I watch a lot of reality TV, mostly shows on Bravo, maybe because Bravo shows look amazing in HD and take full advantage of 5.1 sound set-ups. In addition to looking and sounding amazing, the reality TV I watch gives me a chance to revel in the good and bad of people behaving like themselves. Sometimes it's a triumph and sometimes it's a train wreck.
One of the shows I watch is Tabitha's Salon Takeover. Of course I'm bald which makes it rather strange that I watch the show. The thing is though, it could just as easily be Tabitha's Garage Takeover, or Tabitha's Bait Shop Takeover. The show focuses on the owners of small businesses, salons in this case, and the things they're doing wrong and how it can be fixed by somebody who has been successful in the field.
This past Tuesday night the salon in question was Christopher Hill Salon in Brentwood, a tony section of Los Angeles, that, given it's prime location, should be generating kaboodles of income. That is, if the owners knew what they were doing. The owners were a married couple, a husband with considerable business experience and his wife, a very bitchy Asian lady with an MBA, cum laude as she frequently points out, from Southern Cal and who had worked as a consultant in corporate America. Neither owner had any experience at all in owning their own business or any salon experience either.
I won't go into all the particulars of how things turned out but the end result was that the wife was the problem. They had bought a salon with an existing stable of very good stylists but had run things into the ground through poor management and a basic lack of experience. The wife had zero people skills and salon turnover was well beyond what it should be because everybody questioned the business and leadership skills of the owners. They were $300,000 in debt and in danger of losing their house which they had mortgaged to keep the business afloat. After Tabitha fixed things up like she always does and came back after six weeks for her usual check in, things had reverted back to the way there were when she got there and the wife who had agreed to step aside was back in charge and seven people had left or been fired.
At any rate, the show and the wife got me thinking about the word "business". My wife has a business degree that allowed her to get a foot in the door of some insurance companies in Atlanta where she was allowed to butt her head against the glass ceiling many women face and also allowed her to watch the rampant nepotism in corporate America where the friends and nephews of the big wigs get positions and advancement without merit.
Business is a funny word. Business schools are ubiquitous, physically and virtually. America churns out more business school graduates and MBAs than, I would guess, every other country in the world combined. I'm not sure what it means but I guess you graduate knowing how to "do business". That's pretty vague. Supposedly you get a big boost in income over somebody who doesn't have a degree. I guess I'd have to do a lot of research to find out what percentage of small businesses and successful small businesses are started by somebody with a business degree of some description. Basically though, it would seem that, you learn on the job like you would in just about any vocation. The difference is that, should you have a degree, you can demonstrate to an employer that you had the diligence to complete a course of study. You don't really have a demonstrable skill-set; you do have a piece of paper showing that you have an understanding of basic business concepts.
The wife at the salon in question seemed to be of the impression that an MBA imparted her with some special powers akin to being bitten by a radioactive spider or like the graduates of Hogwarts who have been given a magic wand and a familiar. She thought that the concept was the fact: successfully completing a business course means success in business. If this were true America would be a much better place to be sure. There would be little, if any, poor investments. Most poor investments are the result of overlooking obvious leaps of logic. Once such leap would be to believe that it's not necessary to know anything about salons to run a successful salon. That might be the case if one were to hire a manager with salon experience. The wife in question, however, thought that her MBA carried with it the requisite skills to manage anything as long as it was a "business".
This is that sort of "build it and they will come" philosophy that has dug America into a hole that I seriously doubt it will be able to dig back out of. You can look all around the area in which I live, Baldwin County, Alabama, and see the failed businesses and the empty or unfinished subdivisions that are the result of that philosophy. All are the result of people with money to invest being talked out of their money by somebody with a slick brochure or Power Point presentation. The myriad, out-of-business chicken finger franchisees and the quaint, empty subdivisions with "sales person on site" signs tell a sad tale. The vast majority of investments are poor investments. Having a business degree isn't like getting magical powers. American business has become something of a shell game or Ponzi scheme in which things aren't manufactured anymore. Money is invested, churned around, sent overseas and back, packaged and repackaged in various schemes to skirt regulations and laws, and the people making money are the ones handling the money and controlling the political process designed to regulate it. It's the people loaning money to the small businesses who fail who are successful not the small businesses themselves.
America isn't producing much in the way of goods anymore. We import much more than we export. China is producing stuff; we're producing business degrees. All of this is so important because of the tax breaks we've just extended to the wealthiest Americans. In theory, they will invest this extra money in the economy and it will all trickle down on the average American. The problem is that most investments are bad ones like the salon owners at Christopher Hill Salon. All of that tax break money they've invested will end up with the bankers who financed their ill-fated venture, the bank will own the house they mortgaged to pay for it, and they'll become part of the financial class to which I belong while the financiers continue to put distance between themselves and serfs like me.
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