself. Listening means you’re having a conversation with your customers — a dialogue, not a monologue. And if the customer is talking more than you are talking, it means the conversation is focused on your customer’s world. And that’s good, because it means you don’t have to tell the customer everything you know about your product or company; you only have to tell him what’s relevant to meet his needs.”

Would listening more to your customers have a positive impact on your sales?

I just saw the announcement from Echo and Shindaiwa regarding their new business alliance. The alliance involves buying $2 million of each other’s shares (Echo’s parent company Kioritz and Shindaiwa are both listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange). And they will work together to “develop and implement future mutually beneficial product and operational programs.”

Why would these two companies want to form an alliance? Chuck Kitazume, president and CEO of Kioritz, specifically mentioned “the rising cost of product development and the need to meet changing worldwide environmental standards.” Y. Asamato, president of Shindaiwa in Japan, mentioned “the entry of low-priced products from China and other developing countries.” He also said, “Substantial investment and advanced technology will be required to meet these new competitive challenges.”

It’s amazing how our world is changing and requiring big and small companies to make paradigm shifts in how they develop, source, and manufacture product. Although both presidents state that their companies “will retain their unique identities in the marketplace and remain autonomous companies,” I wouldn’t be surprised that at some point in the future an even closer alignment would make a lot of sense.

You’ve probably read a lot about the coming worker shortage in North America. Usually, it’s mentioned in an article about the large number of Baby Boomers — retiring over the next 20 years — taking their skills and knowledge with them. I just finished reading an article titled “It’s 2008 — Do You Know Where Your Talent Is?” by Deloitte Research, which touched on how we’ll be affected by skills’ shortages and presented some startling examples of what’s going on in our secondary education system.

For example, did you know that “between 1998 and 2008, U.S. colleges will graduate 198,000 students with degrees in science and engineering to fill the shoes of 2 million Baby Boomer engineers and scientists scheduled to retire?”

A disturbing fact about secondary education is that in “the United States, only 70 percent of high-school students graduate, and only 32 percent of those graduating qualified to attend a four-year college.”

“For African-Americans and Latinos, the graduation rate is only about 50 percent, and only 20 percent of these two groups leave high school with the qualifications to continue their education at the college level.”

Comforting news about our educational system is hard to find these days.

In a recent Manpower Inc. survey of 2,400 U.S. firms, 41 percent said they’re struggling to find qualified workers for at least one position.

The top-10 list was as follows: 1) Sales, 2) Teacher, 3) Mechanic, 4) Technician, 5) Management/Executive, 6) Truck Driver, 7) Driver/Delivery, 8) Accountant, 9) Laborer, 10) Machine Operator. Mechanics included a sub-category called small-engine mechanics. Manpower found that, overall, more mechanics are retiring than there are replacements available.

Generally, Manpower also found that many job seekers lack sought-after skills; there is an increasing number of retiring or soon-to-be-retired Baby Boomers; and lower birthrates are not keeping up with the number of retirees.