If you want to achieve anything extraordinary, you need to question everything. If you want better insight, you need to ask good questions. How do you ask good questions?

Read Want to be the best in your field? Analyze everything, and Ask Better Questions. Here’s how.

Read What Does a Futurist Do? How Can A Futurist Help Me?

Read Who wears the cape in your stories?

I am to blame for America’s achievement gap.

Here’s how I know.

In the 1990s I was a volunteer at Iowa’s Business Horizons, a weeklong business camp for high school juniors and seniors. I had all the problems you would expect from a novice trying to corral hormones-in-tennis-shoes into being interested in business … for an entire week … in the heat of the summer.

It was a disaster….

Read I am to Blame for the Achievment Gap

This morning, Richard Florida appeared on NPR and suggested that service workers need higher wages:

“[...]sooner or later we’re going to have to develop strategies in our country to boost the wages and salaries of the more than the 60 million workers who deliver our services, who prepare our food, take care of our homes, wait on us in stores. We’re going to have to make their wages higher if everyone’s going to prosper.”

A month ago, I blogged about America’s shrinking middle class and did a little calculation. If Henry Ford were alive today and launched the 2013 equivalent of his 1914 $5-a-day scheme, front-line workers would be earning $14.32. That’s 45-94% higher than our current minimum wage.

Richard came up short in suggesting an increase in the national minimum wage, which is a shame. It’s a policy improvement that is overdue.

Read Richard Florida, Henry Ford, and Minimum Wage