My First Article - from 1978

For some years now I have been paying to maintain a domain name of my own name: duncancmcdougall.com.  Though it was originally intended to become a site from which people could access me in my consulting role, with my growing involvement internationally over the past six years, I have not been focused on consulting, and the site's maintenance has taken on a different purpose.  It is the only place on the web where my older articles can be found.

Last weekend (while reorganizing my computer's overloaded hard drive!) I discovered a .pdf file of my very first published article, from the November-December, 1978, issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR).  With the help of my son (and webmaster) Jesse, that article is now found at the link that follows this post.  But please, before going there, read its story.

The article is the outcome of a visit of my Muse during an all night hospital vigil with my young wife Shirley, who was experiencing serious abdominal pain in the middle of her second pregnancy.  Shirl had been visiting her parents' home in Westborough, Massachusetts, that week, while I was teaching a summer-school class at Plymouth State College (now PSU) in New Hampshire. When  I received a call from my sister-in-law Joan Kimball telling me that Shirl was going to the Framingham Union Hospital, I drove south at once to be with her.  We all feared that the pregnancy might be in jeopardy, but, thank God, Jesse was doing fine in there.  However, Shirl was in excruciating pain, and was unable to eat or drink anything without losing it a few minutes later.  A series of diagnoses were hypothesized, and ruled out, one by one.  The one my Dad, Mac, had told me over the telephone to have them check for, a bowel obstruction, was not seriously considered at the hospital's emergency room, as Shirl had been examined with a stethoscope, and had been said to have "normal bowel sounds."  So, Shirl was admitted for the night.  Because of her pregnancy, the hospital's emergency room doctors chose not to take an x-ray of her abdomen, a decision with which Shirl concurred, so as not to risk harming our baby.

As Shirl lay sedated that night, I, her husband, spending the night at her bedside in a state of worry and sleepless nervousness, borrowed a pad of lined paper from the nurses' station, and with a borrowed pencil, wrote the article that I called "The Corporate Ratchet."

On the following Tuesday, after Shirl had remained in the hospital for four agonizing days, and was in danger of starving to death if the problem were not solved soon, Basil Kimball, Shirl's father, called an older surgeon that he knew from Worcester, and asked him to examine her.  That 80 year-old doctor examined Shirl, said he suspected an obstructed bowel, and asked Shirl to allow one x-ray.  The x-ray revealed the obstruction.  The doctor operated within the hour, and a week later Shirl was back on solid food, as good as new.  Praise God for Shirl's father's wisdom.

A week or so later, I typed up the linked article (below), and sent it to the HBR. The HBR editors accepted it for their then-new section of short thought-pieces called, "Ideas for Action." They changed almost nothing, except for the title.

Postscripts

• My Muse visits me at strange times.  But in 1978 we were in a time of 12% per year inflation, so I guess she knew what she was doing.  I later learned that this article was being assigned to some Harvard MBA students in a management accounting course.
• Tomorrow we shall be driving to France to honor Basil Kimball's service during World War II.  It is fitting that we do so.  Basil loved his family, loved his country, and lived a righteous life in service to God.  May Basil rest in peace, knowing that we in his family love him still, and hold him in the highest regard.

Link to the article:
http://www.duncancmcdougall.com/articles/the-corporate-ratchet-effect-on-spiraling-inflation/.

Today's Rant: "You don't know what you've got, until you lose it."

Click to enlarge.  
Source: http://www.rttsweb.com/outsourcing/statistics/, Accessed 28 September, 2012

An early rock 'n' roll song said, "You don't know what you've got, until you lose it."*

That is America's present plight.

Perhaps it is the plight of all the "industrialized" states of The West. 

We have lost much of our industrial base, most especially in high-volume industrial products such as steel, textiles, automobiles, and electrical and electronic devices, but increasingly in the technically sophisticated products that make other products, such as punch presses, machine tools, plastic molding equipment, textile machinery, mining machinery, as well as tool-and-die work and software manufacturing.

I fear that the next World War will be a nuclear war.  We in the West have not the industrial capacity to fight a global conventional war anymore.  Nor, I fear, do we have the know-how in our imaginations and in our fingertips to create in needed volumes the tools, machines, and factories necessary to build such capacity quickly enough to respond to a major conflict without resorting to the nukes.  I find that downright frightening.

Over the past 50 years, we in the West have shipped these industrial capabilities to the East.

Many companies have sent their best (and often most senior) toolmakers, millwrights, and production engineers overseas to teach the newcomers to heavy industry how to do that at which we were once the best.  And the bright and skilled young people in our western societies who, in the 1930s or 1940s would have become skilled tradesmen, are now going to college, never again to dirty their hands.  This is the meaning of effete: to prefer any white-collar job, no matter how low-paying, to being seen as a member of the "working class."  Such thinking (and such public policy) has made plumbers scarce and rich, and teachers and bank tellers plentiful and poor.  The questionable quality of their education aside, Western universities produce far more graduates than our economies need, and our societies have far too few skilled technicians of many kinds.

After the "successful" invasion of Iraq in 2003, we failed to get the electricity to work in that country's major cities for three or more years!  We built in that much time the myriad armaments, thousands of ships and tens of thousands of airplanes with which to fight World War II on three continents, and in five oceans!  Why, in 2003, couldn't our President have called the CEOs of GE and Westinghouse together and said, "Your country needs you to get the lights on in Baghdad, and do it in three months!"  I fear it was because Westinghouse was no more, and GE was largely a hollow corporation.  I fear we have become industrially incompetent.

And it is not only Americans who have invested in this easterly tidal wave of industrial know-how.  Was not Volkswagen the leading producers of passenger cars in China throughout the 1990s?  (GM/Buick was a distant second.)

Meanwhile, even as much of The East has embraced the profit motive, The West has pursued socialism, albeit "creeping socialism," promising ever-more to its less productive citizens in the name of invented "rights," and misconstrued "compassion." Is it not more compassionate to get a family off welfare by providing a job that pays a living wage than to trap that family in dependency on governmental handouts?  Where is human dignity?  Where is one's pride?  Once the majority of citizens live off the government, who will be left to pay taxes?  Has the West learned nothing from the collapse of Communism?

If we live past 21 December 2012, which some predict we shall not, we may find that we miss our freedom, and the self-reliance that won it for us, and that built our great Western Civilization.  Where is Ralph Waldo Emerson, when we need him?

Oh, but Emerson's "Self-Reliance" is an essay longer than two pages!  In fact, I just printed it out on 15 pages.  It may be the most important set of ideas ever written about democracy, and about what makes democracy work.  But, will anyone take the time to read it?

I am a blessed man of a blessed generation.  I have lived in a golden age.  So, I do not begrudge prosperity and happiness to anyone.  If the peoples of the East  and South are willing to work hard and to learn industrial skills, then I shall applaud the economic progress that those efforts bring them.  It might become a great thing for Humanity, if the wealth of industrialization is more broadly distributed across the globe.  But, should we in the West be exiting the manufacturing sector?  Should decisions to outsource be made without any thought of their national or regional strategic effects?

Manufacturing, the function wherein I trained at General Motors, and in which I managed at two subsequent corporations, is little-appreciated in the boardrooms of too many American corporations.  A factory is not a black box from which flow products and problems, costs and strikes.   A factory is a strategic resource, filled with can-do people and creative talent.  It produces not just "goods," but also flexibility, on-time deliveries, quality, and ideas for improvements in all of those.  Without a factory, a product-company is hollow.  It becomes like a fortune-teller on the boardwalk, selling what it knows little about to people it cares nothing about, albeit at high margins.  Do we want to be such pure marketeers?  Or do we want to create real goods and real value?

Think twice, dear reader, before you allow your company to outsource your products.  You don't know what you've got, until you lose it.
_________________________________________
* "You don't know what you've got, until you lose it," by songwriters Paul Hampton and George Burton, 1961.

D-Day + 24,472

Sixty-seven years ago today, when I was not yet one year old, the allied armed forces of the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and the Free French jumped from airplanes and/or stormed the beaches of Normandy, and thus began the liberation of Nazi-dominated Western Europe.  Let us not forget those men and their sacrifices.

I raised the flag today at the door of my home in honor of those who fought their way ashore that day, one of whom was my wife Shirley McDougall's late father, the kind-hearted and soft-spoken Mr. Basil Kimball of Westborough, Massachusetts.