On Blindspots and Arrogance: A Story from Detroit

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The ideas in this article started as a comment on a post by Jeremiah Owyang, Four Threats That Could Decay Silicon Valley, until I realized I had more to say. Jeremiah has been a strong proponent of many of the disruptive apps that Silicon Valley is known for and consistently trains his analytic mind on what’s working. Now, he’s shining a useful light on what’s not working. I want to share my personal experience and put in a plug for the struggle of consciousness, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Threat One: Complacency and Competition is the first point, in which Jeremiah traces the history of Detroit over the past many decades. It’s a place and a culture which played key roles in my own growing up. My father worked at Ford for 37 years, retiring as Global VP of Marketing. We moved every few years as he climbed the corporate ladder; he got his start by sweeping floors in a Charlotte, NC dealership. The auto industry was my third parent, after my father and my mother — herself a corporate wife extraordinaire. The car industry’s values and practices were always present at the dinner table, on our vacations, and even deciding who I was allowed to visit in the hospital after several friends’ overdosed. My father (I rarely thought of him as “Dad” growing up) wore a tie even on Saturdays and Sundays. He was the CEO of our family.

So this sentence from Jeremiah really caught my attention:

To think Silicon Valley’s trajectory will continue unabated for much longer represents an arrogance that’s creating a tremendous blind spot for the region.

I witnessed that type of blind spot, first hand, so here’s my brief-as-possible synopsis in case it’s useful.

My senior year in high school, I also worked at a local Ford dealership, though my job was born of patronage and executed in part by smoking pot on the way to work. (Time Stamp: 1969–70) What I witnessed first-hand at home, I could now see outside my family: how full of themselves the all-male management, sales, and service crew were. (It’s tempting to digress here, but this is not about me though feminism does make an appearance.)

Then, I went west to college in 1970, with my first year spent at UC Riverside. This was a dumping ground for southern California smog problems. My daily swims and runs were curtailed as outdoor exercise was often discouraged due to high pollutant counts. Simultaneously, the Japanese car makers were making inroads in southern California.

As gray and depressing as Detroit’s weather can be in the winter, I’d never seen anything as oppressive — or dirty. The concept that merely breathing could put one at health risk, was a fact my consciousness could not ignore. Already a science major, I took courses on air pollution and learned not only to change my own engine oil but to understand the ways of internal combustion engines.

My first trip home, that Christmas, 1970, I informed my father of the situation. I asked, “How can the auto companies not be dealing with this? It’s going to become way more than a California problem!” I pleaded with him to lead the way at Ford, to position the company to produce a “clean car” — as I knew it would be successful as well as innovative. We were already discussing the technical options in class.

Not only could he not see the business case, but he had two prejudices that helped keep his blinders on. Prejudices that I believe many of his peers shared.

ONE: He quite seriously believed that California was home to “fruits and nuts.” Well, that and lots of cool celebrities with whom he enjoyed hanging out during the high-glam Ford media and marketing productions around the globe that he produced. California just was not relevant to product development, only to product marketing.

TWO: He was a World War II vet. He had a personal and passionate disrespect and disregard for Japan. Its nation, its people, its products. And since the U.S.A. beat Japan in the war, they were dismissible as a competitor in the minds of my father and his colleagues. The empathic part of him could not reconcile the inhuman wartime practices: Japan: All Bad. Plus, Henry Ford invented the goddam car and there was no way a Japanese company would be able to take away Detroit’s dominance in all things auto. Japan Threat: Dismissed.

He and his colleagues were similarly dismissive of Europe, those less passionately so.

Is Silicon Valley the Detroit of our times?

It certainly could be. It’s no minor point that the Valley is one of the least diverse industries in America. 50 years later and the needle has barely budged when it comes to women and minorities being in positions of leadership or influence.

In fairness, though, the automakers have come around a lot. They started to pay attention to air pollution, to do deals with Japan, and re: marketing, collected data showing that car buying decisions are largely controlled by women. Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) told the dealers to clean their damn bathrooms if you’re going to keep the customers (women) in the store for several dreadful hours of a car buying experience.

But IMO there’s still way too much foot-dragging in Detroit and in the Valley when it comes to improving product quality before or alongside profits. Changing one’s mindset is not easy! I get that. I’m a student of consciousness and as MLK said, it’s a continuous struggle, lest our totally understandable, built-in biases get the better of us.

Mindfulness is Not The Answer

Much as I had hoped, the trend of mindfulness in the Valley has not made a measurable dent on business practices or product development. While meditation can provide blissful benefits, consciousness is hard work:

• To examine oneself and one’s beliefs in the darkest of corners;
• To be able to entertain “the other” with curiosity and respect whether that is a being or an idea;
• To detach from the belief that’s one highway is the only one worth traveling;
• To experience a genuine peer-to-peer connection with others who share this planet.

Mindfulness without a growth in consciousness is like eating the cake without doing the work of shopping or baking or cleanup.

Mindfulness in a walled garden is not #makingtheworldabetterplace. That’s become an empty slogan, akin to the icing on the cake. Instead, I invite you to join me in the uncomfortable, probing, detached-from-righteousness examination of what is working and what is not, for whom, and by when. That intelligence is available in the trenches of #questioneverything.

Good luck, Silicon Valley. I‘d love to see more consciousness occupy the boardroom and the code. Otherwise, as Jeramiah suggests, it’s feasible you too could be confined to live in a #gigeconomy one day.

Photo Credit: St. Agnes Church in Detroit, MI; on Flickr, by Mike Boening Photography

Thank you for reading. You can find more discussions about consciousness on my personal website.