Reinventing the US- Shifting the paradigm to high work values
The 2008 crash caused a lot of soul searching among American experts, particularly economists. One famous academic was heard to say, “Everything I’ve been teaching, for all these years, was wrong.” A lot of businesses have also been re-assessing, and the state of the American job market is hardly a secret, with a new need for upgrading the domestic economy and career environment to meet the demand of competition and income requirements. Every form of employment market function, from leadership training to performance training and team building, is now under the microscope.
The gigantic American economy, the biggest in human history, was well insulated until recently. It could ignore new trends, and capital flowed through the markets regardless. That’s all over. The business and economic culture which created 20th century America is utterly obsolete in the 21st century.
Notwithstanding the all too well known vagaries of American politics and domestic policies, many of which are as responsible for America’s latest walk off a financial cliff as the Rip Van Business motif, real upgrades are now essential.
The High Road approach
One of the first of these new initiatives is the High Road, which began its existence in the somewhat unlikely setting of the Rust Belt, America’s Elephant’s Graveyard. This decaying museum of an environment was the home of a machinery making business, Bucyrus International Inc, which looked like it was about to follow its neighbors into oblivion. It was in debt up to its grandchildren, losing money, and losing orders. It was uncompetitive, and like many old style businesses, quite out of touch with the market realities.
The solution: Incentives. The company stopped playing office and started paying its boilermakers, top tradespeople, top dollar. Productivity skyrocketed, and when you’re producing top quality product, that means you’re making big money. This company is now also offering apprenticeships, hoping to get more local talent. From being half a billion in the red it went to a billion in the black, and improving.
The New Economy approach
The New Economy is all about low overheads, and outsourcing to the best people in the world. The global job market is now truly global, but if you consider the amount of untapped expertise in the US, you can see a huge potential, and an extremely cost-effective way of doing business. Outsourcing is often accused of being the death of the American worker, but it could also easily be the American worker’s salvation. New economy jobs are based on skills, not merely mindless office rituals and turning people into high stress crash dummies for X number of days a week. New economy workers are contractors, and interestingly it was the professionals that first jumped ship into these working modes. New Economy workers are businesses themselves, and they’re extremely highly motivated. They don’t even need business equipment, they supply their own, usually much better, pro-standard, equipment.
Management training is also changing to meet this new business mode. The new frontier needs people that can think on their feet, not on their backsides. This is the mode that will get America running again.