Business as usual is what we hear often, but business as unusual do I want to hear!

Business as usual is what we hear often, but business as unusual do I want to hear!

One of Ford’s most famous quotes was, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

It’s not that Ford was against profits, or bankers, Ford was aware that every business needed profits in order to serve the society. However, he saw that the banking system was working towards only its benefit, and not to the benefit of society.

²   His view for “tomorrow” was a monetary system based on driving value to the society through hard work and improvements. This would ensure that society would improve based on the gains in technology and industry. Today’s Question is Has this happened? Where are we as of today?

²   Have we achieved his vision, or should it be argued that the society has become worse over this time period. Have wages and earning power gone up in the entire society? Have prices of products gone down based on improved technologies? Has the quality of products and the quality of service in our society gone up?

Can we deal with the question of Sustainability for today …

“Today” we are still living under the profit motive that Ford warned us about.

²   Companies are pushing to lower wages by going to low-cost countries and paying substandard wages in order to achieve profitable numbers. No focus on service to the society as the main customer. All our activities today service the owners of our money system.

²   One can see already the effects of this today in the US. The US historically has been and is still the most productive and technically advanced country in the world. So why are products more expensive to produce in the US? Why is the standard of living in the US falling dramatically? Why is the dollar losing value at an unprecedented rate? Most companies today are well advanced in implementing lean manufacturing tools in the US.

²   We are living in Ford’s “tomorrow” and his vision of tomorrow, what today should have been, has not been achieved. Today, the US is bankrupt. For all of the advances in technology and improved standards of living, we can easily see in our world, more poverty, more pollution, more war, more suffering. All this so-called wealth has been created through extension of credit or “dead money”. It is not real wealth, and it is not real money, and eventually the bills will have to be paid.

²   With all this advanced technology, products should have been  less expensive and real wealth should have been created.

²   The US went from being the largest creditor nation in the world to the largest debt-ridden nation in the world in just the last 30 years. So what is the problem? Is it because of high wages?

      No, because Ford proved that high wages were necessary to drive lower costs. In fact, mean wages are

      going down in the US. No productivity improvements will be enough to turn it around. Lean will not

      save  the US or US manufacturing, unless we start to listen to Henry Ford’s words.

Acceptance

Lean tools cannot, and will not save the US or any country to that matter, any country which is proud of their manufacturing if the basic fundamentals of free market capitalism are not understood, followed, and balanced with lean thinking.

We need to take a hard look at ourselves and realise that our “tomorrow” will not be improving. Instead, it will be much worse if we continue down this path that Henry Ford warned us about, since we have not inherited this world from our forefathers, but we have borrowed it from our children and one has to bare this in mind and make amends.

Sujeet James Sarwan