Miami Valley Needs More Barbarians

Lawrence M. Miller's book, Barbarians to Bureaucrats: Corporate Life Cycle Strategies, points out that we used to be take-chance visionaries: thinkers, doers, inventors and change agents.
Now we have become civilized, homogenized, bureaucratized and follow-the-herd thinkers.
Dayton spearheaded a new segment of the economy with two barbarians named Wright who had the wild and crazy idea that they could fly. The Wrights were true innovators because they not only overcame the `It can't be done,' standard killer phrase, they also had to overcome faulty data developed by the respected German engineer Lilienthal. How many millions of jobs were created because of the contributions of two inventors from Dayton; barbarians, according to Miller?
What does our homogenized, bureaucratic thinking produce? Current headlines tell us: 600 jobs lost in Mead Westvaco consolidation, Hewitt Soap to close after 128 years, 160 jobs from Deuer Manufacturing in Dayton to move to Mexico.
Instead of the inventor engineer being the driver or the force behind the company, Charles F. Kettering being one example, we have bureaucrats in distant holding companies focusing on number crunching: Buying and selling companies for profit, making the quarter or the month, and moving plants in search of low wages.
The problem is we are no longer focused on making money through innovation and developing engineering-based products. We chase low labor rates, moving plants first to Mexico and then to China.
We need our corporations to be healthy. Making money is a good thing. To do this long term, however, we need wisdom-driven, value-based barbarians to get to the top.
We want our leaders to out-think the competition and to create corporate wealth through good research and development, engineering innovations, and continuous improvement - the removal of wasteful activities.
The current follow-the-herd bureaucratic thinking, that focuses on making money, buying and selling each other, or chasing low labor rates, leads to chaos and job displacement - and does not create a wealth-producing economy.