Corps

First class back in MBA program last night. 40 minutes in we're watching a Clinton era video on the effect of outsourcing and decline of unskilled assembly line workers in Oklahoma. Workers complaining. CEO's preaching about the need for eight figure incomes. The massive corporate void between have and have nots.

The lesson is The Stakeholder Theory, but I can't help feeling like I'm outside the Twin Pines Mall and Doc Brown just chucked this video out of his ice-covered Delorean. It's been only 10 years since this video was produced and it already sounds like someone speaking from another century. Have things really changed this much in the last decade?

Unskilled labor, job security, and company paid everything. Relics. As I listen to the words of these CEO's I cannot help but here the words of Cluetrain bouncing across the screen...

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

We need to get smarter.
The corporation is dying.

Technology has raised us as a generation with little ability to distinguish a colleague in China to a buddy down the hall. Why should it be any different in the boardroom? If my 3G cell phone is a faster route to global suppliers in Taiwan and world-class marketing in NYC, why am commuting 75 minutes through traffic each day to your fluorescent cubicle farm?

Funny how things change... my freshman year in college I remember a radical communist student speaker waxing at poetic at one of the local schools on how we would all one day become free agents in a global marketplace of products and services.

The only question in my mind is, "Why'd it take this long?"