We Don't Get No Respect

Thirty pages into a painful book on organizational behavior by an academic named Howard Schwartz, I came to a chapter in which he expounds on the anti-social behavior of large organizations - and the examples he cites to make his case are from the movie Silkwood.  I hope Mr. Schwartz gets a chance to read this because I want him to know that, at last word, Meryl Streep is fine.  She did not really die from radiation exposure propagated by evil business people.  In fact, she is probably lounging in some spa as you are reading this.   For that matter, it may come as a surprise to Mr. Schwartz to know that neither John Travolta nor Gene Hackman are really attorneys, and neither of them actually saved the world from evil manufacturers. In fact, I cannot think of a single movie ever made that comes close to reflecting manufacturing as it is.

Mr. Schwartz is hardly the only one who takes popular culture as a legitimate source for intellectual argument.  Consider this from a prominent George Mason University economics wizard: "Service-sector jobs are the most desirable" and "Ever hear a parent say 'I want my boy to grow up to be a pipe-fitter!'"  Th term 'manufacturing job' is synonymous with 'dirty', 'dangerous', 'oppressive' and the term 'manufacturing manager' is on par with a pre-Civil War plantation overseer in the common culture.

Until manufacturing is viewed with the respect afforded just about any other line of work, it is hard to imagine that lean manufacturing will be taken seriously.  Of course, the opposite of the Western disdain for manufacturing is the Toyota view.  Fujio Cho, in the unlikely event he would ever care about them, is apt to need someone to explain stock derivatives to him when he takes over as Toyota's chairman next month, but he won't need anyone to explain manufacturing.  Respect for the importance of manufacturing and the value placed on people who have done it well at Toyota goes a long way toward explaining their success compared to its competitors.

The practical fallout from the cultural disregard for manufacturing is all around us.  The University of Arizona has a very aggressive program for turning its leading edge research in optics technology into entrepreneurial endeavors, bringing in wheelbarrows full of venture capital and spawning over 1,000 small manufacturers over the last few decades.  At the same time, there is virtually no manufacturing management taught at the U of A.  For that matter, there is no MEP in the Tucson region.  Very few of the 1,000+ manufacturing start-ups have survived.

From the academic scientists who conjure up this Star Wars stuff, to the University administration to the venture capitalists, the prevailing attitude seems to be that if you dream up a great product, manufacturing will somehow take care of itself.  Any collection of unemployed bums can be gathered off the street corners to make the whiz bang innovations.  The U of A model is just a small scale example of national policy in the U.S. and the thinking that is sweeping through Europe.  Innovation is the new rallying cry!  Dream up more and better inventions - the higher tech the better!  What we need are more engineers and scientists to do more of the sort of work the U of A has been churning out.

Who is going to make all of these innovative products?  I suppose the plan is to round up all of the out of work extras from Silkwood, Class Action, A Civil Action and the rest of the Hollywood play list and have them run it.  What else are we to think when the 'Manufacturing Czar' is a former marketing manager from a small carpet making company?

As I have often pointed out, lean manufacturing is almost non-existent in the colleges and universities - at least in the mainstream programs.  An accounting professor at Georgia Tech recently explained that Lean Accounting is not part of the curriculum because the school has to respond to job requirements for its graduates, and there is no great call for lean manufacturing skills.  I think he may be misreading the market, as evidenced by the fact that the MEP run in conjunction with Georgia Tech is one of the best and the busiest in the nation.  Manufacturers in Georgia can't seem to learn about lean fast enough.

That scenario plays out everywhere.  MIT and Michigan run great lean education programs - but not for mainstream students.  Manufacturing is all but ignored in the standard business curriculum.  Wharton publishes operations management advice - almost exclusively devoted to outsourcing management.  The universities establish these adjunct programs in responce to enormous pressure from the manufacturing community , while the tenured faculty rolls on viewing manufacturing as work for lesser intellects.

In many companies, lean manufacturing does not take hold because manufacturing is viewed with a combination of ignorance and disdain.  The notion that manufacturing can be the greatest source of profits, rather than finance and brand management, is inconceivable to people who think that having your kids work in a factory for a living is a sign of bad parenting.

In Japan, China and throughout Asia, manufacturing management is viewed as a respected, honorable profession.  The people who have positions of authority and influence in factories are admired.  In the West, manufacturing people are described as "the slugs making turbines and lightbulbs".

If we do not work to restore manufacturing as an honorable profession, soon enough all of the 'slugs making turbines and lightbulbs' - and cars and furniture and just about everything else - will be Asian where the 'slugs' get the respect they deserve.

Comments

[Peter]

Fantastically eloquent positing on a very important subject. As a danish citizen I experience this first hand, from our more or less socialist government. As most research at danish universities is government funded, the government controls what areas receive funding. This means that "hip" areas such as mobilephone technology, energy techonology, and general "innovation and entrepreneurship"-research receives more and more, while other areas are neglected(not totally of course, or else I wouldnt be getting any education). This resembles the system from the old USSR where farming was seen as "old and outdated" and therefore the farmers where greatly poverished. People need to understand that the whole spectrum is important, from the innovation, to manufacturing of products. China is not going to be cheap forever, and what will we do then?

[Mfg Manager]

It seems wrong when the people who buy and sell companies make more money than those who make the companies work. Our market values finance jobs and "analysts" to a ridiculous extent. How did that get to be such a valued profession, as opposed to someone who is leading 700 people at a factory? I bet your average Wall St. analyst makes many times more money than a good plant manager. That's just wrong.

[ed]

Mfg Manager,
I have a relatively wealthy friend who says the wealth you get is proportional to the value of the stream you poke your finger into. In other words, if you are moving a billion dollars a year, its easy to justify getting paid 0.1% and have it not seem like a lot of money.

[Karen Wilhelm]

Sue Sondergelt teaches lean accounting in her courses at University of Phoenix Online MBA program-- does that count as being in Arizona?
She says:

"One of the students in my advanced cost course recently told me that he thought lean accounting should be called 'action accounting.'"

Here's an article Sue wrote for Lean Directions:

http://www.sme.org/cgi-bin/get-newsletter.pl?LEAN&20060309&3&

[Bill Waddell]

In fairness to the great State of Arizona, I should point out that, while the University of Arizona doesn't seem to care about manufacturing at all, Arizona State University has a very good lean manufacturing program - shop floor stuff only - no Lean Accounting, HR etc... -byt they at least acknowledge that lean exists.

[Kathleen Fasanella]

okay, okay; it's a painful first section to read -and I *did* tell you that. Now that you've riffed off (one of the) weaknesses of it, Schwartz does have something to say. _________?

And yeah, I'm with you on the whole "can't get no respect" thing. It really gets old. Working in apparel, people think I'm a proponent of using children as sweatshop labor when I can barely get my own kid to take out the trash. I'm not suggesting my mountain is bigger than your mountain but the designers in this business can be the worst. How many designers in other industries insult the very factories and labor who construct the products they design? As a factory consultant, I'm considered to be a bad guy or too stupid to do anything better. It really gets old.

[Eric H]

Without doubt, business-people are reviled in popular culture as evil - in fact, I think that since the fall of communism, businessmen (okay, I'm going to be not-PC and I'm going to drop the people in favor of the traditional and easier-to-type form) are the evil foil for the hero by 6:1 or so in movies (don't recall the source, but recall people like Stossel and Medved citing it, so caveat emptor but just look around). Not just manufacturers, anyone in business. Friedman won the debate on the ground and in the streets, Marx wins the debate in pop culture (ha! - Andy Warhol would love it!). James Bond's greatest nemeses are now rich entrepreneurs (many of whom, on the screen, have more than a passing resemblance to Bill Gates).

But, as they say, the problem with socialism is socialism, the problem with capitalism is capitalists. Those idiots at Enron, MCI-Worldcom and Adelphia, though only about 0.000001% of the business world, are going to be represented as the norm, the average, the typical. You might consider what the co-blogger of your recent foil had to say about the true cost of Enron here.

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2006/05/the_damage_done.html

Besides that, the Silkwood yarn introduced something you teed off on in RoAI: the degeneration of manufacturing (and related cultures) into mere shells. In the Silkwood story, he was talking about the fictionalized version of something that really happened: an employee working for a DOE contractor who had apparently lost his moral compass. Although I've never seen anything quite that egregious, I have to say from first hand experience that his analysis of the culture of NASA was so accurate that it was frightening. They have assumed that "building safe launch vehicles and developing engineering practices to support that" is now secondary to "being NASA" in much the same way that GM has assumed that "making automobiles" is now secondary to "successful branding". Once you buy into that, those more interested in promoting the company itself are going to rise faster than those interested in furthering the company's basic function; in some extreme cases, they may even lose their moral compass. I thought Schwartz was onto something, though throwing away the first third and last chapter of the book would have improved it.

Peter - good point about China not being cheap forever. Some responses (not entirely counterpoint): at one point in the past, Japan was seen as successful because they had cheaper labor: what happens if China follows the same trajectory? What happens if India does (India is showing signs of being very, very interested in TPS!); and two, maybe Latin America or Africa is the next Asia? I don't know which trend will dominate the future, but it sure will be interesting!

[Bill Waddell]

Excellent observations, as usual Eric, and everyone should follow the link in his comment to Cafe Hayek. Everytime I visit their blog I get mad and tell myself that I am not going to get sucked into any more debates with the George Mason University economists, but I keep getting drawn back into it. IF nothing else, the comments they post are provocative and interesting.

I agree that, if Schwartz were to jettison the superfluous stuff, and have the book translated from Freudish to English, he would have a very good piece of work on his hands.

Concerning Peter's comment and your addition to it, I have commented in the past that, in the long run, manufacturing success in any country is going to come down to capital and management. In Japan, cheap labor drove a manufacturing boom, but as the standard of living rose and labor costs increased, there was a winnowing of well managed from poorly managed companies. What remains are the relatively few well run manufacturers. The same is happening here.

Mexico is an example of the same affect. Their manufacturing economy grew solely on the backs of cheap labor, but that can never sustain. Absent access to capital and homegrown managerial talent, as NAFTA drove Mexican wages up, it drove manufacturing out, with only the automobile companies left in any significant way. And when those relatively new Ford, GM, IBM and Delphi plants have run their course, the replacements will not be in Mexico. In the grand game of global manufacturing, Mexico has blazed the trail for long term failure.

China, on the other hand, and India, as you mentioned, are making strides to develop both capital markets and managerial capability. When their labor costs grow, as they inevitably will, and the multi-nationals pack up and head for Africa or South America, there is every probability that a manufacturing base of their own ownership will remain to support their own huge economies.

South Korea is another example of a degree of success. Left behind in the pursuit of cheap labor, the Souh Koreans seem to have taken enough knowledge and capital from the multi-nationals during their short visits to be building a manufacturing economy of their own.

I believe that, one by one, the poorly managed companies will fall by the wayside as it gets harder and harder to find labor cheap enough to compensate for poor management, and only the well run manufacturers (i.e. lean manufacturers) will be left.

And the countries that see an influx of manufacturing in search of cheap labor as a temporary phenomena, but a golden opportunity to build their own manufacturing capability, will become self sufficient players in the global economy in the future. But those countries that see foreign manufacturing within their boundaries as a goose that will lay golden eggs forever, will end up as the world's backwaters.

[Micheal Gardner]

Bill, what is the source context for Wendt's "slugs" comment? I have to check that out and see what's behind it.

[TJ]

Yes, it's just one more example of the bad stuff getting the attention so that the overall picture becomes distorted. Most people in all roles are good. Occassionally you hear a story about a person doing an ordinarily good job on the news. Once. If someone is doing something extraordinarily bad, we hear it over and over and over.

Of course that's how we finally deal with the problem. The unfortunate part is that the shadow of the evil offenders falls on everyone else.