Some idiot phoned in a bomb threat to Solitaire Homes, a manufactured housing company in Deming, New Mexico the other day.  The plant had to be evacuated and everyone sent home for the day while the local sheriff looked around for a bomb that wasn’t there.  Use this event as a primer in how accounting and managers who believe their numbers screw up manufacturing.

Of course, when everyone was sent home, that meant that the hourly folks in production lost a day’s pay.  Managers, who are on salary, did not lose any pay.  This is just the way it is because everyone who took an accounting class in school knows for a fact that management is a fixed cost and direct labor is a variable cost.

General Manager David Krull was probably sincere when he said, "For the company, yes it was bad. But it’s worse for the employees. It hurts them… there are people who may live paycheck to paycheck."  Whether he was sincere or not, he certainly was accurate.

According to Krull, the 210 hourly employees lost out on $12,000 worth of wages.  At eight hours apiece, the workers average just a shade over $7 an hour.  At that income level, taking fifty bucks out of everyone’s pocket had to hurt.

Then the company further reported that the shut down caused them to miss shipments of two manufactured homes.  The company called this a "$101,000 production loss".  Only someone so twisted up in accounting that they have completely parted company with reality would see a number like this as meaningful.  The actual loss to the company was nothing – just some vague number someday, perhaps, somehow.  Their labor cost for the day was zero.  The material that went into making the homes was still there when they all came back to work.  They are left with a bunch of fixed indirect overheads that may or may not ultimately be spread over ample production volumes depending on their capacity situation and whether they catch up to their schedule without incurring overtime.  Even those were minimal since I presume someone had the sense to turn off the lights when they were done looking for the bomb.

In terms of real money – hard cash the company laid out because of the bomb threat that they would not have otherwise spent – the actual cost was somewhere between nothing and pocket change.  At least it would have been had not the company decided to offer a $10,000 reward for anyone who helps them catch the guy who called in the threat.

So what is the final outcome of the bomb debacle?  Deming has a population of less than 15,000.  The cops are going to catch the guy – in fact everyone at the local bowling alley probably knew who did it within an hour of the call being made.  So the company will spend $10,000 for nothing in response to a non-existent $101,000 loss and the hourly employees will be out of luck.

If Mr. Krull knew the difference between money and accounting, actually had the concern he expressed for the people who work in the plant, and used just a little bit of common sense, he would have handled things a whole lot differently.

He would have kept the reward money, trusting the Luna County Sheriff to do his job and recognizing that, unless they have a serial bomb threatener on their hands in Deming who is going to do it again, it makes no difference to the company whether the guy gets caught or not.

He then would have called the employees together and told them that they were all going to be paid for the day they were sent home.  And he would have told them that the criminal had created a problem for some customers who would not get their homes on time, and that he really needed the guys in the plant to hump extra hard for a few days to get caught up.

How hard can the choice between spending $10,000 on a reward versus spending $12,000 to demonstrate compassion for employees be?  For someone gullible enough to believe a $101,000 loss number, I guess the answer to that question is not as clear as it appears to the rest of us.

With competition like this, does anyone wonder why Toyota thinks there is money to be made in the house manufacturing business? 

When I peer into my crystal ball, the future looks like this:  Toyota enters the U.S. market with a plant in New Mexico – Solitaire Homes loses business and loses money – Solitaire Homes announces that in the global economy the only way to compete in house manufacturing is with cheap labor in spite of the fact that Toyota is hammering them with New Mexico labor rates – Solitaire closes the Deming plant and moves 50 miles south into Mexico where people will work for $1.50 an hour – Solitaire still can’t compete and goes under – Toyota wins – Professor at New Mexico State University publishes white paper explaining why Solitaire should have moved to China instead of Mexico.

CNN recently published a list they called the 50 People Who Matter Now.  The ‘professional’ business community’s love of fads, numbers games and short term thinking – and their corresponding disdain for manufacturing – could not be much clearer.  The Chairman of Toyota made the list, representing the only serious manufacturer in the bunch.  A couple of major league outsourcers who still try to hang on to the title of manufacturers – Motorola and Hewlett Packard – are there as well.  The rest are money changers, techies and various other non-value adding sorts.  Oprah Winfrey and a guy who wrote a book called "Getting Things Done" apparently ‘matter’ more now than the heads of any manufacturing companies.

You might be surprised to know that I have a different view of who – and what – matters today.  Manufacturing in the United States is at a crossroads, which means the economic health of the nation is at a crossroads.  It may come as a shock to the boys on the Street, but there is nothing that Oprah or the author are doing that is going to have a whit of impact on whether my children and grandchildren live in economic prosperity or not.  Same goes for the investment guys and most of the techies who are little more than living proof of Andy Warhol’s 1968 prophesy: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes."

Riding the crest of a wave in technology or popular culture does not mean that someone matters to much of anyone other then him or herself.  Making a killing in the market doesn’t matter to anyone outside of the circle of people who will help squander the money.

Manufacturing, however, creates wealth, security and long term prosperity.  Manufacturing excellence really does matter to everyone.  To set the record straight, I put together my own list of the "10 People Who Not Only Matter Now But Will Matter Long After The CNN List Is Dead".  What these people have done in the last several years matters.  What they will do, or not do, in the next few years matters even more.

1. Fujio Cho

The new Chairman of Toyota has the task of continuing to set the standard for manufacturing excellence – a responsibility Toyota has born for more than forty years.  It is a big responsibility.  As Toyota becomes a truly dominant global force, keeping the factories running as they have – and maintaining the pace of continuous improvement – will be a challenge.  Size and success have ruined just about every big manufacturer eventually, and it will fall on Cho to assure that Toyota does not slide down the road to ruin that has snagged all who came before him.

2. Bill Ford

You would think that Wall Street would appreciate some real juicy inside information.  Insider trading is illegal precisely because it provides the benefit of detailed knowledge about a company that the investing public is not privy to.  Insiders know what the future holds.

In a story in the Detroit News titled WOW! 47,600 Buyouts, the mass exodus from GM and Delphi is chronicled.  The number of folks taking the cash and bailing out is exceeding all projections.  To me, that looks like 47,600 people with very close, detailed and extensive knowledge deciding not to bet their future on GM and Delphi.  Wall Street should take note of this ominous warning, rather than celebrate.

With almost 50,000 insiders making it clear that GM’s turnaround is unlikely, it falls on Bill Ford to demonstrate that America has the ability to manufacture with the best in the world.  He has given a lot of signs that he may well be up to the task.  He certainly fell out of the right family tree.  What he does at the helm of Ford over the coming years matters quite a bit to everyone.

You can see more about the Ford crossroads – inlcuding the first installment of their Change Or Die video – in my latest post at Lean Executive.

3. Jim Womack

The man who coined the term "lean manufacturing" (with a little help from his friends), Jim is the spokesperson, the guy the press goes to, the man who puts lean in the public eye. Through his vision and leadership, lean has become widely known and widely discussed.  Yet lean has not become the standard in industry nor has the education system and government understood and embraced their responsibilities for ‘leaning’ American manufacturing.

In the next few years, the lean effort will either gain traction, or be tossed onto the heap of failed  management fads.  Jim’s prominence in the public eye will be a vital platform in our efforts to keep lean momentum going.  His message must become tougher and more demanding.  He needs to raise the bar for manufacturers and the institutions that support it, and act as a stern taskmaster, challenging those companies that forsake lean for quick solutions.

4. The American Math Teacher

This is Ginny Hinckley, Maryland’s Math Teacher of the Year from Havre de Grace Elementary School.  She represents the people on the front lines of America’s manufacturing competitiveness.  In many ways, the decline of American manufacturing mirrors the erosion of American education.  While the think tank folks can wax about the need for more scientists and inventors, the factories really need  more people with solid skills in statistics and problem solving. 

The educators need to understand that the standards of the No Child Left Behind Act are pathetically low, and that the children of America have the ability to far outstrip the expectations the education system currently puts on them.  A rebirth of American manufacturing will follow a resurgence of education – especially math, and the Ginny Hinckley’s of America must continue to lead the way.

5. Senator Charles Grassley

  The senior senator from Iowa and Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee recently demonstrated a willingness to take on the powerful Wall Street lobbies and challenge the LIFO tax break system.  LIFO, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg in the tax and regulatory code that undermines competitive manufacturing and rewards manufacturers for outsourcing and building inventory.

Grassley is in a position to have a profound impact on manufacturing.  He has only to look at Pella and the other outstanding lean manufacturers in his own state for input.  And he has only to look at Whirlpool-Maytag to see the alternative.  His own constituents know quite well what the privately held lean manufacturers are doing for communities, and how the Wall Street driven publicly traded companies are devastating them.  He is in the right place at the right time to have an enormous impact on America’s manufacturing future.

6. Small and Medium Manufacturing Company Owners

This is Chuck and CJ Buck, owners of Buck Knife in Idaho and true representatives of manufacturing excellence.  A few years ago, the company was uprooted from southern California and moved to Idaho, and CJ has led a top to bottom lean initiative that has been an extraordinary success.

The strength of American manufacturing lies not in the big names but in the thousands of small manufacturing companies like Buck and the people that drive them.  Lean success in America is almost exclusively among this group, and much of the credit goes to the MEP’s that support them.  The continued drive to become leaner and globally competitive by the small and medium sized manufacturers is stemming the tide of America’s manufacturing job loss.

7. America’s Next President

Regardless of who the next ‘Leader of the Free World’ is, he or she must be someone who can go beyond the outdated thinking that manufacturing is a titanic struggle between capital and labor.  Decades of Democratic leadership have resulted in absurd union influence and power, excessive overhead costs, and work rules that make it impossible for manufacturing to succeed.

Decades of Republican leadership have created a financial structure that has manufacturing companies jumping through hoops to satisfy Wall Street’s short sighted demands.  Republican driven economics drive manufacturers to abuse labor for the sake of dividends – Democrats counter with stifling union demands and legal protection of unions – then Republicans counter with offshore outsourcing in search of non-union labor to dominate …  While we lurch from one extreme to the other, manufacturing slowly goes down the drain.

America’s next President must be someone beholden neither to Wall Street nor the union halls.  Instead, we must be led by someone who has the vision and courage to look at the Toyota model and see that manufacturing well done can serve both labor and capital, and every other stakeholder.

Whether that person is John McCain or someone else, the right leader for the American manufacturing economy will be someone the idealogues who blindly follow the advice of either Hollywood or Rush Limbaugh cannot stomach.

8. The Military Leadership

Major General Michael Collings from Warner-Robins Air Force Base is in charge of the lean efforts that have accomplished spectacular improvements in the C-5 maintenance efforts and broader Air Force logistics.  He is representative of a growing number of military leaders who are quietly, seriously, effectively and forcefully driving lean principles through the defense industry.

I could have just as easily put general Pillsbury’s picture here – the man who told the defense suppliers that it ain’t lean if the lead time isn’t dropping.  While the big defense companies are angling to try to outsource even critical military components to cheap labor countries, leaders from the military have recognized that lean manufacturing is a vital element of America’s security.  The continued leadership of people like Collings and Pillsbury will be a huge factor in assuring the future of American manufacturing.

9. Ross Robson

Ross Robson is the Director of the Shingo Prize and the man the lean community looks to to serve as the final judge and jury regarding manufacturing excellence.  It is a thankless job, and one that brings pressure and criticism down on him no matter who wins and who loses.

The Delphi debacle was a great learning experience for all of us.  I know Dr. Robson has learned more than anyone from it.  He will need broad shoulders to set the Shingo Prize criteria high and to demand that no company receive the ‘Nobel Prize for Manufacturing’ unless they truly deserve it.

No matter who wins and who loses, American manufacturing wins when Dr. Robson sets the Shingo Prize as a true gold standard for manufacturing.  His ability to withstand the heat and keep the pressure on American manufacturing to meet that standard will affect us all.

10. The Production Workers

American manufacturing workers have been been conned. lied to, used, and abused by managers and labor unions for better than a century.  Through it all they have shown up for work every morning and done the job of making what America and the world has needed.

They have been led down so many primrose paths of management schemes and false union promises that their skepticism of lean manufacturing initiatives is easily understandable.

The future of American manufacturing rests in very large measure on their willingness to give us another shot – to take us at our word when we promise true involvement and participation in the continuous improvement of our organizations. In the end, American manufacturing depends on lean manufacturing, and lean manufacturing depends on the people in the factories to commit to contributing their knowledge, creativity and experience, then on our willingness as managers to treasure that contribution.

  These are the people who really matter in my book.  The CNN list, as far as I am concerned, consists of people who my Texas friends would describe as all hat and no cattle.

One sour aspect of the World Cup that is quite a bit like some professional sports in the U.S. is the tendency of many good players to lose sight of the fact that they are plaing a team sport.  Take this guy, who pulled this move immediately after scoring a goal for Argentina.  I’m sure he was happy and exctited, and I am also sure that in order to be playing in the World Cup at all, he is an extraordinary athlete.  For that matter, the ability to do a standing flip is impressive in itself.  But of all the things to do to express the joy of scoring in a team sport, pulling a stunt like this to draw the attention of tens of thousands of people in the stands and millions watching on television to himself, rather than the team, strikes me as both egotistical and somewhat ignorant.

Just like the American football player who dances in the endzone after scoring – apprently so impressed with himself that he forgets about all the blocking it took to get him there – this guy seems to have forgotten that there is a field full of guys wearing the same colored jersey, sweating and sore, who just made his goal possible.

This self centered view is fueled by fans who really don’t know much about the sport and who idolize the player who touched the ball last, and by the media who often knows even less.  All over Argentina I am sure there are folks who think this guy actually did score all by himself.  The media is surely splashing his picture in full color on every TV and newspaper.

I bring this up because it was the comparison that immediately came to mind when I read a couple of recent business articles.  One of them was another executive compensation story, this one stating that the average big company exec makes 262 times as much as the average employee.

In another story, a company called Steelcloud is under SEC investigation for illegal stock option deals, joining a shamefully long list.  It turns out that it is pretty common for the execs to huddle in a back room and selectively backdate their stock option deals to whatever date the company stock was at its lowest.  Martha Stewart went to jail for lesser greed.  The long list of companies under investigation is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is driven by exactly the same sense of exaggerated self worth, and egotistical disregard for the contributions of the rest of the team.  If the company is making a lot of money, it is solely the result of brilliant executive leadership.  The boss believs that, as does a cadre of business reporters who have never worked in a similar operating environment, as does a reading public.

Business writers theorize and speculate for pages on end about the poor track records many ‘superstar’ execs put together when lhey move to another company – the mediocre performance of the ‘GE alumni’ comes to mind.  The reason for their failure is no different than the reason why Michael Jordan was not the superstar in Washington he was in Chicago.  In Chicago he part of a great team.  In Washington he wasn’t.  Those hot shot GE execs were great because they had a whole lot of great people working for them at all levels at GE. 

Take away the talented, committed workforce and the exec is nothing special.  Take away the blockers and the dancing running back is  working on a garbage truck somewhere.  Take away the passing that set him up and the Aregentinian soccer star is doing his backflip trick on a street corenr in Buenos Aires for pesos.  In sports or business we are all as good or bad as our teammates enable us to be.

The execs have a habit of losing sight of that.  Jack Welch epitomized it.  Everything good that happened at GE was because of him and him alone.  He was only too glad to smile for any magazine cover that would have him – and if he weren’t so old, I am sure he would have done a back flip in front of the GE headquarters building for the cameras.

The last article is one about Ford and their aggressive overhaul of their product development process.  It is very impressive, very lean and very much the right thing for them to do.  It also sounds like a whole lot of very hard work on the part of thousands of engineers and engineering managers.  If it works out – and I believe it will – it will be because of effective leadership and clear vision on the part of Bill Ford and Mak Shields and because of very hard work on the part of many smart people throughout Ford.

The real test of leadership, however, will come when the process begins cranking out quality new products in short cycle times and Ford is making a lot of money again.  Then we will see if Bill Ford and Mark Shields rush to grab all of the credit from a gullible media, splash their pictures in front of the world, pay themselves 262 times what the engineers who did the work make, back date their stock options and turn back flips for their adoring fans. 

Or maybe, they will turn out to be team players.  I hope so.  We’ll see.

Sometimes a title conveys all you need to know to judge something.  For instance, I heard that Toby Keith approached Willie Nelson at an awards show and asked if Nelson would consider helping him with a new song Keith had written.  Nelson told Keith to send the music over to him and he would consider it.  He then asked Keith, "By the way, what’s the name of the song?"  Keith replied, "Whiskey For My Men, And Beer For My Horses."  Nelson immediately backtracked and told Keith there was no need to send the music to him – just count him in.  With a title like that, Nelson knew that it had to be a great song.

I had just such a Willie Nelson moment when I came across a piece written by Bob Sutton, from Stanford University.  As much as I bad mouth academia, as soon as I saw the title, I knew that Stanford University had made an important contribution to management.  The title: Management Advice: Which 90% Is Crap?

If you have any doubts as to whether it is worth a fifteen minutes of your time to read, consider the following quote:

"The Harvard Business Review, for example, publishes a list of ‘Breakthrough Business Ideas’ every year.  I read through it carefully each year, and I’ve never actually seen a new idea on their list.  Sometimes they are old ideas wrapped in new language (like emotional intelligence) but that is as far as they go.  Between Jeff Pfeffer and I, we have made the list three times, and I confess that none of our ideas were new, let alone a breakthrough. Take for example, my alleged ‘Breakthrough Idea’ from their 2004 list: ‘The No Asshole Rule’ which asserted that organizations should try to avoid hiring jerks, and when people act like jerks they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.  The only ‘breakthrough’ I know of associated with this rule (which my father first told me when I was nine years old) was that HBR had the nerve to publish ‘asshole’ in its respectable pages (which I applaud)."

His description of the logic behind adopting a management practice because all of the Fortune 500 have adopted it: "Eat shit. 100 billion flies can’t be wrong."

And all of this is from a Stanford professor – to my delight and amazement.

You really ought to read this. In fact, copyrights be damned, you ought to make a copy of it and nail it to your CEO’s office door.

I came across an article on CNN’s site that lays out all of the usual advice on the appropriate attire for work, including the statement, "Boardroom attire screams ‘I made it’ to the outside world. Boardroom attire is made of the most luxurious fabrics, the best fit and the most exceptional accessories. It’s standard for CEOs, and adopted by many second-level executives who hope to ‘dress for the job they want.‘"  It goes on to describe ‘boardroom attire’ as "only the highest-quality wool suits with pleated trousers and superior white cotton business shirts with straight collars" and "the highest-quality suits in wool or silk, as well as the highest-quality silk blouses".  It seems to me that if you actually "made it" you could wear your pajamas to work if you wanted to.  I wonder who is it the CEO is trying to impress with the "highest quality wool suits" and "superior white cotton business shirts"?

Instead of "I made it", that look screams to me, "I never go in the factory".

Another article I came across in some Human Resources publication decried the tendency to leave the HR pros out of strategic decision making.  I recently had a chance to meet one of those HR professionals.  She was wearing shoes with heels (not particularly high, but heels nonetheless), a very nice skirt and a long sleeved, very, very white blouse.  She may well have been dressed for the boardroom, but since it was apparent that she had no intention of going into the factory, I suspect there was little she could tell them in the boardroom.  Anyone who avoids the manufacturing floor as if it were some sort of leper colony has little to offer in the way of strategic advice.  This was a manufacturing company after all, and HR advice that is not related to and integrated with the manufacturing floor is of little value no matter how ‘strategic’ the HR pro might think it to be

Have you ever had an occasion to ask someone from Accounting or HR to go out into the plant with you to look at something, or to talk to someone?  Do you always have to stand around waiting for them to find all the safety stuff they need to go out there?  Who is Accounting trying to impress?  Nobody from outside the company comes in to meet with them very often.  And who was this woman in charge of HR trying to impress?  If she meets with anyone, it is a job applicant, who should be trying to impress her.

There is a restaurant here in Tucson in which a guy uses a big pair of scissors to cut off the tie of anyone who walks through the door wearing one.  They should hire him to set up shop with his scissors at the front door of GM World Headquarters.  That might send the message to the folks working at the largest manufacturing company in the world that they should at least look like they might go find a factory and stroll through it from time to time.  Really, for whom are Rick Wagoner, Bill Ford and the execs from the Fortune 500 dressing to impress?  Not the customers – they aren’t impressed by tailored suits.  The suppliers?  Not hardly.  Their employees? That’s a laugh.   Obviously they dress the way CNN says they should because that is the official uniform of Wall Street.  The fact that it is wholly inappropriate for their factories sends a pretty loud and clear message to the whole company that they have no intention of going into a factory.

All of this gets at the culture of lean manufacturing.  In most companies you can tell by looking around the staff meeting who the manufacturing people are and who has an office job.  The office folks are wearing the finest shoes they can buy at the local mall, while the manufacturing people are wearing the finest shoes they sell from the back of the safety shoe truck that comes by once a month. The rims of the manufacturing people’s glasses, if they wear them, are the most stylish you can get with lenses at least 1mm thick to comply with the safety regulations. No matter how clean the factory is, the manufacturing people will not be the ones wearing white shirts to work, and they most certainly will not be the ones wearing the nicest suit in their closet to the factory.

In far too many companies, the manufacturing people are dressed for manufacturing, while the rest of management is ‘dressed for success’, whatever that means.  Most of the lean literature gets after the top people for their failure to spend enough time on the shop floor, with good reason.  But in most companies, the failure to do much ‘gemba walking’ is hardly limited to the senior manager.  In meetings, the manufacturing people often have to dumb down the discussion for the rest of the staff.  You can’t just mention the CNC Vertical Machining Center.  You have to stop and say, "It’s that big gray thing to your left from the Coke machine."  Suggest that the offices be torn down and the staff be given desks out on the factory floor near where the work is actually done and the bleating and whining will be so loud you would think a herd of sheep had stampeded through the company.  A 6′ X 6′ cubicle next to the door to the men’s room in the office carries more status than anything in the factory.

While the problem extends much wider than the CEO, he or she certainly sets the standard.  As the CNN article said at the outset, the other gang wearing the boardroom attire consists of those "who hope to ‘dress for the job they want’."  That HR manager was not dressing to do her job – she was dressing to demonstrate to the CEO that she is big time management material.  She can rub elbows and put on a fashion show with the execs, unlike those manufacturing rubes with their clunky shoes and hair that has been mashed down under a hard hat all day.  A ‘monkey see – monkey do’ mentality prevails in the management ranks.  Once the monkey in the CEO’s chair starts dressing like he works in a manufacturing company instead of a bank, and begins to spend a chunk of his day in the factory, the rest of the management monkeys will fall into line and start doing the same.

I have been knocking around manufacturing for better than 25 years.  Thanks to my book and to Superfactory, I can’t keep up with demand for my on-site lean management course, which puts me in a lot of manufacturing companies all over the world.  In nine companies out of ten, I can walk into the room and, without anyone saying a word, pick out the manufacturing managers from the staff folks.  In those companies, I know that every module of the course is going to be a struggle with someone in the room.  In that tenth company, where they all seem to dress and look about the same, I know that every module is going to exciting, because a lean culture is already well on its way.

If you work for a manufacturing company, dress for success means dress for the factory no matter what your job title is.  Save the wool suit for weddings and funerals; ditch the designer shoes and get in line when the safety shoe truck rolls in, and, even before Labor Day, white is always out of style.

How about if we move all of the suspected terrorists from Guantanamo Bay to regular federal prisons and convert the pens at Gitmo to a special prison for executives?  The first inmates can be the boys from Enron, followed quickly by the fellows from Volkswagen and Hyundai.  It would have to be a co-ed gulag in order to ship the Boeing folks there.  Former execs from WorldCom, Tyco and from firms all up and down Wall Street would easily fill the available space.  I am sure that all of the uproar and protest over inhumane treatment of prisoners would come to a halt.  No organization would care how they were treated, including many of these people’s own families.

There are increasingly two distinct business communities in the world.  There are the privately owned businesses dominated by smart, hard working managers with a great deal of character and integrity; then there is the cesspool of greed and corruption of the publicly traded firms.  Unfortunately, most people only know of the second group.  What passes for business news in the press revolves almost exclusively around Wall Street.  When government officials contemplate business and economic matters, they gage the magnitude of a problem or the results of their decisions by the Dow Jones Average.  The worst part of it is that the increasing public awareness of just how greedy and corrupt the leadership of the public business community is spills over to taint the conscientious people in the private community.  Businesses in general, and manufacturers in particular, are viewed more and more as institutions without concern for employees, communities, the environment, or the well-being of the countries in which they operate, which is far from the truth in the vast majority of cases.

I would think that as someone makes more and more money, the drive for cash would start to ebb a bit, and other priorities – like family, for instance, or a desire to improve the community one calls home – should start to move up in the priority scheme.  I would think that building something of lasting value, such as a business, a school, some community resource, or a church might seem like a good thing to do.

I cannot understand, then, how someone like Gary Rodkin would leave his job at Pepsi in New York, with its $2.28 million paycheck, and commute to the top job at ConAgra in Omaha, with it’s $3 million paycheck (plus the continuation of his old Pepsi salary as part of a severance package for a couple of years).  The stated reason is that his children are in school in New York and he did not want to move them, but he promises to move to Omaha some day.  If his family is so important, why take the job in Omaha and be gone from home five days a week?  It seems to me that the man should either commit to Omaha, or not.  He should either commit to his family and stay in New York, or move them to Omaha if they mean that much to him.  How else can anyone interpret this but to believe that $2.28 million was not enough for him to elevate family or community up to the same level as cash in his priority scheme?  How much does he need to make in order to decide that it is enough, and to make a commitment to his family and a community?

Jim Kilts ran Gillette in Boston, sold out to P&G in Cincinnati, worked for them there for a while, laid off north of 6,000 people and put $153 million in his pocket – all the while never moving from his home in Rye, New York.  Exactly how is this supposed to be interpreted as anything other than pure, unadulterated personal greed?  Is anyone in Boston, Cincinnati or employed by Gillette one iota better for Jim Kilts having been on this earth?  Or is it just Jim Kilts who is better off, and a few folks on Wall Street who made out like bandits on the multi-billion dollar deal?

Every day in America there are families that face layoffs and downsizing, who decide to tighten up their belts, get a second job, learn to live on less, because the communities in which they live and the schools their kids attend are more important to them than the money they can make by relocating.  That mentality seems to be completely foreign to the wheelers and dealers at the top of the Dow Jones feeding frenzy.  It is almost certain that they cannot begin to appreciate how little respect the average American has for them. 

It is nothing short of appalling to read the legacy of Jack Welch at General Electric.  He is proud of his ‘alumni’ and watches like a proud father as dozens of former GE execs have moved on to run some of the biggest publicly traded companies.  The business press carefully scrutinizes their performance to see how effectively they achieve Welch-like results at places like Home Depot, Allied Signal and Albertsons (on balance, it has not been very good).  The most noteworthy element of this Welch legacy I see is a complete lack of loyalty to General Electric.  Dozens of execs, all making north of a million a year jumping ship for more millions elsewhere? It speaks volumes about the value scheme and culture engendered at GE.  But it should come as no surprise, except perhaps to thousands of loyal GE employees naively following leaders who see them and the company as nothing more than a springboard to personal riches. 

The hallmark of Welch’s tenure at GE was a massive hollowing out of GE.  "Every time we have an outsourcing forum, it’s like a GE and McKinsey alumni association meeting," says Sunil Mehta, vice-president of NASSCOM, India’s software industry association.  Welch demonstrated no regard for GE employees, GE communities or GE customers.  His loyalty was to himself and the investment community that made him fabulously wealthy.  That he created a culture of executives ready to jump ship to the highest bidder and begin hollowing out their new employers should be expected.  The common trait of these people is no commitment to their employer or their employees, and often an unwillingness to live even in the same town as the company they run.  Some legacy there, Jack.

As Gary Rodkin soars over Sterling, Illinois in the corporate jet on his way to and from Nebraska to pick up his loot, I wonder what he sees when he looks down at the Wahl Clipper company – or at hundreds of other towns with hundreds of other similar companies.  Can he possibly fathom Greg Wahl running the family business, just like generations of Wahls before him, struggling to maintain the 500 jobs that are the lifeblood of the city in which he was born and raised?   Can he even fathom how it has never occurred to the Wahl family to sell the whole thing for a vast amount of money tomorrow and retire in luxury in any glamorous location they want, even though they easily could?  Most likely he doesn’t even know they are there.  If he thinks of them at all, I suspect he views them as GE alum Gary Wendt, who would not even discuss taking over Conesco unless they paid him a $45 million bonus, and who, while running GE Capital, looked with disdain at "the slugs making turbines and lightbulbs".

There are exceptions, in the public sector, of course, but they are fewer and farther between.  The shame of the big corporate culture is that the 90% of global business that is good, decent, dedicated and goes about their job with character and hard work gets splattered by the Wall Street executive mud.  If I could write one line in one blog post that gets picked up and spread throughout the media, it is this: Wall Street is a greedy and destructive freak show and not the heart of business in America or anywhere else; and 90% of America’s businesses would not pay minimum wage to a Jack Welch alum.