Cookie Cutter Calamity
Making Sense of the Crumble
Don’t blame my mother for the calamitous conditions of the 21st century workplace. She cooked freestyle and never used a cookie cutter. I once asked her how to make biscuits. Her reply: You take a mound of self-rising flour, cut in some shortening, stir with enough buttermilk to make the dough sticky….When she made cookies, which was not often enough, she would roll them with her hands and slice pieces off or drop the dough from a spoon. No cookie cutter. The results were always unique but predictably delicious. My mother, however, wasn’t baking for Nabisco.
Henry Ford knew how to use cookie cutters and they worked for him. But Ford was manufacturing cars using standardized parts and an assembly line process that had to be perfectly understood by successive shifts of workers. Other manufacturers followed suit and whole industries successfully organized along comprehensible principles of production. The result was an astounding level of productivity.
Then followed the “service economy.” New entrepreneurs envisioning unexplored opportunities looked at the success of manufacturing industries and thought they had an ah-ha moment when really it was oh-no. But they misunderstood and did it anyway.
My first experience with sort of fast food was Charlie’s Hamburgers in East Atlanta during the Fifties. Every Charlie burgher was prepared and cooked at the time it was ordered. It didn’t take long and the result, like my Mother’s, was unique and predictably satisfying.
Business wise guys doubtlessly had similar experiences and sought to duplicate the results, ultimately achieving only the speed. Still, they were onto the scale of something big and there is some value in that. The counter fronting Charlie’s grill could never have accommodated billions served and the evolving population demanded innovation.
There is something to be said for standardization in fast food to the extent that customers feel comfortable with certified cleanliness. I’m not sure I would have wanted to see what might have been running around behind Charlie’s counter when the lights were off.
In today’s fast food businesses, the lights are never off and customers pay quick visits to spotless environments without the time required to fight ketchup from the bottom of a bottle. Uniformity rules and those uniforms became part of what customers convinced themselves are part of the quality built into fast food industry today. We convinced ourselves that we prefer seeing uniforms to sloppy jeans and faded tee shirts. And we were probably right about those things but the mega proprietors of mini outlets misunderstood the moral limits of uniformity and soon we had plastic smiles and scripts.
The gradually ground down workers could no longer be trusted to offer a genuine greeting. Granted, sincerity is hard to pump on minimum wage but that’s a different aspect. As delicious as Chik-fil-a sandwiches are, I hate hearing, “My pleasure,” over and over from every single worker every time. It makes me want to bust out with a “Bullshit,” in reply. But, of course, I don’t. I plastic smile right back at them while grumbling between teeth that are on the cusp of efficient enjoyment.
The problem is that we endure unwarranted uniformity in more important venues because guess what rolled off the assembly line next? Stores. What had once been caverns for exploration turned into polished monoliths of stylized syndication. The objection is far greater than towers of folding board perfect identical shirts under precisely the same spotlight angle. There is a human consideration, also.
Ironically, as stores began to fit themselves for straight jackets, they shed the black dresses, navy blue suits and fake carnations that had mischaracterized their denizens for generations. Any dash of individuality that might have resulted was lost amid identical aisles and copy machine layouts.
Top management liked those results because they could refine cookie cutters to eliminate crumbles. Fewer crumbles, more profit. If you think of it as less waste you admire efficiency but at the expense of much greater potential. Because in the drive for profit through efficiency, stores began to treat their employees like merchandise: plan ‘em, push ‘em, stack ‘em, use ‘em, replace ‘em.
Ratchet this process throughout management and there is a calamity with oozed out creativity lost between the cracks and any possibility of potential cooked away under the pressure of conformity. Top management saw an opportunity to extend control still further and refine the cookie cutter still more by distilling everything — literally everything — into simple step-by-step instructions that anyone — literally anyone — could read and follow. Top management set out to reduce labor costs by making it possible to have low paid managers because the processes were so simple. All “managers” these days need to do is follow instructions. That’s all top management wants them to do because to do otherwise is — gasp — creative. What are employees for, top management, thinks, except to do as they are told.
And they instituted this process while survey after survey cited lack of control over how they did their jobs as the greatest dissatisfaction of workers. People, it was being statistically shown, wanted some control over their workplace, how they accomplished their work and their work environment. It is no wonder that other statistics credit the American workplace as lacking in these vital areas and the American worker as disengaged. It’s tough to be involved when every action you take is directed, every communication you make is specified and every contact scripted.
Think about the loss these businesses have incurred by failure to allow people the latitude to make even minor decisions regarding their work. Some, analyzed by Zeynep Ton in The Good Jobs Strategy, have seen the light. But many businesses continue to stumble around in a fog of self-pride and misbegotten authority.
Worse, reinforced by advertising, businesses conditioned customers to accept self-serving mistreatment and react in predictable ways that benefit themselves rather than their customers. This can be seen in fast food lines where customers have been encouraged to order by number, faster, easier and often combined with pricey add-ons, instead of thinking about what they really want. And by gulping repeated insistence from stores, customers add credit cards that benefit. Whom? And hurt. Whom?
Worse still, our educational system gears students for low rise employment and prepares successive generations for bad business fodder. Nothing typifies this better than cashiers who couldn’t make change if their cash registers didn’t tell them what it should be and customers who can’t afford anything but trash food.
Perhaps with screw turn irony, modern manufacturers now need employees with elevated skills and critical abilities that have been successfully eliminated from public schools. We squelched ourselves collectively dry of content and now find hollow shells in need of filling.
Successive generations learned the wrong message and applied it widely. The scale of their putative success was massive in aggregate, and for some, individually. But now it’s a crumbling chimera, unable to sustain needs of the human psyche. And with the greed of stupendous sponges they even absorbed fundamental sustenance from their victims.
How the crumble occurred is now clear, and with clarity, should be more instructive than shocking. Good entrepreneurs — businesspeople of any variety — are not mere manipulators of opportunity or navigators of the shortest distance to a buck. They are creators of meaningfulness.
Calamity resulted from confusing products, byproducts and outcomes. Henry Ford was not confused. He understood that cars were his product and that the outcome was improved lives. Money, he knew, was a byproduct.
For my mother, cookies were a product and happy children were the outcome, along with personal satisfaction. Her byproduct was more work in the clean-up. To be truly successful, we all must find a suitable path to products yielding meaningful outcomes with acceptable byproducts.
Cooperating with others working toward a common goal, even if it involves standardized parts, can be fulfilling. But stay away from cookie cutter companies. Given time, they’re sure to crumble. And if you ever see an employer come at you with a cookie cutter, run like a mad gingerbread man.
copyright 2014 by Michael Driver
Twitter: @mdMichaelDriver
#RaiseLabor
