• The wealthiest 1 percent sees their income dramatically outpace others;
• Men in their 30s today earn less than their fathers did in the 1970s;
• A parents’ economic success is one of the biggest pointers to their children’s future economic success.

Those are key findings of a study that evaluates economic mobility, or the ability of a person to move up or down the economic ladder within a lifetime or from one generation to the next.

“To be sure, the apple can fall far from the tree … [but] the tree dominates the picture,” the study says. “In modern America, upward mobility is increasingly a family enterprise.”

Though the conclusions are grim, they don’t come as a great shock. What we found surprising was the source of the report: a consortium of conservative think tanks including The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

The report, “Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?” argues that a successful democracy needs upward mobility.

But the data demonstrates that this is not happening. In 1974, men in their 30s earned $40,000 a year (inflation-adjusted dollars) but the same group in 2004 saw their real wages decline 12 percent to $35,000 a year.  ”Between 1978 and 2005, CEO pay increased from 35 times to nearly 262 times the average worker’s pay,” the study finds.

And despite dramatic increases in productivity, particularly since 2000, wages have remained relatively stagnant. Technology has certainly made it easier to be more productive at work but previous generations were rewarded with a raise.

In the past, decade Americans experienced a jobless recovery right after dot-com bust and 9/11. Now we have much higher employment but static wages across much of the non-executive part of the workforce.

This is compounded by the assertion that, among their counterparts in the industrial world, Americans are the least likely to advance based on their own merits.

Why do you think nations such as Denmark, Germany and Sweden have greater economic mobility? With unemployment rising rapidly do these statistics matter to you?

One blinding flash of the obvious that is often missed, and that could be extremely pertinent in the age of employee engagement, is “Engagement requires thinking.”  In my experience, many employee engagement approaches are still one-way communication efforts on steroids that fail to tap into the ability of employees to think and act differently.  At a time when study after study confirms that only about 20% of employees are engaged in their current work, it’s hard not to conclude that something’s not working!  Maybe “having a best friend at work” isn’t the determining factor.  Why are so many employees simply checked out at the place where they spend 40% of their waking lives…at work?

Let’s start with a key premise that’s often missed in engagement efforts - that we want to solve problems ourselves.  From Sudoku to mystery novels to crosswords, we all love the challenge of solving a puzzle.  Obviously, we could just turn to the back of the book and get the answer or read the final page.  But what’s engaging about that?  We want the intellectual and emotional experience of finding a sense of achievement in our own thinking.  When people get a chance to solve their own puzzles, they own the result.  And owners think, act, and engage differently from non-owners.  They’re vested, they’re passionate, they won’t take no for an answer, and they’re willing to put in more effort than is required.I once talked to an employee at a large Canadian bank just after she was given her first opportunity in 15 years to actively think about her business.  In an “official” group discussion, she was asked to compare and contrast major marketplace trends and consider competitive threats, industry consolidation, and consumer expectations.  The experience was a real eye-opener for her - and for her leaders.

She told me, “You know, learning and engagement require thinking.  In the past, people have tried to persuade me to do things differently in order to improve the business.  But they never asked me to think about the business.  This is the first time I’ve ever learned anything here - the first time I have really been engaged in solving our problems.  Now that I’ve had a chance to actually think about our business, I’m beginning to change my ideas about how it works and my role in it.”

And it’s not just intellectual - engagement is emotional.  You can’t possibly be engaged if someone else is trying to draw your conclusions for you.  You need the “emotional aha.”  You need to feel like you’re totally in the game by really feeling what the business needs, figuring out how you can help, and realizing why you make a difference.  The woman at the bank felt valued because her company offered her a challenge instead of spoon-feeding her a solution.  That showed her that her leaders believed that she had the ability to think.  And this energized her and created a sense of belonging, pride, ownership, and desire to go the extra mile.

Most organizations attempt to execute their strategies by doing all the thinking for their people - and then trying to persuade them to dedicate their heads, hearts, and hands to bring the strategies to life.  Our 20% engagement statistic should loudly tell us that this doesn’t work!

So to be engaged means that you know what you need to do as well as why you’re doing it.  But if you’re a leader at any level in your organization, how do you get people there?  Abraham Maslow said, “The great tragedy of the human race is the history of people selling themselves short.”

To apply this to business engagement, I’d say, “The great tragedy of the engagement movement is the history of leaders selling their people short.”  By telling employees what the answers are - solving the business puzzles - we are giving them only the answer key and depriving people of the chance to think about truly engaging in the business differently.

Jim Haudan is the CEO and founder of Root Learning.  His new book, The Art of Engagement (McGraw Hill, August 2008), explains how organizations can close the gap between their aspirations and actual, tangible results.

Aimed primarily at recent (and impending) college grads, Bunko is a graphical story told in illustrated panels. Pink says it is the first US business book rendered in the Japanese “Manga” style - an entertaining, fanciful yet unintimidating way to assimilate information.

Pink’s hero is stuck in a dead-end job. One night, as if in a fairytale, a hot looking (give or take her pointy ears) career adviser named Diana shows up at his office offering to show him the way to a better life. Bunko summons his mentor by rubbing chopsticks. (Don’t over-think that one.)

Diana badgers him a bit, but Bunko needs both a push and encouragement.

Pink, who authored A Whole New Mind and Free-Agent Nation, is a gifted writer and perceptive thinker (well known to FC readers). Unlike old-school business gurus, Pink doesn’t do all of the thinking for you - he leaves some room for you to flesh out his ideas. The corporation isn’t the center of gravity in his writing - it’s what’s best for the reader.

Along the way, our everyman hero discovers key lessons of a successful career:

• There is no plan
• Think strengths, not weaknesses
• Persistence trumps talent
• It’s not about you
• Make excellent mistakes
• Leave an imprint

One of the most perceptive observations in the book is that where you work is almost more important than what you do there - at least to begin with.

“The most successful people … take a job or join a company because it will let them do interesting work in a cool place - even if they don’t know exactly where it will lead,” advises Diana.

Pink draws a distinction between taking a job for “instrumental” reasons - “because you think it’s going to lead to something else”,  versus “fundamental” reasons - “because you think it’s inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to.”

And he adds (through Diana’s voice) that, “The Dirty Little Secret is that instrumental reasons usually don’t work. You never know what’s going to happen so you end up stuck.”

Less clear is how Bunko or the rest of us will “leave an imprint” in this world. I hope that blogging qualifies as an imprint. Rob Ten Pas’ Manga story illustrations in “Johnny Bunko” are hip and fun.

As business schools race to add global curriculum, dozens of new alumni-education programs and executive education courses suggest that there is a market waiting to be served - expensively and immediately.

One of the more interesting new programs stems from a firm that has been evangelizing the discipline of global leadership for years, the Center for Creative Leadership, a non-profit executive education group. CCL, as it is known, is launching a program in October called Advancing Global Leadership.

“What makes this program unique is a business simulation,” says Mike Kossler, CCL Senior Enterprise Associate. He says the US$3,500 program will run simultaneously in Brussels, Greensboro, N.C. and Singapore. The three sites will collaborate to “simulate what it’s like to work in a global environment and lead a dispersed team.”

This won’t be just another day at the MNC office. The simulated company will be in a crisis and the teams will have to respond in real-time - distributing the workload as needed.

As CCL’s own research illustrates, global business might better be called undomesticated for the stresses it places on participants. I don’t think organizations prepare their managers and leaders to be effective global leaders,” asserts Kossler, who consults on global leadership issues, often for MNCs. “A lot of people learn their global roles by trial and error.”

Of course, as we have reported, there are other intriguing global executive programs available. The Global Leaders Program: Growing and Innovating in a Flat World is a global executive leadership program launching this summer in India and the U.S. Produced by two of the world’s top business schools, Global Leaders is staffed by professors from the Indian Institute of Management - (IIM-A) and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Students will spend eight days in Ahmedabad, India, followed by eight days in North Carolina.

Sounds cool but the price tag is a lofty US$19,000. Do you have that much headroom on your AmEx?

For more information about global careers, check out our free Global Ready? skills assessment test, and Global Virtual Management, a free, self-guided Careers Primer that identifies best practices in globally-distributed enterprise.

As a boss your first instinct is to rattle their cage. But what will that accomplish?

Employers fret about holding onto Gen Y workers who may be less inclined than previous generations to stick around through thick and thin.  Given the cost of recruiting young talent, employers are understandably concerned about return on investment - keeping an employee long enough for them to develop into strong contributors.

Still, loyalty isn’t part of the “deal” any more between employers and employees, so it’s no surprise that, according to a new study by Taleo, an HR software company, 41% of those who are no longer working for their first employer out of college left in less than two years. That doesn’t strike me as an epidemic - a lot of first jobs simply aren’t good fits.

Taleo teamed with Harris Interactive to conduct a survey of 2,045 adults ages 18 and older, a series of questions about their first jobs and first employers.

Three out of five respondents said that their first employer did not provide a clear path for advancement. Of course, the reality is that few employers provide a clear path to anything, much less to the corner office.

Other key findings:

• Describing how their first job made them feel, 13% said they couldn’t wait for Friday to arrive, 10% wanted to quit every day and 8% felt it was a waste of their time
• 19% of 18-34 year olds wanted to quit their first job every day, compared to 3% of those 55 years old and over

There’s no real way of telling from the data whether first jobs are worse than they used to be, or whether employers or employees are primarily to blame for the gap between expectations and experience.

How well do you remember your first job? I wasn’t thrilled and I wasn’t miserable but knew I wanted to move on before the first year was complete. There isn’t always a retention solution for an employer, but money helps a little.

Maybe the survey results will strike you differently. As for me, I can’t wait for Friday to arrive and I love what I do.

Just ask the founders of Google and Yahoo! But then again, when friends ‘break-up’ at work, whether it’s a legal partnership, two chefs at a bistro, or heads of a public company such as Disney, it can cause a permanent rift in the relationship. The truth is it’s risky to work with friends.

Yet it turns out that working with friends - or befriending co-workers - can enhance your job performance. Nearly two-thirds of employees believe that office productivity improves when co-workers are friendly outside of the office, according to a recent study by Accountemps, a staffing company for financial services professionals.

For many of us, friends are magnets that lure us to a new job and the ties that bind us when we might otherwise break away. Yet balancing the chemistry of friendships on and off the job is often a bit of an ordeal.

“Usually it is friends who take things personally,” says Juliana Gidwani, former marketing manager at neoIT, a consultancy in San Ramon, Ca. “It’s harder for a friend to rationalize business decisions.” Gidwani concedes that it’s easier to be friendly with co-workers - rather than to become close friends with them.

“It’s fun to work with friends, but it’s even more fun to start work at a new job and become friends with my co-workers,” says John Eckhouse, Editorial Director of Modern Media, a conferencing and branding company in Oakland, Ca. “Good friendships created at work often outlast the job.”

In Eckhouse’s case, his boss is also a long-time friend and co-worker. “When you disagree on strategy or tactics or who to hire or who to layoff - it can strain the friendship,” says Eckhouse. He jokes that it would be tougher if his boss was also his spouse.

Just how easy is it to blow up a friendship at work? I’ve experienced it before, but then I didn’t have the benefit of reading James Mitchell’s practical work-friendship rules, which he sets forth in a post called “How to Prevent WWIII While Working With Friends.” Mitchell suggests that you do not:

• “Drudge up the past. This will get you nowhere.
• Storm out of the room. Leaving the situation won’t make it go away.
• Throw your hands up in disgust and say, ‘I’ve had it, I quit!’ In most cases, you really don’t mean it, so don’t say it.
• Think of ways to get even. It may temporarily feel good, but will certainly eat away what friendship existed.
• Apply the war to the friendship. You’ve heard ‘don’t bring work home’ likewise don’t bring work into your friendship.”

Do you want to work with your friends or simply make new friends on the job? Despite the possible negative outcomes, if you work with friends, there’s usually someone who will join you for lunch.

What’s typically at stake for employees is a cash reward and heightened organizational stature - a big step toward a promotion. If the organization fails to come through even star employees head for the exits.

Unfortunately, HR experts say two pervasive problems undermine employee trust in rewards programs. First, there is often a lack of transparency into the rewards process and second, there is fuzziness about what it takes to qualify.

A study of HR executives by Towers Perrin finds that rewards programs are “not meeting talent and people management needs effectively, especially in attracting and retaining people across the organization.”

What’s the answer? Job seekers who want to work for a world-class employer should look for a “recognition culture,” says Eric Mosley, CEO and co-founder Globoforce, a software company that specializes in employee recognition programs, often for multinationals.

If recognition matters to you, Mosley suggests some questions to ask when you’re checking out a potential employer:

• Does the employer apply for the annual Best Places to Work Institute awards?
• Does the employer set a target for every manager to give out recognition awards? Mosley says it is in management’s best interest to recognize their best performing team or department members.
• Have they (your interviewer) given awards before? Ask them to tell you about it.
• Does the company typically notify co-workers or keep it quiet when an employee achieves recognition for extraordinary work?

Will this line of questioning work in a job interview? “If they have a working recognition culture,” says Mosley, “they will be able to describe awards they have won or given and the impact it has had on their culture.”

If you’re going to give away the best years of your life, it’s a good idea to do it at a company with a strong recognition culture.

A former professional beach volleyball player, software executive and IPO survivor, Trunk reinvented herself a few years ago as an author, blogger and career columnist for Yahoo! Finance and the Boston Globe (The Climb).

It’s not so much that Trunk advocates lying on your resume, what she preaches is closer to spin control, though she doesn’t call it that. “If you’re too honest you sound like a psychopath,” she says. After all, a resume is “not a list of every truth in your life. In my mind it’s absurd that people give advice that says ‘Don’t lie on your resume’ because it’s totally useless advice. ”

The trick she explains is “knowing how to frame your life in a way that is informative but not lying.” For instance, Trunk says she dropped out of a graduate school English program to take a job managing a website for a Fortune 500 company. “It would be ludicrous to put in my resume that I left to pursue a lot of money instead of taking out more Stafford loans,” she says. In her resume, she doesn’t claim to have graduated from the English program, just that she attended.

Trunk makes sharply observed points about changes in the workplace and what this means for job seekers and hiring managers. She is at her most salient when she contrasts and compares generational changes between what the “millennials” want versus the Gen X and Gen Y and Baby Boomers before them. “The workplace divide is no longer between men and women it’s between older and younger people,” she says. “Now it’s young people valuing time vs. older people valuing money.”

The Gen-Ys and Millennials don’t want to climb corporate ladders any more than they want to work sixty hour weeks, says Trunk. Instead they want mentors, time-off and personal development - and many of them are smart enough to negotiate for it right out of college. Seeking more responsibility doesn’t hold the same appeal to the new generations. “Getting promoted is moving along on someone else’s path,” says Trunk. “Young people are all about personalization and customization and generally it’s not going to be a step someone else has laid out for them.”

Getting ahead, says Trunk, entails more emotional intelligence than anything else. “Being likeable matters more than being competent,” she contends. She argues this is, in a way, a good thing. “The idea that we value skills first is tragic and it has lead to backstabbing, hurtfulness and workplaces that don’t care about personal lives.”

Trunk, who enjoys saying things “straight,” strongly advises budding careerists to specialize rather than become generalists. In this sense Trunk’s advice is somewhat akin to the popular concept of personal branding, which she calls typecasting. “People with power need to see you as someone who is extremely good at something, and no one is extremely good at everything, so don’t sell yourself that way to senior managers.” Good point. Although Trunk would be among the first to admit that if one career path isn’t working for you there’s always another worth taking.

Even as the injured veterans undergo treatment or therapy, the Walter Reed Equal Employment Opportunity Office (EEOO) offers classes to help prepare them for careers in information technology (IT) and tech support.  As a part of the Assistive Technology Training Program (ATTP), educators guide participants to develop the knowledge and skills they need to become Microsoft and Network + certified technicians or even engineers.

Early on, the program was a huge success with a number of men and women passing their first level of certification and, more importantly, gaining needed confidence to excel in a new career.  However, many in the program were discharged from the hospital before they were able to complete the program. They were unable to learn the full set of skills necessary to pass certification exams.

Carl Stephenson, the primary educator for the Walter Reed program, began looking for an “on-demand” solution to continue training those who could not be present in the physical classroom.  After evaluating a few collaboration tools, Stephenson chose WebEx Training Center Online Classroom to help extend the reach of the training program.

Today, with the help of WebEx Training Center, educators are able to work with injured soldiers no matter where they are recovering, ensuring that they are able to gain the skills and knowledge they need to pass certification exams.  In addition, WebEx enables participants to continue on with the program to expand their skill set and qualifications by allowing access to advanced new training classes with educators around the country.

Karl Unbehagen is one of the soldiers who have benefited from the program.  One of the original students, Unbehagen suffered from TBI (traumatic brain injury) and worked with Stephenson to gain new skills as well as to meet his goal of returning to active duty.  Today, Unbehagen has 8 IT certifications, is back on active duty and is currently at Fort Hood in Texas preparing to return to Iraq.

Stephen Holden is still in training with Stephenson and plans to leverage the skills and training he has received to start a new career after he retires from the military.  Holden noted that there will come a time when it will be difficult for him to commute to work every day and he values the ability to have a sustainable career from anywhere.

That online collaboration tools have transformed the way millions of people approach their jobs is no secret or surprise; however, it is exciting and inspiring to see the ways it helps injured veterans discover new career opportunities and options.

Bob Lee is senior product marketing manager of WebEx Learning Solutions, Cisco WebEx

Have you ever asked yourself whether you have achieved good work/life-balance?  What criteria do you base your answers on?

Most people tend to connect work/life balance with time or hours spent at work.  While that can be part of it, I would like to challenge your thinking on a deeper level.  I believe it’s about the quality of how you spend your time, not just time itself.  I ask myself: “How rewarded do I feel by what I did today?”

Maintaining balance is an ideal that permeates our lives in multiple ways.  People go to chiropractors when they have a “misalignment” in their body and are looking to be “cracked” back into place.  Generally, when one area is out of alignment it can have a ripple effect upon other parts of the body.  The same thing happens in our lives.  When one area is out of balance, it usually can, and most often does, have an effect (whether we realize it or not) on other areas in our lives.

Consider that job stress doesn’t respect the boundaries of the workplace.  Stress at work can affect how “present” you are with your family at home, which could lead to poor communication and arguments with your significant other, or lead to a lack of sleep, which could affect your physical and mental health, leading to further unhappiness and loss of motivation… and on and on and on.  Do you see how easy it is for a misalignment in one area to affect the balance in the rest of our life?

You now may be wondering how do I know if my work/life balance is in-sync?   More importantly, how can I achieve maximum fulfillment in every area of my life?

Take a few minutes to answer the questions below.  They should provide some insight into how in-balance your whole life may or may not be right now.

1.    Do you go to sleep at night feeling rewarded by what you did that day?
2.    Do you look forward to getting up in the morning?
3.    Are you in control of your stress and anxiety at work? At home?
4.    Are you proud of what you do for a living?
5.    Are you happy with the amount of time you set aside to do the things you love?
6.    Are you spending enough quality time with loved ones?
7.    Are you proud of how you take care of yourself both physically and mentally?

What impact are your answers having on you right now?  What emotions and thoughts are coming up?  Become aware of what has just happened and reflect.  A routine self-check to see where we are at any given moment is important.

These questions are not meant to upset or de-motivate you.  Rather, if you say “no” to any of the above then look at is as a great window of opportunity for you to choose to create a positive change in your life.  These questions are designed to heighten your self-awareness and to help you understand your thinking.  What areas in your life are going really well?  What seems to be missing or off kilter and needs to be “cracked” back into place?  If you drift off course, then actively choose to get back on track.

Ask yourself, what could you start doing more – or less - of?  Which positive change or changes would make the biggest impact in your life?  A professional coach can work with you to help put your life back “in-balance” through awareness, action, accountability and results.

Stephanie Vora is a certified coach who works with motivated professionals to achieve their ideal work/life balance.  She has received a dual certification in Executive and Personal Coaching from New York University and is reachable at mail@stephanievora.com.