There's More -- If you look under the hood...

Now that you've had a day or two, to digest the parable, here's something to think about...

Ford has spent the last thirty years moving all its factories out of the US , claiming they can't make money paying American wages. TOYOTA has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US. The last quarter's results: TOYOTA makes $4 billion in profits while Ford racked up $9 billion in losses.

Here's my take...and I'll start with some questions...

1. Do you think the Japanese management, at Toyota, is just better a creating a profitable mix of engineering and factory management?
2. Is the profit missing from Ford's results because the Senior Executives squandered the opportunity and gave themselves an undeserved raise?
3. Does either culture have any underlying contemporary ideas that would influence quality or workmanship?

The answer to the first question is 'No.' Both the US and Japan exhibit Top-Notch engineering and management skill.

The answer to the second question is, also, 'No.' Even if you envision the upper management of Ford Motor Company as unscrupulous scoundrels, they couldn't possibly abscond with several billion dollars in profit. Nor, could they successfully hide their thievery while posting record-setting corporate losses.

This leaves question number three, as a possible culprit.

Notice, that in our parable, the US company doesn't have enough workers. The parable implies that the organization is heavy with supervisory personnel and upper management. This leaves only one poor sap to row the canoe. The modern management team realizes the job of a 'rower' must be terrible. So they offer pens, pencils, and an occasional free dinner. The cultural reason for this dilemma is that, in the US, hard-work has no place of honor. All of the men and women, who used to be rowers, got promoted. Why? Because there is no value to manual labor.

Do you think the Japanese are just persuing the profit motive? Or, could there be real value and satisfaction in a job well-done?

This is a classic example of the promotion of humanitarian equality rather than the kind of God-given equality promoted by a Biblical understanding. In the eyes of our founding fathers, equality was a simple rejection of 'rights-by-birth.' There was no longer to be a king or nobility. Hereditary offices were abolished and people were allowed to flourish. People could reach whatever station in life their qualities and efforts could earn.

Equality of opportunity and equality before the law were realized only imperfectly but remained worthy ideals for Americans. In our modern era, however, the old-fashioned Puritan Work Ethic has been jettisoned for an entirely humanistic (as opposed to theistic) perspective.

Humanism is a thoroughly materialistic religion and can only measure equality in monetary or material terms. This modern cultural rejection of the honor of achieving excellence in all aspects of work, creates a vacuum where only the high-profile jobs receive any attention. Normal jobs are deprecated leading to the needless promotion of superintendents and management.

The contemporary disdain for the actual working class has been growing, recently. The result is illustrated in this parable. Even though the rower got some free ball point pens, his position is not viewed as valuable and his work is not seen as honorable. In fact, all of the soon to be promoted rowers never choose to continue in their productive positions. There is no honor in hard work. Yet oddly, people find honor in being promoted to relatively worthless positions.

The modern humanistic perspective that denies the value of the boot-maker, or bread-baker, does so at its own peril. In the modern factory, this misguided notion also leads to the promotion, and protection, of workers who are not actually contributing to producing a viable product.

The battle-cry for this destructive behavior is always, "People matter more than the products they produce." Yet, paradoxically, people can't be seperated from their own activities. These ideas actually represent a counterfeit Christian love being exercised as Altruism. It permits the promotion of the non-productive, while allowing the destruction of the productive.

All because, as modern humanists, "We care..."