I worked for US based companies and their international units in many countries in Europe, Asia, Japan, Canada and Latin America. I have worked at the hands on, personal levels with senior managers to middle and lower level managers, totaling 45,000 people worldwide. I have been on the board of risk management and international consulting organizations and economic services organizations. I have had assignments to make mergers and acquisitions work and to buy and sell companies. I have worked directly in the transportation industry on rail, bus and multi model. I have coached and trained in restaurant management and in building jobs. I was on the board of a new university dedicated to construction trades and consulted with a prominent home improvement company.
I was appointed a volunteer chairman of the Hastings Drug Guidance Council in 1972. I led this community-based drug and law enforcement agency that has received many awards and has sustained and morphed into the most effective educational community in New York State. I have led as chairman of the Gwinnett Transit Advisory Board, the introduction of a new county bus system in the south that won numerous awards as a compressed natural gas bus system
I have been a senior manager at an educational publisher during the Vietnam War that pushed the draft deferment tests and I successfully quelled the violence of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1964. I taught at two universities in an MBA and a BA program for 14 years part time. I spent most of my work for pay years in the defense industry. As an Army soldier I served in an elite Scientific and Professional unit as a Project Director responsible for a controversial weapon system with both a nuclear and conventional warhead. I worked to keep the semi-conductor business of a major computer company alive in the USA by building a team in IBM that produced the first one-megabit chip that was built and sold for ten years. I was asked to work with the company that made the equipment to manufacture the semi-conductors used by most American chipmakers. I was referred to them as the only person to work with to “get their act together” to solve their product and delivery problems or “we will be forced to buy Japanese chip maker machines.” I did and it worked out well for all and for the USA in 1978. I was also actively involved in projects that either went nowhere or folded. I refused to work with a Chinese videotape manufacturer in 1985 because I feared that they would ultimately surpass the USA by implementing my Central Productive Process™ (CPP™) while I failed to get it implemented in the USA. Under the title of my economic monograph, How the West Will Win—that included the CPP™—I did send it to President G. W. Bush and his Secretary of Commerce, Malcolm Baldridge, in 1989. At age 75, I now recall that I learned a lot in 1977 when I was asked to lead a group of high-tech engineers in meetings with 25 Japanese visitors to, “tell them whatever they wanted to know about our ways to produce our semi-conductors.” Here’s what I learned. They wanted to know not how to “copy” us, as was the mantra then in late1970’s. They did want to know what they could do better than us and then they did. First it was Quality. Then price and profit. They did sustain this in all they did especially with autos. Then came the Chinese who did implement the CPP™. I have not given up on American leaders who do not grasp the CPP™. Somehow they do not fully see our financial, fiscal and economic crisis. This is my hope, that everyone will understand before the depression kills us.
The Heart and Brain
Without understanding the heart and the brain of our system, the CPP™, they do understand that non-regulation and runaway greed have been involved. They call the financial, banking and mortgage markets the Oxygen of our system. It is! However without the Heart and Brain, Oxygen is not enough. This error is the “sine qua non” to the restoration of the USA. We must build and sell new innovative products. We must develop excellent prime movers and key players. The second urgent piece to revitalizing the American economy is described in my “USA—The Innovation Nation” piece. I believe strongly that our new President, Barack Obama, will get it right, if helped by advisors and staff, as he has “gotten it” on so many vital issues that all Americans want resolved. In summary, jobs will come from our innovative products sold here and abroad in successful, victorious competition with China. We need our market share to provide jobs to produce sufficient income to enable our middle class to pay their mortgages, credit card debt and to finance health care for all. Prolonged war has hurt badly . . . very badly. At this time, 93% of Americans are hurting. There is no end in sight. They only way is through peace, progress and profit through the rigid adherence to the CPP™ and the prescription I advance in USA The Innovation Nation. Now let’s get it on!
The Central Productive Process™ (CPP™) first published in 1989
Richard G. Lazar, PhD and Carôn Caswell Lazar
In 1987, Richard first constructed what he called a Behavioral Economic model that describes what it takes to have a strong and sustainable economy and called it The Central Productive Process™ or CPP™. In fact, when we met 22 years ago our very first conversation was on the US economy and product building.
And, although he and we have refined the model over the last 21 years, it remains as true today, December 2008, as it was then. At the CPP™’s core is the “Building and Producing of High Quality and Market Driven Products for Sale in the U.S. and Abroad,” (step #1 of model). Everything progresses from this single strategy for economic prosperity. Everything depresses from ignoring this single strategy. Economic well-being starts, or stops, with building and producing products domestically.
To believe otherwise, that a successful economy can be created, grown and maintained by the financial and service sectors, has driven us to one of the lowest economic points of our history.
From the production of tangible, market driven products all other sectors of an economy develop. When a company employs people to build a tangible product it will soon employ people to sell and service that product. The company will hire others to improve the design and function of its product. As the company grows more people will be needed to administer the affairs of the company. All of these employed people will need homes, furniture, food, and even books. Many want coffee and donuts from the coffee truck that comes at 10:15 in the morning or from Starbucks. The building of products springs forth all sorts of businesses that employ many times the number employed by the product producer (spin-off job factor estimates are 3.5x to 12x). All of the people employed in the construction trades to build the homes, the furniture makers to fill the homes, the farmers and food processing companies to feed the families that live in the homes, and the authors and publishers who produce the books to fill the minds-hearts-and shelves of peaceful inhabitants’ homes, and the coffee truck owner and Starbucks—all of them derive their income from the product builders.
They, in turn, also financially support the providers of goods and services and they all then pay taxes that combined with the taxes of others provide for the common good. But take away product building and there is no foundation upon which to grow and then a once mighty economy will begin to move towards the tipping point that can almost overnight reverse the fortunes of whole local communities, nations, and even a world. We are on the verge of that collapse now.
The key to a strong economy is income, taxable income. And the way to ensure income for individuals and government is with jobs centered in product building and then moving out in circles around that center—like the ripples formed when a rock is thrown into water. That’s the ripple effect to aim for. Have you noticed that when the rock sinks to the bottom, the ripples also end? That is not the ripple effect to aim for. We need to re-establish our economy as diverse product builders that provide a continuing stream of expansion. The financial sector is not one of the rocks it is one of the ripples. No product-building, nothing to invest in. A strong economy is founded on ideas made tangible and consumable. Believing that the financial markets can continue to offer sound investments and flourish while selling dying ripples is just foolish. There has been a misguided notion of what creates ripples.
Sticking
