Re: HP9826 ?? Message #11 Posted by Bernhard on 16 Aug 2005, 8:53 a.m., in response to message #10 by Howard Owen
Dear Howard,
your enthusiasm for these recent developments and the transformation processes in the industry is understandable, these new products indeed have tremendous power and still are cheap, but there are some evil by-effects of the transformation everyone should be aware of:
What I meant with the term "management cockroaches" is the type of management which destroys the unique culture, values and spirit of a company for a short - term profit.
Like the insect bearing the same name, they are quick, clever and once they got a foothold, they multiply until the place smells and living (or working) there gets unbearable. Of course all I have posted on this topic is allegoristic and to be interpreted as such.
In a real company infested by them you could only smell the fear of the employees. The situation gets worser and worser, so many key people who over decades have built the company opt to leave. Those who stay stop to lovingly craft their products, they just put them together under ever increasing time pressure. Products start to lack signs of the individuality that in the good old times was associated with the company, or even worse, products get too many annoying flaws. Once old customers find out, they will more and more refuse to buy these new products.
The irony is that all this act of destruction actually may increase revenues and profits, as new customers, who previously were unable to afford the brand, are attracted by the new, lower cost products. As they have never owned the older, quality products, they have no chance to compare, and so it is likely they even think the shoddy disposables they have just bought are of high quality, as they look, owing to clever industrial design, more valuable than they really are.
This lack of opportunity for comparision and the inability of human perception to make absolute measurements without having a standard to compare with is the key why this evil scheme works.
It is evil because in the end, a once reputable company, which had quality, lovingly crafted products of real value, and was a good place to work because spirit and morale was high, has been turned in just another sweatshop churning out cheap mee-too products with low profit margins.
On the long run, they will never be able to compete with Asian sweatshops even if they use them as their manufacturing backend, because those do also have local, and hence, much cheaper management, design and development.
When these far east competitors have learnt to make their own products and how to sell them on the world market, the once reputable company which once had had elitarian products will have lost the ability to compete and will go under. They simply can't go back and start making elitarian products again. They have lost the key people, the know-how, the spirit, and the old customer base who
was willing to buy expensive products. The damage caused by the management cockroaches can't be undone. The only way then is to close down the company, and maybe sell off the brand name and other assets. Most likely, the buyers will be Asian companies.
At this point the shareholders will have lost all of their money.
Ah, yes, I forgot the management cockroaches. Quick and clever as they are, they will leave the company and move on to the next company to infest and destruct. Optimum timing, leaving at the zenith of their "success", guarantees a heartly welcome there.
So far the tale of the cockroaches. The foul fruits of their work are evident everywhere, ruined companies with demoralized workforce, shoddy products with lots of flaws that make using them a pain,
or stealing a lot of time to find out how to dodge the flaws, which at normal hourly rates would cost more than buying a elitarian product, which however isn't available anymore, except at Ebay or flea markets, and overall, a decline of the industrial basis and a rise of unemployment and social unrest.
Some people call this "progress". Unfortunately, it is a process that can't be stopped. The industrialized era will soon come to an end, with natural ressources depleted, all of them turned into a flood of shoddy products that are made in such a way that there is no hope to repair them or recover useful parts. Living in the post-industrialized era will be no fun indeed.
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