Needed a new contract between workers and employers

There are warning signs all over the place.  You do not have to talk to many corporate employees to figure out that our current model of doing business doesn't necessarily do a great job for either consumers or workers.

Investors, CEOs, and corporate insiders do pretty well.  Obviously there are people who would probably disagree with me, but I think I have some evidence that is hard to refute.

There are exceptions to every general observation, but more and more I am convinced we have become a throw-away economy for both employees and products.

I can still remember when appliances lasted almost forever. Now our appliances break every few years.  I will admit that automobiles are much better built, but the only reason that happened is pressure from Japan. 

Employees also used to stay with corporations for life.

I am not so much worried about the throw-away trend on appliances as I am on skilled workers.  I know there are companies that understand how to harness the power of their workers, but I suspect they are far outweighed by companies whose vision is limited by that of their CEOs and the management structure around them.

I have often said the best way to build anything is to hire competent people and get out of their way.  That is a simplistic way of looking at things, but I think it is harder and harder to do.

There are companies like Apple which is idolized by investors and analysts because of the great products that turn out. It is a company where one person and one person only is in the driver's seat.  Yet Apple can be a terrible company to work for because you have to march to the orders from the top no matter what.  At least if you want to keep your job.

Apple is actually a ship headed for a ship wreck in spite of the fantastic results they are going to report this week.  It is a one person company, once Steve Jobs is gone, billions in valuation will disappear in a flash.  There was no great bench of replacements every developed at Apple.  You can't develop strength when performance is measured by how high you jump and how many times you can say yes.

Somewhere between a company like Apple and a company which has too many bosses is where American business needs to head.

We need companies which while achieving their current goals take bright, hardworking new college graduates and the best of their about-to-retire employees and build new lines of business or better ways of doing business.

It is the only way we will compete in a global economy.  While I nodded my head at a few of the points in David Brook's article, A Reality-Based Economy, (Times Select Required), I had to laugh at the following comment.

...companies are getting more efficient at singling out and rewarding productive workers. A study by the economists Thomas Lemieux, Daniel Parent and W. Bentley MacLeod suggests that as much as 24 percent of the increase in male wage inequality is due to performance pay.

Sixth, inequality is also rising in part because people up the income scale work longer hours.

I am sure there are companies that are good at handing out performance rewards, but I also know that the process is usually fatally flawed.  I can verify that many people who work long hours do so because they are afraid of losing their jobs if they don't.  Getting more pay for more work isn't usually part of the equation.

I know how hard I had to work to reward a couple of exceptional employees.  Really the only way that I could reward one was to help him go to work for someone else in the company.

I also know of a couple of exceptional employees who ended up working for a completely useless boss who decided they were not needed any more when they were exactly the type of employees the company needed.  He preferred to hire his friends even if they were not qualified.

American business has become more and more of a who you know is more important than what you know.

While some companies can escape this, most don't

I have made a lot of friends while in the business world, but I have not made mistake of hiring people because they were friends.

We need to work hard to get back to a corporate environment which rewards not only hard work and intelligence, but the ability to get the job done.

That would be a far cry from the companies where personal ties determine the direction of the company and who gets rewarded or even who keeps their job.

Companies need to figure out how to absorb the critical assessment of their weaknesses which are often painfully obvious to long time employees leaving for retirement or another job.

One of the best sales people I have ever known is leaving Apple.  While having some stock options in the bank helps in the decision, the real push to leave is frustration in trying to do a job that management does not even understand much less help get done.

I wonder how many great workers are leaving companies with their secrets of how to get the job done while young workers are being thrown into a corporate meat grinder with the hopes that they might end up successful?

I often think America's hiring policy is take new workers, throw them up against the wall, and see who sticks.  Doing otherwise would be to take a long term view instead of focusing on quarterly profits.

Likely seeing who sticks is not going to be a strategy for success in the global economy.

Neither is our messed corporate performance reward system.

I would like to see corporations keep hiring those new workers, but actually commit real resources to growing them and making them part of the companies.

While blind corporate allegiance isn't very healthy, neither is this new environment where there is no corporate allegiance and certainly no attempt to build the kind of employees that could create unbelievable customer service and perhaps better ways of doing business.

I would like to see a minimum one year commitment between employees and companies with some challenges in the mix for both employee and company.

Right now too many good potential employees get ground up.  I would also like to see some basic fairness imposed on the whole process of when employees are let go.  In our current political and judicial environment companies can pretty well do whatever they want.

Just ask any aging technology person how they are being treated by their employers assuming they haven't already been shown the door because they were too expensive.