Editor’s note: In my frequent travels to Greece on business, I have witnessed firsthand the devastation which has been visited on this beautiful land by the nation’s European lenders. But the legacy of the corrosive and misguided actions of the nation’s former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras – an atheist and former member of the Communist Youth of Greece – and his government in dealing with the nation’s fiscal crisis, and his fecklessness in dealing with the Troika particularly, makes him complicit in the spoliation of the country. Tsipras lied to his nation as he came to power on an anti-austerity platform. Yet, despite the fact that 61% of the nation voted to reject the European conditions for a bailout only days after the vote he agreed to the suffocating conditions of the bailout. For his part, Mr. Tsipras was more concerned with whether the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) – a largely Slavic and Albanian nation with no claim to the legacy of Alexander the Great and with perhaps irredentist ambitions for a united Macedonia – could keep the name “Macedonia” in its country name than in navigating the nation through its perilous economic shoals.

The assault of the Troika – the triumvirate of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank – on the sovereignty of Greece was harsh, unrelenting, and meant to punish the small nation for its apparently spendthrift ways. Ten years after Greece received the first tranche of bailout monies, the nation remains under strict supervision to repay its foreign lenders, principally Germany and France, at the expense of further impoverishing its people, and strangling its economy. As a result, Greece will remain forevermore under scrutiny by its lenders until the approximately $400 billion debt is repaid – which is to say forevermore.

“The fundamental reason why the Greek crisis [has, my italics] lasted so long was the extreme level of austerity that was imposed.” So, says, Ashoka Mody, a former deputy director of the IMF, in his book, Euro Tragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts. Mr. Mody, has gone on to say that the IMF should have “…insisted on a restructuring as a condition of its participation.” It was, however, mind-numbingly irresponsible of Mr. Mody and others at the IMF that they didn’t raise a loud and bloody hell at the time knowing full well that Greece’s debt was unsustainable as many of us on the outside understood.

THE CRISIS IS OVER!

Disgustingly, some Greek politicians are hailing the “end” of the crisis and disingenuously claiming, as Euclid Tsakalotos did, that “…things are improving and people can see that they are improving.” Mr. Tsakalotos, Minister of Finance in Tsipras’ Syriza radical-left government and a student member of the Communist Party of Greece while at Oxford, was reacting to a debt relief deal struck with the Eurozone that would allow Greece to begin to repay its debt in 2032. But, no amount of debt relief – “relief” is merely a euphemism for digging a deeper grave – will make up for a shrinking economy. In any event, that “things are improving,” as Mr. Tsakalotos alleges is more a statement of political expediency than of economic reality, and is the furthest thing from the truth. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation (OECD), nearly one-third of the population of Greece is living near poverty. Retirees are living with reduced pensions; employers are “hiring” without contracts to avoid making social security and health contributions; and employees with bona-fide jobs can go months without pay while always keeping an eye on the calendar as their one-year anniversary approaches after which it becomes more difficult for them to get fired.

“CONTAGION” IS SCAREMONGERING BY THE EUROPEAN UNION

It has been my position for years that Greece should unilaterally repudiate its debt as it stands and restructure existing bonds at no more than, say, 20%. Interest arrears would be off the table in my scenario.  Clearly, easy credit fueled the Socialist practices of current and previous Greek administrations and it is clear, as well, that no one was minding the shop as the nation lived well beyond its means. What is done is done. But, make no mistake about it, the longer a voluntary default is forestalled the greater the cost will be to both Greece and its European lenders. And, an involuntary default might be inevitable anyway.

The strongest expressed argument coming from the Eurozone against a voluntary default is that it would lead to “contagion” that would spread to other countries. But contagion is precisely what is being precipitated by straight-jacketing the Greek economy with austerity measures that will deepen an already deep recession. These austerity measures will almost guarantee that the growth needed to pay an increasing debt obligation is precluded. And, rest assured, the Greek economy is flat-lining if not eroding. Unemployment currently stands at over 18% (the highest in the European Union), with youth unemployment running at twice that rate. The nation also faces serious long-term demographic challenges. Since the height of the financial crisis in 2008 to the present, Greece has seen more than 500,000 of its citizens or nearly 5% of its population – mostly young and educated citizens – leave the country. Dr. Giannis Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine, and a specialist in statistics at Stanford University, for instance, reckons that only about 14% of the approximately 672 Greek scientists of world-class stature make their home in Greece. And, this is not likely to get better anytime soon as the nation’s fertility rate of 1.35% is much below the required rate of 2.1% needed to maintain the population stable. A scarier demographic scenario can hardly be imagined as the nation will continue to atrophy in size.

No bailout is worth the loss of sovereignty that is in full bloom in Greece at the hands of the bureaucrats in Brussels and who already are making noises about not having enough control over the sovereign nation’s budget. The United Kingdom which had a lot less to lose than Greece voted 52% to 48% to exit the European Union in June of 2017 precisely because they didn’t want Eurocrats calling the shots.

I would give the Eurozone lenders a take it or leave it offer. Either they take the proffered haircut at 80% or Greece returns to the drachma, converts the remaining debt at the old exchange rate of 350 drachmas to the euro, prints money and thus ends up in a better place financially. Meaningfully, credit-card-toting bureaucrats will not be telling Greece how it should run its internal affairs. This path of devaluing the currency will work by ratcheting down prices across the board and thus encouraging entrepreneurs to again take measured risks in lieu of running to offshore locations. It is true, the country will be excoriated in the European and American press and the economic, social, and political flak in the short term will be unceasing. Creditors, too, will have their day in court. Nerves of steel will be the order of the day.

IS ARGENTINA THE MODEL?

The roughly 50% write-down agreed to by Greek bondholders in 2011, in large measure under duress, as part of the bailout has proved to be a Faustian deal.  Again, with little or no economic growth all the debt swaps in the world will fail to work miracles. And, for all of the talk about how Greece cannot be trusted to pay its debts unless it puts up sufficient collateral – some countries have suggested including the Parthenon and some Greek islands as collateral – the country has begun mortgaging its infrastructure by disposing of utilities, airports, seaports and highways mostly to international consortia. Clearly, fire-sale privatizations were also part of the bailout scheme. But it doesn’t end there. The esoteric shell game cooked up by the European Central Bank known as the Securities Market Program, allowed the bank to buy Greek bonds in secondary markets at deep discounts while selling them at par. The profits, which should have been returned to Greece are in arrears to the tune of nearly $10 billion.

The unarticulated reason for protecting Greek bond-holders throughout Europe, and the raison d’être for the Eurozone, in the first place, is that Germany covets as many captive, non-manufacturing country markets for its products as it can stand on the backs of its own citizens. It is clear that what Germany did not accomplish with tanks during World War II it is accomplishing with the complicity of the euro. In fact, it is an undervalued euro – in combination with relatively low wages – which in large measure explains Germany’s world-leading trade surplus of nearly $300 billion in 2019. Lest there be any doubt in anyone’s mind about German designs, it must be remembered that beginning in the late nineteenth century prominent German economists, politicians, and scientists held the view that it fell to Germany to “organize” the continent of Europe. That is hardly a faded dream. To this day that theme persists. German Sociologist, Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System, for example, hails what he calls a “consolidation state” where a nation state’s market-conforming fiscal policy, a policy of austerity, and debt service take precedence over public policy.

There is no ignominy in being associated with an Argentine-styled default. Certainly, no more scorn could possibly be heaped on Greece than by those who have taken to the airwaves, social media or their print presses across the globe and spoken of the country’s “moral collapse.”  There is life after default, however. Argentina is proof of that. Argentina’s 2001 default restructuring offered investors a 70% haircut, which three out of four investors accepted. That was a wise decision on the part of investors as the country was not open to further negotiation.  The restructuring was also a wise decision on the part of Argentina as GDP subsequently soared. That Argentina has suffered additional defaults since 2001 speaks as much to creditor greed as it does to the fiscal mismanagement of South America’s second largest economy.

CAN ANYTHING ELSE GO WRONG?

Adding to Greece’s financial woes are two other exacerbating factors neither of which are of Greece’s doing: The first is the migrant crisis which has seen over one million refugees transit through the country. An equivalent percentage of migrants into the United States, by way of example, would amount to over thirty million people. The migrant crisis was born of German Chancellor, Angela Merkel’s open border conceit and financial leverage over a diffident Greek government but it is aggressively fueled by Turkish smuggling bands. Many Greek islands of the Eastern Aegean – Kos, Lesvos, Samos, and Chios have been particularly hard hit – have been turned into public sewers by the migrants which have overrun historically pristine beaches, desecrated Christian crosses, complained about Greek food and free accommodations, caused civil disturbances, and helped fuel a surge in prostitution. The European Union, an amalgam of 500 hundred million people, now finds reason to rebuke a nation of under eleven million for not doing enough for the migrants.

Now comes the onslaught brought on by the Chinese Communist Virus. The current Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, panicked and overreacted by taking a heavy hand to impose severe lockdown conditions on the country such as banning inter-city travel, closing schools, shuttering places of worship, and enforcing early evening curfews. Violating lockdown restrictions can cost a citizen up to 600 euros. This, in addition to the imposition of a fine – the Prime Minister refers to this as a “health fee” – of 100 euros per month for citizens who are over the age of sixty and who remain unvaccinated.  This group of citizens, incidentally, amounts to all of 17% of the cohort population. The Prime Minister, however incongruously, has seen fit to re-establish diplomatic relations with the murderous regime of Syria’s Bashar-al-Assad whose civil war has cost the lives of approximately 500,000 people.

LET’S START AT THE BEGINNING

Against this backdrop, I would move to reopen negotiations with the European lenders. The point of departure for a new set of negotiations would start by taking account of the Romans’ endless pillaging of Greece; or the Venetokratia, and Frankokratia  following the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, which lay waste to the Byzantine capital and much of Greece; The looted art treasures served to adorn Venetian churches such as St. Mark’s with friezes, enamels, columns, capitals, mosaics, and the four copper-gilded horses stolen from the Hippodrome; or the horrific savaging of the Parthenon, destruction of its statues, and plunder of the Piraeus Lion – which majestically but most shamefully stands guard at the Arsenal in Venice – by the sadistic Venetian Doge, Francesco Morosini, who was hailed at home for his bestiality; or by the thievery of ancient Greek marbles by Lord Elgin who to this day is defended by British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson for his actions; or the theft by French historian Emmanuel Miller of caryatids from Thessaloniki in 1864 which are housed in the Louvre Museum; or the winged Nike of Samothrace which commands the top of the staircase at the Louvre and which was appropriated by Charles Champoiseau in 1863; or the depredations of the Franco-British legations who attempted to destabilize the nation during the First World War; or by the savage and site-damaging excavations by amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann including the demolition of Frankish treasures at the Acropolis; or the incalculable death and destruction suffered at the hands of the Germans and the Italians leading up to and during the Second World War. Clearly, if Greece calls in all of these IOU’s, Greece and its European lenders will be all fair and square.

The nation’s engine of growth in new jobs, historically, has been the young and emerging enterprise. Twenty years ago, companies less than one year old generated nearly five million new jobs. Currently, one-year old startups are creating a shade above three million new jobs.

The driver behind new job creation is the new business startup. And, the arithmetic makes clear why new job creation in the United States is the lowest in memory. According to the Small Business Administration, the failure rate of young firms is roughly on par with the rate of new business formations. Again, twenty years ago the number of new business formations handily exceeded the number of companies which failed.

It is no wonder that the United States is nowhere in the top ten of nations for spinning up new companies when compared to the number of existing businesses. When looked at in this way, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) calculates that the United States is second from the bottom ahead of only Canada. The OECD methodology punishes advanced economies as they have a larger base of established businesses thereby diminishing the ratio of new business startups. Even so, the United States ranks behind Austria, Israel, and the Netherlands – hardly impoverished nations with thin industrial bases – in the OECD rankings.

I can think of no greater threat to our democratic spirit than our inability to inspire, if not incent, young entrepreneurs to take the plunge. The rate at which entrepreneurs ages 25-54 – the prime years for throwing caution to the wind – choose to risk it all is about half what it was three decades ago. Millennials, the offspring of the digital age, who should be best poised to launch a low cost, technology inspired, entrepreneurial enterprise have proved to be risk-averse and now account for the least represented demographic responsible for new business formations. The evidence is muddled as to why this demographic behaves the way it does. Is there no wellspring of ideas coming from this group? Is this a group whose inspiration has been sapped by the creature comforts provided by their parents or by one government program or another?

Consider this, Mike Rowe, former host of the Dirty Jobs television series which featured Mr. Rowe doing disgusting jobs – which apparently no one else wanted to tackle – launched a scholarship fund for high school students willing to take on a skilled trade like welding, plumbing or electrical. And, despite Mr. Rowe’s largesse, he can’t give away scholarship money fast enough because few applicants are willing to step up to an Oath of hard work and hard study.

I started my first business – a delivery service – with all of $500 in start-up capital at the ripe young age of nineteen. I started my business because I was motivated to be my own boss, make my own money, work my own hours, and because, in the end, I had “ants in my pants”. To my way of thinking, there is no better definition of an entrepreneur than an individual who has ants in his pants and who is never satisfied with his station in life.

In contrast, I don’t believe that sporting a sheepskin emblazoned with “Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship” will make an entrepreneur of the person. The $50,000 per school year investment that most colleges call for is money better spent in an entrepreneurial venture.

Regardless, the lack of representation by Millennials in the entrepreneurial ranks is all the more serious given that as of 2020 Millennials represented the largest age segment of the population at about 22%. Clearly, the confidence, passion, and ambition of our latest generation has eroded to the point where it now seeks refuge where rewards are more in line with pursuits involving little or no attendant risk.

THE GOVERNMENT’S ROLE IN NEW BUSINESS FORMATIONS

The French nineteenth century free-market economist Frederic Bastiat, insightfully warned of the cost of overwrought government intrusion: “The real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that do not exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us.” Sadly, over one-hundred years after Bastiat’s admonishment, we still have not learned that less government is always best.

The continuing onslaught of stultifying regulatory prohibitions (licensing, permitting, and other forms of red tape), is a serious impediment to the young start up. Community bank credit, the source of about 60% of the nation’s small business lending, has been decimated by the suffocating compliance provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The Act, passed in 2010 by the Obama Administration in response to the financial meltdown of 2008, was intended to address the abuses of large banks.

Unfortunately, the Act’s nearly 2,300 pages made few provisions to address the operating characteristics of thinly capitalized banks whose purpose it is to deal with the special needs of their local communities. As a result, since the passage of Dodd-Frank, nearly 2,000 community banks have gone out of business. And, those that have survived have seen nearly 25% of their net income sucked up by compliance costs. It is no wonder then, that new business formations so heavily dependent on the lubricant that is Community bank-lending have suffered so dramatically.

If stifling regulations, and reluctant bank credit weren’t burdensome enough for the young entrepreneur to deal with throw in, for good measure, a tax code of mind-numbing complexity, and confiscatory tax rates. Now comes the lockdown measures implemented by many States which, for largely political reasons, have sought draconian responses to the outbreak of the Chinese Communist Virus. This factor alone has the potential to extinguish whatever spark might be left in our young entrepreneurs.

AMERICAN DREAM OR SOCIALIST NIGHTMARE?

It seems hardly surprising, therefore, that the brightest young minds seek sanctuary in menial, corporate, or government jobs where innovation will hardly move the needle on the nation’s global competitiveness. In this context, the United States might learn something from the pro-business regulatory, and tax regimens that have been enacted in both Dubai and Panama – small, albeit financially astute nations – as I have written in separate essays.

The numbers tell the story: according to the World Bank Rankings for 2019, the United States ranks 55 out of 190 nations – behind countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Albania, and ahead of Niger – for the ease of starting a business. The World Bank’s metrics factor in the minimum capital required to launch a commercial or industrial start up, the licensing and permitting required, and the time and cost to get started. One can quibble with a methodology that attempts to compare 190 economies but if the World Bank’s calculation is only half right the United Sates would still not rank near the top.

More troubling is the nation’s lack of innovation coming from young firms. Here again, the United States is a laggard. Patent applications on a per-capita basis ranks the United States behind Korea, Japan, Switzerland, China, Canada, and Germany, and ahead of Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. But that doesn’t tell the whole story as patent filings in the United States are dominated by large, deep-pocketed corporations which are able to finance the legal, administrative, and accounting work necessary to process a patent application, and defend it if challenged. In this connection, it is a known fact that industry-disruptive technologies are less likely to spring from established market leaders – which are largely motivated to preserve the status-quo – than from entrepreneurial companies.

The United States has no option but to restart the nation’s entrepreneurial engine of growth in order to rekindle its democratic and free-market principles. In the absence of anything less than an overhaul of the educational, regulatory, fiscal, and legislative climate at the federal, state, and local levels impinging on new business formations The American Dream will remain a lost slogan.

The Chinese Communist Virus has not only killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans but it is now the most recent foil used by organizations around the country to kill service to the customer.

In telecommunications, hospitality, education, banking, retail, healthcare, and countless other business sectors of the economy the virus is cited as the reason why organizations are slow or unable to respond to the needs of the consumer. Government services, which have never been known to respond to the needs of citizens with alacrity, have become congealed in a combination of fear and ineptitude.

The virus now takes its place in the pantheon of reasons which organizations have long proffered for barely lifting a finger on behalf of the customer. Lousy and trivial excuses for not serving the customer now seem more grave and sincere because the virus is involved.

A handful of examples will suffice to make the point:

• Comcast Corporation, the nation’s largest internet provider with over 28 million broadband customers, and over 21 million TV subscribers has a long history of slapdash service and high cost. The virus, however, is now used as a reason for the further degradation in service. A telephone caller can now remain on hold for an hour or longer before someone at the other end will take the call. Worse, it can take days for the Company to address a technical issue either remotely or in person. The reason? As a supervisor explained it to me: “Because of the virus, our technicians are having to work from home.” Again, we’re not talking about an upstart piker in the phone business but about the largest telecom company in the United States with monopoly markets in many metropolitan areas of the country.
• The prestigious Boca Raton Hotel and Resort in South Florida continues to bill its members a monthly fee of nearly $1,000 despite the fact that all of its facilities have been shuttered and most of its workers furloughed for months. The place is a shambles with few amenities. Only recently was the resort moved to issue a meager one-time $500 credit to its members. “In appreciation of your support,” reads the communiqué from the resort’s President in announcing the spending credit.
• Universities continue to charge full tuition for students to participate in what is essentially an online class curriculum. Dartmouth college, for instance, charges over $55,000 in tuition for nothing more than so-called “computer”learning. It is no wonder that the college is facing a $5 million class action suit from parents for its failure to mitigate the cost of tuition and fees. Dartmouth is not a solitary offender as approximately one-hundred other universities and colleges are facing similar lawsuits.
• Major banks such as HSBC and JP Morgan Chase have closed many of their branches not only to foot traffic but to drive-through traffic as well. Private bankers whose value to their clients rests on personal relationships coupled with an in-depth knowledge of financial products are largely missing in action. The fallback service provider for these banks is as ineffective now as it was before the virus, namely the call-center attendant in Manila who although effusively polite is unable to help a customer except with the most mundane of requests .
• David Wohl, a California Criminal Defense Attorney, recently visited his favorite haberdasher, Men’s Wearhouse. When Mr. Wohl arrived at the store he was not allowed inside due to “social distancing.” He was instead asked to stand outside in 103˚ weather. After about fifteen minutes of waiting in the sweltering heat Mr. Wohl asked if he could enter, “No, the manager said, and if you have an issue with it you can go somewhere else.” The Men’s Wearhouse chain has over 700 stores and is owned by the financially troubled Tailored Brands. The Company has negative equity and negative earnings. It is $1.4 billion in debt and it has seen its share price drop from $5.96 a year ago to $.65 at the most recent close.   Blame the virus all you want but the problem with this retailer runs much deeper than that.
• According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) hospitals rated 75 points out of 100 with consumers in 2016 in satisfaction. By comparison, government services rated a paltry 68 points out of 100. In school, the former score would earn you maybe a C grade. The latter, no better than a D+ in your report card. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has railed against a local hospital charging $150 for a virus test. But predatory pricing is what awaits the patient who visits a hospital emergency room. Cases abound of hospitals gouging patients by charging thousands of dollars for visits to the ER which at times have been devoid of a swab test for the virus.
• The court system in the United States is at a virtual standstill as judges have postponed trials and hearings. Only a few jurisdictions have sought to use technology such as remote video and teleconferencing to conduct business. Clearly, a failure to adapt to the new reality brought about by the virus could have serious implications for people with immediate problems including those in prison awaiting trial, individuals in need of a restraining order or those in need of a custody judgment. Worse, individuals facing indictments are getting a free pass while the court system is shut down. When the court system reopens, the unprecedented backlog of civilian and criminal litigation will bring chaos to the courts to the chagrin of both litigants and law professionals alike.
• New York City has experienced an increase of 53% in shooting victims to 636 and an increase of 21% in homicides to 178 for the first six months of 2020. And, after a spate of violence over the Fourth of July Weekend Mayor Bill de Blasio, attributed the uptick in violence to the virus. “This is directly related to the coronavirus,” said the Mayor. Outlandish if not bizarre, the Mayor’s explanation failed to mention the city’s new bail reform which puts convicted criminals back on the street, defunding the Police Department to the tune of $1 billion, releasing inmates from Rikers Island, and disbanding the city’s anti-crime unit.
• Election officials in twenty-one states made changes to election dates, procedures, and administrative procedures presumably to accommodate citizens dealing with the virus. That states such as Alaska, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and others would allow votes to be received after election day renders the whole idea of a National Election deadline meaningless. The upshot was that the general election of November 3, 2020 was the most fraud-ridden election in our nation’s history.

The state of affairs described above is a confluence of supplier behavior best epitomized by the glib phrase “we’re doing the best we can,” and consumers who no longer have an expectation that their suppliers can deliver excellence in service. At the dawn of the twenty-first century it appeared that consumers were emboldened to become more demanding than at any other time in history due to techno/economic trends that shrunk the globe, increased consumer choices exponentially, and thus leveled the playing field for rich and poor consumers alike. Now it seems that our optimism was unfounded. The Chinese Communist pathogen has taken care of that.

We are experiencing a service meltdown that is ineffable despite decades of lip service by executives of organizations large and small about the great and wonderful job they are doing on the service front.

And, I am not optimistic that suppliers, in the main, will relinquish their obsession with financial rewards or other perquisites and suddenly become more disposed to work in the customer’s behalf.

THE CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS REQUIRED FOR EXCELLENCE IN SERVICE

There are four critical success factors needed for excellent service to result. These factors must work holistically – as a system – so as to deliver unimpeachable service. Leave any of these elements out and you suck out the oxygen needed to contribute to the growth and vitality of the customer-focused organization.

What follows is my take on the critical success factors of service based on my experience starting and running numerous business for nearly fifty years:

1. Leadership from the top – The key issue that catalyzes all other critical success factors is leadership. The customer-focused organization demands a special kind of leadership. The customer-focused leader must have his ear to the ground, the moral courage to challenge long-held assumptions, make tough decisions, implement needed reforms, and, in the end, raise what is intellectually sound to an emotional level. In the absence of this kind of commitment service will continue as nothing more than an afterthought, something to deal with only in the face of serious customer discontent.
2. The customer as the centerpiece of strategy – The customer-focused organization centers its strategy around the customer. Reaching out to the customer in a thoughtful and meaningful way forms the basis for a strategy which gives direction to a long-term vision, a mission statement, financial goals, organizational structures, technology initiatives and so on. The alternative is a strategy formulation process which only rewards the technocrats in the ivory tower.
3. A service ethic – The organization that is genuine about its commitment to the customer needs to actively promote and enforce an ethical standard that, above all else, celebrates and rewards employees for satisfying customer needs, and for always acting with integrity. Lapses in integrity erode trust, and this, in turn, erects barriers to the free exchange of candid information so vital to the pursuit of excellence in service. A service ethic can only thrive in an environment of hard-hitting, frank, and open discussion both inside and outside the organization.
4. Power to the front line – Human capital, intelligent, skilled, and properly supported and equipped is the fundamental resource that adds value to the customer-focused organization. My definition of a frontline worker is, therefore, correspondingly broad: anyone who has contact with the customer is by my definition on the frontline. Service at the front, the mechanics of which are just as much art as they are science, pivots on the competence, preparation, support, and dedication of individuals distant from the executive suite.

A full expression of service to the customer can only be found in an environment where these critical success factors work in harmony. No one critical success factor, working in isolation, can be the determining factor, regardless of how much organizational might is put behind it. A failure to appreciate the interplay of the four factors, and to execute in the light of their complex nature leads to myriad rationalizations such as those described above and whose current scapegoat is the Chinese Communist Virus.

It is now roughly one hundred years since the world became enamored of Socialism. In the intervening decades, the infatuation with the socialist experiment has led to environmental despoliation, mass starvation, the demise of entrepreneurial initiative, and the spread of a welfare mentality.

The rise of demonic monsters such as the Castro brothers, Mao Tse-Tung, Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jung Un, among others, was the direct consequence of the extinguishment of individual initiative, human dignity, and citizen freedoms.

Currently, in the United States, political leaders with an unquenching thirst for position and power are at it again proselytizing to the public that Socialism is in the best interest of the nation. They count on the economic illiteracy of the citizenry to vote them into power on the strength of a myth that Socialism renders equality for all.

The florid rhetoric of Socialist fanatics aside, Socialism is unworkable the moment central planners substitute their actions for the myriad actions of players in a free-market society.

At the heart of the unworkability of Socialism and why it is always destined to fail is that, as the great Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises asserted, the absence of the private ownership of an enterprise it is impossible to establish market prices that reflect actual market conditions. And, in the absence of true market prices it is consequently impossible to make judgements about the most effective uses of economic resources.

Rest assured, proponents of Socialism are not able to cite one historical antecedent where the egoism and presumed “wisdom” of central know-it-alls were an able substitute for the actions of countless sovereign consumers and producers in a free-market society. The irony of America’s greatness, however, is that both demagogues and democrats have an equal opportunity to stir the masses.

Left unsaid, of course, is that violence is part and parcel of the Socialist calculus. As Lenin famously said, “We must not depict Socialism as if Socialists would bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history without violence. When violence is exercised by the working people…then we are for it.” Who is to say but that the violent convulsions we are now experiencing in our nation’s cities are not faithful to Lenin’s precepts.

The defense of America comes easily to those who are united by the uniquely American principles of liberty, democracy, equality of opportunity, the rule of law, individual choice, and the sanctity of private property. Citizens who fail to grasp these “self-evident” truths owe it to themselves to undertake self-study, if not self-examination, to reaffirm that the American Dream is indeed not a slogan but a unique experiment that can only be realized in our great nation.

It is now common knowledge that China muzzled – if not eliminated – its own medical professionals who sought to sound the alarm on the coronavirus outbreak for months. The critical time that was lost led to countless innocent lives being sacrificed at the altar of China’s totalitarian ego: an ego suffused with fraud and data manipulation. How many Chinese were butchered by the Red Communists in this manner will likely never be known.

Less well known are the reasons why the World Health Organization (WHO) has been complicit in the Chinese fraud. The WHO is an agency of the United Nations, presumably impervious to political pressures and agendas, mandated to act on health issues across the globe. Indeed, the WHO’s stated mission is the “attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.” The chasm between mission and execution, however, is vast.

The Director General of the WHO, Mr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is an Ethiopian politician and member of the Marxist-Leninist Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). China has long-courted infrastructure investments in Central Africa and it should therefore come as no surprise that China is now Ethiopia’s largest trading partner, investor, and lender. How cynical does one have to be to believe that Tedros refuses to call China on the carpet for its deception on the spread of the coronavirus for the simple reason that he would be turning his back on his masters.

Tedros is not a medical doctor. And, leaving aside the folly of choosing a director who is not medically trained to lead the WHO, it did not take a medical doctor to realize that his own country suffered widespread devastation from several cholera epidemics. The epidemics were repeatedly affirmed by health professionals across the world but Tedros refused to acknowledge them as such.  In the end, Tedros was more concerned with his own political gloss than he was in saving the lives of his countrymen. That Tedros’ cholera cover-ups did not disqualify him ipso facto as head of the WHO speaks tomes about how China was able to wield its influence, money, and power to ensure that Tedros was elected as the new director.

Further indicting Tedros’ executive judgment came soon after his appointment to head the WHO as he reached out to name Zimbawe’s strongman Robert Mugabe as “Goodwill” Ambassador to the organization. It took a firestorm of international opposition for the appointment of Mugabe to be rescinded.

In December 2019 when Taiwanese health officials warned about the infectiousness of the coronavirus Tedros refused to share Taiwan’s warnings with the rest of the world. One doesn’t have to be a geopolitical genius to see that the WHO was doing China’s bidding. Taiwan, at China’s behest, is boycotted from participating as a full-fledged member of the WHO and thereby from sharing its epidemiological expertise with other nations.

Tedros’ fulsome fawning of China’s deception knows no bounds. He has heaped praise on China for its “openness to sharing information” on the coronavirus and he has also called upon nations “…not to limit travel to China.” He, of all people, has warned against “politicizing” the outbreak.

The WHO’s most flagrant breach of the public’s trust occurred January 14 when it stated that “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.” This statement, clearly propaganda devoid of any scientific fact, came more than a month after researchers in the city of Wuhan – the epicenter of the outbreak – found ample evidence of human-to-human transmission.

The United States – surprise, surprise – is the largest contributor to the coffers of the WHO. In 2017, the United States was assessed $111 million or 22% of all member states’ assessed contributions while contributing an additional $401 million to the WHO budget. What the United States gets for its largesse is hardly an impartial arbiter on international health issues but a marionette which shamelessly does the bidding of the Chinese. President Trump has justifiably suspended any further funding of the WHO pending a review of its practices. But rearranging deckchairs won’t get the job done. Tedros and his acolytes at the WHO must go before America opens up its pocketbook again.