Video: Meet Professor Kochan and the 15.662x Team

Flash and JavaScript are required for this feature.

Download the video from iTunes U or the Internet Archive.

Description: Prof. Kochan contextualizes the course and gives some personal background. The rest of the teaching team, Barbara Dyer, Zeynep Ton, Christine Riordan, Francesca Cicileo, and John McCarthy, introduce themselves and the topics they will cover in the course.

Instructors: Tom Kochan, Barbara Dyer, Zeynep Ton, Christing Riordan, Francesca Cicileo and John McCarthy

I'm the head instructor for 15.662, How to Secure the American Dream for the Next Generation

Workforce.

I'd like to take a little time to tell

you a little bit about myself and why

I'm offering this course.

I've been studying, and teaching,

and working on issues about the nature of work for the last 40 years.

I've never been more concerned about the future of work

than I am right now.

I'm concerned about the need for more jobs, better jobs,

for you and for all people in the next generation.

And so I think we can work together in this course

to explore how you can address these issues

and secure your future as well.

So let me tell you a little bit about my background

so you can understand where I'm coming from.

I grew up on a small family farm in Wisconsin.

We learned at a very early age the importance

of working together, the value of hard work,

and the satisfaction that comes from doing a job very well.

My father only had an eighth grade education,

but he told all of us, my brother and my sisters,

get as much education as you can so that you

can get an occupation and a career that is better than what

farming will be in the future.

That was clearly the best advice I could have ever gotten,

and it worked.

Here I am, many years later, an MIT professor,

thanks to a good education from the schools in Wisconsin

and from the University of Wisconsin.

So in my professional life I've been

fortunate to work with a wide variety of business,

and labor, and government organizations over the years,

and I've been a constant advocate

for improving relations at the workplace,

for getting people to work together,

to think about how the workforce is changing,

and how they need to change to meet

the conditions of the economy, and the society,

and the workforce that we find ourselves in.

And so that's what I want to do in this course:

to engage you, the next generation workers, and those

of us in the baby boom generation who still care

about these issues and want to make

a contribution to a discussion of how

we can improve the workplace.

And I want to especially learn and listen from you.

I'm engaged in writing a book on this topic,

and I want to get your ideas so you help shape

how we're going to change, how we're going to adapt,

and how we're going to create the workplace of the future.

I'm Barbara Dyer, president and CEO of the Hitachi Foundation

and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management.

The Hitachi Foundation focuses on the role

of business in society, with a particular emphasis

on how businesses create social and economic value

in the pursuit of profits.

We'll be talking about start up companies and their motivation

to create a real benefit for society,

and we'll be talking some about traditional businesses,

more long term businesses, and the ways in which they create

social value and environmental value,

and the lessons that can be learned across the spectrum,

from early stage businesses to later stage businesses.

I'm Zeynep Ton.

I'm an adjunct associate professor

at MIT Sloan in the Operations Management group.

I will tell you about how we can create companies

that deliver great value to their investors,

good jobs for their employees, and great value

to their customers all at the same time.

I'm Christine Riordan, a Ph.D. Student at MIT's Institute

for Work and Employment Research.

I am going to be talking to you about how labor unions are

reinventing themselves, and how new forms of worker advocacy

can help support your aspirations for work.

I'm Francesca Cicileo, an undergraduate at MIT.

I'm going to tell you more about what

our generation, the so-called millennials,

say are their goals and aspirations for work,

and their version of the American dream.

Hello, my name's John McCarthy.

I'm a postdoctoral fellow here at MIT's Institute for Work

and Employment Research.

I'm going to be talking to you about freelancing

work, including new technology-mediated work

arrangements that are springing up across the economy.

We're going to look at some of the positive and negative

aspects of these work arrangements,

and also talk about how work institutions might emerge

to ameliorate some of the negative aspects of these work

arrangements.

So I hope we will learn together, and then

let's take our lessons and our message to the broader

audiences, to future leaders, in this country

and around the world.

Free Downloads

Video


Caption

  • English-US (SRT)