To be, or not to be, Born in the USA
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "Son if it was up to me"
I go down to see the V.A. man
He said "Son don't you understand"
Chiefexecutive.net
The Quiet Debate Among CEOs: Are We American Companies or Not?Take it away, Bruce...
As a young correspondent for United Press International in Lansing, Mich. In 1975, I drove up to Midland to interview Carl Gerstacker, then CEO of Dow Chemical, about his statement that he wanted Dow to have its headquarters on its own island out in the ocean. He didn’t want to be domiciled in a single country.
In short, the debate about whether major U.S.-based companies with extensive global sales should consider themselves “American” has been going on—quietly—for at least 30 years. CEOs whose companies have 80 or 90 percent of their sales in the U.S. don’t ponder this question very much. It’s clearly the big guys like Intel, United Technologies, Coca-Cola that may have 60 percent or more of their sales outside the U.S. that are at the eye of this philosophical storm.
We see threads of this debate in the storm over outsourcing of Information Technology jobs and Business Process Outsourcing jobs, as well as the debate about the investments that major companies are making abroad. Microsoft is investing $1.3 billion in India; Intel is investing aggressively as well in India and other emerging markets. Craig Barrett of Intel has come out and said, in effect, if we can’t find the skills sets we need in the United States, why should we invest here? General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner is sending much the same message to Washington: if you don’t implement better health care policies, we’ll keep closing plants and moving jobs elsewhere. And as expressed by George David of United Technologies, his company has an obligation to governments and societies wherever the company operates. One isn’t necessarily more important than another.... (empahsis mine) [more]
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years down the road
Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go
I'm a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.
posted by fouro @ 12:22 PM
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I have a hard time working up sympathy for the GM CEO saying "Please senator, save me from the excesses of my predecessors!"
As for the general concept of the stateless corporation, I think it's a myth conjured up by CEOs long removed from contact with employees who don't think of themselves as "company persons" first. Most employees save their passions for other entities, including country.
Many of these global firms tried to deal with these issues by creating separate operating units in each country and giving those country managers full authority of product and pricing decisions. Yet there was "waste" in this scheme in the form of overlapping products, inconsistent pricing schemes, and redundant R&D costs. So they've tried to recoup some global control over various pieces of the business in the name of optimization, with varying levels of success. I'm not sure many companies have figured out the appropriate balance of "corporate culture" and general culture in managing their firms.
I'm torn, cuz Toyota's no lamo outfit and they're voting with their feet too (Ontario or Alabama? Hmmmm). Our structural costs are the snap-back from fity years of jiggering the regs just the same way the tax code gets written: The Rotarians have an idea they're getting the short end in some way, have a chat with friendly beauros, and another layer gets added to the onion. In a way, the excesses are not just from prior GM CEOs, although they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. So, GM is just less resilient--became unwisely exposed--in a macro US economy that's been predicated, post-70s, on cost cutting rather than value creation.
"Company persons"? Why the hell should one feel like a company person any more? Once upon a time working at Goodyear or IBM was viewed as dead and gone to heaven, union or salary. You wanna know class warfare? Read some board meeting minutes from the 70s and 80s as directors (LTV, Penn Central...) looked to find some boogeyman to pin with the results of sclerotic thinking about conglomeration, diversification and so on.
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