California Dreaming… No More!
Right after receiving my Ph.D. in materials science from the University of California at Berkeley, some 50 60 miles from the hub of silicon valley, I had some 4 offers from the chip-making companies, namely Intel, AMD, AMI, and the last one was a new startup company called the Cypress Semiconductor, in the heart of the silicon valley in San Jose, California. The guy who had founded the company was this colorful, opinionated Stanford graduate named TJ Rogers. Tough guy, demanding boss. I guess it was in 1985 or 1986 Fortune magazine named him to be the toughest boss in the valley. What was so tough about him, you might inquire? Nonstop micromanagement, incredibly disciplined, foul-mouthed, like I said opinionated, bellicose, and ‘my way or highway’ kind of attitude. He was a stickler for time management and used to stand right at the entrance of the building a few minutes before 8 am to make sure that the people who reported late received a dirty look from him. However, I must acknowledge that whatever the practices I performed during my professional career, many of the habits and attributes I picked up from this guy. One thing he used to say often when he collected the small team on Friday afternoons was the value we were creating was enormous in the building, which was built on fields that used to grow onions. No kidding. Onions! The transformation, which was taking place both physically and commercially as the onion fields and the apricot orchards, were being demolished and replaced by high tech chip manufacturing companies of Intel and AMD fame was quite extraordinary. Is not capitalism all about this destruction and rebirth of new businesses and innovative establishments? Much later in life when I was teaching entrepreneurship classes in the Far East, I came across a term introduced by Schumpeter back in the 1940s uniquely coined creative destruction, which took me a while to grasp, but later I became a big proponent of it citing many examples from our own lives.
As I said, it was the best of times in the valley. Creative destruction was so inescapable. The chip revolution, which had started in the 1980s, culminated in the most impressive improvement in productivity of the labor pool and propelled USA to world leadership. Japan and right after the Soviet bloc disintegrated, which both countries could not gain the foothold since then. The remarkable improvement in productivity begot another example of creative destruction, the internet, and its derivatives Facebook, Google, and many others. Since the outset of this century, we were all glued to our mobiles, taking part actively or vicariously in this tight web, being tracked as it turns out every single little move we make or purchase we may end up buying or just simply looking. Pretty powerful stuff. Control in 2020 much like the big brother in 1984 is many folds amplified with an increasing crescendo to a vista where we stand and see vast destruction of the environment lying in front of us.
California dreaming is no longer. Fires are raging out of control, firefighters cannot even be dispatched because of the pandemic fears, and the fertile Sacramento valley, which supplies almost 50 percent of the total US consumption of vegetables, is running dry. The predicament of the Californians is so dire that in droves they are moving out of the state, sped up by this on/off policy of working from home or some flavor of it. The spaceship Apple building Steve Jobs designed, a showcase of an architectural triumph, and ego is thinly populated and used. Oh, what have you done COVID 19 turning California into the most calamitous place on earth? We did not even mention the San Andreas fault and the upcoming earthquake.
There is this expression in Turkish ‘tuy dikmek’ that roughly translates to adding insult to injury. That is what the pandemic is doing to California, a place that formatted my life in the 80s and 90s. If you believe in Schumpeter, this outward destruction will cause the creation of new and innovative disciplines and industries, which will continue to grow the economy through ubiquitous consumption and thereby more employment. There is that common notion that capitalism will continue unabated regardless of what happens. However, with the pandemic, we hard realized that we had been living with a tiny margin of error. COVID 19 virus wiped out many sectors and will continue to do so. Global warming insidiously is increasing the desertification and causing the upheaval of many societies, causing the unprecedented and unpredictable mass migration of the peoples. Flooding because of hurricanes and typhoons are coming so close to each other that the weather people are having a hard time finding names for these events. Hence, capitalism’s poster child California is mired with smoke from the forest fires, silicon valleys famed 101 which runs across the state is clogged with traffic, people are moving out in droves, and moving companies have now a waiting list. What we now need an asteroid to hit the earth, which remains to be the only thing, left to end this go crazy unfettered capitalism.
