In noting President Obama’s rallying cry for a program to support small businesses in America, the White House published the following in the President’s Facebook news feed:
A minority in the Senate is standing in the way of giving our small-businesspeople an up-or-down vote on the jobs bill. That’s a shame. We need to decide whether we’re willing to rise above the election-time games and come together—not just to pass a jobs bill that is going to help small businesses hire and grow but al…so to rebuild our economy around three simple words: “Made in America.”
While we wholeheartedly support a jobs bill that will help small businesses like ours, ‘Made in America’ is an Industrial Age idea that has very little resonance in the Networked World. Nothing substantial can be built around anything as meaningless as that statement. Here’s why…
The problem is that making stuff is not what America does any more, not exclusively to ‘Brand America’ anyway. Stuff gets made all over the world. What’s the most ‘American’ brand you can think of. Disney? Coca Cola? Nike? ‘Made All Over the World’ is the truth of these brands, and the same is true for any other brand vibrating on a network frequency. The Budweiser Clydesdales are Belgians now. Deal with it. In light of these new truths, ‘Made In America’ becomes just another piece of empty political rhetoric, designed to dampen disagreement rather than to foster any large-scale agreement around a new economic narrative.
What we need is an idea that will generate new narratives, and new ideas about how to stimulate the economy.
One of our favorite American companies, ABRO Industries, based smack dab in the heartland of America, South Bend, Indiana, with 25 employees and projected 2010 sales exceeding $150M, does over $40M of sales a year in Nigeria alone with products it manufactures in South America. Most of ABRO’s products are made outside America, and yet most of the wealth it generates comes back to this country. How? It originates the business cycle and the brand. It creates networks to market its products around the world.
“Made in” is no longer an differentiator for American business. ‘Created in’ still is.
What makes American business unique, what we can count on every time, is Creativity. The true American brew isn’t Budweiser, it’s the idiosyncratic brew of cultures and personal histories that make the American narrative unique in the world.
What matters about Disney is not where it’s made. After all, its primary product, happiness, can be conjured up anywhere in the world. What’s unique and irreplaceable about the Disney brand is that it was created in America, born out of the imagination of a Scotch-Irish Socialist-Farming Depression-Era Cartoon-Making Hollywood-Bound Space-Racing Commie-Fearing Polo-Playing Chain-Smoking Family-Loving Chili-Eating Anti-Semitic Dandy From Kansas City Who Dreamed He Was a Mouse.
Making stuff means replicating it, and that means commoditizing. Anybody can do that. Originating stuff–growing Walt Disneys and Apples and Pixars and Lady Gagas and ABROS–that’s what America still does best.
