Journey To Excellence

   i won’t bore you with the details, but I’m going through some training through Toyota right now, and it clarified a thought I’ve been having.  The Idea of the training is to make your company run leaner.  remove waste in all its forms, etc.  Tomorrow we take a trip to the toyota plant to see it in action, but the basic premise seems so simple, and yet most companies don’t even come close to the goals.  The stats aren’t really important.  what is important to industry and society as a whole is why they don’t come close.

    I’m taking the class, and it occurred to me that the leadership tier at my plant has already been through this training.  they found it important enough to send every employee in the plant to it, a status usually reserved for OSHA Safety Training.  Why?  Because they know we do things, a lot of things, wrong.

    Now here is the rub.  they can send us to all the classes they want.  What continues to be important to them is that we produce a million pounds of clean XXXX a day.  That’s round the clock, every day of the year, xmas included.  The only exceptions are during furnace rebuilds, and you wouldn’t believe how fast them occur.  The things in this class they pay lip service too.  Cleanliness, wasted motion, transportation, and all the other little things that hinder a company are pushed aside with the eye toward reaching the immediate goals of the company.  While in the short term taking care of these things would slow production, over the long run they would increase profits. 

   Corporate myopia isn’t new, and virtually every aspect of our society encounters similar issues.  Nothing gets done because we wait for those ahead to lead.   In droves we wait for a president that will lead us out of this malaise we have inflicted on ourselves.  Many think Ron Paul is the guy to do it.  My question is why do we need a Ron Paul?

    The only way things are going to change is if the bottom tier leads the top.  The top is pretty happy where they are, and I don’t care what Ron Paul says, he has been in congress long enough to be part of the problem.

  Did you know there is a Subaru Plant here in Indiana that creates zero waste?   No dirty water, no trash, no nothing.  It’s true.  These automakers are successful because they are not dictated to from the top.  The lower echelons are encouraged to think creatively, and to recommend ideas that will make the companies better.  This isn’t something that starts in the middle.  It starts on the line. 

   Thats the same place it should start with America.  At the roots of our constitution is the theory of “we the people.”

Voting for people that will not behave as our current crop of representatives behaves is the first step.  Which means virtually none of the candidates have any hope of making a difference, and I’d venture to guess about the same number really want to.  If obama, ckinton, edwards,mccain,tancredo, and all the other current or former members of congress or white house administrations wanted change they would already have done something to make that happen.  Face it, you never heard of ron paul until he ran for president.

   Our problems can only be fixed on our streets and in our homes, and our workplaces by us.  Stop looking for someone to lead, and do it yourself.

I just can’t see it

    I mean, even if I cover one eye like you do when your drunk to make stuff stop swaying, I can’t see what it is about Ron Paul that makes everyone on the net so ….damn….every word I come up with sounds bad.   exuberantly whacko, maybe?  I just see this guy who I know is worshipped by every militia and ku kluck klansman in the country.  He really doesn’t bring rational ideas to the table.  I like that about him, but I’m more twisted than most, and I kind of always hoped that my felllow Americans were a tad more stable than I.  Having treaded water in the shallow end of the gene pool for as long as I have, you can’t help but feel things are a little saner over in the deep end.

    I guess I’m wrong.  Take the war in Iraq.  Are you really mad that we fought a war in Iraq?  You weren’t up blowing your kazoo during the not ready for prime time “shock and awe” exhibition? Oh, c’mon, you can tell me.  i watched it.  morbid fascination is a hallmark of mine.  Isn’t whats really stuck in your craw the fact that after your little foray into imperialism, and preventive destruction, George Bush and his cronies have made such a hash of the job?  Mission Accomplished, if it had been accomplished then would have been received all over the country with ticker tape parades and 76 trombones, and even the little peace and love liberals would’ve flown the flag.  They’d of hated George again a week later, but they would’ve loved one in the win column just like everyone else.

    Got a little off track there, but my point is the folks that are all for Ron all the time really don’t seem to be in it for the isolationism stance.  They seem to like the same things david koresh liked, and the folks at Ruby ridge liked.  I’m not against anti-government nuts except when they couch it as a normal and proper way of thinking.  I’ll grant that a lot of the folks that have posted me are looking at Ron Paul from a utopian perspective.  If everything in the world were right and 1 + 2 = 3 all the time then Ron would be the man.  We live in a very dysfunctional world though, and there are plenty of people that can make 1 + 1 =any damn thing they please.  Ron Paul is not suitable for a roll as a leader in a nation facing as many dramatically dangerous issues as ours.

    How do you suppose he would deal with China?  That is the single most important issue facing America today, and I don’t care how many terrorists you whip out.  Do you really think his idea of foreign policy is suitable to deal with the inscrutable?  I don’t think so.

     You can usually judge a book by its cover, and you can tell a lot about a person by the people that they associate with.  You may not be a mobster, but if you hang around with the mafia boys you probably eat a lot of cannoli’s on the cheap.  If every rightwing nutjob organization in America is endorsing you then you may just be a …dare I say it….naw….I won’t but you know what I mean.

   I still think most of his supporters are decent people, and several I’ve spoken to seem like fine people.  i happen to think they may be misguided.

Blog Crackdown imminent

   The Federal Election Commission could be getting ready to crack down on those of us who like to talk politics.  It surprises me that the three democrats on the commission blocked an appeal of the judges ruling in the matter.  Check out this link

http://news.com.com/The+coming+crackdown+on+blogging/2008-1028_3-5597079.html