 Why would anybody want to study economics if they didn't have a way to use it? Why would anybody study political science unless they wanted to do things through public service? The entire study seems to appeal to just two classes of students. Those who would plan on being leaders in business or government, and those who plan on being economists. Unlike language or math, these are specialized fields of study. For those who are in the study of human performance, there is intelligence in asking the question. It is a witness to these being us and them studies with an established science of leadership that is useful for us who will either run things or influence those who do. Our performance perspective has a different foundation. When it comes to governance and economics, it is that we the people are the only party in interest in governance. And it is that citizens are the only party in interest in our national economy. We are the in fact owners of these entities. We are the in fact customers. We are the active element in what they accomplish. What we are addressing is our personal potency in our ownership. Our ability to pick up the reins of government or the economic management and steer in our preferred direction. There is always an in-group of youngsters. It is a group of kids that seem to form a clique that is special and access to themselves where the presence of each one appears to be specially valued by the others. It is social grouping that is both common and a matter of some level of envy. It is people who seem a little more able to establish their own circle of friends that is somewhat close to others. Even when such a group is unable to do much of anything, it is still valued for its social nature. That is human. And there is recognized value in being able to come together as us in the group. Even in our early years, there is value being presented and belonging to the group. There is value in sharing in the popularity of mutual social relationships. And it even rivals the value of personal fame. With performance orientation, we have come to see this from another side as well. Does a child really belong to the group? Perhaps it is the other way around that the group belongs to those who are in it. Power is not in one approach or the other, but in the realization of personal choice. It is having the choice of how we wish to approach this. Doing what the group seems to decide has appeal, but there is more personal potency if the group does what those in the group decide. It is the group that is in charge, or it is the people who make up the group. It is two like sides of the same coin, heads and tails, with your choice of which is up. Commercial advertising strongly favors the group decision approach and taps into their product supporting your being in the group. It is belonging to the group of attractive people with intensely white teeth, or the ones who live in the right neighborhood. The political industry uses us to belong to the right political party. This discussion opens a possibility of that political party belonging to the ones who are members. The strong preference for group ownership of members is part of our political culture. For us, it is to be a choice. Our current privilege-oriented culture supports privileged leaders having ownership of commoners. It is corporate business acting for the owners and speaking on behalf of employees and owners to those in government. When we address ownership by people even in just promoting a few concepts from that potential, it is going to stir up negative reactions from those who accept their privilege to exercise ownership over others. Being set into authority gives the illusion of power. It is the power of government leaders to tax the public they claim to represent and to pass laws that those citizens would not support on their own. It is the power of a corporate leader to donate corporate funds to the politician of their choice and to exclude those who might disagree from their official think of leadership family. I address it as illusion. The witness is the labor union. It is where commoner workers have gathered together and given potency to union leaders by their personal choice. It is that these labor unions do not answer to corporate leaders but are every bit as potent without ever getting the approval of privileged business leaders. It is not that the privileged leadership in the union is all that much more effective than the privileged leadership in the corporate business but that people can gather, come to agreement and simply empower those they choose. That is a choice. The customer can gather and boycott a product or business that offends them and there is no power in leadership to deny them. The people can elect a president who is not the choice of either political party and all those other leaders can do is complain about being exposed as not having real power. The reality is that we as common citizens are the in fact owners of our nation and its economy and there is nothing that privileged leadership can do about it. Their effective potency is secured by preventing people, the real owner, from coming to agreement on what our leaders are to accomplish for us. The extent of a business leaders powers are the influence they can achieve over the decisions of those who are outside the business, the owners and customers. The extent of a government leaders powers are in the influence they can achieve over citizen decisions. In recent history a major retailer business announced a bathroom policy that offended many so that they would no longer shop in its facilities. Publishing the leadership decision was incredibly stupid. It was waste, something that did not have to be done but could not have any positive effect on its customer base. The success of a business leader in gaining power is through advertisement and political influence has had some success but running things has not been good at increasing sales. Again we look to the automobile as a symbol of American industry. The personal powered vehicle serving the person or family had its birth here as an industry. It grew up in our American industry as it responded to industrial revolution and it was the symbol of the new potential for both people and for the nation. There was a certain level of truth in connecting the welfare of the auto industry and the welfare of the nation. It was the industrial symbol of the United States, its productive capacity, its employment and its leadership potentials and even its ability for worker union activities. The product itself was a symbol of personal freedom like the fulfillment of the promise of the freedom of the people. In another perspective it was a symbol of the weakness of our industry. It was a symbol of industrial giants joining in competition for a share of the huge domestic customer base for its products. The challenge was joined not only in building the highest quality of mass produced product but designing it to support sales. The challenge was in advertising, touting why the specific design and features should be important to the customers so that they would purchase what these giants offered. But then there is the other side, the performance side. There is the basic reality that has yet to be considered. Competition creates drama, not performance. To put this into our performance framework, what they did to compete with each other was a source of waste. It was something that could be eliminated without any significant impact on performance. Our tool, the one that is not used by privileged leadership is the black box. And there it is, it's stark denial of the very concept of competing businesses. The business survives through maintaining a symbiotic relationship with its customers. When it serves their needs and wants at a good price, then they purchase its product providing the input that the business needs to continue. The only decision makers are the customers, not the business. The customer is relatively unconcerned with the competition between businesses but is looking for satisfying needs and wants at least expense. Actions taken by leadership based on competition are generally waste. The only decision makers are the customers and their decision is unlikely to include picking one business to win over some other. The very concept of corporate leadership has been based on privilege rather than symbiotic teaming with customers. It is seeking for the best way to influence, have corporate effect upon customers. The customers are them outsiders to the business. The fact that customers do not answer to the directives of business leadership does not alter the fact that they are incredibly important to the survival of the organization. The truth of the symbiotic nature of customer-producer relations is that the customers are not outsiders, they are volunteers. They are as much a part of what the corporation will accomplish as are those who are employed. When a potential customer chooses to buy someone else's product, they have volunteered somewhere else. The harsh reality includes the inability of the business to run their customers. They are not able to direct performance. Their ability to influence customer decisions is there but tends to be temporary and limited. The reality includes the power of the customer, the choice to purchase what seems best in their personal perspectives. Leadership was in the same old mold of privilege that it was all about being winners instead of losers. We are taught consistently that besting those others, making them the losers, will be good for all of us. A message that we are the beneficiaries of businesses competing against each other. And it is right back to the reality that nobody ever really wins a war. There is death and destruction on both sides and being left bloody standing on the field of battle after the rest have been beaten down is not much of a win. It is the same lesson of little Susie on the football field that the purpose of contest is drama, not accomplishment. It is the same lesson in business that competition creates drama, not value. Are those who own the corporation in it to win over those who invest in competing industries? They may even be investing in both sides and take damage from the leaders treating each other as competitors. What is expended on competition does not come to them as owners. Are those who work for the corporation in it to win over those who work in other competing industries? It is more likely they both belong to the same union with the same industrial competition reducing or limiting what either group can earn from their efforts. Are those who are customers really getting value from businesses competing for their business? The in-your-face answer is the same one that tailors scientific management, GEEF to business leadership all those decades ago. People who work together are more than twice as effective as those who do not. Striving to be winners in ways that make losers out of others creates drama, entertainment. It does not yield performance results. It inhibits performance. It produces type one waste by requiring competitive time and effort without contributing to values that get delivered to customers. The best product is not the one determined by competition. The best product is the one that satisfies the needs and wants of the customer at least cost. We are a single economy, not a collection of hostile neighbors who are bent on besting each other. There is only one party in interest and it is us. We are the owners. We are the customers. We are also the employees. But serving owners, customers, and employees has never been the purpose of privilege. It harvests what common people do and offers them protection and stability as value that leadership produces. The American auto industry did not recognize any unity of purpose with those who dealt with the corporation. They accepted that those commoner owners, workers, and customers were to be beneficiaries of what leadership determined to provide as leadership. And so automotive giants entered into competition with each other to win a share of the domestic market. They strove to build better vehicles, more attractive products, more versatile and safer cars than their competition, all to attract customers. One of the more important concepts in dealing with privilege is that these leaders were applying the principles of administration with focus on skill, on so running their organizations that they would overcome their competition. They isolate themselves as a local leader family and will not team with owners, employees, or customers. Administration will gather with other administration in preventing the gathering of people, be they customers, employees, or owners. They will gather with union leadership to assure a continuation of the management labor split. They will gather with government leadership to assure that owners have no chance to gather and interfere with the proper running of their organizations. These leaders may not have wanted foreign competition to intrude on the domestic market with products to compete with what domestic industry offered, but they will support that competition as preferable to actually teaming with their own customers. This creates a wonderful opportunity for those who would create the teaming that is now presented as impossible. Consider a business that builds automotive kits so that customers can assemble and finish their own vehicles, taking part in the process. I would not be at all surprised to have them produced for less than half the cost of the modern vehicle while providing what the customer needed and wanted in car ownership and operation. Of course, the reaction would probably involve violence. It would put large parts of the industry in competition with the industry's customers. Neither government leaders, union leaders, nor corporate leaders can tolerate customers having other choices. We know we have a challenge in corporate law. We know it because there are family businesses that choose to incorporate for the benefits and personal protections that are extended to corporate business leaders that are denied to citizens. The very concept of government creating legal persons who are given better government services than citizens is a pretty harsh pill to swallow. There are also costs associated with becoming a corporation. Increase taxes as well as the cost of legal services and registration to become a corporate entity. And that just raises the issue of government selling protection to corporate leaders. It will provide more protection to some citizens if they are willing to pay for it. Is that really a government service that you, as someone who is entitled to a voice in representative government, might consider as good governance? Along with this, the protection that the government is granting through laws of incorporation are protecting business leaders from legal responsibilities that would otherwise be to the benefit of employees, of owners, or of customers. The very purpose of limiting the application of responsibility to those who are authorized is a well-known and well-documented bad management practice. Then again, we have the stock market, the subject is gambling, a practice that has been intentionally occurred by government because of its harmful effect on a significant part of the citizen population. To the contrary, gambling on corporate stocks and bonds is supportive, no matter how many people get hurt. Gambling is committing to a resource that is based on an expectation of future earnings from buying stocks and bonds. There is some risk that the business will be so poorly run that it will actually lose value. There is even greater risk that someone, some other gambler or gamblers, will be able to manipulate the value of those investments, harvesting their own earnings from their efforts. We have an entire industry trading paper interests in corporate America. That industry is funded by trading, not by customers. Trade businesses are managing the risk for customers even as they enhance that risk by their trading activities. The industry is not supported by the businesses who issue those interests to investors. They earn the same profits independent of what goes on in the stock market. The costs of the trade industry comes out of the value that would otherwise be harvested by those who own the interests that get traded. Privileged government leadership has generally acted to protect the traders, often corporate businesses themselves, at the expense of the investors who buy their services and try to buy an interest in American industry. Government leaders harvest their own portion from citizens who invest, taxing whatever is earned through trading. The primary function of the trade industry is waste. It produces no goods or services that are valued by customers. Let the challenge to the insurance, it minimizes the risk of investors as a service, even as it increases the risk by its own activities. To put it most simply, the more that is taken out of the earnings of stocks and bonds by traders, the less remains on returns on investments. If we act to eliminate that waste, we also eliminate the work of trading without any impact on what the industry delivers as goods and services to people or what the business earns for its investors. They just get return on the investments instead of trying to manage their portfolio to maintain some wealth. As with CAR kits, there is potential to actually team. It is the building of an alternative corporate investment organization, one that does team investors in owning a piece of American industry. It would involve accepting the same investment services to businesses and investors, but without supporting trades or transfers, only buybacks by the companies that issue the stocks and bonds. While it would be difficult to find modern corporate leaders who would deal with the entity, there would be private businesses and smaller institutions that would take advantage and would promote the gathering of investors to have impact on business operation. That would be accepted as a serious threat to privilege by businesses, by government, and most certainly by trade-based business interests. We have an interesting historical lesson in the overview of the development of corporate law in the United States. It just begins with acceptance of privilege and corporate leadership. Governments supported incorporation and there were actual laws passed on leaders having master privileges over workers. One government protection involved promoting yellow dog providers. This is where a worker would be fired for joining a labor union who removes choices even as being fired for belonging to the wrong church or living in the wrong town. And yes, there were mining towns where the business owned the stores and often the private homes and workers had to be dependent upon the largesse of the business to live there. The legal challenge was representative government. There were a lot more workers there to interrupt government leader privilege than there were business leaders who would maintain it. The yellow dog provisions were eventually outlawed, a balanced response that did not have to otherwise interrupt corporate leader privileges. Union leader privilege had to be allowed. I bring this to memory for noting an ongoing competition between privilege and union leaders and privilege and business leaders. Neither can continue without recognizing the other even if they must also compete for effect. Such internal competitions have potentials that may be harvested by those seeking change. It is that they are somewhat isolated and will have difficulty ever joining their efforts even in areas where they have agreement. This is opportunity for those who seek performance-oriented change. Their isolation and competition damages their potency. The sharper that divide becomes, the less able they are to resist suggested improvements as in the alternative gathering of business workers to see to their own interests other than through privileged union leadership. It is an opportunity for workers to come together based on what they can as a body determined to have a value resolved. Their competition provides us an opportunity to promote the benefit of workers as a coordinated group, an action from which people are served. Those who lead in our name are doing things that we would not do and taking credit for doing things with what we own that may even defeat what we are trying to do. These are acts of someone who does not respect us as owners. We have elected leaders in government acting in the name of the people who elect them, claiming that their actions are the actions that we would take through their efforts. The effrontery is laid bare whenever a voter contacts them as their agent seeking for a change in direction. At that point they are told, told very nicely, that the people have already chosen to support their direction and it was through their election. The message is that only effective voices for a citizen is at the ballot box. The message is that the privilege is being through voting into a position of privilege. Once election is gained, your suggestions will be received gladly, but their action will continue. That is what election means. Election is not a coronation. It is a hiring action. Being hired in the public office sets duties and responsibilities on the one who is elected and authorizes actions in the name of the people who own the government. Public officers commonly listen to citizens for guidance only as they feel it necessary to retain good chance of remaining in office. Otherwise they act on their own best understanding of what should be done and act with the privilege of office, exercising authority over public resources as was granted through election. In a like manner, we have corporate leaders hired into authority over corporate resources including the man hours purchased from employees. Being hired into senior position of privilege calls for acting with intelligence and for the good of the corporation and in accord with the general duties and authorities of the job they are hired to perform. The effrontery is laid bare whenever a stockholder contacts them as their agent, seeking for a change in direction. At that point they are told, told very nicely that it is the duty of the office holder to act in accord with his or her best judgment. This is presented as the reason that the officer is in position. The challenge is pretty obvious even without performance orientation. Now it is laid bare. It is in government giving charity in your name to causes that you consider inappropriate. It is in corporate officers supporting a candidate you would oppose. It is then that giving you the credit exposes that their actions have just set you against yourself directly disempowering you even as they claim that this is what they were hired to do. It is the political answer to your complaint that provides the deeper understanding that will serve this course. It is the answer that the elected office is acting for the good of the nation. That he is an authority to do just that bending his every effort to see to the welfare of the whole nation. It is assurance that this is the orientation that provides the basis for his being elected and that he will not act to other purposes. And then it is also the good of the nation. It is good as seen by most of the people. That is the final nail that holds the banner to the wall where all can see it. It is his duty to represent most of the people in overcoming the rest. It is his duty to act on issues matters where the people are not agreed taking sides that make some into winners at the expense of the rest. The like approach by corporate leadership is like a mirror to that in government. It is that leaders are hired to act for the good of the corporation as seen by most of the investors. It is support for the majority of stockholders in overcoming the wishes and decisions of the rest. Those who have not had performance orientation are left without any good way to challenge this. What you hear is that this is for you to buy into the decisions that are made by these leaders. That they are in some sense the decisions you make by authorizing these leaders to fill their public or corporate leadership offices. And then it is the ugly truth that the one who are in office to serve do not accept you as someone who can define what you receive as a service. It is the ones who are in authority who have been granted the duty and responsibility to make your decision for you in light of their service to the non-human corporate entity they now serve. This is the nature of privilege and leadership. It continues today in almost universal support of stability and privilege that they enjoy by being leaders. If that was all, it would be disturbing. But there is another whole level of disempowerment. We elect many officers in the public authority. We hire a whole group of corporate officers to privilege positions. And they do act as a team for that is the nature of human performance. Our elected public leaders do not get to act as our representative but as one of a group of elected officers as a member of a privileged family who does not represent any one of us. Our corporate officers act as one of a group of corporate leaders, a family of privileged leaders who accept and honor the decisions made by other members of that corporate leader family. What some owner might want is not of consequence unless they are some major stockholder who has effective authority to fire one or more of the family. What can we say except that feudalism is alive and well in the United States? In that, our revolution from England did not succeed in anything but changing who the privileged leaders are and how they get into positions of authority. Our experience with labor unions opens another aspect of our human experiences. We have the effective oppression of people who are employed using the ancient master and servant area of the common law to create a temporary class of servant citizens. It provided the equivalent of a human feud to replace the landed feud of earlier English experience as American citizens or at least a few of them saw greater potentials in having people free of England's political rule. So American employees or at least a few of them saw greater potentials in having employees free of servant status in dealing with corporations. As Americans felt compelled to establish a new corporate government to replace the one disrupted by revolution, so the American worker felt compelled to establish a new corporate structure to deal with privileged corporate leadership. The American national experience and governance has resulted in leaders exercising their privilege and defiance of the founding documents. Likewise, the gathered labor experiment in union has resulted in union leaders exercising their privilege and defiance of the purpose for having a union. We have many parallels with similar challenges and they yield to similar solutions, the similar challenges in their results. We do have some remarkable changes wrought on behalf of workers. In the mining industry, there were mining towns that functioned as plantations for miners. The miners were politically free, but otherwise worked for the mining company in effective economic slavery to its leaders. The union of mine workers changed the nature of corporate worker-leader relations. For the benefit of miners, it worked to establish safety and mechanical miner supports. It significantly raised the safety and earnings of miners, but also significantly limited the number of people working as miners. Otherwise, the unions provided political representation for working employees and a means to have leaders who better represented their interests than the feudal baseless corporate leaders whose focus was on running their businesses. There were soon privileged union leaders running their organizations and their resource base. The same master-servant law that has been exploited to establish employment as an hour-based servitude of workers was used by labor organizations to authorize union interference in government. It was not just the business leadership that exercised privilege by supporting their own locally preferred political efforts. The union leadership claimed that same privilege to represent workers, and there were a lot more voting workers than voting business leaders. The lesson is that people can gather and have effect even on those who claim privilege. There are potencies that are associated with being a human being. There is a complementary perspective that is also worthy of notice. There is always a level of chaos associated with privileged leadership. It comes with the very concept of privileged representation. It is an oxymoron. The legal concept of representation is that the agent acts for the client or does not act. The privileged concept of representation is that the agent acts on behalf of the client and the client has claimed to support it. When these differ it, which turns out to be the rule more than the exception, we have competing purposes. This kills performance. It inhibits fulfilling of either purpose. Nowhere is this more clearly witnessed than in corporate leadership representing their owners and employees when they deal with government leaders. At the same time the union's leadership claims to be representing the interests of the same employees when they deal with government leaders. And then it is even more confused when the government leaders they are addressing are supposed to be there representing the same people as voters. And the kicker? You are the owner, the customer, the active element in both our government and our economy. You are the only one entitled to representation and are not even a party to the compromise solutions that these privileged leaders may agree upon. For our next step to empowerment we will address one of the critical elements for your empowerment It is a step toward your ability to apply your purpose to organizations. It is that necessary knowledge of performance measurement. Nobody can enter into performance management until they have something to accomplish. Knowing what is wrong is not enough to bring people to agreement on action that requires knowing when there is improvement. When there is potential for an increase in value it is necessary for setting the direction for others who volunteer to commit efforts to the actions.