Self Sustainability Needed Again (Opinion)

In the Seinfeld episode, “The Cheever Letters,” Jerry and George are lamenting the accidental burning of a cabin owned by George’s prospective father-in-law.

“C’mon, it’s not even a house – it’s, like, a cabin,” Jerry says.

“We could build a cabin like that,” George says snapping his fingers.

“Well,” Jerry says, “maybe not us, but two men could.”

Imagine the amount of practical knowledge we are getting ready to lose in the next decade. The next two decades.

As more baby boomers die, with them will pass a lot of hands-on, real-world abilities that have largely skipped the alphabetically labeled generations that followed. The notion of subsistence, being able to provide for yourself the basic necessities to survive, seems like a lost concept altogether.

We just expect “it” to be taken care of.

My friend Tim Kizer, a Fayetteville entrepreneur, and I were recently discussing the lost artistry of the vegetable garden, spot-welding broken equipment and other once-prized skills. Not to mention the artistry of fundamental business practice.

There is a generation of men, for instance, who it troubles greatly — and it is a strike to their pride — that they might have to take their vehicle into the shop for repairs. Most of us don’t think twice about it. It’s true that today’s vehicles are a computerized cry from the 1950 Dodge pickup that required only one socket wrench to disassemble the entire truck.

The point is “fixing” your own car used to have nothing to do with wealth or convenience. It had to do with trust and pride. It was about the satisfaction of being self-reliant.

We have done so much to make ourselves more comfortable and supposedly more efficient that the resulting over simplification has rendered us helpless to adapt when things don’t go as planned. How smart is that?

Some of the loss is due to technology micro-chipping away the simplicity of our tools and toys. We use a lot of devices today that are much more sophisticated, and if they break it’s definitely easier and probably cheaper to just throw them out and buy a new one.

We as a culture have lost our self-reliant spirit largely because of this unfamiliarity. We don’t work on our own vehicles anymore because we don’t make anything anymore. We lack the confidence to hop in there and tackle a carburetor because we are no longer familiar with its basic mechanics.

Business in general is a lot more complicated that it used to be. But the same thing happens when you get away from the basic mechanics of your ventures.

There is a lot of change happening in the world and in business — some silly, and some great — but what is not changing is it’s still about products and people and you better be familiar with both.

Take the recent return of Leland Tollett, 71, to CEO at Tyson Foods Inc. Probably half of the Springdale company’s subsequent stock rebound was simply the market’s confidence in having an old-school guy in there who knows what the heck he’s doing.

Relevant insights and good, solid decision-making are critical for any business. So is allocating resources wisely so that if the market turns, you’re not in such a debt-to-equity position that you’re toast.

We as a business community and nation have to re-acquire some self-sustaining principles. Too many of us though are generations into a culture that has to hire someone to come do electrical rewiring in a room. That was unheard of by Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” They saved the world and built America into the most prosperous nation on the planet. Dealing with an electrical box is nothing.

They knew how to get their hands dirty because they weren’t playing tennis on Wii. They were fighting for their lives and their livelihoods. We e-vite people to parties.

Now that many companies have found themselves fighting to keep pace, it will be interesting to see what kind of momentum comes out of this experiential learning process. A couple of people could probably build a cabin all right.

A couple of people can also make a difference in an organization by getting hands on and translating today’s experiences into pragmatic abilities and ideas for tomorrow.