[slide start; when to title, can start speaking]
It's an honor to be here in Tampere, addressing this audience of the most outstanding textilians in the world today.
[slide with faces]
Looking around at this diverse sea of faces, I see outstanding elements of corporations like Dow, Denkendorf, Lenzing, all at the forefront of consumer satisfaction in textiles. I see members of the European Commission, Euratex, and other important political bodies that aim at easing rules for corporate citizens. I also see professors from great universities walking into a prosperous future hand in hand with industrial partners, using citizen funds to develop great textilic solutions to be sold to consumers for profit and progress.
I see on all of your faces a touching, childlike eagerness to tackle the biggest textiles questions today. At the same time I see a deep understanding that some of these solutions may not be easy, but that come what may, we have to press on into a future that few of us understand, except in terms of its dollar results.
[slide helping hand]
How do we at the WTO fit in? Well, that's easy: We want to help you achieve those dollar results. When roadblocks to dollar results arise--protectionism, worry, even violence against physical property--we want to help make sure that none of this stands in the way of your dollar results.
What do we want? A free and open global economy that will best serve corporate owners and stockholders alike. When do we want it? Now.
[slide charles darwin]
Of course, just like nature, the market sorts things out by itself. It's like Darwin said, if you look at nature, one thing is clear, and that's that things go well--and that if you apply natural laws to human society, things will go well too.
But like all of us--even wild animals--the market can use some help. And we at the WTO are committed to providing that help, to helping the market help those that need it the most.
We're using a variety of techniques to do so.
[slide lobbying]
Lobbying for example, and other political tactics; "guerrilla marketing" and other corporate techniques,
[slide guerrilla]
to cleverly show teenagers the value of liberalization; and so on.
Finally, we have in mind some far more sophisticated and advanced solutions.
[slide with several things, and question mark]
Some of these solutions are based in Textiles. In just twenty minutes from right now, I'm going to unveil the WTO's very own solution to two of the biggest problems for management: maintaining rapport with a distant workforce, and maintaining healthful amounts of leisure. This solution, appropriately enough, is based in textiles.
[slide with title]
But how did workers ever get to be a problem? Before unveiling the solution, I'd like to talk a bit about the history of the worker/management problem. We will follow the stages of work from pre-industrial to an imported workforce model, from an imported workforce to a remote workforce model, and finally--the stage we're going through now--from a remote workforce model to a remote workforce that really works. And incidentally, we'll see that at every step of this evolution, it is textiles that has played the central role.
[slide Civil War]
The first leg of our management-historical journey is back to 1860s America, and the U.S. Civil War. We all know about this war--the bloodiest, least profitable war in the history of the U.S., a war in which unbelievably huge amounts of money went right down the drain--and all for textiles!
[slide paradigm shift]
Of course, this war is most famous for having effected a mighty change in the management paradigm from a central-owner hierarchical model to a much more decentralized, fluid model--a real "hippie revolution" kind of paradigm shift!
We'll talk about this misunderstanding in a moment--but first, a bit of background.
[slide freedom]
[more colloquial]
Believe it or not, even many Americans don't know what caused the Civil War. Why did people fight and die and lose money? The answer is really really simple, but it is surprising.
[click for word]
It comes down to one word: FREEDOM.
[slide southern happiness]
By the 1860s, the South was utterly flush with cash. It had recently benefitted from the cotton gin, an invention that took the seeds out of cotton and the South out of its pre-industrial past. Hundreds of thousands of workers, previously unemployed in their countries of origin, were given useful jobs in textiles.
Into this rosy picture of freedom and boon stepped... you guessed it: the NORTH.
[slide north]
The South, of course, wanted to buy industrial equipment where it was cheapest, and to sell raw cotton where it fetched the highest price--in Britain. The North, however, decided the South should NOT have the FREEDOM to do this, but instead should HAVE to do business with the North, and only with the North.
The North used its majority stake in the country's
governance to exploit the Southern landowners and deny them their freedom to
choose the cheapest prices; this of course made them very angry. You'd be angry
too if you were denied your freedom of choice! And so the North's abusive
tariff practices basically caused what otherwise was a perfectly good market to
spiral into a hideously unprofitable war.
[slide no excuse for war]
Now some Civil-War apologists
have said that the Civil War, for all its faults, at least had the effect of
outlawing an Involuntarily Imported Workforce. Now such a labor model is of
course a terrible thing. I myself am an abolitionist. [if laugh--"not that
it makes much difference now!"] But in fact there is no doubt that left to
their own devices, markets would have eventually replaced slavery with
"cleaner" sources of labor anyhow.
[slide thought experiment]
To prove my point, come join me on
what Albert Einstein used to call a "thought experiment". Here:
Suppose Involuntarily Imported Labor had never been outlawed, that slaves still
existed and that it were easy to own one. What do you think it would cost today
to profitably maintain a slave--say, here in Tampere?
[slide finland]
Let's see.... A Finnish clothing
set costs $50 at the very least. Two meals from McDonalds cost $10 or so. The
cheapest small room probably runs for $250 / month. To function well, you have
to pay for your slave's health care--if its country of origin was polluted,
this could get very expensive. And of course what with child labor laws,
much of the youth market is simply not available.
[slide gabon]
Now leave the same slave back at
home--let's say, Gabon. In Gabon, $10 pays for two weeks of food, not just one
day. $250 pays for two years' housing, not a month's. $50 pays for a lifetime
of budget clothing! Health care is likewise much cheaper. On top of it all,
youth can be gainfully employed without restriction.
The biggest benefit of the remote labor
system, though, is to the slave--because in Gabon, there is no need for the
slave not to be free! This is primarily because there are no one-time slave
transport costs to recoup, and so the potential losses from fleeing are limited
to the slave's rudimentary training. So since the slave can be free, he or she
suddenly becomes a worker rather than a slave! Also terrific for morale is that
slaves--workers!--have the luxury of remaining in their native habitat and
don’t have to relocate to places they would be subject to such unpleasantries
as homesickness and racism.
Is there any competition between
these two models of life, for either side?
[slide paid/unpaid]
I think it is clear from this
little thought experiment that if the North and South had simply let the market
sort it out without protectionist tariffs, they would have quickly given up
slavery for something more efficient anyway. By forcing the issue, the North
not only committed a terrible injustice against the freedom of the South, but
also deprived slavery of its natural development into remote labor.
[slide bush]
The WTO is fortunately not alone
in understanding the power of the market to resolve serious issues. I quote
president George Bush on this issue. At the Quebec FTAA meeting he said: “Free
and open trade reinforces the habit of liberty that sustains Democracy over the
long haul.” Had the leaders of the 1860s understood what our leaders understand
today, the Civil War would never have happened.
[slide title]
Now the "modern" remote
labor model, while much better than the imported workforce model, is--being
decentralized--also much more complicated from a management perspective.
[slide home office]
In a world where the headquarters
of a company are in New York, Hong Kong or Espoo,
[slide remote work]
and the workers are in Gabon,
Rangoon, or Estonia, how does a manager maintain proper rapport with the
workers, and how does he or she ensure from a distance that workers perform
their work in an ethical fashion?
Let's look at a counterexample--a
case in which managers remained out of touch with remote workers, leading to
extreme worker dissatisfaction and the eventual total loss of the worker base.
Perhaps we can learn from this case and avoid such catastrophes in the future.
[slide britain]
In 19th century Britain, just like
in the South, things had never looked better. The country was flush with cash
and potential and freedom, thanks to new technology--the spinning jenny. Like
the cotton gin in the South--for turning raw cotton into useable
cotton--Britain's spinning jenny turned useable cotton into finished textiles,
so the British could suddenly mass-produce clothing.
Like in the South, all that was
needed was a workforce to produce the raw materials that these new tools
required. The British, being more advanced, took a modern approach: instead of
expensively importing workers, they located their employment opportunities
where workers already lived: India.
[slide india]
There were problems, right from
the start. For thousands of years India had made the finest cotton garments in
the world--so Indian workers felt humiliated when they had to just provide raw
materials to British industry.
[slide gandhi sewing]
The main
rabble-rouser--literally--was Mohandas Gandhi, a likeable, well-meaning fellow
who wanted to help his fellow workers along, but did not understand the
benefits of open markets and free trade. Gandhi thought that through
"self-reliance"--protectionism against textiles trade with
Britain--India could become strong and relearn its own ancient ways of
textiles.
[slide india rioting]
These rather naive ideas became extremely
popular, and a big proportion of the citizenry rose up against the British
management system. The British eventually had to leave!!!
So what are the lessons for
management here? The big problem in India was clearly a grave lack of
management rapport with workers. By making only small adjustments, British
management could have kept India on the path to modernity.
[slide a lack of vision]
For example, one of the things
Gandhi and his anti-globalization followers did was make their own clothing at
home, to symbolize their independence from the cotton trade that they perceived
as imposed and oppressive. Now as any student can tell you, if management in
England had been properly in touch with worker concerns, they could have
responded in a timely way--e.g. by making available clothes in the home-spun
style that the Indians craved. Today you can see clothes like that in many
clothing catalogues, like the Whole Earth Catalogue, for example.... But of
course they didn't have that sort of perspective in Britain and so they
couldn't do it.
[slide bill gates]
India still has a long road to
recovery from Gandhi's legacy of protectionism. Bill Gates really summed it up
on his recent visit to India when he said, "India faces big challenges,
such as the existence of well-meaning laws that hinder entrepreneurs. For
example, there are laws that say people can't be laid off and that companies
can't go bankrupt. As its technological, political, and economic systems are
modernized, India's progress will accelerate."
[slide title]
Now while the British may be
excused for losing India because of a want of technology, we have no
such excuse. In these sensitive times when a large percentage of the world's
population is nearing the boiling point over problems they imagine with
globalization--when much of the world may be feeling as Gandhi felt, and may be
on the point of taking drastic measures--we need to use all resources at
our disposal to help the market help corporations, to assure that things go well--in society just as in
nature.
[slide political lobbying again]
Again, we need to use all the
political tools at our disposal.
[slide guerrilla marketing again]
And again, marketing to certain
population sectors can change future perceptions. The market--in the form of
privatized education--is likely to be our ally in this process of shifting
children's awareness from less productive issues and thinkers to more
productive ones, but we can help it along as well.
[slide staying in touch]
But even more important than any
of this is management's on-the-ground efficiency. To avoid another India, we
must insure that management is constantly in touch with workers, but constantly,
and not just intellectually but by all the tools at our disposal--i.e. the
senses. So that the manager has direct, visceral access to his or her workers,
and can experience their needs in a visceral way.
[slide with clip of guy walking around]
Now I'm about to show you an
actual prototype of the WTO's solution to two major management problems of
today! There are some video spots that accompany it--and I just want to say
that you know, sometimes things don't turn out quite as you imagined they
would--sometimes you give something to an agency and it just comes back a
little different from what you expected. The animators went a little too far in
some parts--I think you'll see which parts....
And a second thing I wanted to say
is--this design isn't necessarily to be taken literally. This is more important
as a direction, really--to get you thinking outside the box on solutions to
management problems... so you can start imagining a more holistic way of
answering the call of management's many challenges.
Now we all know that not even the
best workplace design can help even the most astute manager keep track of his
workers.
[slide with clip of guy in panopticon]
[just watch the slide until guy
explodes]
You need a solution that enables a lot more rapport with workers--especially when they're remote.
[step out from behind podium]
Mike, would you please?
[Mike rips it off with a drum
roll]
Ah! That's better! This is
the Management Leisure Suit.
[slide with unveiling, automatically leads to slide with words]
This is the WTO's answer to the two central management problems
of today: how to maintain rapport with distant workers, and how to maintain
one's own mental health as a manager with the proper amount of leisure.
How does the MLS work--besides
being comfortable? Well, allow me to describe the suit's core features.
[Inflates the phallus.]
This is the Employee Visualization Appendage--an
instantly deployable hip-mounted device with hands-free operation, [slide of inflation],
which allows the manager to see his employees directly, as well as receive
all relevant data about them.
[slide visualizing employees
auto leads to slide visualizing employee performance]
Signals communicating exact
amounts and quality of physical labor are transmitted to the manager not only
visually, but directly, through electric channels implanted directly into the
manager, in front and behind. (The workers, for their part, are fitted with
unobtrusive small chips that transmit all relevant data directly into the
manager.)
The
MLS allows the corporation to be a corpus, by permitting total communication
within the corporate body (on a scale never before possible). This is
important--but the other, equally important, achievement of the MLS has to do
with leisure.
[slide leisure activities] In the U.S., leisure--another word for freedom,
really--has been decreasing steadily since the 1970s. The MLS permits the
manager to reverse this trend by letting him do his work anywhere--all
locations are equal.
Now the MLS is good for both managers and workers, but the number
of non-corporate solutions, also, is as endless as our imagination. [slide with protest] For the WTO, for example: with the MLS I'll be able to
not only see protests right here, but I'll be able to feel what's going
on in the hot spots of the world. What will the
danger level be when the first protester is beheaded? I'm against beheading,
but they do that in Qatar, where we're holding our next meeting. The MLS can in
a general sort of way show us things--it can help us discover new metrics.
This suit--is it a science-fiction
scenario? No--everything we've been talking about is possible with
technologies we have available today.
[slide all the faces repeat]
And even more interesting
solutions are being developed everywhere. Right here, today and tomorrow, we
will be learning about many of these very technologies I've been discussing
from the prime movers themselves. Interactive textile materials, adaptable
materials for smart clothing, living shirts that monitor the wearer's vital
signs and motion.... The very people pioneering these remarkable tools will be
telling us about them.
Also here, and of equal interest,
are the regulators, trade officials, and others who make the world go round-- my colleague Pertti Nousiainen of the European Apparel and Textile Organization,
whom I have the pleasure to follow, and my colleague Erkki Liikanen of the European Commission, who will
show us tomorrow how traditional industry can be made more useful to the global
economy, and who will show us the importance of always looking forward
on the highways of progress towards ever new horizons, with cooperation and
mutual delight in the fruits of prosperity.
[slide final bumper]
I am very excited to be here.
Thank you.