Earlier this week I watched a powerful two hour life view on American Experience about Henry Ford. I have studied Ford, his linkage with Frederick W. Taylor, the Father of Industrial Engineering, his power-driven nature but really never understood the phenomenal impact this man had on us to this very day. In our world, now a century past Ford, our lives are cluttered in so many ways and I do not use that word clutter loosely.
Standard of living, politics, entitlements, "Cliffs", school killings, gun control, Roe V. Wade, an inept legislative process, school funding, unions seeking to survive and on and on. When I think about those items of today against the context of the last hundred years, I realize after learning about Ford just what a powerful man he was in how he affected an entire world for an entire century plus. So having said that, I found my mind tracing through the events of our world in the century where we find now three and four generations of people interlaced by this strand of history as we view into a seemingly dark future.
World Wars, Korea and Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other relatively minor conflicts have scarred we as a People deeply. Through all of these military conflicts rides the drive, the vision, the take-no-prisoner attitude, the entrepreneurial spirit; the epitome and essence of Henry Ford. He detested unions, he sought constant improvement, he was endless in his drive and energy. Sure, he had many flaws but through the flaws, he changed a world with this thirst for invention of the automobile. That drive shifted our national Gross Domestic Product from being driven by Agriculture into a whole new Age, the Manufacturing Age. Now one hundred years hence, we find ourselves in the midst of a globalized-driver moving us toward the Service / Information Age.
I could go on about Ford but the real question that has run through my brain is simple: where are the Henry Fords today. Where are the men and women that are driven to create something that will truly change the course of mankind as the automobile has done and still does. Today we have people that make money from other peoples' money which adds zero tangible value. We have inequities, biases, frustrations about things we cannot see nor touch nor understand. I see in my classes semester after semester in my students where only a very small handful would even consider manufacturing as a career path. I watch the commercials of office work today and what you see are "kids" sloppily dressed, looking very unprofessional, lounging or slumped in cubicles all armed with ipods, ipads, tablets, ear phones texting each other. What fantastic technology! But it scares me when I think of being so isolated and insulated from interactivity with real people faced with managing real problems.
It is perhaps because I am getting older or I try to look at the bigger picture of events in our world in an attempt via understanding to connect the dots to better grasp what and where our world is heading. But in saying that I am really saying or actually asking, where are the Henry Fords of today? Sure we have the Gates, Buffetts of this world but where are the people that inspire us via investment in our world that generates real, measureable things. I come from a manufacturing world so I understand what it means and what it takes to make things to very high standards. But we are more and more leaving, actually running from that world for the digital, wireless, bloodless connectors of information flows. So what should we be doing now to better prepare my grandchildren for this very different world into which they will be faced with rearing a family, creating a career, living a life?
My point is that there are no simple, easy answers. But as I wrote on a FB response yesterday on a volatile topic, I am either just smart enough or just dumb enough to believe if you bring the right constellation of minds together, any of these issues can be remedied. We put people on the moon and brought them home. We can bring water from a desert floor. I believe this is fixable as naive as that may read. But the spurs of politics, race, bias, bigotry, anger must be hung up at the door of tomorrow. The degree of poison, finger pointing, insinuative rhetoric in our world is truly unbelievable to me and all of those create a barrier to progress.
I will close by saying that I have not lost faith in my fellow man to make right things happen. But I am losing faith in the dearth of energy, passion and fueled change to turn this thing around. "If you do not know where you are going, that is exactly where you will end up." .... can I get a witness??
No comments:
Post a Comment