Reply #25: I'll tell you what I want to see. [View All]

America at the dawn of the 21st Century reminds me a lot of the state of military affairs in the last quarter of the 18th Century.

At that time, the state of military affairs was surprisingly static. British soldiers were still carrying the Brown Bess muskets used by their great-grandfathers. Supply trains and artillery still used horse-and-wagon. Roads were improving, but not all that much.

What broke open military affairs in the 1770s was a breakthrough in ideas, the idea of subdividing an army and marching it by parallel roads, for example. The idea of marching an army in a formation from which it can instantly spring into action, instead of taking time to deploy.

Those were innovations in organization and method, and those are the same innovations which are going to save America's bacon, if anything does.

I'm pretty sure that one of those ideas will be to compete with the large corporations through small, employee-owned corporations which share their profits more equitably, reign in director-level salaries (because they will be employee-approved), and focus heavily on the first three things that the bloodsuckers on the traditional Board of Directors routinely sacrifice for pocket money: speed, quality, and customer service. They won't have the clout to lobby Congress for their biggest profits (tax breaks and subsidies), so they'll have to earn it through delivering a better product faster and with a smile.

I further suspect that the people who are going to do it are reading this right now. They're in their forties, fifties and sixties, having put in decades of labor to unthankful corporations that have recently dumped them to hire unqualified kids and to skimp on benefit payouts. They have, collectively, more institutional and practical experience than the corporations for which they once worked. They have their Rolodexes. They now also have the ability to plan and commiserate over infinite distance for negligible cost. And they're pissed.

So when they're ready, they'll be able to call up the best and the brightest, whom they already know, and tease them away from the corporate maw with the promise of equitably shared profits, unbeatable benefits, more autonomy and authority, and the flexibility of an association of like-minded people rather than the dour environment of the competitive (but collectively doomed) workplace. I sure hope someone calls me when that happens.