We Need to Make Stuff Again
December 21st, 2009
Upper Mismanagement : Another example of how America has forgotten how to make stuff. Our manufacturing base has been decimated since its height in the 60s and 70s. We’re so consumed with “thinking” work, that we’ve lost sight of the most basic source of wealth – making and selling stuff.
This is now ultimately reflected in the quality of executives available. Most of them are coming up from finance backgrounds, not manufacturing backgrounds. So we have fewer and fewer executives that understand manufacturing on a basic level, from experience in the trenches.
Up until World War I, the archetypal manufacturing CEO was production oriented—usually an engineer or inventor of some kind. Even as late as the 1930s, business school curriculums focused mostly on production. Khurana notes that many schools during this era had mini-factories on campus to train future managers.
[…] By the 1980s, the conglomerate boom was reversing itself. Investors began seizing control of overgrown public companies and breaking them up. But this task was, if anything, even more dependent on fluency in financial abstractions. The leveraged-buyout boom produced a whole generation of finance tycoons—the Michael Milkens of the world—whose ability to value corporate assets was far more important than their ability to run them.
[…] it’s hard to believe that American manufacturing has a chance of recovering unless business schools start producing people who can run industrial companies, not just buy and sell their assets. And we’re pretty far away from that point today.
Two other articles I posted recently relate to this –
Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” fame is big on sending American back to work actually making and doing stuff with…physical stuff, rather than financial abstractions. He even created a Web site to advocate for this:
His basic premise is that “working the trades” has been vilified. Everyone wants to go to college, because working as a plumber or a carpenter or an ironworker is beneath them. He’s creating this site as a community and an advocate for people considering going to trade school to learn a skill.
And just recently, we discussed a Time article about how the value of a college degree was falling, and many students are being pushed into college when they would do better at a trade school of some kind.
Sadly, in this county, not going to college is general considered substandard, as if college is the highest purpose of the high school graduate. It’s not necessarily true – I read somewhere recently that the average annual salary for an experienced plumber or electrician in this country is almost $50,000. How is this not considered professionally successful? When and how did making and fixing stuff drop down the acceptability scale?