Scott Walker's Plans For University Of Wisconsin Are Epically Stupid

Gov. Scott Walker plans to cut $300M from the budget of the University of Wisconsin and, if he has his way, will alter its mission from a “search for truth” to “meeting the state’s workforce needs.”  These steps are so fantastically at odds with what the business community, economy and state need from its public university system that no synonym for ‘stupid’ is too strong.

What the Workforce Needs in 2015 is the Ability to Think

I sit on the Executive Advisory Board of the University of Wisconsin’s Grainger Center for Supply Chain Management within the Business School.   I have lectured students at the University on a number of occasions and have a daughter in the freshman class right now.  I love the University of Wisconsin and admire its breadth of thinking, depth of teaching and commitment to developing young people who can reason and lead.  Graduates of the Grainger Center program are thriving in jobs at great companies like Cisco, GE Healthcare and Intel.

I also direct research and content development for SCM World in London, an organization that provides talent development for strategic leaders in global supply chain management.  Our community includes some of the most respected companies in the world from Samsung to Amazon to Caterpillar.  In our research on the people needs of companies like these we have found consistently and decisively that workforce requirements lean toward problem solving, lateral thinking and intellectual agility rather than functional technical skills.

The world of supply chain management is grounded in basics like materials handling, inventory planning, logistics modelling, and purchasing.  Much of the technical foundation is well established and available inexpensively from professional associations like APICS, ISM and the CSCMP.  All offer courses and certifications that are recognized and respected by employers.

What these bodies don’t do is teach young people how to think ahead about trends that may one day make all the difference.

The Next Amazon

Take for example the topic of digital demand.  Amazon and the whole concept of e-commerce did not exist at all as of 1993.  For another ten years e-commerce accounted for low single digit percentages of total US retail sales and as such was ignored by most.  As we have seen since, this phenomenon now so dominates shopping behaviour that virtually nothing in retail looks as it did ten years ago.

The changes ripple back into distribution center design, product packaging, returns policies, pricing dynamics and virtually every other corner of supply chain management.  Success in this retail revolution is very clearly a product of thinking beyond the nuts and bolts of traditional production and inventory control.

This is the blue sky domain of Apple whose sales per square foot dwarf all other retailers worldwide or REI, whose command of omnichannel principles wins unparalleled customer loyalty or Burberry’s whose profitable vertically integrated supply chain rejects the conventional wisdom of cheap apparel imported from China.  The workforce in these companies is anything but an army of disciplined order takers.  They are thinkers, dreamers, and problem solvers who play where the puck is headed, not where it is.

The same thing can be said of other nascent trends like 3D printing, advanced robotics and data analytics.  None of these emerging technologies is anywhere near maturity which means university students will be much more valuable to the economy by asking questions about what is possible tomorrow than by mastering what is already known today.  The best of these kids might just end up launching the next Facebook, Google or Amgen.

The Wisconsin Advantage

Wisconsin is home to some hugely innovative and excellent businesses including Johnson Controls, Harley Davidson, Rockwell Automation and SC Johnson.  Each faces tremendous challenge, but also great opportunity in the dawning digital age.  If the state’s students are deprived of not only 13% of their funding, but also the intellectual freedom to look over the horizon, then some of what makes Wisconsin great will be lost.

The University of Wisconsin, Madison is currently ranked 47th by US News and World Report, with a Final Four basketball team, a Top 15 football team and the #4 women’s hockey team in the country.  Things are pretty good right now in Badgerland.  Why ruin it?