A TAX-CUT STIMULUS:Restoring Industrial Vigor

The birth of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner was a true family affair.

As a burgeoning teenager with an interest in science, girls, engineering, girls, and aviation, I took a bold step and wrote directly to a great aviation entrepreneur. I asked Robert Gross, CEO and co-founder of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, about careers in the aircraft industry. Astoundingly and reassuringly, I got a personal answer. Today, if I even got an answer it would most likely be a carefully worded vapid document that was all PR and not a true, personal response. So, what am I trying to tell you?

When Robert Gross responded to my inquiry he was a proud parent writing to me about his family – Lockheed. As the image above illustrates, a sense of family in some industrial areas (especially aviation) remains as a strong sense of corporate unity. A nationwide return to that operational and management philosophy is, in my opinion, an essential for America’s return as a leading and powerful industrial nation. I see it as a vital, two-step process.

Step One: The Favorite Uncle: Uncle, of course, goes by the name of Sam, but actually he is a polyglot mix of politicians and lobbyists interacting to put profit and power as their prime and most rewarding efforts. Since Uncle is government, he always strives to take his own cut, but also makes sure that his corporate buddies get special considerations. Uncle needs to change.

Step Two: Who’s In Charge Here:  Wall Street and its various corporate boards of directors are currently in charge. All those well-paid executives are just hired hands under strict orders to meet specific profit goals – or else.

The New Uncle: In a confused but solicitous manner, Uncle Sam has been most generous in his relationships with corporate America. The net effect has been an industrial population that is on the dole. This is counter to the strong, independent and innovative giant that helped America and its citizens both grow and prosper. The result is a continuing dwindling of that industrial prowess as their favorite uncle gently adds a few more dollars to the dole either as subsidies or as reduced taxation.

Well, as noted above, Uncle must change, and here is the plan.

• The dole will continue if the recipient corporation stops salting away cash and starts investing it in new innovations (either of their own or from a start-up).
• The amount of the dole is adjusted based upon the level of innovation investment each corporation spends. A full commitment to reviving American industrial strength will preserve full support from Uncle.
• Corporations who ignore or defy Uncle will immediately lose all aspects of the dole and will be fully responsible for meeting their total tax obligations.
• Lastly all corporations must guarantee that no less than 70% of their labor forces are resident Americans. Off-shore operations will still be permitted, but only under this new rule.

Spunky, new leadership: Certainly the Wall Street investment community will continue to play a major role in our economy and in the future of Uncle’s new offspring, but they will be required to return to their traditional roles and step away from direct efforts to control both the scope of a corporation’s business profile and the intense profit pressure that actually eliminates sound risk-taking. It is this latter bold process that is the true stimulus for corporate progress and prowess.

Corporate executives will be grown and groomed from within the corporate community. Yes, they will get dirty hands and bruises as they become intimate with the specific processes of their company. Pride in the product and in the worker-family that produces the product returns corporate leadership back to dedicated commitment to both profit and the ongoing good health of the family. Accountability, duty, and a unique degree of paternalism again becomes the character of the CEO and his or her associated executives. He or she is answerable to the board of directors and to the corporate family first and in doing so stimulates the design, development and manufacture of a quality and profitable product or service.

What It Will Take To: (a)Restore American Industrial Prowess and (b)Make It Last. Leadership willingness must become both an objective and a motive that begins, gently, in the home with the parent and the children. It then carries forward as an active value in the maturing child, and blossoms as a quality in a confident adult (male and female). Next we go back to the future by making leadership an apprenticeship process that invests the prospective employee-leader with both the knowledge and affection for what the company is, what the product is, and what doing it means to all that work at it.

We are family and in this instance it is a state of mind and a bond that produces a unity of effort that creates a quality product or service that ALL value and respect.

Will we go there? If not, think what that foretells for humankind.

Summary:

IMAGE CREDIT:

Image of roll-out of Boeing 787 jet liner. Courtesy of: www. LJWorld.com