SPOTLIGHT: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Efficiency, Solutions!, July 2005, Vol. 88(7)

Oh, if the founding documents of the United States only included the word “efficiency.” In fact, why limit to the United States—if only the whole world would accept the idea that “efficiency” is a necessary human pursuit.

The older I get, the more I become convinced that there is a bias against improving our individual work habits. Perhaps it was the adoption of the personal computer over the last 20 years, and, the subsequent perceived loss of jobs related to this phenomenon. Or, the cause may be the unwillingness and uncomfortable feeling a certain portion of the population has towards change.

We often cite efficiency improvements related to basic manufacturing machinery, improved logistics and so forth. That is not what I am talking about here. Here the subject is how we individually do things each and every day, whether we are an office sitter, wrench turner or truck driver.

Efficiency ultimately reduces to what we do with our mind and body each and every minute. For those of us constantly looking for better ways of using our mind and body, it seems strange that an apparently vast portion of the population has no interest or motivation to do anything to improve the way they do things.

RESISTING CHANGE
For the sector of the population like me, who simply gets bored with doing things the same old way every day, change in and of itself is rewarding. Many, however, seem to have an anti-employer bias and, if anything, actively resist change, from within themselves or from outside sources, adopting an attitude of “What’s in it for me?” Some, with a bit of supporting evidence, think if they initiate doing things more quickly with the same or better quality, they will be assigned more tasks. What they fail to see is this is how one becomes valuable to their employer and, in some sense, protects their job from elimination.

The danger of this complacency and its micro and macro negative economic effects is most pronounced in highly developed societies. It has become conventional wisdom, for instance, that much of the reason for movement of jobs to lesser developed societies is the lack of developed cultural infrastructure in those societies (minimum wage, old age benefits, workplace safety laws, environmental laws and so forth). Granted, these things are significant cost factors. However, what is lost in the uproar is that people in poor societies given the opportunity to work at any steady job at any steady wage are grateful for the opportunity and show their enthusiasm by finding ways to constantly improve the efficiency of what they do.

A LOOK BACK
Look at the archival pictures, still and moving, of the early Ford Model T assembly lines. Perhaps these were staged, I have no way of knowing, but certainly they show all involved actively trying to find ways to do things better. Then look at the pictures of the strikes at Ford and GM in the late 1930’s—same generation of workers, just fifteen or twenty years older. The joy of cooperation between management and labor seems to have disappeared. What happened? I think the newly urbanized farm boys of the earlier pictures became the entitlement-driven workers of the latter. Think about it—the striking workers, even though it was still the Great Depression, were making more money, had more disposable income and a much better lifestyle than the workers trying to make the assembly line function a couple of decades earlier. What had changed more than anything was their attitude.

We find many reasons today to blame for the “hard times” in the pulp and paper industry. We mutter these reasons to ourselves and our coworkers as we leave our jobs and climb into our late model automobiles in the parking lot, the ones with electric windows, thermostatically controlled air conditioning, heated and cooled seats and carpeting as deep as the toes of our shoes. What we fail to do is adjust the electrically operated mirrors to see the person responsible for this attitude and the person failing to find little ways to improve their own efficiency—the one behind the steering wheel.

The danger of such attitudes are local and worldwide, generational and legacy inducing. For if the well off (older workers, developed societies) do not impart an ethic of responsibility for ever improving personal efficiency in younger workers, we have a strong chance of wrecking developed societies in exactly the same ways it has happened before in ancient Egypt, Athens and Rome (I’ll spare the guilty the direct comparisons to modern equivalents, but they exist in abundance). In today’s interdependent world, wrecking any society can send shock waves around the globe. I urge you, look in the mirror, challenge your own personal efficiency, for the sake of generations to come, and, indeed, perhaps even for the sake of world peace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thompson is CEO of Talo Analytic International, Inc. (www.taii.com), a member of the Solutions! editorial board and executive editor of PaperMoney (www.globalpapermoney.org), which is published by TAPPI and TAII. Contact him at jthompson@taii.com.