Overheard in the Aiport

Overheard the following conversation in the airport. A guy was talking on his cell phone to a business associate.

"No one cares about quality anymore. No one cares about the company. All they care about is the price of the stock.

"I called up ATT customer service before I left home and asked them where the hot spot in the airport is. She told me to ask someone at the airport.

"Ask someone at the airport?! Which one of the 1000 employees?

"I called Verizon, same thing. So I just walk around asking people? The company can't tell me?!

Unbelievable."

Not so unbelievable. It has become the rule. I can back this up from my experience in the factory.

It used to be that the people in charge were product or service oriented. They had come up through the ranks and knew the business from top to bottom. If something wasn't right they could see it on a walk-through and they knew what to do to fix it.

Now the folks in charge are the number crunchers. Their figures show that if we leave out step x in the process we can save $10,000. So we leave it out. No matter that half the orders get in the wrong queue. No matter that front line workers have to push twice as hard to make up for the increased error rate. No matter that customers are irate. We're showing good profits. We just pushed the price of the stock up.

You can see this on all levels. The corporate mentality has spilled over to government as well. Donald Rumsfeld lost his job as Defense Secretary because he thought he was smarter that the folks with the boots on the ground. How many soldiers lost their lives due to inadequately armored personnel carriers?

So finally the push-back from the front lines--and from the concerned parents of soldiers--forced him from his position. A rare exception to what nowadays is the rule.

Values are lost. Morale suffers. Quality is secondary. At what point do we as a society lose our integrity? The quality of our work? Pride? What will it take to get it back?