Sunday, February 17, 2013

Let’s stop the sequestering of American Industry…

As congress goes on vacation this week, the nation faces deep, across-the-board cuts to defense and non-defense spending starting March 1. In other words, the sequester that was made into law by a leaderless congress in 2011, with the belief that it would never happen, is now going to happen.

This is a further impediment to industrial manufacturers primed for recovery, ready to break the chains of so much government-induced uncertainty. Having taken the right steps to conserve, strengthen and prepare for renewed growth, manufacturers are eager to hire again. When they needed to, they made necessary cuts in spending, and you can bet that if any one of these manufacturers had been incapable of reducing 2.3% of its gross spending, the CEO of that company would have been removed. Yet that is the very situation that has faced the would-be leaders of our congress.

Perhaps this period in our democracy can serve as a reminder for any business, whether an industrial manufacturer or the congress of the United States: A winning culture starts with a core coalition of leaders dedicated to the mission of the company: Leaders who understand that the greater potential of the company lies in its collective ability to serve the needs of customers: Leaders who feel a sense of urgency to agree on a course of action.

The reason our congress has been unable to act on such an obvious matter of urgency is because there is no core coalition in place, no group of leaders able to feel and act on such urgency, and so no possibility of agreement. The career politicians entrenched in Washington D.C. are not in the main motivated by mission and intellectual honesty, but by self-interests and personal survival.

Ironically, meanwhile in Rome, a 2000-year-old organization is about to implement a very different kind of sequester. Its core coalition is about to begin a super retreat during which it will in relatively short order agree on a new CEO to replace a retiring CEO, a situation not encountered by the company for 700 years.

Say what you will about the Catholic church, this will be a decision efficiently arrived at so as to avoid sending the company and its marketplace into a downward spiral of self-destructive uncertainty.

Talk about the importance of culture. 


www.centrifuge-now.com

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