Downsizing No Stroke Of Genius
A recruitment firm reported the other day that the number of workers laid off because of mergers has dropped by 46 percent in the last year. That’s good news for seniors, who’ve been taking most of the downsizing hits for a decade.
According to the personnel outfit, managements are now discovering that good workers - people with the mental skills to learn quickly - are not to be found so easily in every graduating class of our public schools. Thus brass hats’ former notion that their proven, veteran employees are burdensome costs, rather than scarce, valuable assets, is giving way as the search for trainable workers gets harder.
Many of those whom downsizing firms have been dumping have qualities that are difficult to find among recent graduates. Things like literacy, learning skills, a work ethic and that good, old without-which-nothing, IQ.
What is going to drive the progress and profitability of the next century is neurons, not horsepower. Brain stuff, think tools - talents and abilities to use those mind machines.
The good worker, it turns out, is the worker who can be trained. And retrained. And retrained again, as the pace of change speeds up. Some bosses don’t know this yet.
I heard a bright, young information-system exec - a boss geek - tell how, when he left computer school a decade ago, mainframe was everything and he, a PC guy, was relegated to menial chores. But now, having changed jobs four or five times, he’s on top. The networked PC is king and he is saying how sad it is that he’s having to dump several old geezers - in their 40s, for heaven’s sake - because they are “mainframe guys.” Technological relics, as he sees it.
Baloney. That notion needs to be replaced with the old American ideal - anybody can be trained to do anything, provided that a willingness to learn is there.
It’s why long ago America aimed at schooling for the masses, as well as the upper classes. Why our Civil War was the most documented ever, because it was the first war in which most enlisted soldiers could read and write.
And why, twice this century, America has been able to catch up with warlord powers that spent years preparing people for war. Catch them, out-train them and beat them.
The Japanese began World War II with superb first-string naval aviators - a small, carefully chosen elite, they were selected at 14 and their long, intensive training program turned out only about 100 graduates a year. But we could train thousands, then tens of thousands in a hurry. While Japan had an all-star first string, they had no depth.
After most of that prewar first team was killed, they could not be replaced by the Japanese training system. Thereafter, U.S. pilots were encountering raw, ill-trained tyros who could barely fly. Later air combats were so one-sided, they were called “turkey shoots.”
The United States Marine Corps, a notably effective firm for more than two centuries, is a tightfisted organization, not only with cash resources but with human ones. It makes the most of the folks it has.
Famous for training, it also shines in retraining. When the Corps suddenly needs, say, several hundred rocketeers and what it has is Marines trained as infantrymen and howitzer gunners, it does not abruptly fire the latter and go out on the labor market looking for rocketeers. It grows its own, retraining those good Marines, with their basic skills and known quality, for the new specialty. Training and retraining are constant.
Every Marine, a rifleman first, can expect to be retrained in other fields, from artillery to electronics to piloting a jet. A Marine who knows the heavy mortar has a running start on retraining to fire, say, the 8-inch howitzer. The Corps has built its excellence on that mental base.
Some months ago an old friend, a Phi Beta Kappa mathematician who’d served his company at the cutting edge of computers for decades, was downsized by one of those stupidly shortsighted managements. He found other work but recently he went on to an even better job than his old one - snapped up by the downsizers’ competitor. He’s now happily working his head off, proving what a blunder his old outfit’s management geniuses made. That, too, spotlights motivation.
Such time-tested veterans offer not only experience but a storehouse of brain capital - knowledge, but also proven ability to learn new things. Companies MUST have that to survive in the next century.
The latest good news on the layoff front suggests managements may be tumbling at last to that fact, since a desire for survival is also a great aid to motivation. It’s about time, seniors say.
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