I just finished devouring (in a herky-jerky fashion) Andrew Yang’s The War on Normal People and I found it incredibly inspiring and bleak.  With a background in Industrial Organizational Psychology, I love studying work.  My Pollyannaish thinking…I believe that you should enjoy what you do for a living and it should provide you with the means to meet your personal and professional dreams and aspirations (purpose, autonomy, mastery, belonging, and food on the table).  This dream keeps me hoping and wanting a shift in how our country sees and lives work.

I must admit that I almost put the book down after reading 5 chapters.  As I mentioned, the book was numbingly bleak.  Looking for some happiness, I skipped ahead to Part Three of the book, “Solutions and Human Capitalism.”  If the solutions were half-baked or non-existent, I would end my mental misery by closing the book.

The following phrases in chapter 16 kept me reading.  “One friend who read the early pages said to me (Andrew), ‘Reading this feels like I’m getting punched in the face repeatedly.’”  Another said, “you should change the title of the book to ‘We’re F—ed.’” 

During one of my graduate school classes I shared my Pollyannaish view of work and work-life balance.  The professor leading the course let me know that my “humanistic views” would have no place in the “real world.”  While I discovered that he was indeed correct in 1995, I don’t believe he would be today.

The students and young adults I meet today not only refer to the previous and current generations as “annoying,”  they conclude that our decision-making, judgment, and lack of foresight…not to mention our greed and inability to cooperate over the last 40 years…has created a shrinking middle class, enormous student loan debt, and class and race inequity.  As heirs of this nation, they recognize that we have hamstrung them. Yet, they welcome the challenge to compete in a global environment and recognize that trust, cooperation, and the desire to close the inequity gaps are keys to their success and freedom.  Our leadership has failed them.  Their hope will propel them.

First, to be clear Andrew Yang is a capitalist and I am as well.  Andrew Yang suggests that now is the time to move to Human-Centered Capitalism and we might be ready for the adventure. We almost were in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  Medicare and Medicaid were passed in 1965.  Nixon proposed in 1969 a small annual guaranteed family assistance plan that easily passed in the House of Representatives.  However, Senate Democrats (especially one from New York) wanted a more robust (and in my opinion unrealistic) and expensive plan.  The proposal died. 

Whether for altruistic reasons or business necessity, many large corporations and other organizations have discovered the importance of being more “human-centered,” and they provide health and dental care to their employees, support ERG (employee relations groups), and are beginning to adapt to the newest generation’s desire for continuous learning opportunities.  If our social contract with the people does not include their physical and mental safety and their ability to create a prosperous life for themselves, then why would I or anyone continue to labor, innovate, or linger in your organization? 

Human-Centered Capitalism (Human Capitalism), as defined by Yang, has the following tenets…

1. Humanity is more important than money.
2. The unit of the economy is each person, not each dollar.
3. Markets exist to serve our common goals and values.

Currently we determine the health of our economy by measuring GDP (Gross Domestic Product).  Increases and decreases in this measure, birthed during the Great Depression, allow us to know when the economy is improving.  However, it is possible that this single barometer of economic health does not reflect the equality, happiness, and mental and physical health of its inhabitants.  My happiness and well-being can be influenced by my paycheck; however, it is my education, health-care, social network, and a safe neighborhood that is my stability and foundation when taking professional risks.  Social researcher Brené Brown notes that we (in the United States) “are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history.”   Are these anxiety-driven statistics symbolic of a strong and robust foundation, or of a house of cards?  Imagine what we could create if we all had a solid foundation under us?

So, what if we measured GDP and, as Andrew Yang suggests, average physical fitness and mental health, childhood success rates, human capital development and access to education (trade school or college), cyber security, reacclimation of incarcerated individuals and rates of criminality, responsiveness and evolution of government and the people that represent us?  What more could we be as a country?

I have worked in many organizations, helping them reinvent themselves to tackle the evolving business landscapes.  Each reinvention has been a balance of how we can best stay in business and supply our customers in a safe and timely fashion, as well as how we can internally grow our talent to meet these needs.  Each reinvention has been a duel between scarcity and abundance thinking.  Do we focus on the bottom line and efficiency?  Do we do this at the expense of our talent?  Do we develop our talent knowing that they might go to work for the competition? 

The successful reinvention of a vaccine planet in Sanford, NC has only been made evident years after the initiatives began.  One initiative they undertook was to focus on growing talent and leadership at the 1,500 person site and to create a robust talent pipeline. Another was to introduce and embed lean manufacturing principles.

Four years and several plant managers later, the Sanford site and the rest of the company were purchased by a larger pharmaceutical organization.  This site, with close ties to its community, talent that embraced and practiced “you own it,” and leadership capability at every level of the organization, fought hard to reinvent itself.  While one of the negative outcomes was downsizing, the site remains open today.  Initiatives that begun in 2005 (well before the large pharmaceutical merger), along with the savvy exploration of various business models, secured their role in the greater network and protected their community as much as possible.

Living full, productive and purposeful lives is a goal that means you have the opportunity to stretch yourself, to grow, to challenge, to live outside your comfort zone.  This goal is much more easily accomplished when the capitalism we practice is less Darwinian and more humanistic.  Slicing the United States’ population into 5 equal pieces, the first slice or 20% of its citizens hold wealth ($25 trillion) equivalent to more than the sum of those in the second, third, and fourth slices combined ($18 trillion).  The employees at the Sanford site belonged to the second, third, and possibly fourth slices, and yet they continue to save lives every day. 

So much has happened this year (2020).  The cracks in our human and physical infrastructure are now visible to a much larger population.  Reinventing a splintered country that doesn’t myopically support the corporation and its high level stakeholders and board members, but rather supports the people who live and work to create the wealth of their country and its organizations is more palatable when the country is visibly in need of repair.  Imagine what we could create if we all had a solid foundation under us, as Andrew Yang proposes.

I don’t believe that I have even a smidgen of the answers.  I do believe we, as a cooperative collective, have the answers.  We made it to the moon and back.  I am hoping that in 2021 and 2022 we reclaim what is our human right under the constitution of the United States by working together towards a single mutual purpose.  Perhaps the following….

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

To provide for the common defence looks like the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, FBI, etc.  To promote the general welfare looks like…?