My grandfather’s farm,
eighty acres
earned
these eighty acres,
inherited
with judgement
and the rights of kings
eighty acres,
eighty rightful heirs
claiming birthright
eighty acres,
unearned
Oh how the families of the rich
can only feign family
as these eighty acres
these eighty little acres
are destroying
mine
I am a retired product engineer for a major corporation with whom you are familiar. You have touched my product. I have patents. Woo hoo. As a young engineer I worked with engineers I called those old flat top guys, amazing engineers of the fifties and sixties era who calculated with a slide rule, drew their designs on paper and had no calculator or computer. They knew their stuff.
As a young engineer I worked for a chief engineer who knew my job. We worked with autonomy and very few meetings. Job appraisals were short and sweet. I saw the work force shift to the model used today. The chief engineer was replaced by three levels of managers none of whom had ever done my job.
The job turned into meetings with the Lead Engineers, Project Managers, and Directors. The individuals rewarded were often those who performed the rudimentary, non creative tasks well. Job appraisals turned into a nightmare of meetings and objectives and ratings. They called it the Performance Management System.
What was the difference in motivation?. For my Chief Engineer I would have walked over hot coals. He knew my job, had done it, could teach and keep me out of trouble, left it to me.
Now my product is built in China.
The product was sent to China because the overhead became too high and caused the product cost to be too high to compete. I was there when we costed the product and it is the product cost that sends the product overseas.
The products went to China, not because of politics, or labor costs, but in large part because the extra layers of American management ends up in the cost of the product. Our product cost $100 to manufacture. That included only $10 in labor. Mexican labor alone would not mean a move. The “burden” or overhead was $30 to build it here. Let’s add that up:
Material……………..$60
Manufacturing Labor……$10
Overhead……………..$30
Total…………………….$100
The cost of that overhead includes our pay for performance philosophy. It also includes healthcare folks. The American built product has healthcare in the cost. Products are outsourced because of the extra layers of management and because of healthcare and benefit costs that end up in the product cost.
Our cost was $100 and the Chinese placed a product on the shelf in the store for $80 retail….It costs us $100 to make it and they were selling it for $80….
We need to take the burden of healthcare and fat management out of the product cost and the products can come home. The old flat top guys had it right. Daniel Pink is correct and the our business model rewards waste in creativity and that waste ends up in the cost of the product and the product ends up being built elsewhere. The CEO bonus is in the cost of the product but, as Daniel points out, that bonus means lower performance when creative solutions are needed.
the ol’ engineer david michael jackson
The air flows
there are musical notes,
the water flows,
there are birds who still sing
and will bring
babies in the spring.
There is coffee and a comfortable chair
and willow trees make me write
foolishly in this box
while wearing only socks
The grinding of the grain
The turning of the stone.
The water falls
The generator turns
the generator moves electrons
The fingers move over the keys
bringing these
leaves of the grasses
waving in the breeze
The turning of the words,
the words they look over
my shoulder at the page
at the blank page
put us there
they say
put us there on the page
with the grasses
david michael jackson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRcOWghazHA
This next one is a real find. 1988 and the ladies, ah the ladies! Good ol’ Youtube, one of the best internet ideas and collector of our times. Ya gotta stop and wonder at the thing, this net. It kinda created itself like a big ol’ universe explosion and an idea like a “database” catches the stars and saves them for people of the far distant future who will study us. They will find this ancient thing called Google and they may be here reading these words. Hello people of the future. The next video you should take back to your time and play it for your beings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWgedFTeMEw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NZPrwgYe60
Leonard Cohen,
most of my heroes have
evaporated like my youth
not that they made promises
they couldn’t keep but
I guess I just got
bored
but Leonard
across the burning sands
I’m your man
I saw you in Nashvile in what, ’77?
now here I stand in 2012
and
I’m still your man
Leonard and his ladies are
my own personal angels.
david michael jackson editors@artvilla.com
To like or not to like
that is the question.
I used to like things
better
before there was a button
and an unlike button
but no
button for
I’m sorry I pressed the
like button
or I’m sorry I didn’t
so
I became confused about
what I like
and what others saw
that I like
so that I was
careful to like
or not to like
Ike
or my bike,
Mike
Oh but wasn’t it pages like this that hurt the book? Yes so progress marches on. Websites like this are now dinosaurs in the Facebook and Twitter a paragraph is all we have time for world. Maybe we can get ourselves down to a single word on a page, a single stroke of the brush, and a single note. There are too many words on this page. No one will ever like it but me. Oh sarcasm thou art no angel!
david michael jackson