Alternatives

With the looming recession (or is it here already?) and feeling a little down after reading this article by de minimis. Having worked in two different manufacturing concern for quite a few years made me come to the realization that wholly manufacturing industries is coming to an end. Perhaps not in this lifetime but it could be during my children's or their children's time.

Wholly manufacturing industries are those that depends solely on manufacturing for their survival, without other divisions (A&P, Marketing, Research & Development, Customer Service), or if they have one, they're not an important part of the organization. These manufacturers often get their technologies and technical skills from others in the same market and often do not innovate or improvised upon this technology.

We were once considered a low cost manufacturer in the Asian region. Japanese manufacturers came here to invest by building new factories and hiring our workers. Now those low-cost factor is lost to two emerging new economic powers, China and India. All these years, we have not 'advance' in our knowledge to seriously compete with more advanced countries. Most of the owners only think of profits and when new technology emerged to replace old and obsolete ones, they fail to keep up.

In the owners quest for the bottom-line, they have neglected the most important assets of an organization. No, it's not the buildings, machineries and equipments. It is human capital. Only humans can innovate, not machines. By staying the same, they would only make their products lose competitive advantage to those who knows how to value-add to their goods.

And Vision 2020 (do we still hear of this phrase nowadays) will remain just that - a dream and nothing else. Where does that leave us?

Looking back to my school days, me and my school mates were made to think we did not really have much options in our life choices. If you are the bright ones, you get to choose to be a doctor, lawyer or engineers. If you're not so bright but not too stupid either (the stuck-in-the-middle types), you can take up accounting, business, marketing. And if you are the no-hope case, then you most probably would go out to work in a store, motor shop or factory.

Most of us never thought of going into the creative fields. Advertising, design, the arts, because they're considered not lucrative and not in demand. Maybe part of it could also be the heavy emphasis placed on rote-learning and memorizing facts in our school system. Those are 'left-brain' skills. Whereas creativity is a right-brain skill. This skill has been seriously overlook in my generation and will continue to be so.

In a world moving towards globalization, where a financial crisis in a country thousands of kilometres from here could seriously affect our economic well-being, it would be sensible to start using our right-brain skills. People in developed countries has long been using it while those in 'developing' like ours continues to disregard it. It's time to change this for the sake of our children.

Mat has a very entertaining take on the right-brain, left-brain analogy.