The industrial Age of thinking

Are you a Manager that thinks of his people as an expense on a P&L? Do you think of your equipment as a asset. Your people as an expense? If you do, you really need to have a gut check. In this day and age if you do not have the heart and the passion of your people. Your biggest asset (your employees) will drag down your business results. Labor Expenses is usually in the top 3 of any small, medium or large size business. Mostly the biggest expense is your employees. The hidden cost of having an employee is not salary or bonuses but insurance, theft, and other benefits like matching 401k plans and other contributions. Your people can be an asset if you use your leverage and influence to motivate them.

In 1900, the industrial age of thinking was to push your people to perform, they are just a machine just like any piece of equipment. The difference thou is that people were replaceable, it cost money to buy and operate a piece of equipment.  Have you ever felt you are replaceable at a job or has anyone ever told you this? I sure have. The industrial age brought the biggest improvement over humanity since well the agricultural age.
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As said in Steven Coveys "The 8th Habit, from Effectiveness to Greatness" There are 5 different ages of Civilivation
1. Hunter and Gather
2.  Agricultural Age
3. Industrial
4. Todays Age. (Information/Knowledge worker)
5. the next generation (I'll get into this more in a later post )

Below is an except from "the 8th Habit, from Effectiveness to Greatness" By Steven R Covey.

Imagine for a moment that you take a step back in time and are a hunter and a gatherer of food. each day you go out with a bow and arrow or stones and sticks to gather food for your family. That is all you have ever known, see and done to survive. Now imagine someone comes up to you and tries to persuade you to become what he calls a "farmer." what od you think your response would be? 

You see him go out and scratch the earth and throw seeds into the ground and you see nothing; you see him watering the soil and removing weeds and still you see nothing. But eventually you see a great harvest. You notice his yield as a "Farmer" is fifty times greater than yours as hunter and gatherer, you are considered one of the best. What would you do? You would likely say to yourself, "even if I wanted to, I couldn't do that. I don't have the skills and I don't have the tools." You just wouldn't know how to work that way.

 Now the farmer is so productive that you see him making enough money to send his kids to school and give them great opportunities. You are barely surviving. Little by little, you're drawn to go thorough the intense learning process of becoming a farmer. You raise your children and grandchildren as farmers. That's exactly what happened in our early history. There was downsizing of the hunters and gatherers over 90 percent; they lost heir jobs.  

Several Generations pass, and along comes the Industrial Age. People build factories and learn specialization, delegation and scalability. They learn how to take raw materials through an assembly line with very high levels of efficiency. The productivity of the industrial age goes up fifty times over the family farm. Now if you were a farmer producing fifty times more than hunters and fathers and all of the sudden you see an industrial factory rise up and start outproducing the family farm by fifty times, what would you say? You might be jealous, even threatened. But what would you need to be a player in the industrial age? You would need a completely new skill-set and tool-set. More importantly, you'd need a new mind-set-- a new way of thinking. The fact is that the factory of the industrial age produced produced fifty times more than the family farm, and over time 90 percent of the farmers were downsized. Those who survived in farming took the Industrial Age concept and created the industrial farm.

Many companies still operate in the Industrial age of thinking. Most corporations still operate this way. By not empowering your employees to be successful, let their creativity thrive, and let their passion grow. Your employees will turn into things and expenses. The Information age may have started in the 1980's but really didn't take off until around 2000. The last 20 years we have seen the industrial age peak (Around 1999), and then fall in 2008. We have mastered manufacturing and we have mastered how to get the most out of our employees by the jackass method of holding a carrot in front of the employee (Bonus) and a foot in the rear (Termination) if performance falls.

How can we get the most out of our employees if we have pushed, and pushed and got rid our bottom performers (rinse and repeat). GE started a method of the top 20% and the bottom 20%. It is the best thing and the worst thing to come out of the industrial age. The top 20% are rewarded, and the bottom 20% are put on something called Goals and PIP (Performance Improvement Program). A lot of employees goal is to be in the middle. See the top 20% always are rewarded and given financial Security and that bad part is that they are seen through the rest of the peers as showoffs and they have a target on their backs. The bottom 20% are given deadlines to improve their performance. If that employee has not built a network of people and built relationships especially with there direct boss. They will be lining the unemployeement line. What happens when a top performer, who was a top performer for years falls into the bottom. They are quickly put on goals to improve there performance. In reality they may have lost a step, or other people may just be better at there performance. Is a bottom performer still an asset, yes they are. If it is short term then they will climb out of it. If you give that employee time and and let their creativity rise. Then the rewards might be impossible to imagine. See what happens in companies that think like they did 100 years in the industrial age is that their employees want to be mediocre, just average and stay in the middle. This is the doom of the industrial age. Top Performers are over compensated and bottom performers have attitude problems because they are not taken care of. They are micro-managed and their heart isn't in because their boss is kicking them in the ass. Even the best bosses can care about their employees but when it comes down to their performance but if you work in a culture where performance is everything. Even the best boss must do what is necessary to keep their job and have accountability.

What can you do to become successful in information/ knowledge worker age? You need to know your employees. You need to find what makes them tick. You have to understand everything about your employee in the most deepest way. You must know what passion they have, and with this, there ownership must be equal to yours. See every level in the civilization later builds on the generation of yesteryear. The hunter and gatherer, agricultural, industrial age is just a path. We will never leave the industrial age more we will grow on top of it. When the most successful companies come out in the 21st century. You will see their employees, and small business owners succeed. The productivity of the Information/Knowledge age worker will be 100 times greater than that of the industrial age. As Leaders, we must find a way to pass our knowledge and passion onto the next generation.