By Guest Author, Al Weatherhead
As we struggle through economic hard times, I’m convinced that the underlying problem hamstringing our economy is under-employment.
Even worse, I believe the root causes of the sluggish job situation are not blips. Rather, we are now faced with a new paradigm. The fierce competitiveness of the global jobs marketplace is here to stay and will only get worse as countries such as China and India continue to flex their growing muscle.
But just because the causes of our economic adversity may be here to stay doesn’t mean that we can’t find effective solutions to mastering those problems. They just have to be the right solutions.
There have been calls that what’s needed to jolt us out of our fiscal doldrums is a reincarnation of the New Deal – a massive government outlay to create jobs. But today’s economic macrocosm is very different than in 1927, when the American economy powered the world and not the other way around. Even if the government had the deep pockets to finance our recovery, it’s a national shame that Washington, D.C. should be expected to ride to our rescue.
This is America, the greatest nation in the world, built on capitalism, and it’s only capitalism that can save us. I believe it is the patriotic duty of our business leaders to put people back to work, because people – not profits – are the lifeblood of any business and ultimately our economy.
Management and employee success are intertwined.
You can gauge the health of any business in the faces of the employees, for beyond all the mechanics of the place there is one truth: a viable business is a collective human endeavor. Indeed, much of what is wrong in current business is the failure to recognize that the heart of any business beats to the rhythms of its employees.
The bottom line must not be profit, because profit can only come as a fruit of the health and dreams of the human endeavor the business represents. Management’s training and development responsibility is to cultivate within the workplace an environment which lends itself to creativity, dreams, and collective spirit larger than the sum of its paychecks and mechanical parts.
Tragically, business leaders have had it drilled into them that the only thing that matters is shareholder value. It hasn’t always been that way. For much of our nation’s history, business by and large was America’s heart and soul, focused on the long-term good.
To be fair, today’s business leaders have some justification to be timid in taking the lead in confronting unemployment. Ongoing uncertainty concerning taxation and government regulations are paralyzing business from acting. When a company doesn’t have a handle on its future expenditures it’s only natural that it wants to sit on its money instead of using it to put people to work.
How can we encourage American business to ride to our nation’s rescue by putting out the “Help Wanted” sign? We need to create a climate in which our multi-faceted, robust and resilient American business establishment can thrive through the virtues of the free-market system, starting with deregulation.
It’s no secret that businesses across the country are drowning in a Sargasso Sea of onerous state and federal regulations. These, combined with the threat of higher taxes are encouraging business to sit on the sidelines. As a successful industrialist, I know from personal experience that business succeeds when government (no matter how well meaning) gets out of the way and lets American ingenuity go to work.
There is no question the next generation of business leaders has before it a golden opportunity to start fresh and valiantly serve their country. I challenge them to make a break with current business practices and for the good of our nation, use the shining light of capitalism to lead us out of our economic shadows.
Al Weatherhead is the author of The Power of Adversity and chairman and CEO of Weatherchem, a private manufacturer of plastic closures for food, spice, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products.
The Power of Adversity: Tough Times Can Make You Stronger, Wiser, and Better