THE ELECTION IS OVER; LET US NOW CONCENTRATE ON THE STEROIDS OF THE FUTURE!

THE ELECTION IS OVER; LET US NOW CONCENTRATE ON THE STEROIDS OF THE FUTURE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 7, 2012

REFERENCE:

This is a reader’s response to “The Dreamer and the Mechanic vie for the presidency of the United States.”  It was written before President Obama had been sucessfully reelected.  My response is after he had won.

A READER WRITES:

We're entitled to our differing opinions. -  Here was mine of Romney to a newspaper editor:

Dear Editor,

Mitt Romney says he wants to create U.S. jobs. Why, then, doesn't he save Sensata-- the Freeport, IL, plant being sent to China by Bain Capital?  OK, maybe Mitt didn’t make the decision to close it but, as the owner of Bain, wouldn’t he have the influence to stop it?

That would seem the patriotic (as well as the Christian) thing to do. - The greedy corporatist thing to do is move a profitable U.S. company to China solely to squeeze out more bottom-line profit… while ignoring the plight of 200 Freeport families ABOUT TO LOSE EVERYTHING!  How does closing countless companies and pirating their pension funds make someone a good businessman??

The Bain folks aren’t entrepreneurs, building something from nothing.  They are vulture capitalists…  one-trick ponies that can buy and sell and strip and flip to maximum advantage, primarily, because they lack human decency and compassion. They’re snake-oil salesmen, only giving lip service to core values. Is that the type of person we want running our country?

Foreign countries & global corporations are spending billions to elect Romney/ Ryan for their own reasons, not ours. Please show them that your vote’s not for sale. - Vote to keep America moving forward with Obama/Biden for four more years.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

What you say in a sense is true, and certainly from your perspective.  I've no doubt of your sincerity.  The president has won reelection.  Let us pray that his last four years are successful.  My remarks here are “My Way of Looking at Things.”

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Mitt Romney misrepresented himself as a "job creator."  He might better have addressed the nation with the skills with which he had succeeded so well (not at Bain Capital) in running the Olympics and as governor of Massachusetts.  Those skills are in short supply in our nation's capital. 

Not being an ideologue, either Democrat or Republican, my views range closer to his, which are those of the moderate.  We need moderates now but seem disinclined to be enamored of them.  Governor Nelson Rockefeller comes to mind; a Republican that could never get nominated much less elected, but probably would have been an FDR like president.  Oh, well!   

He is a good and decent man, and as a mechanic, the quintessential manager.  He is perhaps not exactly right for the times, but my sense is neither is the dreamer I describe President Barak Obama to be. 

President Obama is a lame duck president now, and can do some real things, but as I point out subsequently here much of it can only be initiated because we have far too deep a hole to dig ourselves out of, and it is not only economic but also technological. 

I was a consultant, certainly not in the realm of Romney, but all consulting is more about efficiency then anything else.

Consultants are hired to do what those in charge either lack the moxie or the courage to do on their own.  It is easier to pass it off to outsiders. 

Yes, with consulting, jobs are lost and/or combined, obsolescent plants and equipment or practices are scuttled, operations are merged to make them more competitive. 

I got out of mega consulting early because I found myself increasingly seeing that we justified our fees on the basis of the "savings" accrued mainly through job elimination.  Obviously, we made recommendations beyond such contretemps but recommendations largely ignored as our consulting -- for those in charge -- was too often an end in itself to show workers and executive boards "that they were doing something" when they weren't at all.

On the positive side, it was a learning experience. 

This was work after I came back from South Africa and before I earned my Ph.D. but while going to school consulting on the side.  In graduate school, I was studying social, organizational and industrial psychology.  The answers sought in that work were best found in the trenches talking to workers, not in academia and certainly not with management.

The doers in the trenches not the executives at the top knew what was working and what was not, who was working and who was not, what needed to be changed and how that could best be done.  You find this incredible?  Well, it was true.

It is the basis of "Work Without Managers" (1991), which was to be written a score of years later. 

Most of what I learned about organizational development (OD) was on the job as a consultant talking to workers, not managers, not to academics in graduate school.  I never had a professor who knew the working world I had come out of first hand.  Academia and academics were therefore a disappointment.  I found academia very much the same factory cage that enclosed the executive ranks of most companies in boardrooms.    

We had since WWII created a workplace culture in which those that knew what was what had been programmed, because they were in the trenches, to take orders not to confront management, to be safe hires not trend setters, to let management make demands that might prove counterproductive while feeling no compunction to challenge those work orders.  Workers instead echoed the refrain, "Not my job!"

On the other hand, I discovered I had a gift -- perhaps because of my working class roots -- to get these perceptive workers to talk to me.  I would in turn relay that to the head of the consulting company to which I was a member, some of it was then filtered at that level before being presented to management -- because the consulting company wanted to get paid and it knew its employer was not geared to accept hard truths.   

When I consulted on my own, I used no filter, and must confess I had mixed results. 

Companies then and companies now don't want to hear of their incompetence.  They have a set of fall guys including the previous management, the economic times, foreign competition, on and on, never current existing practices.   They would rather sell their interest, merge with another company, and carry their winnings off to the bank, then admit any betrayal either of the company or to the workers. 

Consequently, over the decades, workers have become cynical, and the quality of work has faltered because of it.  The greatest motivator in the workplace is not money, not job security.  The greatest motivator is trust.

My experience has been most businesses could be saved if management leveled with workers, asked for their help, and then assimilated that help into actual practices.  My sense is that the best brains in most operations are those quiet faces on the line.

Was Mitt Romney solely responsible for Bain Capital?  My sense is that Bain was doing what such firms do, and that is to find a way to save or convert businesses into being profitable. 

Long before an operation dies, perhaps that is true of the Freeport plant you mention, it is likely to be dying and on life support.  Everyone sees it, the workers, the managers, and the merchants in the area who derive benefit from its operation.  Little or nothing is done.  It is easier to cry "foul" then fight and embrace our fears, easier to complain then to construct positive alternatives, easier to reduce operations to the polarity between labor and management than to pull together, easier to drift toward the dole than make sacrifices now for benefits later. 

The Freeport plant seems a microcosm of small businesses across the country.  Bailouts are not the answer, gut-wrenching reality is.  We are a debtor nation because not only do we live in a dream world much of our enterprise does as well.  We expect optimism to be sufficient currency at the grocery store and scoff at pessimism when both have the same currency value. 

When such a plant is salvaged, usually there isn't much to be salvaged.  To find a way to give it new life, which is the creative destructive formula of capitalism, chances are it will move towards cheap labor.  In our culture, the one who picks up the pieces of a failed enterprise, not the sleeping dogs who operated the obsolescent operations for years, are the bad guys.  You cannot run a business on the audacity of hope, but can on the courage of fiscal policies that show a profit.  Romney did create companies that made it into the competitive ranks (Staples for one), and of course jobs were a result of that success. 

The consulting business is one of those corporate creations that have grown out of specialization and fragmentation.  My sense is that we are now moving back to the cottage industries of the past but with a science fiction toolkit where mega corporation prove increasingly anachronistic. 

The current issue of Foreign Affairs (November/December 2012) has a tantalizing article, "How to Make Anything: The Digital Fabrication Revolution That's Turning Science Fiction into Industrial Fact" (Neil Gershenfeld of MIT, pp 43-57). 

This article is telling us that cumbersome factories are of the past and that precise manufacturing is going to science fiction perfection.  It means far far less workers doing grunt work, far far less workers who bring their bodies to work and leave their minds at home, and far far more systemically skilled workers with brains and manual dexterity with 3-D perception. 

We don't have many such workers today.  Our schools are not turning them out.  A president cannot make a wish list and see it transmute into instant super manpower reality.  Our dreamer-reelected president must keep this in mind.

Tom Friedman of "The World is Flat" fame reported the other day that a small metal fabrication plant in Wisconsin advertised for welders with very specific requirements in the ad for what skill base was needed.  They expected at least 800 responses; they got twelve with only one welder having the math (geometry/trigonometry acumen) and engineering (mechanical) skills to do the work required. 

Even welding isn't welding anymore. 

We are in for a very bumpy road which cannot be avoided because parents aren't doing their jobs motivating their children to study the tough courses in school, and schools are not offering much less presenting these courses to students in a way that they might be appealing other than to the college bound.  Everyone today should appreciate that they are part of the technology age.  Math and science are the steroids to the future.

Thank you for your candor and well defined views.  I always appreciate hearing from you.

Be always well,

Jim

PS I voted for Mitt Romney.  I see a lot of myself in him and see little of myself in the president.  Some think me more the dreamer, but I believe BB will tell you I am more the mechanic.  I wish the president well, and at the same time, am proud of the vigorous campaign that Mitt Romney conducted.  The people have decided, so lets get on with it!

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