Tim Sullivan has a simple definition of the skills gap in Wisconsin. “We have jobs available but no workers qualified to fill those jobs,” Sullivan told Mike Gousha, Marquette Law School’s Distinguished Fellow in Law and Public Policy, during an “On the Issues” session on Thursday. “Quite frankly, it stifles economic development.” Sullivan called the gap “probably the most important thing to kill economic development” in Wisconsin.

When Bucyrus International was sold in 2011 to Caterpillar, Sullivan, who had been CEO and president of the South Milwaukee-based industrial giant, came away in a good personal position. He could have chosen to leave the spotlight. He decided not to seek public office, despite encouragement to do so. But he did not walk away from his willingness to be involved in trying to close that skills gap and change other things that are hurting economic development in Milwaukee and Wisconsin.

Now an unpaid special consultant to Gov. Scott Walker on workforce development and education issues, Sullivan recently issued a report, “The Road Ahead: Restoring Wisconsin’s Workforce Development” that is likely to spur legislative proposals and changes on other fronts in coming months.

Describing what he found in compiling the report, Sullivan told the audience in Eckstein Hall’s Appellate Courtroom that there are more than 600 agencies in the state working on economic development which ought to be reduced to nine and that there is no one with a handle on reliable, up-to-the-minute data on available jobs in the state when software systems that can provide such information are being used elsewhere and can have large benefits.

There were points in researching his new biography, Barack Obama: The Story, when David Maraniss says he was struck by the obvious but profound thought of how amazing the personal story of the current President of the United States is.

In an “On the Issues” session Wednesday with Mike Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy, Maraniss discussed his extraordinarily deep research into the family roots and early life of Obama, touching upon episodes and influences that would not conventionally be associated with a path to the presidency. The suicide of a great-grandmother. An absent father with alcohol problems who abused wives. Several years as a child in Indonesia, living in modest circumstances. A period in Obama’s youth where his two major interests were basketball and marijuana.

Maraniss contrasted the two presidents who have been the subject of high critically-acclaimed biographies that he wrote: Bill Clinton, “who was running for president from the day he was born basically,” and Obama, who “showed no inclination to what he was to become.” Maraniss said he stood in the neighborhood where the elementary-school age Obama lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, and was hit by the thought of “that incredible journey” from there to the White House.