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Background |
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In 1999, I traveled to Singapore on a business trip, a few weeks after U.S. planes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war. You may remember the incident: three Chinese foreign service workers were killed, and the Pentagon insisted the bombing had been an accident due to its reliance on outdated maps. I was working for an American retail company that had a high profile in Singapore, and the suppliers I was meeting with that week were eager to talk with me about the bombing and their conviction that it had been a deliberate provocation of China—a touchy subject for anyone living in Asia. As the only readily available spokesman for my nation of birth, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of defending the U.S. by insisting that incompetence was by far the most plausible explanation for the bombing. I cited my own company’s rather ham-handed efforts at doing business in Singapore. “The reason we don’t buy more from you,” I told my supplier friends, “isn’t that we’re trying to undermine your business. It’s that we’re incompetent. You think we know what we’re doing? We’re Americans, for Pete’s sake.” At the time, I was exaggerating to make a point and to ingratiate myself with a bunch of savvy pros. But in the intervening five years, I’ve come to believe maybe I wasn’t so far off the mark. In that time, America has seen a massive failure of our intelligence and law enforcement services ahead of 9/11; the collapse of the telecom sector; the implosion of NASA following the Columbia disaster; the ascendance of perhaps the most abysmal administration in American history; and the chronic mismanagement, by both military and civilian officials, of the reconstruction effort in Iraq, where we can’t even keep the lights on. In any one of these cases, we could feasibly put the blame on the incompetence of a select group of individuals or particular institutions, but put them all together and a pattern begins to emerge. The fact is we are all complicit in tolerating and even encouraging a general atmosphere of shoddiness in almost every aspect of the culture. We watch lazy reality shows and bloated Hollywood clunkers, reelect members of Congress who block pragmatic solutions to real problems, shell out obscene fees to Microsoft for its buggy products, carry enormous mortgages on houses built out of spit and drywall, and stampede each other to grab $29 DVD players and sweatshop clothing at the local big box discounter. Doing things half-assed is becoming the American way. It’s not supposed to be like this in a free market, democratic, fully wired society living under the rule of law, or so Thomas L. Friedman claims in The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Five years after its original publication, the book still sells many thousands of copies a year, and with his regular appearances on the talk-show circuit, his New York Times op-ed column, and his recent Discovery Channel documentary, “The Other Side of Outsourcing,” Friedman has become the leading pop theorist on the phenomenon of globalization. Many of Friedman’s fundamental tenets—that the world is becoming an exponentially smaller place, that the quickest way towards world peace is through the opening of markets and societies, that the unprecedented speed of technology-driven change in the world is the primary instigator of the violent backlash we see in groups like al-Qaida—have become axiomatic in any discussion of global affairs. But in other respects, Friedman’s analysis seems almost quaint. He talks about the benefits of faster innovation, the process of creative destruction, the power of communication to increase efficiency, and so on. But never does he mention quality. If Americans have demonstrated anything in the past five years, it’s that it’s simply not enough to have what Friedman calls the right “hardware” (capitalism), “operating system” (liberalized markets) and “software” (rule of law and relative absence of corruption) to succeed in improving people’s lives. You also need people who have an inkling of how to use the machine. As my programmer friends might say: garbage in, garbage out. A telling detail appears in the acknowledgements at the end of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. “The reader will notice,” Friedman writes, “that I quote a great deal from … ads from Madison Avenue.” Indeed I did. Friedman particularly seems to be a fan of, or a sucker for, ads from the Internet businesses that were flying sky high in 1999, such as E*Trade, Cisco and Dell, and his vision of an Evernet future, where we are all connected to the Web all the time, sounds a lot like the “City of the Future” exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair—an advertiser’s opium dream. What Friedman fails to acknowledge is that marketers exist in a wholly postmodern world, where reality is whatever you say it is. A friend of mine likes to talk about the time vine-ripened tomatoes first appeared on grocery store shelves. That first year, he said, they tasted like tomatoes straight out of the garden. The second year, tomato and grocery store marketers realized they had a bonanza on their hands and started selling “tomatoes on the vine” grown in hothouses with half the flavor for twice the price. This scenario would likely qualify as a success story in Friedman’s book, because an innovation succeeded and everyone theoretically came away happier—the tomato growers, the grocers, and the people who continued to buy the tomatoes under the illusion that because they were on the vine, they must taste better. In fact they were just another example of shoddy merchandise. In
a marketing-driven culture, “quality” is just another
buzzword, as in the catchphrase, “Quality is job one.”
But the marketers are wrong. Crap is crap, no matter what you call
it. Unfortunately, as long as people are willing to buy crap under
the guise of quality, crap is all we’re ever going to get,
because it’s so easy to produce. One of Friedman’s favorite
platitudes is that “none of us is as smart as all of us.”
If that’s true, then all of us are in a lot of trouble. Caveat
emptor. A2P Email
deepbackground@annarborpaper.com
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