If you do the business calculations, the closure of a single small bookstore will likely result in the loss of between $125,000 and $170,000 to the local economy. And that is just the estimate for lost wages. It does not account for the value of all other inputs to the small business.
Small business is recognized to be the major avenue of job creation. Small business is also high risk with most firms not surviving past the 3 year mark. Due to my injury, I do not feel capable of putting on my SMB consultant’s suit and racing off to save some small firm in distress. When I made that attempt in Halifax, I discovered I was trying to address a range of intractable macro-economic issues that everyone would much sooner ignore. While the consultant’s role is out, I may be able to function as an SMB gadfly, a sort of poke-around-and-see-what-is-happening sort of person, an attempt to discover what works, and what does not. At the same time, the blog can provide a strong measure of support for start-ups, help to bring them to the attention of the public.
For 12 years I worked for one of the largest corporations on the planet. At the end of 12 years I was still learning of products and corporate divisions that I had not heard of before. And then, in a blink of an eye, they moved my job, and the jobs of our entire work group, offshore. No one knows where the work went. It just disappeared. And roughly $1,500,000 in annual wages disappeared from the local economy.
I believed I had built some form of job security with the Grosse Computer Corporation; I worked diligently to achieve that goal. I frequently went above and beyond normal expectations in order to address major client issues and help resolve screw-ups that had originated elsewhere in the firm. When the crunch came, none of that mattered. Loyalty was expected; none was returned. In retrospect I see myself as a fool, like a man building a house on quicksand and believing himself to be secure. Measured against this form of evanescent “corporate security” the risks associated with a small business venture appear much more manageable, more acceptable, easier to bear, less impersonal, less hidden.
There is another aspect to this discussion. My years were spent in IT. More than 30 of them in fact. I was on the Internet back in the days of Archie and Veronica and WAIS. That is a long time ago. And although “high tech” is offered up as a solution to everything it is very much a rough and tumble, highly uncertain undertaking. I once invested much time and effort in a “leading edge” technical solution with the intent of offering it to the small business community only to watch in dismay as an inferior product offering took the market by storm and left me with a skill set of zero value. There are a group of important issues here in terms of the interaction between technical innovation in all its myriad forms and the changing definition of economic viability, and the very nature of what we call work.
There are multiple threads here and I am having problems teasing them apart. I cannot determine if this is because the topic is dense, or because I am dense. And, if it is me that is dense, I cannot tell if that is due to some lack of knowledge or due in some way to my injury.
One other element to throw into the mix. This is very clear cut. My job was highly skilled and required considerable knowledge in order to perform well. During my tenure I was aware of various efforts being made to automate my position. From one perspective this was seen as near impossible: too many variables in play, too great a mix of the technical and the interpersonal, too much need for human intuition and the random recall of an event from six months ago that should be investigated as it might have bearing on the present customer’s technical problem.
But I have also engaged in job design, the matching of man and machine, the programming of the interface between the human and the technology. What appears impossible within one paradigm is easily achieved if you radically restructure the relationship, if you redesign the way the work is performed. Taking that perspective, I could envision a number of ways I might reprogram the work to eliminate my job entirely. I didn’t tell anyone; putting myself out of work wasn’t my job. And no one in my immediate chain of command would have been interested as their jobs were wholly dependent on mine and my need to be “managed”. But it was clear that a radical transformation was possible.
Such a radical transformation has the potential to totally revamp the operation of a vast range of businesses. It will reduce costs and eliminate jobs. Or, to be more accurate, it will consolidate tasks, redefine jobs, and make the resulting work subject to relocation. When the local bookstore closes, and $170,000 in wages drops out of the local economy, that money is relocating elsewhere. It will go to support a very different skill set, one that delivers reading materials via a suite of technologies that completely replace the bricks and mortar and flesh enterprise that constitutes the local store.
Bricks and mortar and flesh; the BMF enterprise. There are a set of issues embedded in the loss of the BMF that are vital to address. Not just for the success of my little blog project but for the viability of the local economy.
- New venture support
- Technology driven change
- Corporate threats
- Labour market transformation
- Local impacts