Ain’t Nobody Going Galt
After a weekend on the Holodeck with Ann Coulter, Pamela Geller and Michelle Malkin, the hottest fantasy topic among the wingnut Right is “going Galt,” recalling the character in Atlas Shrugged who led a strike of all the creative leaders of society. I’ll just stop leveraging buyouts on Wall Street and move to some remote town in the mountains. That’ll show ‘em!
Ain’t gonna happen. Here’s why.
1. What’s Galt going to do there in the hills? Sit on the front porch and whittle? These guys get to make big decisions and handle huge amounts of money. They’re going to give that up and sit in a rocking chair?
2. Galt has power. People fear and maybe even respect him. He has a top floor penthouse office and a desk big enough to land a Raptor on. He gets laid! Who wouldn’t leave all that for a cabin in the hills?
1+2 = 3. Because of 1. and 2., John Galt has 500 people waiting in line behind him to take his job. They all think they can do the job just as well as he can, and they’re mostly right because….
4. Galt has no real skills. He pushes paper and yells at people, and mostly he spends his time fending off rivals for his position. CEO’s who also spend time in the lab inventing stuff, like Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne or John Galt, are staples in fiction for the very good reason they don’t exist in real life. There isn’t enough time in the day to do both jobs. Spend most of your time in the lab and you’ll come in one morning to find someone has engineered a coup in the board room. Spend too much time in the board room, and you won’t have any good ideas in the lab.
I had a professor, the late, great Charles Meyer, who worked in exploration in Anaconda Copper for years. Finally they wanted to promote him to an executive position. So he did the smart thing. He quit and became a college professor. Tony Hayward, late of BP, rose from being a geologist to CEO, but the only useful, creative work he ever did was as a geologist. Bet he wishes he was still a geologist.
[Historical note: when I took his class in 1969, Meyer told us that Anaconda knew perfectly well it was going to lose its mines in Chile some day. This was several years before the Allende regime actually did it. So weep not for poor Anaconda.]
Actually, there is one thing a worker turned CEO can do. Stay out of the way. Since he’s been there, he can recognize that the biggest impediment to productivity is middle management. He can facilitate his producers. He can eliminate status reports, time sheets and personnel reviews. He can let the people on the cutting edge make the key decisions. He can let the producers dictate procedure to the accountants and lawyers, not the other way round. It was some “suit” wanting to shave pennies who told the BP drillers to cut corners. He really didn’t even care about the cost; mostly he wanted an “attaboy” from his higher-ups. He wanted to camouflage his fundamental uselessness.
5. Since Galt has no creative skills, who’s doing all the creative work? His employees. The R and D staff. Not the board, the advertisers or the legal team. Also not the assembly line. Despite all the complaining about how “workers productivity” has risen without a corresponding increase in wages, it hasn’t. Industrial productivity has risen, but due to innovations that neither management nor the proletariat had much to do with. If you work at a stamping machine that makes 500 parts an hour, and it’s upgraded to produce 1000 parts per hour, your own productivity hasn’t changed in the least - the productivity increase is wholly your employer’s.
So unless Galt plans to bring all the scientists, engineers and inventors in America to Galt’s Gulch as well and give them good salaries and state of the art labs to play in, he won’t make a dent in America’s productivity. The real creative people will stay at their jobs doing what really matters to creative people - being creative.