Also, those were the days of profit sharing when employees really did own a big piece of the company. I remember meeting an elevator operator who, it was rumored, had several hundred thousands in stock. A manager might be intimidated at trying to push one of those employees around.

I went to college on a scholarship funded by Sears employees, led by David Brooker, and had a lot of contact with Sears folks who helped me find part time jobs, etc. It’s been sad to see their decline.

I wonder if the way-out-of-date 3×5 cards were actually used for reordering purposes, or if that was accomplished by someone noticing that the shelf/bin was empty.

That same store had a warehouse, the inventory section for which was run by three old ladies. They laboriously entered each item sold from the warehouse on a 3 x 5 card. The card had deliveries and sales and was supposed to represent the inventory for one item in the warehouse. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of the cards. The old ladies had worked for Sears for many years and had weeks of vacation each year. When they left, for three weeks usually at a time, the cards sat, waiting to be updated when they returned. This had gone on for years and the actual inventory was years out of date. A year later, I got a job as a computer programmer and realized how easy it would have been for Sears to modernize that system. I wondered why. That was 1959.

Dr. Greg Burns wrote that 80% of communication is non-verbal; such is the power of perception. The stronger the ability to communicate in such a way as to “paint a picture,” the more meaning. And the ability to convey “meaning” is key.

On a side note, Charles Murray’s Real Education provides some practical remedies to the phenomena of intellectual stovepipes devoid of real-world context.

I suspect that many academic economists or also “mathematicians manque”; unfortunately the abstractions of their discipline mostly lack the rigour and power of the abstractions available to the engineers.