It is telling, that on Labor Day number 12 on Alexa’s top 30 search terms was ‘Make Money Online.’ The point is that Americans are desperate for work. The fact is that millions of Americans want to work and are perfectly willing to do any number of tasks, but after 80 years of relative prosperity we may simply be unable to remember how.

According to Wikipedia, the purpose of Labor Day was originally outlined in 1884 as “[a holiday] to exhibit to the public ‘the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.’”Since then, membership in trade and labor organizations (which once stood at nearly 40% of the American public) has fallen to just over 12%. Clearly, the esprit de corps of working class Americans is lacking something.

As the son and grandson of union members, I propose that what is lacking is a common understanding and acceptance of the values that once made working class Americans the most powerful influence in the United States and the world. What is lacking is work-ethic.

Work-ethic is more than just a willingness to work. Work-ethic(s) are those values that make it possible to work for, with and to the benefit of others. In The A Game’s last post our President, Matt Smith, recounts his observation that the problem resides not in the older or younger generations, but in the middle generation where, as parents, we have failed to instill appropriate work-ethic values in our children.

As parents we’ve taken our work-ethic values for granted and neglected our responsibility to give our children the best educations we can. As true leaders, our first responsibility is to admit it when we simply aren’t adequate to a task because we lack the skill, knowledge or time to complete it. We cannot begin to re-build America’s work-ethic and economy without first acknowledging that we need help.

The A Game is designed to be a resource for parents, educators, workforce advocates and employers who recognize that re-building the American work-ethic starts with leaders like them; it starts with a desire to help our children bring their A Game to work.

Other than the sun, I do believe in the significance of Memorial Day.  It’s a time to honor those who work to tirelessly to preserve our freedom and died fighting for us.  While a little bit of R & R is nice, the weekend really drives home the how hard others have worked.

On Saturday afternoon, I was outside washing my wife’s car and was able to observe three generations of men hard at work on our neighbor’s yard.  My neighbor was out with his father (grandpa) and his probably 8 year old son.  Watching the modern family ‘work’ together made me think about the time honored traditions of hard work and what, sadly, could be in store for the future.

To make the story short, the grandfather was doing most of the heavy lifting and had the vision for the project.  The dad was doing a great job at ‘supervising’ as he watched his son and father toil with heavy loads of dirt, pecking away at his Blackberry.  The son, while he was doing a good job at shoveling dirt, told Grandpa that he was doing a poor job and called him stupid at least 4 times in the 35 minutes I watched.

This may be an isolated incident, but it made me sick to my stomach to see a father stand by while his son belittled his grandfather and didn’t even say thank you to his dad for helping all day.  This same father told his 8 year old son that he could be done working after about ½ an hour (I think because he was annoying him) and let him go play with friends.

I know this isolated incident gave me a few reminders we can use at home or at work to help ourselves and others work:

1. Respect for Elders is a Lifelong Value-  They may be old and not understand our technology, but their wisdom will always surpass us.  At work or at home, an elder holds a special status they have earned.  Show them respect and learn from them.

1. Rewarding Poor Work Doesn’t Create Good Work- Letting employees off the hook because you can do it better yourself is no excuse.  Hold them accountable for working until the job is done right.

1. Hard Work Breeds Hard Work- Model the behaviors you want people to follow.  Pick up the darn shovel, spatula, garbage can, whatever and help!

While this all may seem like a litany of self-righteous criticisms from an old timer, it is are nothing of the sort. I am a proud member of Gen Y, and I lived through this ridiculous admissions travesty. I played that game, and I went through the expected motions. Even though the admissions process is a necessary evil, I do think there is hope. There is a way to subvert the system, simply because admissions committees aren’t as robotic as one would think. They still do want a student to demonstrate and desire an intellectual capacity. Inundated by notions of what the process has become, students just don’t know how to do this.

The only tip I can give to parents is really quite simple. Teach your children to read. Not just that–teach them to love it. And start early. Initially, it doesn’t matter what your child reads, since the learning process is a labor of love. If your child doesn’t start by enjoying it, she’ll be discouraged and she’ll stop before she even begins. As your child becomes more interested in the simple act of reading, encourage books beyond the norm. After all, there’s only so far you can get with reading books of the Stephanie Meyer oeuvre.

How does this all tie in to the college admissions? Simple. If your child is well-read, her writing skills are vastly improved. That helps with application essays enormously. If your child can read and write well, and if she’s been properly socialized from grade school and on, then she can communicate well by proxy. That helps with the admissions interview. Reading promotes a sharp and long attention span, and an attention span is really all you need in order to practice for and ace standardized tests, even the math sections.

The rewards that your child can reap from a love of reading transcend, of course, just university admissions. It will help enormously in successfully finding employment, it will cultivate a peace of mind that combats the ADD-inducing speed of the Internet, and it deepens and expands a well-informed sense of the world around us. What else could be more important?

This guest post is contributed by Katheryn Rivas, who writes on the topics of online universities.  She welcomes your comments at her email: katherynrivas87@gmail.com

You can't spell "hard work" without one or two of the letters in "The Godfather."

“Because this is the business we’ve chosen.” – Michael Corleone

If ever a movie quote more brilliantly illustrated our message about Acceptance, I haven’t seen it. Remember: When employees accept jobs, they’re making an agreement. They’re saying, “I will do A, B, and C in exchange for X dollars.” Included in A, B & C are following the rules of the business. And sometimes that means doing distasteful or disgusting things. Like cleaning drains. Or folding the same t-shirt again and again. Or whacking Fredo.

OK, hopefully not that last one.

“Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter’s wedding… on the day of your daughter’s wedding. And I hope their first child be a masculine child.” – Luca Brasi

So this one maybe doesn’t have quite clear-cut path from A to B that the other one does, but it’s one of my favorite lines from the movie, so I had to work it in. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that its obscure relation to A Game values means it’s irrelevant.

On the day his daughter is married, Don Corleone cannot refuse a favor. He cannot say no. In short, he is providing customer service. Even after the undertaker asks the Don to do murder (this, he cannot do), Corleone still finds a way to honor the request for justice.

Instead of telling young people that the customer is always right (so often we see that they are completely wrong), try telling them to provide customer service like it’s the day of their daughter’s wedding.

*Please note that we do not recognize Godfather III as a Godfather movie. As Joe Pesci put it in Get Shorty: I’ve seen better film on teeth.

In fact, one could say that Wile E. Coyote has a serious tendency to self-destruct in the course of his ill-fated efforts to catch the Roadrunner. And it’s not for lack of equipment. Wile E. always seems to get his hands on the coolest ACME brand rockets, roller skates, and anthropomorphic-coyote-sized-sling-shots.

Despite all the awesome gear he has, Wile E. Coyote just plain stinks at catching that bird.

But failures are often more instructive than successes, and that means that Wile E. Coyote can teach us a whole heck of a lot.

1. When times are tough, a positive attitude is a must

If at first you don’t succeed, you aren’t Chuck Norris.

If you fail again and again and again, you’re probably taking a page out of Wile E. Coyote’s book. But as much as he is to be faulted for his failures, Wile deserves a lot of credit for his attitude. Every time he sets about his task, he’s certain that he’s going to succeed. He never allows a negative attitude to stand between him and a full-fledged effort at catching the Roadrunner. He is the eternal optimist. (Though you might be, too, if you withstand countless explosions and falls from tall cliffs.)

Business often feels like you’re chasing the Roadrunner. Sometimes there’s that last task you just can’t get finished. Sometimes the ground just falls out from under your feet. Sometimes you just want to say [beep] [beep]. But you can’t let that down. Wile E. Coyote wouldn’t be fun to watch if he were always griping about his failures. It wouldn’t be fun to be around him. So, no matter how hard the hits keep coming, if you can keep a good attitude about it, you’re much more likely to be tolerated by the people around you – whether they’re your employees or your bosses.

2. Reasonable goals are important

No matter how great your drive, your spirit, and your ability, you will never be able to jump from Manhattan to Hollywood in a single bound. You probably couldn’t even make it to Jersey.

In business, as in life, goals and ambition are important. They give you something to aim for, something to motivate yourself toward, and a way to measure it. But it’s just as important that you’re setting achievable goals as it is that you’re setting goals in the first place. If you’re shooting too high, you’d just as well be banging your head against a wall.

And this is the problem that Wile E. Coyote has. His goal of catching the Roadrunner (and presumably devouring it, post haste), is out of his league. The bird is too fast, too wily, and just too darned likable to become coyote food. So, no matter how hard the coyote is trying to catch the Roadrunner, the fact is that he should be setting his sights elsewhere.

3. Awesome gear will only get you part of the way.

You have to imagine that the Acme account executive responsible for Wile E. Coyote lives a very comfortable life. The guy has gotten his hands on more sophisticated ballistic equipment than most developing nations will ever have, and that kind of stuff has to cost a pretty penny.

While his account exec. may be living the high life, Wile E. Coyote is pretty much constantly in pain. If he isn’t exploding, he’s falling off of a cliff. And maybe it would all be worth it if he could just catch the bird. But we all know that’s not going to happen.

And the real world is just the same way. It doesn’t matter how good your computers, ingredients, tools, or machines are if you don’t have competent people backing them up. A great team can overcome extraordinary odds with only the most rudimentary of tools. (We got a man to the moon on a spacecraft that had less computing power than my cell phone.)

Smart organizations spend time looking for people who can do the job regardless of the tools they’re given. Great potential employees take the time and energy to show employers that they can do a great job, regardless of the circumstances.

But not very many people bring a book to a job interview.

This isn’t terribly surprising. Your focus is supposed to be on the interview. You’re supposed to wear clothes a step above the everyday dress code. You’re supposed to follow six thousand different pieces of advice, and bringing a book is never one of them.

I’m unclear on why the “bring a book that makes you look like a super-genius” approach to job interviews hasn’t caught on yet.

But here’s the thing about all of that advice: The bottom line is that you’re supposed to get yourself hired. So, whatever works will do the trick.

Our friend DJ went to a job interview the other day. He brought a copy of Bring Your A Game to Work with him, and after discussing what he had learned from reading the book, he was hired. Now, we’re not shy about making it known that our goal is to eventually have every employer require that a teen applying for a job complete A Game Certification, so we took this as great news.

But it also got us thinking. There are tons of great business books out there. So, if you had an applicant walk in the door today, what book would you hire them on-the-spot for mentioning that they’ve read? What book would they have to have read to even get your consideration for the job?

Post thoughts to comments.

TJ Wihera is the Director of Development for the Bring Your A Game to Work Initiative. Contact him via e-mail or check out www.theagame.com. The A Game helps youth learn that work isn’t a bad thing so that they can lay the foundations of great careers.

But one of the most commonly overlooked workplace requirements in all of this is safety. And that’s not really a surprise. You can speak and train endlessly to improve leadership. It’s an in-demand skill that’s hard to find and takes years to properly develop. But safety is a bit dry. It’s deceptively simple. And it’s all-to-easy to think that you’re doing it right. And that seems to be the view from the C-Suite, all the way to the store level.

And with the view that pervasive in management, the natural teenage tendency to move the opposite direction  of authority, safety, prudence, and procedure only makes the problem worse. So, if you’re addressing teens about the issue, you’ve got to hit them where it counts.

Right where it counts.

That’s probably a large part of why workplace accidents are a major problem for employers of teenagers. The statistics are damning – it’s a major problem that no doubt costs businesses buku bucks. And that’s why the Texas Mutual Insurance Company decided to put together a campaign called One Wrong Move to talk to young employees about their safety at work.

You can find the website for the campaign at http://www.onewrongmove.org/index.html

I encourage you to take a look at the site. It’s a great example of ways to reach teens when you’re talking about an important subject that doesn’t have the sex appeal of Facebook or video games.

When you look at the posters and ads, pay attention to the way that the campaign uses real-life examples that will matter to teens. Rather than focusing on time lost at work or the costs to the company, the campaign focuses on the time away from work that will be affected by a bad decision at work. Whether it’s having makeup done embarrassingly or missing play time at sports, the consequences the campaign discusses are painful and very real for a young person.

Additionally, the campaign has a great aesthetic feel to it and it attacks via multiple media, with an online quiz, posters, billboards, a movie theater advertisement, and a radio spot. These are all elements we paid close attention to in creating The A Game’s certification and curriculum materials, so I know how difficult it can be to go through the process of creating a product that speaks to teens in their language and still communicates important messages.

One thing I’d like to see that I don’t see is an element that incorporates text messaging and a little bit more social media (the primary means via which teens communicate), but it’s overall a very well thought out and executed campaign aimed at reaching teenagers. So, whether you’re looking for some inspiration when it comes to reaching teens, or if you need to talk to some of your young employees about safety, or both, take a look at the One Wrong Move campaign.

TJ Wihera is the Director of Development for the Bring Your A Game to Work Initiative. Contact him via e-mail, or check out www.theagame.com. The A Game helps youth learn that work isn’t a bad thing so that they can lay the foundations of great careers.

Here’s the tough part, at least for this guy.  Do you really have the discipline to live your values and have a positive work ethic on a monthly, daily, and even hourly basis?  My assumption, speaking from personal experience is no.

Unless you’re this guy.

Discipline is a hard thing to wrestle with.  There are so many things we could be doing that it can be overwhelming sometimes.  Do I check my twitter feed? Call a prospective client, check e-mail, write a blog post, or develop a new training program? We all face an onslaught of tasks and decisions that involve discipline daily.  It’s also a hard concept because it usually has a negative connotation.  Discipline is NOT doing what I WANT to do in this moment for a long term payoff.  This is completely counter-intuitive to the way our society runs.

So, how do we discipline our daily lives to live the values of work ethic?

Here’s a few simple ideas to start with and I’d encourage everyone to add their top thoughts to the list…

• Discipline Your Schedule-  Jim Collins, in my mind the most prolific business thinker ever, holds such a disciplined daily schedule that he carries a stop watch in his pocket and charts his time on an excel sheet to make sure that he is living true to the priorities he values.  While we don’t all need to carry an extra watch, what about shutting off e-mail, facebook, twitter and just focusing for the first hour of every day on what we value most?  Knowing priorities is a good 1^st step.

• Discipline Your Relationships-  No, this isn’t giving the people you care for tough love, it’s making sure that you share your priorities with people who will hold you 100% accountable for those priorities.  Openly share your goals and challenge close co-workers and friends to hold you accountable for meeting them.  It will eventually manifest itself into holding yourself accountable.

• Discipline Your Gratitude-  Something we all can easily forget is to say thanks to those that help us and show appreciation and willingness to serve.  To live a life of constant appreciation, we need to discipline ourselves to show it more than we get it.  Use any opportunity to show someone how much you appreciate them or simply give them a smile.  Get up and talk to someone vs. texting/sending an e-mail.  It’s not tough to show people you’re here to serve.

How do you discipline yourself to live with great work ethic?  If we want to change others, we need to start with ourselves.

Matt Smith is the President of the Bring Your A Game to Work Initiative. Contact him via e-mail, or check out www.theagame.com. The Bring Your A Game to Work Initiative is a national workplace initiative aiming to rebuild work ethic in young people. Youth can earn mastery level certification to prove that they are work ready, and the adults who teach them, manage them, and care about them can help get them there.

And that’s when it hits you: You don’t have to tell it – you can show it. All you need is a prop.

Props are great tools for training and teaching for a number of reasons. Primarily, they’re great because they can be used to illustrate concepts that are otherwise difficult to explain. But they also contribute a great deal of value to hands-on learners – those of us who learn best when we handle something and play with it. Props can also add variety and fuel engagement with material that would otherwise be challenging.

So, for anyone interested in discussing, teaching, or training young people, props are a must. And when you’re covering a subject that is as abstract and challenging as work ethic, competing against smart phones and iPods for attention, you’re more likely than ever to need props.

Following is a list of five props that everyone teaching or training young people about work ethic should have handy to help make those tough points.

4. Duct tape

“How is duct tape like The Force? It has a dark side, a light side, and it holds the world together.”

It’s universally recognized that duct tape can solve any problem. (I once used duct tape to explain protein synthesis to a classmate in high school.) Keep some handy, because you can demonstrate all kinds of things with a bit of tape. Need a rectangle to illustrate XXXXXX. Bam! Pull off a piece, and you’re there. Need things to hold together to demonstrate the value of teamwork? Bam! Use a piece. Need to show which portion of your customers are repeat customers? Bam! Make a pie chart out of a ring in the middle. The applications are endless.

3. Two candy bars

So, when you’re talking about the real basics of workplace behavior, one of the issues that has struck a chord with young people for quite some time is appearance. (No, this is not a new phenomenon. Five Man Electrical Band wrote “Signs” in 1970.) So, when you’re trying to explain to young people why they ought to dress appropriately and mind their hygiene, you’re already fighting an uphill battle. One of the best ways to really get young people to understand the importance of their appearance is to let them realize just how much appearance matters when we judge something. What you’ll do here is keep one of the candy bars in pristine condition, and really make the other one look disgusting. (A short visit to the microwave is a good start. Then tear the wrapper a bit, and cover it with dryer lint and pet hair.) Ask your charges which they would prefer, then ask them why.

2. A cash register and a mirror

Eye contact is an important part of customer service, and cheerfully serving customers is an important part of service positions. When you’re trying to teach a young person about providing good customer service, set the mirror up in front of the cashier, where a customer would be standing, then let the young person see what it looks like when they’re looking customers in the eyes instead of staring at their register.

1. $$$ Cash $$$

Occasionally, you will meet someone who wants to learn for the pleasure of it. But more often, and particularly when you’re dealing with a topic that has less sex-appeal than how to make flamethrowers, you’ll be dealing with a captive audience. This means that you’ll need to sweeten the pot.

The bottom line of work is that we go because we get paid. Sure, many of us are lucky enough to do something we enjoy, but if we couldn’t get paid doing it, we’d have to get out there and find something that did pay. So, when you’re trying to teach young people about the virtue of hard work, there’s no reason to remove one of its great rewards from your tool box. Even if you’re not giving out the money, using cold, hard cash to demonstrate a point is always going to garner more attention than a bar graph.

TJ Wihera is the Director of Development for the Bring Your A Game to Work Initiative. Contact him via e-mail, or check out www.theagame.com. The A Game helps youth learn that work isn’t a bad thing so that they can lay the foundations of great careers.

Eric here. Stay with me on this one.

At the end of a live presentation, the questions I dread more than any other all fit into the same broad category; parenting. When your topic expertise is teens and young adults in the workspace, people often assume that you must also know the secret formula to managing attitudes, behaviors, and performance at home. Risky assumption, at best.

I am a parent of two and step parent of two children (all now well into their twenties) and I’ve made more than my share of mistakes in the parenting department. Truth be told, I don’t believe there is anyone qualified or worthy of the title ‘parenting expert’, and if there is, I’ve never been in the same zip code with him/her.

That being said, I do feel qualified to call out lousy parents when I see them, and aside from the obvious (i.e. abusers, abandoners, etc.) I am about to point all ten fingers at the idiotic parents who choose to ‘unschool’ their kids.

Unfamiliar with unschooling? So was I until I came across this ABC News report revealing a growing movement among parents to allow their kids to pretty much do whatever the h-e-(double hockey sticks) they want to. That’s right, with this Laissez-faire form of parenting, the kid determines what they think they think is in their own best interests.

And the 150,000 parents who are now ‘unschooling’are not limiting this practice to mature children. Kids, tots, heck, even infants are smart enough to make their own choices, aren’t they? Don’t want to clean your room/eat your veggies/brush your teeth/say please or thank you/ or even go to grade school? Don’t worry; you don’t have to.

Talk about completely destroying a kid’s life! By the time these ‘unschooled’ children discover the choices they made through their youth were bad, the consequences will be catastrophic and many will be irreversible. Meanwhile, the permissive parents who’ve taken the easy path to avoiding all confrontations naively assuming that ‘life’ would do their job for them, are left defending their philosophy with skewed logic and shrugged shoulders.

There’s a common term for unschooled children: ignorant. There’s also a term for parents who allow this: unqualified.

And with the number of parents choosing to unschool children increasing, there’s a term for a society that will not step in and enact strict legislation against this: endangered.

Watch this ABC News report and chime in here with your comments.