An Open Letter To Big Business

[TygrBright]

Dear Sirs, and the occasional Madam:

Let me pass on a helpful, practical bit of advice culled from the works of Douglas Adams, whom you would all benefit greatly by reading:

“DON’T PANIC!”

Yes, your days of selling obscenely expensive cold-war era weapons boondoggles to the military are over.

Yes, your days of romping unrestrained through the world’s dwindling fossil fuel supplies extracting criminally inflated profits are ending.

Yes, your plans to corner the world’s water supply are toast.

Yes, your labor costs are going to up, no question.

Settle down for a minute, get a grip, and listen to me. All is not lost. There is a light at the other end of this tunnel, and it’s NOT an oncoming train. You can weather this disaster and emerge at the other end stronger, more profitable, richer, and more stable.

Interested? Keep listening.

Here’s the real problem: You’ve let yourselves turn into dinosaurs, gorging on an abundant food supply without effort, until the things that got you to the top of the heap —creativity, imagination, willingness to take real risks, commitment to long term investments, partnerships with science and education and even labor— have atrophied from lack of use. Your effortless gluttony is grinding to a halt, and the choice is to flex those old muscles, get them back into shape and evolve and strike out in new directions, or to die wallowing in your own effluvia.

The opportunities are all around you. Here’s some Q&A to help you see them:

Q: What will consumers need in to achieve their goals of increasing energy independence, power from renewable resources, and freedom from fossil fuels?
A: Not just new ways to generate power (although think of the markets there, in solar capture and storage technology, in wind capture and storage technology —on a household by household basis!—) but new technologies to use such power efficiently. New designs for household appliances, for consumer electronics, for tools, for games and toys, everything! And look at the size of the potential market as you begin to retrofit American homes in the millions. There’s cash to be made there, alright, for the bright lads and lassies who invent the technologies that will work effectively in the home-generated power market.

Think about it. Right now these power generation technologies and the limited array of consumer products that relate to them are limited to the comparatively small market of innovators and counter-culturists and advance thinkers who are willing to fiddle with the comparatively complex and primitive stuff available. It’s not really that difficult, but it’s different, it’s not what the average American is used to, it’s not familiar. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made gigantic fortunes by taking a complex but highly useful technology and refining its interface to the point where the average consumer could see themselves using it. The rest is history. When some brilliant companies figure out how to do the same thing with small-scale power generation and alternative energy sources, what do YOU think will happen?

Q: What will agriculture need to re-tool and transform itself from factory monocropping to sustainable, integrated small-unit production as water shortages, unstable weather patterns, and consumer demand for “clean food/real food” grows?
A: Who knows? We can’t go back to the horse- or ox-drawn plough, that’s for sure. We will need distribution networks that can quickly and safely enable farmers and ranchers to serve consumers in nearby cities and towns. We’ll need an array of smaller-scale outlets and the technology and infrastructure to serve them. Some morning, when a consumer sits down to their computer and pages through the videos/photos of what farmers and local markets have available today, places their orders and has them delivered, or collected for pickup at a neighborhood distribution point that afternoon, a little bell is going to go ka-CHING! in the bank account of the software developers, suppliers of video linkage equipment, distribution network designers, etc.

Q: What will a really modern military require to keep peace in a world of fragmenting, tribal and ethnic violence?
A: A whole new generation of monitoring, intelligence equipment, weapons, armor, etc., that can enable boots-on-the-ground-right-there soldiery as well as in-the-bunker-half-a-continent-away soldiery to do their jobs, and to work together effectively. “Smart” individual weapons that can be remotely enabled and disabled for troops on missions where ethnic conflict, etc., threaten to overwhelm mission focus. Detection devices and devices that can remotely disable IEDs. Large-scale and individual-scale mine-clearance equipment. That’s just off the top of my head, I’m sure any military-minded person can expand the list to pages and pages.

What are you guys THINKING, tying up all your energy in building massive, Jurassic systems designed for a post-WWII conflict model? The ones who get out front with systems that will enable militaries to fight TODAY’S conflicts, really innovative systems that aren’t just re-toolings of old stuff sitting in the vaults, those companies will clean up.

Are you starting to get it?

It won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap. It will require incredible creativity, risk, imagination, and a hard commitment to long-term investment. You’re at the starting line, now, and the American electorate just fired the gun.

This is NOT the time to lie down and drum your heels and hold your breath until you turn blue, and whinge and mewl and complain and try to buy legislators who will help you preserve a dying status quo for a few more quarterly profit reports. This is NOT the time to threaten and implement massive layoffs and move major operations offshore and try to hold the American economy hostage to an outdated, defunct business model.

What are you waiting for! GET GOING!! The winner is, as always, the one who crosses the finish line FIRST.

exasperatedly,
Bright

[Joe_VB]

1. Very well written, Thank you.....But first I think they should be grabbed by

the lapels of their $5,000 suits and slapped around for a few minutes.

[Locrian]

2. too late....

It's too late. Big business is incapable of moving quickly enough. The consolidation into giant monopolistic companies (mergers, then gutting, repeat) is *momentum* just like a big barrelling truck going over a cliff. You want to turn, you need to turn, but it doesn't matter - your still going over that cliff.

I work for a F500 company. It's ALL about numbers, who knows who, what the stock is doing, what the **process** is. NOTHING about product or actually making something. It's sad.