Sweetening and expanding Trump’s Carrier deal to Ford and all US corporations

President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Pence negotiated an agreement with Carrier to preserve more than 1000 jobs in Indianapolis by fostering a business-friendly climate coupled with state incentives.

However, as Carrier noted, “the forces of globalization will continue to require solutions for the long-term competitiveness of the U.S. and of American workers moving forward.”

I have them. What made America great was a series of groundbreaking inventions that transformed lives in significant ways.

As billionaire Peter Thiel emphasized in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, businesses with significant proprietary ideas don’t need to compete on price. When corporations manufacture products that consumers perceive as roughly equivalent to what competitors offer, they usually choose based on price. To lower costs and retain market share, American companies moved production to nations such as Mexico and China.

Businesses making products with advantages no one else has can charge more (hence generating greater profits) because customers will pay more. Profits can skyrocket when the proprietary breakthrough results in a superior product that can be made for much less by utilizing a different operational principle. I spent much of the past year prototyping and testing one that will knock your socks off with performance that’s better in several ways yet will be markedly more affordable to purchase and use.

Thus groundbreaking ideas are key to reinvigorating American manufacturing. We can’t compete on price alone long-term without innovations that offshore manufacturers cannot match.

Embracing open innovation, an obvious exigency

“Living in the same city as Microsoft, I’m only too aware that, even in low-technology businesses like coffee, the Next Big Thing could knock the dominant player into second place tomorrow. I keep pushing to make sure that Starbucks thinks of the Next Big Thing before it has even crossed anybody else’s mind.”― Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz in Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time

Pushing innovation is wise but the 0.002% of the population that works for Starbucks cannot possibly outthink the 99.998% who don’t. The Next Big Thing rarely originates within a company, network, or even extended network: a fact that is immediately obvious to everyone with at least a rudimentary grasp of statistics.

To help American companies manufacture products in the United States, and to do my part in making America great again, I will give them technology and offer solutions to problems they want solved: something I’ve done for years, being paid (as an independent contractor) by a company led by a friend of Bill Gates to generate ideas, both incremental and game-changing quantum leaps.

When my immediate boss left the company, he introduced me to his successors in a long conference call that began with him saying, “Kevin has a lot of crazy ideas.” Not worthless crazy, but no-one-else-would-think-of-it crazy, as in Apple’s iconic “Here’s to the crazy ones” 1997 ad. A company that internally brags it hires only the smartest Ivy League graduates wouldn’t waste their time with worthless crazy ideas, let alone pay for them month after month for years.

Increasing Carrier’s competitiveness

I prototyped and successfully tested a way to substantially improve dehumidifier performance and have a few untested but theoretically feasible ideas to increase their energy efficiency. With these advances, Carrier could produce superior dehumidifiers. What they now offer is good; the problem for them is that competitive models are also good.

Increasing competitiveness of Ford, GM, and other automakers manufacturing in the USA

It would be wonderful for Americans and our country if every automobile sold in the United States were manufactured here. That will seem like a pipe dream until you see demonstrations of technology I developed that makes cars and trucks so vastly better consumers would rarely buy vehicles without these advances, both of which would save consumers money and improve lives in very surprising ways. I’ll offer that technology free to any automaker (domestic or foreign) that includes it only on vehicles made in the United States.

Increasing competitiveness of other American companies, not only manufacturers

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed that “If Trump did a Carrier-style deal every week for the next 4 years, he could bring back 4% of the manufacturing jobs lost since 2000” and “Trump would have to do one Carrier-sized deal a week for 30 years to save as many jobs as Obama's auto bailout.”

That’s true according to an analysis by Reuters, but these and other the glass is half empty commentaries deliberately overlook that some victory is better than none, especially successes achieved even before Trump and Pence take office. Yet the Nobel Prize winning Krugman does have a point; we need to do much more to catalyze the success of American businesses, which suffered because of tax and regulatory climates imposed on them by Washington and state governments. However, some of their wounds are self-inflicted.

U.S. companies increasingly can’t stomach how sausage gets made

“Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The 'smart' people don't.”— Burt Rutan, innovative aerospace engineer

“Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different … to think out of the box.”— Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs

Tax incentives are nice, but as Peter Thiel suggested, what companies really need are breakthroughs. The question is: how to find them, and from whom?

“ A lot of what is wrong with corporate America has to do with a culture filled with antibodies trained to expel anything different. HR departments often want cookie-cutter employees, which inevitably results in cookie-cutter solutions.”— Nolan Bushnell, author of Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent

Cookie-cutter solutions aren’t proprietary; they are the path to competing on price, and hence the path leading to hello Mexico, goodbye United States, sayonara to American jobs.

Bushnell said that “Steve was difficult but valuable.” What you could do, notwho you were. “The truth is that very few companies would hire Steve, even today. Why? Because he was an outlier. To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in bad clothing.”

In How Not to Turn Away the Next Steve Jobs, Laura Entis wrote, “Outside Silicon Valley, Bushnell sees corporate America as a hostile place for the future Jobses of the world.”

It is. The take-home message from Apple's 2016 holiday commercial is to embrace diversity by welcoming those who seem different: a worthy message, but not one that Apple practices: their obsession with cultural fit virtually guarantees they wouldn’t hire Steve Jobs if he applied for a job today.

Jobs was stranger than most people realize, as brimming with flaws as he was with brilliance. He “belittled waitresses and frequently returned food with the proclamation that it was ‘garbage.’” Bill Gates called him “fundamentally odd” and “weirdly flawed” as a person.

Jobs dated Tina Redse, dubbing her “the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.” After their relationship ended she “helped found … a mental health resource network” and said that he suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, commenting that “expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see.”

Fortune magazine said that “Jobs is considered one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs, which is saying something …”

“After proposing to her [ Laurene Powell, who he later married] on the first day of 1990, Jobs didn't mention it again for months. Even after she'd gotten pregnant with their son, Reed, Jobs remained so detached that Powell moved out. He tried to reunite with Redse and asked a number of friends who was prettier, Tina or Laurene? Who should he marry?”— One of the 11 Most Startling Revelations in 'Steve Jobs' from ABC News

Incidentally, this “appearance is paramount” malignant objectification of women is instilled in the Apple culture, resulting in products in which functionality and practicality take a back seat to appearance.

When his mother Clara was on her deathbed, dying from lung cancer and barely able to speak, Jobs asked her, “When you and Dad got married, were you a virgin?”

Jobs chose Walter Isaacson to write his biography—one that portrayed him as being cold, cruel, manipulative, immature, bratty, petulant, selfish, self-centered, arrogant, narcissistic, exploitative, unethical, abusive, obsessive, ornery, rude, nasty, obnoxious, mercurial, not fully in touch with reality, and a lying, cheating jerk so strange that if he weren’t rich, he wouldn’t be called eccentric; he would be labeled as mentally ill.

[Steve Jobs] “always believed that the rules that applied to ordinary people didn't apply to him. … Even in small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him.”— Walter Isaacson

Isaacson reported that many people, including Mike Markkula (an angel investor and Apple’s second CEO), were repulsed by Job’s poor hygiene and body odor. Isaacson added that Jobs would sometimes “soak his feet in the toilet” and went to bizarre protracted lengths trying to deny paternity for his daughter Lisa.

“In the front of the meeting room, Jobs sat on the floor in the lotus position absentmindedly playing with the toes of his bare feet.”— Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs

Jobs had a labile affect and would reportedly cry at socially inappropriate times—a manifestation of impaired emotional regulation that recurrently colored his life. As Isaacson wrote, “It was as if Jobs’s brain circuits were missing a device that would modulate the extreme spikes of impulsive opinions that popped into his mind.”

One possibility is damage to a specific part of the brain (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), which impairs filtering and may make people more cantankerous. Johns Hopkins scientists discovered “that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.”

“What particularly struck Nocera was Jobs's ‘almost willful lack of tact.’ It was more than just an inability to hide his opinions when others said something he thought dumb; it was a conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, show he was smarter.”— Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs

“Steve Jobs was a complicated leader: brilliantly creative and obsessive about details yet so maniacal that he could make his colleagues cry and, yes, he created his own truth at times. (That’s the polite way of putting it.)”— Andrew Ross Sorkin in Decoding Steve Jobs, in Life and on Film

Alex Gibney, director of the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, said he “doesn’t deserve the iconic status he attained,” according to Sorkin’s review, adding that Gibney depicts Jobs as “ruthless, deceitful and cruel,” citing “a laundry list of [his] sins: backdated stock options, factory conditions in China and secret agreements with Silicon Valley rivals to prevent employee-poaching.” And an interview “with the mother of a child Jobs denied for years was his own.”

Sorkin wisely knows that über-achievers often cannot be accurately boiled down to good OR bad, hero OR villain, and that people who change the world are sometimes deeply flawed, presenting John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr. as examples. In Why It Pays to Be a Jerk, the subtitle says it all: “New research confirms what they say about nice guys.”

“Human relationships were not his strong suit.”— Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3, “ the ‘killer application’ which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s” along with other accomplishments that made him a pioneer of the personal computing industry

Kapor’s wife Freada Klein conducted an intriguing experiment, submitting the résumés of the first 40 Lotus employees, altering their names, and “not one of [them], including Kapor, was invited for a job interview. … Lotus had become a place where its founders were misfits.”

I discussed this topic in a two-part series: Control freaks, creativity, and your career and Self-censoring is bad for your career and the economy. Relevance to you? In our intolerant one-strike-and-you’re-out world, there is a constant need to censor yourself, watching what you say 24/7/365. Thanks to the PC police, we must always be on guard lest we say something that might offend someone, somewhere. This erodes creativity, hence stymies progress, shrivels paychecks, and dashes dreams. It’s one of the reasons why the USA is failing, and why what we now see is so utterly disappointing to those of us who witnessed America’s peak years.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said Apple would never hire him or Steve Jobs today, so close-minded companies potentially miss out “on finding the next person to come along with a world-changing idea.”

Would Microsoft hire Bill Gates with a different name but the same brilliance and behavior? Also not likely: googling him would reveal allegations (including from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) that he would scream at people and verbally abuse them. Although he now seems to have mellowed into a good man, the Internet Manufactured Outrage Machine fed by Google that never forgets leads to rehashing the past instead of moving on and granting clemency for it.

We increasingly live in a world that values genius and talent less than inside-the-box conformity without rough edges. Job applications may as well include a checkbox: “Are you a plastic-perfect robot? If not, can you at least pretend you are?”

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”— Arthur Schopenhauer

What America dearly needs are creative geniuses who spot opportunities others overlook. The penalty for not doing that? Competing on price and all the misery that generates.

Scientists now understand why less angelic people are more likely to be gifted. In The Neurobiological Foundations of Giftedness, the authors wrote,“Leonardo Da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Pablo Picasso illustrate exceptional individuals whose extraordinary accomplishments will forever stand out in history. Yet the autobiographical and biographical accounts of these figures reveal [behavioral] patterns … outside the normal range.”

Take Einstein. His name is and will forever be a synonym for exceptional genius, yet his genius did not arise in a vacuum: it came from the same mind that made him intensely interested in sex.

Evidence released after his death showed that Einstein couldn't get enough women. After nearly 3500 sealed pages of his personal correspondence were made public, the press had a field day with Einstein, calling him a “Phys-sex Genius,” a “Scientific Pimp,” a “Stud Muffin,” a “galactic womanizer,” and even a “sex-fiend.” Einstein's weakness for pretty women was indulged by chasing skirts that culminated in many affairs, including one with a “beautiful Soviet spy.” After infidelity ended his first marriage, “he spent some time deciding whether to shack up with his 42-year-old cousin, Elsa, or her 20-year-old daughter, Ilse.”

University of Alberta researcher Dr. Marty Mrazik noted that “excessive prenatal exposure to testosterone facilitates increased connections in the brain, especially in the right prefrontal cortex [and unique patterns of inferior frontal activation]. That's why we see some intellectually gifted people with distinct personality characteristics that you don't see in the normal population.” One of these is extreme creativity; another is a heightened interest in sex, which is affected by prenatal and subsequent androgen exposure.

Perhaps that is why Abraham Lincoln said, “It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”

“In heaven all the interesting people are missing.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.”— H. L. Mencken

The Stepford World isn’t a better one; bigotry, racism, hate, offensiveness, and the divisions they engender are still rife. We’re zipping our lips for what? We’re giving up our jobs and getting what in return?

Shafted.

Steve Jobs was odd but built the most valuable corporation in the world. Albert Einstein was unconventional in his personal life, but his name became an eternal synonym of genius.

The libidinous genius club is stacked to the rafters with Nobel Prize winners, eminent scientists (such as Richard Feynman, Erwin Schr?dinger, Marie Curie, and Robert Oppenheimer), inventors, writers, businesspeople, and politicians such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Then there was Ben Franklin, in a class by himself in terms of being the most instrumental Founding Father but one who would have raised eyebrows in church, repeatedly.

If those geniuses had corporate sponsors, they would have blushed in response to what those brainiacs did in their personal lives. People who fit in rarely stand out. Fit into a corporate culture hell-bent on weeding out people who aren’t behavioral clones? Fat chance of that!

A relevant quote from one of my relatives, Chester Arthur: “I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business.”

In electing Donald Trump as President, Americans signaled they’ve had it with business as usual. For the middle class, business as usual meant replacing the American Dream with a series of nightmares I couldn’t have imagined when I was young and implicitly assumed the United States would be great forever, destined to always be the world's indomitable economic superpower. Some of our foremost corporations able to compete only by firing the workers who built them? College grads struggling for years working in jobs alongside high school dropouts? Then unthinkable, now common painful realities stemming from a lack of trailblazing innovation permitting them to own the market instead of being battered by making “me, too” products that necessitate competing on price instead of ideas.

Why do businesses struggle when we have Silicon Valley?

Silicon Valley is now synonymous with wondrous innovation, but how is it helping you?

“In a mission statement published on Andreessen Horowitz’s website, Marc Andreessen claimed he was ‘looking for the companies who are going to be the big winners because they are going to cause a fundamental change in the world.’ The firm’s portfolio includes Ringly (maker of rings that light up when your phone does something), Teespring (custom T-shirts), DogVacay (pet-sitters on demand), and Hem (the zombified corpse of the furniture store Fab.com).”— Sam Biddle in Silicon Valley Is a Big Fat Lie

Biddle added that “it’s wasteful and genuinely harmful to have so many people working on such trivial projects … no prior cohort of rich pricks have fooled themselves, and the rest of us, so thoroughly.”

“… technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys, with things like iPhones and apps and social media, or algorithms that speed automated trading. There's nothing wrong with most of these things. They've expanded and enriched our lives. But they don't solve humanity's big problems.”— TED talk Can technology solve our big problems? by Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review

“My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.”— Mark Zuckerberg

Try this experiment: turn off your computer or smartphone and tell me how your life is better than it was decades ago. Now turn them on and explain how it is better. After pondering this for years, I can’t point to a single major way that Silicon Valley and its offshoots helped me. The big change is that after pouring years of my life and a pile of money into its addictive offerings, I haven’t made a penny of net profit nor reaped any great benefit. Instead, I’ve frittered away time that would have been better spent in the real world.

Now consider how the lives of your ancestors changed from their youth: initially no running water or indoor plumbing, no refrigerators or air conditioning, a wood or coal stove that left some rooms icy cold, no phones, no cars, no airplanes, no radios, no televisions, no phonographs or tape recorders, no electric lights or appliances, no power tools, no fax machines, no cameras, no chainsaws, no lawnmowers powered by gasoline (& no gasoline, period), no tractors, no penicillin, no x-rays, and no surgical anesthesia or understanding of germs. Then they had those things and much more, transforming their lives in spectacular ways.

If we enjoyed comparable advances, we’d have flying cars, jetpacks, and other stuff we dreamed about when I was a kid, but that future never arrived—and I know why.

“ We expected jetpacks, but we got 140 characters.”— Peter Thiel

We got robbed, and the businesses that could be raking in money producing those things are instead being pounded competing on price making stuff that makes consumers yawn.

“The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury.”— Peter Thiel in Zero to One

Oh, for folks enamored with cellphones: before they existed, I could make phone calls from my car or anywhere else. The difference? I did it without paying a dime in monthly fees and without getting locked into contracts. The cellphone network we now have isn’t the best one in terms of price or performance; I’m mystified why others didn’t think of this better alternative.

Ironically, while we’re awash in communications gear, my friends still travel (often thousands of miles) to meet with business customers—that’s so 20th century!

Another path to prosperity

Apart from what I can do to foster business success by working with companies, I could teach educators how I went from dunce to doctor and inventor. The secret sauce of success is creativity; it kindles progress and stimulates prosperity. A flash of creative insight can eliminate the need for decades of work by myriad people and confer benefits no amount of hard work can deliver. Genuine breakthroughs obviate the need for corporations to figuratively pinch pennies. America became great by conceiving big ideas, not competing on price. We’ve done it before and will do it again.

In Cincinnati, Ohio on his Thank You Tour (12-1-2016), President-elect Donald Trump said, “Whether it’s producing steel, building cars, or curing disease, we want the next generation of innovation and production to happen right here in America. … It’s time to remove the rust from the Rust Belt and usher in a new Industrial Revolution. … We are the nation that won two World Wars, that dug out the Panama Canal, that put a man on the Moon and satellites all over space. But somewhere along the way, we started thinking small. I’m asking you to dream big again, and bold and daring things for your country will happen once again. I’m asking you to join me in this next chapter of this unbelievable and unprecedented movement as we work toward prosperity at home, peace abroad, and new frontiers in science, technology, and space. I’m asking you to believe in America once again. We have many challenges but this is truly an exciting time to be alive. There’s been no time like it. The script is not yet written. We do not know what the next page will read—but I’ll tell you, it’s going to be a great page—but for the first time in a long time, what we do know is that the pages will be authored by each one of you—each one of you. Americans will be the captains of their own destiny once again.”