Utopia

In many science fiction stores automation nearly always led to greater material possessions AND more leisure time for the average person. This view was predicated on the savings created by more production with less effort being equally shared between all levels of society. So what happened to this utopian view of the future? Simple really, the stories author’s forgot that there is no inherent reason for the people who can keep that wealth to themselves to share with anyone else.

The business owner will always, out of self-interest, attempt to keep as much of the profits for herself as she can. And in their defense, why not? Their efforts in financing the automation, their foresight in making that investment created the ability to make more with less effort.

The one little problem with the idea that the business owner should keep as much of the profits as possible is that any money he pays his employees gets spent to buy the things those employees need to live or to increase their standard of living. That money goes out to other people and ends up coming back as people buying the goods or services of the original company.

The more you keep the less your potential customers have to spend with you.

Selffulfilling Prophecies.

The Southern Poverty Law Center published (6/15/15) an article called “The Criminalization of Black Children in McKinney, Texas, and schools across America” about the police and teenage African Americans that said in part: This brand of “justice” for schoolchildren is anything but colorblind. Study after study show that black children are treated far more harshly than white kids. And the racial disparity has grown dramatically over the past four decades, a period that roughly coincides with the integration of public schools.

I did a Google search and found that in 2008, state and local law enforcement agencies employed more than 1.1 million persons on a full-time basis, including about 765,000 sworn personnel (defined as those with general arrest powers). Out of over 700,000 sworn officers, only a few actually act like this. 

The question is how many times does it take for black teenagers to distrust ALL police and become argumentative and aggressive when confronted? I am a 70 old white, Vietnam veteran who plays by the rules so I don’t have many interactions with the police. In fact most are traffic violations and my license, registration and proof of insurance are ALWAYS in good order so there is little to discuss beyond the immediate question of was I really speeding or did I really run a red light.

In the few interactions I have had with the police, I have noticed that there is a serious spread in how I am treated. Many times the officer will be so focused on “achieving and maintaining command presence” that he (yes - generally a man) will be rude and discourteous. If they will be confrontational and discourteous to me, I can only imagine how bad they would treat a typical teenager. Couple a typical teenager's attitude (including me when I was 16) and the distrust of blacks for the police that has built up for many years and we shouldn’t be surprised that black teenagers automatically assume the cops are out to get them.

During the Rodney King beating in LA, the then police chef Darrel Gates said that he didn’t pay his officers to get down in the mud with the likes of Rodney King. It stuck me at the time that “getting down in the mud” is exactly what we pay them for. To get down in the mud instead of beating anyone like a piñata.

If I, as a citizen, am expected to trust someone out on the street with a gun and the authority we grant to police, I have to be able to trust them to make good judgment calls between a real, dangerous criminal and a teenager acting like a teenager. If any individual officer can’t make that call when under the stress of the situation, do I really want them out on my streets?

Remember that the police are supposed to be our representatives. Do you really want your representative acting like this?

Why should you have an internal mastermind group?

While it’s comforting to just collect your senior management around you for meetings it’s also limiting.

Just because you worked a job 10 years ago doesn’t automatically mean that remember the subtle details of the work or that you will know about the changes or new ideas that have happened in the last 10 years.

A mastermind group should be people from both your industry and outsiders who can help you both create new ideas and develop plans to execute the best of those new ideas. You may need more than one group, one for new product ideas, one for manufacturing, one for finance, etc.

You have that mastermind group because bitter experience (yours or someone else’s) has taught you that you are not an expert in all the things you need to know to run your business. Some of that may be interest and not ability. You could learn all the information to fix your car yourself, but would rather spend your time growing your business and developing new products or fixing your car? Most of us just hire a mechanic.

The janitor’s hobby of flying radio control airplanes may have exposed him to a great advertising campaign that could help you, when suitably modified to your particular product by the marketing department. Or maybe that idea will be from finance guy with a new way of financing R&D.

Whatever that new idea, having a collection of advisers with varied backgrounds will provide you with a huge collection of new ideas to draw on. Not all of them will be winners, but as Benjamin Franklin said: Insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results.

Drawing on the same restricted pool of thinkers will always result in the same restricted views.

Outside your control

The following was co-written with my writing partner Bryan Neva (http://profitatanyprice.blogspot.com/)

When I was in the army , an  old time sergeant said “You either control your environment or it controls you” and like many young inexperienced trainees, I bought into that concept. Unfortunately, it has caused me untold frustration both at work and in my personal life. With age and experience, I  came to realize that there are circumstances outside my control and that many times they are completely outside my power to control. This is the central teaching of both Stoic Philosophy and Buddhism: that there are things under your control and things outside of your control, and if you really think hard, you’ll realize that the only things absolutely within your control are your own attitudes and behavior.  

I recently read an article that included the following statement: “Blaming others for a situation over which you clearly had a choice is simply shirking responsibility.”  While it's true that blaming others for situations over which you clearly had a choice is bad for you anytime you do it, there are real situations where outside influences caused the problem for you and recognizing that the cause was really outside your control is the first step in recognizing that it's not YOUR failure that caused the problem. Recognizing the real cause will help you find ways to either fix that outside disturbance or to separate yourself from it.

Life basically only offers us three choices: we can Accept things the way they are, we can honestly and constructively try to Change things, or we can Exit. In other words we can ACE it: Accept it, Change it, or Exit.  In practice, this is what most people do unconsciously.  The 12 step programs phrase it well in their serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

Remember, you are getting wet because it's raining and you can't control the rain. All you can do is continue getting wet (Accept it), put on a raincoat or put up an umbrella (Change it), or come in out of the rain (Exit).

In any organization whether it’s a family, a social group, or a workplace, people will behave badly at times.  You might blame yourself asking, “what did I do to upset them or cause their bad behavior?”  Regardless of what you did or did not do, how someone chooses to behave is entirely up to them and not you.  You can honestly and sincerely try to positively influence other people’s behavior, but you cannot control their behavior.  That’s completely up to them. You only can control your response and your behavior.  You can choose to be hateful and vindictive, or you can choose to be loving and forgiving - knowing that you too sometimes behave badly.

 

One of the big secrets to life is discovering the difference between what’s inside your control and what is controlled by other people or events. Once you understand what is truly within your control, you can begin to fix the things you can, decide to accept the things you can’t or to exit from the situation.

When it gets right down to it, all you can really control is what you do and how you act. Including what you will or will not stick around for.

Gasoline Prices

Cost at the pump down by a buck in the last year. My question is where did that buck you are saving come from? Or better still where did that buck go last year that it isn't going this year?

Fuel in the US is a fascinating product. Unlike many of the things we buy every day there is a long chain of stops between the oil in the ground and the fuel at the pump. With a dozen eggs there is a relatively short supply chain. The chicken “rancher” harvests the eggs and sends them to a wholesaler who delivers them to a market and you buy it from your local grocery store. OK, maybe there is a distribution warehouse in between but the point is there is little change in the eggs between the chicken and the store.

Gasoline on the other hand has a lot more stops. Pump out of the ground and then to a refinery. In many cases the buyer at the well is just a wholesaler and resells to a refiner who resells to a wholesaler who resells to a name brand who resells to a local gas station.

In many cases that local gas station is really a franchise holder for that national brand and is an independent business sell that brand fuel in the same way they sell packs of gum or candy bars.

With each step in the supply chain, each of those independent businesses add profit.

Anyone out there believe that those businesses are selling at a loss at today’s prices? At least for very long? Cheaper not to pump it out of the ground than sell at less than it cost to pump it up, right? Same thing, if I can’t buy it and refine it for more than my cost, I’ll shut down the refinery. If I can’t sell the gas for more than I paid for it, I won’t refill the tanks at my gas station.

So that buck you are saving was a few pennies profit for each of those steps in the supply chain. Remember they aren't taking a loss so you can save that buck, they are just taking a few cents less profit.

Here is the key to learn - all those companies could have survived nicely on a tiny bit less profit last year and boosted the entire economy in the US. All those extra dollars per gallon that the supply chain siphoned off into their bank accounts, could have been spent by consumers on new shirts, TV and all the other things that would employ workers and pay salaries.

Okay, that buck alone won't restore the entire US economy - BUT - that same process of siphoning off the last fraction of a percent of profit by every business in the US is locking up huge amounts of capital. Money that could be circulating throughout the rest of the economy and lifting every other person and business out of the current stagnation.

Pin the tail on the donkey

Many of us working with large corporations have IT departments that are centralized somewhere far removed from where we work. Getting a computer problem fixed can be an exercise in frustration. Emails that take hours to be answered, computerized forms that get shunted from problem group to problem group within IT, all those seeming impediments to getting what should be a simple permissions issue fixed.

It’s even more frustrating when I had access last Friday but no access Monday morning and IT can’t seem to figure out how to restore that access!

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to fixing these systems is not assigning the cost of my downtime to the actual cause. If we had a charge number for “computer problem” rather than a generic overhead time card charge number the problems would get fixed much quicker.

I call this piece “pin the tail on the donkey” because in most companies, assigning the cost of unresolved or lengthy computer issues ends up looking like the child’s game. A computer problem represented by the paper donkey tacked to the wall and all the people who are trying to get their computer solved pinning the cost of their down time like that paper tail, anywhere they can find a place.

Adding a charge number for “computer down time” as a unique collector would at least allow management to look with some precision at the real costs of IT issues rather than masking them with charges to generic overhead or burn project time on unproductive computer down time.

Noblesse Oblige

My writing partner, Bryan, posted this to his blog (Profit at any Price) a couple of days ago and I thought I should repost here too.

Noblesse Oblige by Allen Laudenslager and Bryan Neva (March 2013)

This Blog was originally published on Thought Leaders on March 13, 2013.  The longer I work, 
the more I see good people who are promoted into positions of authority in organizations slowly 
give into the temptation of pride and privilege. They forget their obligations and squander the opportunity given them to serve others in their organization and improve the corporate culture. 

“Noblesse Oblige” is an old French phrase that literally translates as “nobility obligates.” It means that those who have power and authority, or who are privileged, rich or famous have a moral responsibility 
to display honorable, charitable, and exemplary behavior towards those less fortunate or to those dependent on them.

In other words, whoever claims to be noble must conduct themselves nobly. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. summed it up nicely when he said: every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an
obligation; every possession, a duty.

The idea of “Noblesse Oblige” was created out of enlightened self-interest. The nobility had serfs who 
were dependent on them for land to farm, a place to live and protection from bandits. In medieval 
times all the land belonged to the nobility; the enlightened noble recognized that while he owned the l
and, without someone to plant and harvest the noble had no income. Seeing to the wellbeing of his 
serfs was his “noble obligation.”

The good old days of companies treating their employees as their most valuable assets have been set 
aside in favor of expecting them to work harder for the same pay and fewer benefits. In place of 
rewards they’re told they should be glad they still have a job. Corporate management has developed an entitlement mentality (like the old French nobility) by remembering their privileges (power, prestige, perks, and pay) but forgetting their obligations to their employees.  So what does this mean for you?

Loyalty always starts with the person who has the power and authority and is earned not given. Power 
is the ability to grant or withhold rewards, and authority is the power to influence the behavior of a 
person with less power. And there’s no authority without a counterbalancing responsibility.

Some use their power and authority altruistically; unfortunately, many others use it capriciously or unfairly. Lord John Acton (1834—1902, British historian and moralist) famously wrote: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So what tends to happen is that those in power begin 
to believe their own press releases and act as if their power is a natural right and their authority is to be unquestioned. After all, they must be right or they wouldn’t have been granted the authority in the first place, right?

The key to avoiding falling into the entitlement trap is simply by learning a little good ol’ fashioned humility. Start by walking over to your company’s customer service center and imagine there’s no one there to answer the phones, to take orders or to solve problems. You’re not going to sell anything.

Next, walk down to your company’s shipping and receiving department and watch the employees 
loading and unloading trucks. Now close your eyes and pretend that those workers aren’t there… your products are just sitting on the docks and the trucks are not getting loaded. How much money will you make if you don’t ship your products to customers?

It’s easy to think of all these workers as not being important because almost anyone could do these 
types of jobs. Answering the phones or loading and unloading trucks are cheap but also very critical. 
In other words, the labor costs are inexpensive but the work is valuable.

Now extrapolate these examples out to your entire organization. How much value are all your other employees contributing to your long-term success? Who really produces and who is overhead? 
Enlightened self-interest should tell you that without workers you’d have no income.

So while you may not be willing to pay much for a person working in customer service or shipping and receiving, enlightened self-interest should tell you that a relatively low paid employee might be critical 
to your long-term success and you should begin to treat that worker with the respect their contribution, 
not their cost, deserves.