head 'em up; move 'em out

Everything was going well yesterday and I had blogged about everything that was on my mind and then some things happened to get me blogging again.

I found out yesterday that a guy I play basketball with on Sundays is going to Romania early next year. He’s being sent by the company he works for to train someone else to do his job. His company is outsourcing his job to the former communist block and he has to go over there to train his replacement. This is Bushes America, all right. As I have said before, and I will undoubtedly say again, this shortsighted thinking is economic suicide. Where is Henry Ford now that we need him? I know you’re thinking, “Jimbo, get with the times. How can you resurrect the memory of a relic like Ford? We don’t need twentieth century thinking in the twenty-first century. And what is a relic like you doing playing a young man’s game like basketball?”

Well, you young whippersnappers, I don’t get up and down the court like I used to, but I can still get the three-ball through the nylon if I can find the holes in the zone or lull my defender to sleep.

But, don’t try to get me off the subject, because here is my point. When Ford came up with the idea for the Model T, he knew he needed to create a need for his product. He knew if he could create enough demand he could sell a lot of cars. The way he did this was by using the assembly line and producing a large numbers of cars. To do this, he had to standardize parts so that he could use interchangeable components, and that his workers could pull the parts out of a bin and use them in any car that came down the line. This was sort of a prehistoric version of six sigma. By doing this, he could increase the speed at which cars were manufactured and hence, he could make more cars. He also needed more workers to do this, but by hiring more workers, he was creating potential buyers of his automobiles. You may call this socialism, but in fact, it is good entrepreneurial practice. First, one creates the demand; then gets a targeted market and makes sure they have money to buy ones product and then one sells the product to them. Pretty damned simple, isn’t it?

Now, it seems, our top business executives make their money by putting their workers out on the street. This will yield short-term profits, but it removes long-term profit potential by reducing the number of people with money to buy their product in the future. America has always liked the short term, but our passion has always been for the future. It proves we have become too shortsighted and that America has lost its way. We pay these executives scads of money to make these lame decisions when they could listen to Jimbo’s gems of wisdom for free and be as wise as you are and do the hard work you do. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but whom do I blame the most? Who do you think: The dope in the white house.

Hang your head in shame, Mr. President. Hang your head in shame.

Well, thanks for letting me get that off my chest. I’m sure you’re aware if there is something wrong you can bet I’m going to have something to say about it and I know some of you are listening. Because that’s the way we do it in Jimbo’s world.