In the debate over why the U.S. has been so slow to emerge from the Great Recession, many have laid the blame on what's become known as the skills gap: Despite an abundance of workers, too many simply aren't qualified to fill the jobs available. Even now that hiring is running at its fastest clip since the late 1990s, business and industry groups such as the Chamber of Commerce continue to emphasize the damage the skills gap is doing to the economy. So do a lot of consulting firms.

Over the past decade, Chinese companies have built bulging order books in Africa, cutting their teeth in a part of the world where Western competitors, when present at all, have not brought their A team. The Chinese astutely calculate that the wealth they accumulate in Africa and the lessons they learn will serve them well as they push into bigger, richer, and tougher markets.

There's a custom in Washington that U.S. defense contractors don't talk trash about their competitors, at least not in public. After fiercely competing for multibillion-dollar Pentagon contracts, the winner often placates the loser with a piece of the action. When Lockheed Martin was awarded the contract to build the F-22 fighter jet, it hired Northrop Grumman to build the plane's radar. Boeing won the contract to build the Air Force's KC-46 tanker plane and asked Northrop and Raytheon to contribute key components. Everyone ends up happy. It's how it’s always been done.

When TransCanada first proposed the Keystone XL pipeline in 2008, the company hoped it would be done by 2012 and begin carrying heavy crude from the Alberta oil sands in Western Canada down to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Six years later the pipeline remains in limbo, stymied by Department of State reviews, route adjustments, lawsuits, environmental and economic studies, and (most important) an Obama administration that appears truly divided on the issue. Last month the State Department announced that no decision would come until after November's midterm elections.

When the U.S. economy emerged from the recession in June 2009, productivity was rising at a fast clip. Companies had spent the downturn cutting jobs and were lean and efficient. Productivity—output per hour worked—jumped 5.5 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier as workers did more with less. But as the recovery has chugged on, productivity growth has stalled, averaging less than 1 percent a year since 2011. Workers were actually less efficient in the first quarter of 2014, producing fewer goods and services per hour than they had during the previous quarter.

Retail space isn't what it used to be. More people are browsing and buying online. Stores can get products faster from manufacturers, so they don't need as much space to warehouse inventory. Small businesses are thus moving to smaller storefronts to lower costs.