Flagellum (?)

It was 3 am. Rocky had just made another nightly visit to the bathroom. Overactive bladder in a 70 year old diabetic is not unusual. Being awakened gently is thus nothing new for me but my bladder is not at cause. I guess this is a case of relational bladder!

At any rate my mind centered on flagellum. I thought that odd and wondered what the term meant. I vaguely remembered it was likely a cellular biology term and made a note to look it up on Google – don’t you just love Google?  I also vaguely remembered locomotion and thought a fluttering motion of tendrils or ‘toes and fingers’ might produce the action.

Well anyway, rather than wonder about it at 3 am I got up and Googled the term. Here’s what I learned.

Flagella are organelles defined by function rather than structure. There are large differences between different types of flagella; the prokaryotic and eukaryotic flagella differ greatly in protein composition, structure, and mechanism of propulsion. [Wikipedia]

Flagella is plural for flagellum. Often the organelle (organism’s cellular component or substructure focused on one function) is a single whip or set of fingers that wave and cause the cell to move from one location to another within a larger cell or organism.

OK. This might be interesting to a biologist. But to a retired business person at 3 am on a Sunday morning? It is now 3:40 am and I’m writing about this because it seemed to be the sensible thing.

Well, other readers at this point must be wondering who would get up at that hour and write about flagellum let alone think about it at that hour?

So here’s the origin of the thought. My daughter is once again undergoing a reorganization within her employer’s business. In the last 7 years she has gone through this process 3 times. The usual process is some junior executive in some headquarters office thinks it would be better if some of the company’s support functions were located at different sites in the nation. So Boston’s office moves to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or vice versa. Or several units in Chicago are moved to Timbuktu, Iowa, while field staff still is served by the staff via computer and phone connections quite well. Trouble is the support people are asked to move at their own expense to the new location to keep their job, or face unemployment. Because many of these support staff are married with families, more than one person, and almost certainly, more than one job is affected by this corporate decision.

So my daughter is forced to find a new job. She can find the new position in the same company serving a different set of field staff elsewhere in the nation by remote connection, or she can do the same with another company in the same industry, or change industries.

Of course I feel frustrated for my daughter. She is working in a field not of her first choice because she was displaced by a crashing economy and a dissolving real estate industry over the past 10 years. What she is good at – great at really – she can no longer work at because the industry can’t find the balls (pardon me, the courage) to face new realities and reinvent itself. Too many people protecting old ways of doing things, so the industry continues as a severely damaged organism limping and lurching to new points of equilibrium having nothing to do with its real long term objective and purpose.

A lot of industries have this problem of renewal and change. The real estate industry is a classic one because of its size, political entrenchment in policy and legislative mucking about, as well as the financial enormity of the industry’s consequent sub businesses (mortgage industry, banking, investment banking, land use policy, land prices and optional usage of land masses, etc.).  A lot of money is invested in real estate. A lot of jobs are on the line. Ownership of these businesses is well established in entrepreneurial units of small size. Money and profits make for interesting relationships and skullduggery!

Getting them to realize their lives and businesses have changed at the cellular level is like getting a republican to understand his responsibility to pay taxes. What is old is not now new. What is new is not anything like the old. Times have changed. We must change what we are doing. The need remains the same. But now it will require new methods to address the needs.

Maybe the analogy to cell biology is what made my mind think of motion and flagellum?

If it fits, fine; so in small ways the larger organism is made to change, move and morph. The real estate industry needs a complete reinvention in my mind. A fundamental challenge to be responsive to the needs of the public for housing, shelter and structures which aid human scale relationships and community. I think that is the over arching requirement of the real estate gurus’ focus at this time. Will any step up to do this breakthrough work?

Not any time soon, I think. Sadly.

So, this means my daughter’s career is in the toilet, the career she’s good at and wants back. Meanwhile, she is working for another industry which needs a lot of work within its cellular structure, but that’s another topic for another day. The topic today is really how corporate structures are failing to do two critical functions.

Those functions are: first, overall architecture of their organization to their long term mission (are they truly focused on the mission and therefore able to forge long term vision of the organization’s well-being? And second, how well they safeguard their most important asset in their business – their people.

The first function I have already addressed in principle above. The second function is really a problem our nation faces on a grand scale. People are being treated as things and pawns on a chess set or board game. They are not. They are flesh and blood individuals with brains and aspirations. They are the heart of our society. They are the consumers of what society produces and thus engines of the economy. They are also the engines of labor that perform functions every employer requires to remain in business. Thus they are the functioning assets of every business yet they do not appear on any balance sheet.

Odd isn't it? Think of it. The balance sheet shows cash, accounts receivable, investments, buildings, land and equipment. All are necessary to conduct any business. Nowhere on the balance sheet is shown the value of the employees – the people who get the business done. They do appear on the income and expense report. As expenses – salaries, wages, benefits, FICA, taxes, etc.

However, each employee represents earning power for the company. That isn’t accounted for anywhere. Revenues are accounted for. But those bits and pieces of income somehow do not get connected by accounting to the people who produced the revenues in the first place.

By masking employees as chess pieces rather than people, the company is actually disrespecting its own human resources. And they will lose those resources one day and never get them back.

Corporations are in trouble today. The executives focus on their own pay not the long term viability of their companies. They can always jump to another corporation and make money messing them up! Like they did their old employers. Dehumanizing the company is tantamount to destroying the soul of the business. It will lead to the destruction of the business.

Companies must re-establish how they value their employees. They need to pay fair salaries and wages. They need to provide safety net benefits that encourage employees to take a chance on the employer and work for it. Loyalty to that purpose deserves loyal support in return. That loyalty is the mark of a relationship that truly is a partnership. With the employer.

Today that partnership is fading away. Hourly wages rather than salary. Weakening benefits rather than robust security programs (defined benefit pensions going away, health insurance plans being self funded by the employee, sick days and vacation days being combined and lessened, so many benefits disappearing entirely). The 40 hour work week is being toyed with. Oh the 40 hours remains, but in many instances overtime pay begins at 50 hours now, not 40. Flex time means employees have to adjust their work hours to a 24/7 schedule convenient for the employer, not the family.

You know, it seems to me the Family Values people have missed the point of what everyone else already knows. Owners of corporations are attacking the safety and security of families in America for their own benefit. But politically those same owners are spewing family values, lower taxes on corporations and people of wealth and a weakening of pensions and other benefits.

Who exactly is benefiting from all the republican nonsense in Washington DC and state houses and legislatures? Certainly not you and I. The corporations are part and parcel with them. That leaves the individual employees adrift in a sea of chess pieces being moved about the gaming boards by unseen hands.

And that motion is not flagella! No; it is greed and loss of purpose.

We need to change the script in our country. The function and purpose of government is one script in need of editing. The political process needs an entirely new script, one that returns the power to the people. And economic units – companies, employers, institutions – need a script that protects and empowers the employees so they can continue to be the engine of production as well as consumption.

Now that’s how an economy works. How did we lose our way so thoroughly? But we have, haven’t we?

May 6, 2015