The Great Dumb-Down; Correcting Canada’s Smart Legacy

A few years ago, a business guru came along and devised a much cheaper way to run corporations globally. First, they could eliminate a broad swatch of middle and lower management positions by asking Human Resources (HR) staff to filter resumes with a skills text-search computer applications.

The average age of HR people was 26 to 30 and their training was rarely at a University Degree level, but none of that mattered because their job would be to screen for personality and for fit with Corporate Governance and Spending Criteria. Quality of candidates would be measured by Vice President MBA Generalists and by skilled peer-reviews.

Diversity goals can be met easily now because the HR folks are not invested in the quality of any specific candidate nor business silo either; this is the responsibility of others. The business silos of Operations, Finance, HR, Sales, Marketing, Governance and so on are usually given to Masters-level candidates – often MBAs and Finance Grads, and more often than not EMBA graduates of programs who accept anyone and fail no-one either.

So – out went the 20-year experienced engineers; and good thing too because they were going to amount to $1.2 to $1.8 million pension obligations to Canadian Families very shortly as well. This move externalized pension costs off to Canadian Governments and Citizens as per the standard training that every business-admin grad received in any one of our major business schools – aka, the world’s most short-sighted business ethics curriculum – and this training was reinforced by bonus structures in the workplace too – of course.

North American’s pay an exorbitant amount of their taxes in support of our Universities, in order to crank out a generation of the most socially irresponsible business leads on the planet and then our corporations only bonus them when they meet socially irresponsible financial and operational targets too. Do you see a problem brewing here yet?

These targets – have lead to the Societies and the Economies that support these businesses, to Collapse. Fully 72% of the worlds economies are now in a Collapse Trending – in large part due to this unsustainable business structure.

I do not equate the word “Integrity” with Business School graduates; Engineers yes, Doctors yes, as these professional take an oath to “do no harm” to society and their actions are accountable on threat of losing their license throughout their careers as well. MBAs and Financial Professionals, however, take no such oath and are rewarded richly for pulling out all the strings in pursuit externalizing social costs and maximizing quarterly profit.

Its not hard to recognize these structures in Canadian banks – the anchors of tax havens like the Cayman Islands. As an experienced engineer myself, I am witness to this laudable dumb-down frequently. Its noticeable and it is also easy to see where it is coming from for those of us in the consulting trade who are exposed to work with many companies for various periods of time.

The latest insult to our social well-being’s sensibilities comes from Dominic Barton – the A-Team Lead for our Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s Economic Policy Committee. According to Mr. Barton, a career London-based Management Consultant, Canada must now look to other countries for its Engineering and labour skills.

I can assure the reader that Canada has ever turned-out some of the most talented engineers on the planet, and then squanders them by not supporting them – until fully half of our Engineering Grads at Waterloo University will accept positions in other countries again this year. Annually, IT Phds at McMaster University number just a handful  because the investment in training by these engineering students is not supported nor compensated in Canada.

Elsewhere, in countries that are not Collapsing – countries like China and the Netherlands, businesses must have a high percentage of local ownership and major businesses are not permitted to hire engineers offshore. As a result, local engineers are in high demand at the same time that Engineers are invited to R&D and build some of the most interesting hi-tech on the planet.

Dominic Barton behaves like an incompetent Policy and Thought-Leadership Architect – and there is an urgency in saying so; because at a federal level, Socially Irresponsible Policy Change costs lives. Because as soon as Mr. Barton quits asking for increased immigration of skilled Engineers, he next calls for Interest Rate hikes with no mitigations for the 13-times Housing Bubbles and Usury that are Rampant in Canadian Society today – which are also due to irresponsible housing and foreign investment policy.

See Economic Controls for Housing Bubbles here…

A 3% to 5% lift in interest-rates must happen, but if it happens with no mitigations for the Housing Bubble financing loads that Canadians have been forced to live with these past six years, hundreds-of-thousands of Canadian homeowners will be evicted. Homelessness will soar and Canada has already been cited by the United Nations for its persistent neglect of homeless citizens in Mar 2016. The statistics – in Spain, and in Canada now, show that homelessness results in approximately 5% suicide rates as a direct result.

Making Policy without knowing what you are doing – kills people. The off-shoring and dismissal of Engineering, alongside the ignoring of thought-leadership and experience by Human Resources and by Corporate Executive, kills whole societies – slowly, painfully, but also predictably and preventably.

Fixing both problems is straight forward: first, our democratic voters-turned-politicians must take a Civics course in high-school that teaches them what are the important policies and leadership measures of a sustainable society – see #TEMature Policy. And second, Middle Management must return to the workplace and experienced engineers must replace the HR interviewers as we work to restore our corporations to socially responsible, sustainable contributors once again.

Read more about Transition Economics and Transition Economics Maturity Models for Countries Internationally here…