The Long Game for All: Counting What Frontlines Know

Venki Padmanabhan
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Management
  • Monthly

Every week a working person does something a machine cannot, and no ledger anywhere records it. This show is about what that costs — and about why the people closest to the work have the best solutions. Venki Padmanabhan spent thirty-six years on manufacturing floors. General Motors at Buick City, Lansing Grand River and Lansing Delta Township. Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart. Royal Enfield in Chennai. Ather Energy in Bengaluru. He now writes about the thing he watched on every one of those floors: the capability of the people doing the work is among the largest assets a company owns, and the only one that appears nowhere on its balance sheet. Each episode is a single essay, read aloud. Many are about manufacturing — plant floors, supervisors, line operators, maintenance, automation, lean, the arithmetic of a launch. Others follow the same argument into healthcare, logistics, construction and hospitality, because the accounting problem is identical wherever people know more than their job description admits. No interviews. No panel. One argument at a time, built from people the author stood next to and can name. From the Capability Capital Institute, and the author of the forthcoming Built to Extract and Already Paid For. Written at thelonggameforall.substack.com. thelonggameforall.substack.com

  1. 4h ago

    Nobody Asked Jaime

    Jaime Ray can hit a target a mile away, and nobody at General Motors has ever asked him to teach what he knows. The Marines taught him to shoot. He was one of my team leaders at Lansing Delta Township, a fifteen-billion-dollar GM plant, and he still works there. The Marines formed him the way formation is meant to work. Someone stood beside him for years, and his rank and pay rose with each new thing he could do. He brought all of it to the floor. The end of general assembly is almost a mile from his station. When a defect turns up there, Jaime loads his repair cart and drives down. He fixes it, then walks it back through every car on the floor and in the buffers, all the way to the station on his own line where it began. A target a mile away, hit. The plant writes down none of it. The company pays him as a team leader. The union counts his seniority. Neither has a column for what he carries. I saw the cost at a launch. Every operator had to learn to build the new cars. Jaime was tied to the line, getting cars out the door. So the company brought in new people, I kid you not, to take our people to the training center. It should have been Jaime. The company spent his formation every shift and never once invested it. That is the most common waste in American industry. Companies pay for training all the time. Very few pay for formation: a seat, a rising wage and a teacher who has done the work. Fortune just praised fifteen companies for “economic empowerment.” Two of them are forming people, and both made it last by putting formation on the operating report. That’s the argument. Three buckets Seven of the fifteen are about access to markets and money: credit in Colombia, banking in Brazil, rural e-commerce in China, fair cocoa prices. Good work. But a loan does not build the person who takes it. Four are about training: Google’s skills programs, Coursera’s micro-credentials, free design software from Canva, AI courses for teachers from Anthropic. Training is real, and it helps. But it is countable, it ends, and it leaves nothing on the ledger of the person who received it. Whatever courses Jaime has taken at GM, none of them records that he can walk a defect back a mile. Two are forming people: Walmart and IKEA. What the two did differently Walmart’s Associate to Driver program pays employees while they earn a commercial license and spend 16 weeks in class, behind the wheel and hauling freight beside a mentor. More than 1,000 associates have moved into its private fleet, where drivers average about $109,000 a year. A sister program turns store and warehouse workers into maintenance technicians. Its pilot cohort placed every trainee, and potential hourly pay roughly doubled. IKEA’s story is the white-collar version, and it starts with a machine. Ingka, the largest IKEA retailer, launched a chatbot called Billie in 2021. Within two years it handled close to half of customer queries. The obvious move was to bank the savings and cut the call centers. Ingka retrained about 8,500 call-center workers to handle hard cases and sell interior design by video instead. In 2022 that channel brought in €1.3 billion. What they share matters more than the numbers. The seat came first: the job existed before the training began. The wage rose with the capability: a different rate, not a bonus. The teacher had done the work: Walmart drivers teach Walmart drivers. And it showed up on the operating report, not the HR report. Walmart needed drivers it could not hire. IKEA needed revenue from a channel it was building. Formation solved a problem the CFO could see. Without that last one, the other three would have been the first cut in a bad quarter. Why the Siphon loves training In my books I call the extraction machine the Siphon. It pulls value toward the quarter and away from the person. Training fits the Siphon. It has a cost per head and a completion rate, and it can be cut in a bad quarter without anyone on the operating report noticing. Formation does not fit. It takes years, its return arrives after the quarter that paid for it, and it has no line on the dashboard. So it is the first thing given up. Look at how Jaime appears in the books. A robot bought the year he was hired is an asset, carried on the balance sheet and depreciated year by year. Jaime is an hourly cost, and the cheapest version of him is the one who never stops building cars. Nothing on the page records that he can walk a defect back a mile, so nothing on the page shows a loss when nobody learns it from him. Walmart and IKEA put formation where the Siphon already looks. A driver shortage is an operating problem. A billion euros of new sales is a shareholder story. Once formation earned its place on those reports, it was safe. One more thing. Ingka is owned by a foundation, so no share price was asking for the chatbot savings that quarter. I don’t think that is a coincidence. When the automation dividend arrives, someone decides whether it goes to the margin or to the people. It helps when nobody upstairs is selling. Where even the good ones stop Even these two stop short. At Walmart the wage jumps once, at the license, then rises with tenure, not capability. Formation is a runway: three years of growing skill, matched by three years of growing pay. At both, almost nothing travels. Walmart’s commercial license is the only thing a worker can carry to the next employer. Everything else lives inside Walmart and IKEA. If the company is sold, the formation stays on someone else’s books. And the cost to the person still goes uncounted. Trucking pays well. It often collects in nights and weekends away from home, and no program on that page counts those. Take the mantle Here is my invitation to every company on that page, and every company that wants to be on next year’s. Stop calling it training. Training is something you buy. Formation is something you owe. If you take a person’s best years, say out loud that you are forming them, and let that word bind you. It binds you to a seat before the first lesson. To a wage that climbs as the skill climbs, for three years, not once. To teachers who have done the work and are paid to teach it. To a record of what the person can now do, written where they can carry it. And to an honest count of what the job takes from a person’s time, family and health, not only the wages it pays. Walmart did most of it because it was short of drivers. IKEA did it because a machine freed thousands of people and somebody saw a business in them. In thirty-six years on factory floors, nothing I have seen compounds like a formed person. That is the long game. Jaime Ray is still on Trim 2, still walking defects back a mile, and still on nobody’s books as a teacher. Somewhere in your plant there is a Jaime. Who is it, and what would it take to put them in front of the next launch? Venki Padmanabhan is a co-founder of the Capability Capital Institute and the author of the forthcoming Built to Extract and Already Paid For (Capability Capital Press). He writes at thelonggameforall.substack.com. Written with AI assistance. The argument, the judgments, and the floor testimony are the author’s own. Capability Capital Institute — the case for counting what working people know: capabilitycapital.org This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelonggameforall.substack.com

  2. 1d ago

    Somebody Taught the Robot. Nobody Taught the Kid.

    In September 2025, a roboticist named Benjie Holson put on a silver bodysuit and filmed himself doing silly things. He cracked an egg into a frying pan. He wiped a window with paper towels. He wrestled a dog-poop bag off a roll. He was throwing a gauntlet. Holson had just watched the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing and come away flat. As fun as rock-em-sock-em is, he wrote, what people actually care about is robots doing their chores. So he posted his own Olympics: doors, laundry, tool use, fingertips, wet work. Real medals, mailed to the winners. He figured the easy ones might fall by December and the hardest might take a year and a half. Within months, a robot from Physical Intelligence had taken eleven of the fifteen. Every story written about this has been about speed. I care about how the machines learned, and the answer sits in Holson’s own post, in a sentence nobody quoted. Explaining why robots still can’t handle force at the wrist, Holson names the real constraint: the robot can only ever perform as well as the human teleoperating it. That’s the ceiling. The method that beat his Olympics is learning-from-demonstration. A person straps into a rig, does the task with their own hands, and does it again, and again, hundreds of times, while the machine watches. No code says this is how you spread peanut butter. There is only a formed human being, repeating skilled work in front of an apprentice that never tires and never forgets. Silicon Valley did not invent a technique. It rediscovered a very old one, spent hundreds of millions on it, and called it a data pipeline. What they built is an apprenticeship. They just built the apprentice out of aluminum, and paid for the Meister’s time without once using the word. We pay for that apprenticeship without blinking when the apprentice is a machine. When the apprentice is a kid on a factory floor, we won’t. The machine’s training goes on the books as an asset. The kid’s goes on as a cost. That’s the argument. When we launched Lansing Grand River, I helped build the Operator Support Center. We brought in prototype cars and simulated the trim and chassis lines — bodies you could push by hand, a few stations at a time. Then we walked them through. Each team leader did the installs on those cars himself, writing the steps down as he went and taking pictures of what he had just done. Then he put the steps and the pictures together on a job element sheet. Wally Vinton had the wiring harness on the CTS. Wally and I laughed constantly about his penmanship. He would protest, and dig out the sheets of James, whose writing was worse. But we got there together, to sheets that worked, sheets you could train a new person with. Set that next to Physical Intelligence and it’s the same loop. A rig that moves the work past a human at human speed. A skilled person performing the task over and over. Capture. Then a model. We did it with a car you pushed by hand and a camera. Their demonstrator finishes his hundreds of repetitions exactly as skilled as he started. Everything he transferred went into the model. Wally finished his repetitions as the man who knew the harness — and the job element sheet he wrote was the smaller half of what he’d gained. The document held the sequence. It could not hold what his hands had learned about tension, or what a connector sounds like seated versus almost seated, or which run fights you on a hot day when the vinyl has gone soft. That stayed in Wally. Which is why, for years afterward, when that station went down, nobody went and got the job element sheet. They went and got Wally. Same loop, opposite direction. One deposits into a machine. The other deposits into a person. Holson is honest about what his robots still can’t do. He lists four limits: no force feedback at the wrist, fingers that amount to open and close, no sense of touch, and precision of one to three centimeters. Set that list next to the machine already standing on your floor. Call it the H-1. It knows where every one of its two hundred-plus joints is without being told. Each hand has twenty-seven degrees of freedom; the best robotic hand ever built reaches twenty-four. Each hand carries some seventeen thousand touch sensors, reading pressure, texture, temperature and slip. It threads a needle and swings a sledgehammer on the same hardware. Its eighty-six billion neurons run at roughly an exaFLOP. Frontier, the supercomputer, needs twenty-one megawatts for that. The H-1 does it on twenty watts, a dim light bulb. It has walked reliably for two hundred thousand years. A hundred and fifty million units are operational here. Every constraint the field is spending billions to engineer around is already solved and already on the payroll. And we don’t form it. Here is what forming it costs. Lukas is the standard: the fully-formed H-1, good for business and good for society. Germany produces him on a ladder eight hundred years old. Roughly seventy-five hundred hours — plant and Berufsschule together, under a certified Ausbilder who passed his own federal examination in how to teach — and Lukas is a Geselle at twenty-three. Then the deepening years. At twenty-five thousand hours he is a Meister at thirty: diagnoses a bearing by sound, feels a fault through a housing, forms the next one. Twenty-five thousand hours. Set that against the American number, which is about forty hours of onboarding and a wish. I watched that number land at Lansing Delta Township, when we hired for the third-shift launch. The new hires got the standard forty hours, taught by trainers rather than gray beards off the floor, much of it from material years out of date. Then they were dropped on the line at random. One young woman, very short, landed on the glass line. She could not work the suction handles to carry the glass from the robot’s end effector to the body. She came in late, too. The team around her shrugged. The group leaders talked among themselves about what a poor crew this was, and how to fire them fast, before they made seniority and the union stood behind them. They fired a whole lot of them, with pleasure. That was the kid nobody taught. We will not write that check for a person. We wrote it, without blinking, for a machine that can’t hear a connector seat. It happens at the desk too. The associate marking up a contract, the analyst building the model, the coder closing the ticket, the radiologist reading the scan — each is doing what Holson’s teleoperator does. Skilled judgment, performed hundreds of times in front of a system that watches and keeps all of it. Learning-from-demonstration needs no puppeteering rig when the work is already keystrokes. Physical Intelligence at least knew it was buying demonstrations and paid for them. In the office the demonstration is free and nobody has to admit it’s happening. The analyst believes she is doing her job. She is also, with no contract and no nickel, running an apprenticeship for her own replacement. Hours poured into a demonstrator become a capitalized asset: a trained model, on the balance sheet, depreciable, sellable, financeable. The same hours poured into Lukas hit the P&L as expense in the quarter they occur. The work and the transfer are the same. One is recorded as capital, the other as cost. So the fix is a ledger. A capability account the person owns, funded by the first employer across a guaranteed three-year runway, the deposits confirmed by a Meister standing right there who can tell whether the connector is seated. Three years, not five — short enough that a real employer can sign it, long enough to carry someone to Geselle. The rest of the twenty-five thousand hours is the work of a life. The first employer’s stretch is the one nobody funds, and it decides everything after. We know how to do this. Somebody taught the robot. We are doing it right now, at scale, with real money — for silicon. Here is where I am least sure, and where I would rather be argued with than agreed with. I do not know who sig… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelonggameforall.substack.com

  3. 3d ago

    The Robotaxi Needs Fred

    The technician I’ll call Fred heard the click. I had brought my Artisan Red 2024 Mazda CX-90 mild hybrid to his bay with a complaint I could barely describe. Every time the driver’s door closed, it made a small click. It wasn’t a rattle or a squeak, just a sound that was wrong. Plenty of service departments would have written “could not duplicate” and sent me home. And soon, a lot of cars will roll into bays like his with no driver at all to describe the click. Fred opened and closed that door until he heard what I heard. Then he kept going until he found the cause: a poor design in the inner door trim. Then he did the part nobody pays him for. He hounded Mazda until they approved a warranty replacement. When the part came, he didn’t like it. He sent it back, and me with it, until the replacement was right. He talks about the car as if she’s ours, his and mine. Until she was right, she was his baby. Fred is my advocate. Nobody wrote down how Fred got that way. I don’t know myself, and I have never asked who stood next to him when he was learning. There is no line on any ledger for the thousand cars that trained his ear, or for the stubbornness that made him chase a click to its source. His employer counts him as one technician, one bay, so many billable hours. What he actually is, a man who hears what’s wrong and won’t let it go, appears nowhere. The companies building cars without drivers are about to need a great many Freds. Nobody counts how a Fred gets made, so nobody is making them on purpose. The operators who select people for what they can become, form them under masters, and keep an account of what they learn will run the best depots, and the people inside them will earn more. That’s the argument. The body without the brain The car drives itself. Everything else still needs hands. In October 2026, Lyft’s fleet subsidiary Flexdrive opened an 80,000-square-foot depot in Nashville to charge, clean, inspect and repair Waymo’s driverless cars. Waymo keeps the software and the sensors; Flexdrive keeps the cars ready, as Moove does in Phoenix and Miami and Avis in Dallas. The depot brings more than 70 full-time jobs in its first year: technicians, repair coordinators, maintenance specialists, fleet operations staff. Current and former Lyft drivers get first crack at the interviews, and by April half the roles Flexdrive had filled had gone to people who used to drive. Strip away the novelty and you will recognize the building. Parts cages. Repair bays. A charging line that has to be sequenced like a paint shop. A depot is a plant whose product is a car ready to leave the gate. Now picture a Waymo getting sideswiped at a stop light. Nobody inside is hurt, but the car is done for the day. Waymo’s support staff confirm the crash and help the rider hail another car. Someone tows it. Someone in a body shop pulls the door and repairs the panel, and because the sensors live in the bodywork, someone has to recalibrate them before the car can earn again. Every hour that takes, an expensive asset sits. The economics of every mile get decided in that bay, by whoever is standing in it. Which means the driverless industry is about to learn what every plant manager learns: a building full of people is not the same as a building full of capability. I have seen this movie In 2007, Royal Enfield had a problem customers felt twice. The motorcycles were unreliable, and the service was worse. Put those together and you get an enraged customer base. We fixed the product first, with the Classic and the Thunderbird. Then we went after the promise. We got very sharp about who could carry the brand into towns we would never personally visit: solid businessmen with cash-flow businesses and people on the payroll. One was a local plumbing-supplies man with an ambitious, college-educated son. Every one of them promised, literally, to build a service center and staff it properly. Shaji Koshi, my head of sales and marketing, audited those dealers and service centers relentlessly. That is exactly what Waymo is doing now: choosing who carries its promise in cities it does not run itself. And it was not enough. Read the owner forums from the years that followed and the same complaint keeps returning. The complaint was the person holding the wrench, never the building. One owner who bought in 2007 wrote, more than a decade later, that service in Bangalore had barely moved: centers swamped with bikes and short of skilled hands. A forum regular observed that the best Bullet mechanics had always been independents who ran their own shops and did nothing else. They were Freds. We had not made enough of them. Lately the threads read better, with honest estimates and test rides before the bill. That is process discipline, and audits enforce process well. What an audit cannot see is whether the technician is getting better at hearing an engine. Looking back, our formation was nowhere near the capability development and certification the work needed. We checked the bays, the headcount and the checklist. We kept no account of the people. I saw the same pattern again in electric two-wheelers, at Ather and later advising River. The networks grew fast. Owners liked the scooters and grumbled about service. I remember one customer at a Royal Enfield service center, standing at the window into the bay, watching his bike come apart. He paced. I asked the technician to come out and talk to him. The technician explained why it wasn’t safe to bring him into the bay, told him what he was doing, and came back out twice more with updates. Then he suggested the man go get some lunch. His bike would be washed and waiting when he got back. No audit I ever ran had a line for that. Where nobody does that, the cost stops being a grumble. In Kalaburagi in September 2024, a 26-year-old mechanic who couldn’t get his new Ola scooter fixed, after visit upon visit, walked into the showroom with petrol and set six two-wheelers on fire. He knew what good service looked like, and he could not get it. A showroom can open in a quarter. A Fred takes years. The count that misses Jim Farley is saying a version of this out loud, at national scale. Ford’s CEO says roughly 6,000 bays in his dealerships sit empty for lack of technicians, and he puts the national shortfall near 400,000. His leadership team, he says, meets every month to measure the shortage country by country. It is the same instrument we used at Royal Enfield, pointed at a bigger problem. Ford counts empty bays. Shaji counted the staffing. The driverless depots will count uptime. Each measures presence or absence. None records whether the person in the bay is becoming Fred. The same blindness runs up the org chart. The fleet operations manager who learns which cars to pull before they fail forms that judgment on the job too, and it is no better recorded than Fred’s. When she leaves for the depot across town, the books show a resignation, not a loss. The robotaxi companies are about to inherit both Farley’s shortage and our blind spot, with a business model that tempts them to solve it by designing the person out. Tesla’s Austin robotaxi hub has a permit for a cleaning robot. Where a human is still needed, the work gets cut into scripted tasks a scheduler can hand to anyone. The knowledge moves into the software, and the person becomes the replaceable part. What Bloom would do in a depot There is another way to staff that building, and I think it pays. Here is what I would try. Select for formation potential. Royal Enfield chose dealers for their capacity to carry a promise. Choose technicians the same way. Look past the resume for the signs that a person will grow: the driver who noticed which streets punish a suspension, who asks why, who stays. Form them for three years under certified gray beards. Fred did not become Fred alone. Pair every new technician with a certified master for three years: the master’s last three, the apprentice’s first three. Certify the masters, not just the appr… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelonggameforall.substack.com

  4. 6d ago

    All I Have Is a Claude Max Subscription

    For four years at Lansing Grand River we were taught the Toyota Production System, and we lived it. It worked. The plant took J.D. Power’s gold, and Cadillac came back. I thought we would be its prophets. I thought General Motors would send us out across the company to teach what we had learned. Others went out. I was told to stick to my knitting in my own trim shop. My boss said, you’re good at this, we need you here. I was told I was still too soft on the floor. And then I left. What I knew left with me. Nobody at General Motors wrote it down, and for a long time neither did I. I am writing it down now, with a machine, and I can hear what someone will say. All Venki has is a Claude Max subscription. He would be right about the subscription. Here is the rest. On a Sunday morning in October 2026, a chart came down my LinkedIn feed. A brokerage had ranked countries by what they pay factory workers: Germany at $33,000, India at $2,500. I thought: slop. It turned rupees into dollars at the bank’s rate, as if a painter in Chennai bought his rice in Ohio. So I asked the tool to redo the chart at the prices workers pay. It found the surveys and the filings, built a table of six wages in three currencies, and wrote a draft. The draft had nobody in it. I asked why anyone would read the thing. It said the draft would be dismissed, and fairly. So I told it about Selvam. The tool found every number in that essay. It could not find Selvam. What I publish is testimony, not reporting, and I should be held to that. The machine can lower the cost of the sentences. It cannot supply the witness, and it cannot make it safe for the witness to speak. That’s the argument. What the tool did It did the work of a research desk, and it did it in a day. The lens was mine. I have run plants in both countries, and I knew a wage is not what the exchange rate says. My work on Bloom said something more. A firm sells in one currency and its people live in another, and the job is to thread the needle between the two. The tool put the two currencies into one clean sentence before I did, and I recognised it as the thing I had been circling. I asked for every figure in rupees, euros and dollars so that a reader anywhere could find himself in the table. The arithmetic was the tool’s. I could not have done it in a month. It also told me no. I wanted the essay to say that paying for recognised skill funds a firm’s growth. The numbers showed something smaller: the firms that paid did not fall behind. The essay says the smaller thing. I told it no as well. It suggested I blur the details of Selvam’s life. I kept them as they were. It offered an ending. I wrote my own. It checked its figures against the original documents only at the end, after I asked why it hadn’t. The ones it checked held. That it needed asking is the part I would remember. And it wrote most of the sentences. It wrote most of these. In September 2026 Jason Gay wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Brandon McNulty winning the world road race, the first American man to do it in thirty-three years. It read like poetry to me. Nobody has ever confused my sentences with his, and the machine has not changed that. What it could not do It could not find what we paid Selvam. It searched, and came back with a range from the phone factories on the other side of Chennai. It had no bench. Selvam hand-sprayed our fuel tanks at Tiruvottiyur in 2010. I went out and found him on the bench by the door, getting his breath. His hands and feet were coated in paint. He told me what he knew. The tanks came to him coated in oil to keep them from rusting, and the cleaning stage on the line worked some days and not others. Then he told me about the booth. It was clogged with excess paint. The air moved so poorly that on some shifts he walked out every ten minutes to breathe. Then he looked back at me and asked, “And you’re worried about paint blisters?” Every painting robot follows a path that some painter’s wrist knew first. Robots later painted those tanks, and they never knew why the paint had peeled. Selvam knew. He told me in two minutes. He was a temporary worker. A temporary worker has every reason not to volunteer what is wrong with the plant. He told me because I had walked out to the bench. That knowledge was in one man, and nobody had written him down. A tool built from everything ever published has nothing on Selvam, because nobody ever published him. Nor could it have known that lunch in the cafeteria was the bright moment of his day, and of mine. You can watch what the witness was worth. The tool scored its first draft against my own rubric, a hundred points with ninety to publish, and gave it about eighty. Rebuilt around Selvam, the draft got ninety-three from the tool that wrote it, and a cold reading later put it at ninety. The reporter with the same tool Nick Lichtenberg is a business editor at Fortune who once wrote about my work. In the spring of 2026 the Wall Street Journal reported that he had produced more stories in six months than any of his colleagues managed in a year, with AI doing much of the drafting. The reaction was loud. One website’s headline called editors like him sloplords. So Nick and I have the same tool and the same accusation. We do not have the same job. By the Journal’s count he had filed more than six hundred stories. I spent a long day arguing with the tool over one. He told an interviewer that the tool had pushed him toward more original reporting, because it can only look backward. That is my finding from the other side of the desk. A reporter would have done things I did not do. He would have looked for Selvam. He would have called the plant, and the company in Coimbatore, and asked each for its side. He would have doubted my memory, which nobody did. He would have had an editor, whose job is to disbelieve him. I had a tool that scored its own draft. My essay has one witness, and the witness has something to sell. That is testimony. It is worth having. It is not reporting, and good arithmetic should not dress it up as reporting. The rules already draw that line. The Wall Street Journal’s newsroom lets its reporters create no text with the tool, while its opinion pages let an outside contributor use it if the position is truly his. The Morning Context, where I also publish, takes nothing written with it, so what I send there I write by hand. I live under two rules myself. A newspaper vouches for every sentence its reporters file. A contributor is asked for what he knows and where he stands. Bloom has a rule for machines on a factory floor: augment the person, don’t replace him. The tool did that for me. It took the part of the work that was never the point and left me the bench. Whether it does the same for a newsroom is not settled. The gain from a tool is either banked as fewer people or spent on more of what only people can do. Why the witness stays quiet People who know a floor rarely write about it. They have no time. Nobody pays them for it. And it carries risk, because an employer seldom thanks you for describing what you saw. The tool helps with the first of those. It does nothing about the other two. What happened to me at Lansing Grand River was Selvam’s situation in a better office. I was not temporary, and the message was still the same. Know your work, and stay in your shop. The boss who told me so had come in on a high-potential rotation, a short assignment. The ones over her did not seem to care. It happened in other jobs too. Each time I got closer to why margins, or growth, or relations with the union were stuck, I found that knowing it and being free to say it were different things. The slop charge says the machine made writing cheap. The typing was never the expensive part of testimony. Thirty-six years on the floor was, and so is saying what you saw. You can see the risk in my own pages. The pipefitter who kept our glass cells fed appears under a changed name. So does the painter. The people who know the most can l… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelonggameforall.substack.com

  5. Oct 27

    Subtract the Waste, Subtract the Worker

    Years ago I ran improvement work for a large automaker. I taught lean — the Toyota tools, waste and flow, the whole grammar of doing more with less. I believed in it. I still do. One afternoon I got pulled into a room. The company was looking hard at productivity — hours per vehicle, the number every plant lives and dies by. Someone asked me a plain question. These lean methods you’re teaching — can we use them to get the reductions we need? I felt the color go out of my face. I stuttered. And then I told the truth, because there wasn’t another answer in the room. I said: if there is waste in the system — if the jobs are designed and run with motion that adds nothing — then yes. Take the waste out, and you can do the same work with fewer people. It was the most honest sentence I’d said all year, and the most expensive. I spent the months after that going plant to plant, floor to floor, sitting with the people who did the work, learning from them where the waste actually was. We found it. We took it out. The one mercy was that the people we reduced didn’t hit the street — they went to a jobs bank. Some of those banks emptied out anyway in the years that followed. I knew that then. I know it better now. I have spent a long time trying to name what I was asked to do in that room. What follows is the best I have. It is not finished, and I’ll tell you exactly where it runs out. But I can give you the shape in one line: I’ve come to believe there are only two operations that ever reach the worker — and they run in opposite directions. Everything else is surface. That’s the argument. Here is how I get there. There are, in the end, only a handful of things you can do to a business. Each is an operation, like arithmetic. You can add. Pour leads into the top of the funnel. A whole industry sells this now, and its meter measures volume in. You can subtract. Strip cost and waste. This is the trade I came up in — lean, constraints, Six Sigma, the operational-excellence field. The slogan is more with less, and the less is the tell. You can divide. Split what already exists. This is the bargain — and here I have to say something both sides dislike: collective bargaining and management are not opponents at the level of operation. They are co-authors of the same one. The wage fight is a division. The strike is a division. The contract is a signed division. Both parties walk in having already agreed the pie is fixed, then fight over the slices. I have stood in the brutal American version and in the civilized German one. The German version is better. It is still division — even the best split only governs who gets which piece. Three operations. Three industries built to sell them. And here is the thing it took me thirty years and that room to see. None of them touch the worker. Add fills a funnel. Subtract trims a cost line. Divide carves a pie. The person doing the work ends exactly where they started — same skill, same standing, one quarter older. The operations everyone sells you act on quantities. Not on people. But there are two more operations. And they are the only two that reach the person — and they run in opposite directions. The first is the one I performed in that room. I called it subtraction. That’s not quite right. Subtracting waste is honest work — motion that adds nothing should go. What I did went one notch further. The waste came out, and so did people whose capability the company had already paid years to build and would never get back. That is not subtracting waste. That is subtracting value — same motion, aimed one notch over, off the waste and onto the worker. It has a truer name. Extraction. And it is not a villain’s act — that’s the part I most want an owner to hear. The machine is built to extract: the default architecture every one of us inherited, which treats a trained worker as a cost to recover rather than a capability to grow. You don’t have to be cruel to run it. You only have to answer a productivity question honestly on an ordinary afternoon, the way I did. Years later I watched the same operation from the other side of the table. At Lansing Delta Township, one of the trim shop team leaders — I’ll call him John; that isn’t his name — looked like a rebel, dreadlocks and all. He was a spectacular team leader. He knew every job on his line, took care of his people, and the quality off his team was superb. He found a simple, creative way to improve one part and how it went onto the car, did the due diligence himself, and turned it in as a suggestion. For the two years I was on that floor, at least once a month, we sat down with the higher-ups about the answers he was getting. He honestly believed the company had already made his change and given him no credit for it. I escalated it several times and never got it resolved. It stood between us like a bone: me as management, unable to give him the credit he wanted. I used to think the opposite of extraction was a fair split — that if the worker got a bigger slice, the wound would close. I was wrong. A fairer division is a better floor, not the opposite operation. You can divide the pie perfectly and still never touch whether the work forms or deforms the person doing it. The opposite of extraction is compounding. Form the worker, and their capability compounds — the setup man trains two more; the tacit knowledge gets written down before the man who held it retires; this year’s skill is the base next year multiplies. It is the only operation that grows the underlying stock instead of moving it around, and the only one with a clock. Add, subtract, and divide all settle this quarter. Compounding needs years to show its power — which is exactly why no one sells it, and exactly why it is the long game. So the five collapse into two. Everything sold to manufacturers — more leads, less cost, a fairer split — settles this quarter and leaves the worker where they stood. Only extraction and compounding act on the person across time. One depletes the human. One compounds them. Every business is running one of them, whether the owner chose it or not. And this is not a blue-collar story. The same operation runs in the office, faster there every month. The analyst whose judgment the firm spent a decade building, then hands to a model. The engineer whose feel for the work becomes a training set. Extraction does not care about your collar — only whether your capability can be banked and the rest of you let go. So why does it feel like progress? Not because anyone doubts the man — everyone on that floor knows the setup man’s thirty years of judgment are worth more than the press he stands at. Seeing the value was never the problem. Measuring it is. The press is a half-million-dollar asset, depreciating on a schedule the accountant can recite. The judgment beside it is just as real and nowhere on the balance sheet, because we never built the instrument to weigh it — a habit that runs back to Frederick Taylor, who taught us to measure what is easy and ignore the rest. So the machine became an asset and the capability an expense. On the income statement, subtracting the worker and subtracting the waste look identical. They are not. One removes motion that was never worth anything. The other removes the only asset you own that compounds — and records the loss as a saving. That is the whole trick — an accounting trick built on a measurement no one ever undertook, because it was hard and Taylor told us not to bother. Here is the work I think matters most, and I don’t yet know it can be done: give capability an account that could survive an audit. Not a slogan — a real measure. Build that, let it accrue, and the arithmetic changes. You stop reading a formed worker as a cost to recover and start reading them as the one line on the page that grows. Now here is where I run out, and I’d rather show you the edge than pretend there isn’t one. The people we sent to the jobs bank were spared the street. They were not spared the message — you are… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelonggameforall.substack.com

  6. Oct 25

    The Clearest View of Men Is From Below

    I learned the Mahabharata from my grandmother, in the years I lived in her house in Chennai for school. She told it from the verandah ledge of Ganesh Sadan on Venkataraman Street, eyes closed, her thumbs circling one another in a slow chase that never caught. She had favorites, and they were never the winners. She always came back to Karna. The greatest archer of the age, son of a god, set adrift as an infant and raised by a charioteer — and therefore, his whole life, refused. Refused at the tournament, when Kripa asked for his lineage in front of everyone. Refused by Drona, who would not teach a suta. He learned in the end by lying about his birth, was cursed for the lie, and the curse came due on the last day: his chariot wheel sank in the mud, and he stepped down unarmed to lift it, and was killed while he lifted. And the part she told with the most feeling, every time, was that they all knew. Kunti knew — she had borne him and set him on the river. Krishna knew. Neither said a word until the eve of the war, when they came to him separately and offered what had been his by birth the whole time: his name, his brothers, an empire. They named him at the precise moment naming him became useful to them. He refused it, and went out to die under the name they had let him carry instead. Then Ekalavya came to Drona. A tribal boy who wanted to be taught, turned away for his birth by a man who had himself been turned away for his poverty. So the boy built a clay image of Drona in the forest and taught himself in front of it, and became better than Arjuna. When Drona found out, he demanded the traditional teacher’s fee for instruction he had never given: the boy’s right thumb. Ekalavya cut it off and handed it over. And she would tell me how the epic itself was made — Vyasa composing aloud, Ganesha writing it down on the condition that Vyasa never pause, and on the counter-condition that Ganesha understand every verse before he set it down. When the pen failed, Ganesha broke off his own tusk and kept writing. I have been living inside that one great epic my whole life. Watching Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey with my son Dakshin, I finally met Homer’s. David French wrote in the Times that Nolan has rebuked the spirit of the age — that his Odysseus carries a moral injury, and that the film insists moral transgressions always carry a consequence. That reading is right. But one line put me somewhere French didn’t go, and my grandmother had put me there fifty years earlier. Odysseus says it of the gods, who walk among men disguised as strangers because that is the only way to learn what a man is actually worth: the clearest view of men is from below. Not Odysseus, then. The men who rowed for him. Here is the argument. The suppression of frontline judgment and the extraction of frontline capability are not an efficiency problem, not a culture problem, not an HR problem. They are two things at once, and I have never been willing to say both in one breath. They are the violation of a moral code — and the code says what codes always say: the transgression carries a consequence, the consequence arrives late, and it lands on people who were never in the room. And they are an act of self-blinding, because the clearest view of any operation is from below, and we built an entire profession on the opposite assumption. The moral claim and the operating claim are the same claim. That is what I could not see for most of a career. That’s the argument. Ekalavya is the one that has never let go of me, because Ekalavya is not a war story. It is an operating decision. Look at what happens. A system declines to invest in forming a person. The person forms himself anyway, at his own cost, out of clay and repetition and no instruction whatsoever. He becomes the most capable practitioner in the country. And at the moment his capability becomes visible, the institution that refused to form him arrives to claim a fee — and takes it in the one form that guarantees he can never use what he built. Not the arrows. Not the bow. The thumb. That is not a fable about cruelty. It is a precise description of extraction: capability the system refused to develop, harvested at maturity, in a manner that protects the credentialed incumbent standing behind the teacher. Arjuna complains, and the thumb comes off. It happens every time a company declines to train and then poaches, declines to promote and then consults, declines to form and then buys the formed. And do not miss who takes it. Drona had himself been refused once, humiliated for his poverty by a childhood friend who told him equals only befriend equals, and then spent the rest of his life administering the hierarchy that broke him. That is not the profile of a villain. It is the profile of a manager. So let me say the plain thing once, because I have spent thirty-six years in this business and do not recall hearing anyone say it. What we do to the people on our frontlines is not inefficient. It is not suboptimal. It is not a missed opportunity for engagement. It is wrong. Suppressing a person’s judgment to protect your own authority is wrong. Taking capability you declined to pay to build is wrong. We have a hundred words for the cost of it and no word for the wrong of it, and that absence is not an oversight. It is the design. And the ledger is where the thumb goes. Look at what a public company must name. Named executive officers, to the dollar, equity broken out by grant date. Goodwill, by acquisition. Intangibles, by class, with amortization schedules. Each gets a name, a line, a footnote. Now look at the people. Under ASC 805, when one company buys another, the assembled workforce — the actual trained, formed, functioning capability of the people who do the work — is not recognized as an identifiable asset. It is subsumed into goodwill. It vanishes into a residual. The most valuable thing you just bought is the one thing the standard forbids you to name. What a ledger names, it protects. What it totals, it forgets. Homer does the same. He does not look at the crew. Odysseus’s men are eaten, drowned, turned to swine, killed by their own hunger on Thrinacia, and they are barely named. Twenty years they followed him, and they get no epic. The poem is titled after the man who came home. Vyasa looks. Eighteen akshauhinis march to Kurukshetra and the text gives the arithmetic down to the last man — and then, when it is over, it stops. Book Eleven is the Stri Parva, the Book of the Women. The widows walk onto the field. They find the bodies. They are made to speak, the king is made to listen, and the reader is not permitted to leave until they have finished. That is the difference between an epic that counts and an epic that names, and it is exactly the difference between two ways of keeping books. We built ours on Homer’s model. In 2000 I was a shift leader in the trim shop at Lansing Grand River, where a painted body arrives naked and gets its interior before it goes to chassis for an engine and wheels. In 2022 I took the same job again, at the larger and thriving Lansing Delta Township, after twenty years in Germany and India spent mostly as an MD or a CEO running two-hundred-million-dollar companies. I wanted to see what two decades of lean had actually done to the work in my own town. I wanted to stand on my favorite frontline again. Nobody on that line needed to know any of that, and it would not have helped them if they had. What I could see from the floor had been invisible from every seat I ever held above it — not more detail, which is what people mean when they say get closer to the work, but a different order of fact. From above you learn what the plant produced. From below you learn what it cost, who paid it, and what got burned to make the number. Bloom came out of those years. Both books came out of those years. The institute came out of those years. None of it came out of the years when I held the most authority. Jamie was my team leader on the Trim 2 … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelonggameforall.substack.com

  7. Oct 22

    And You're Worried About Paint Blisters?

    In 2010 the complaints came in a rash. Paint was peeling off the fuel tanks of motorcycles we had built at Royal Enfield’s plant in Tiruvottiyur, in the north of Chennai. It was my line. I pulled the team into a huddle beside it to find the cause. One man was missing. Selvam hand-sprayed our frames, tanks and nacelles. Somebody said he was outside. I went out and found him on the bench by the door, getting his breath. His hands and feet were coated in paint. He told me what he knew. The tanks came to him coated in oil to keep them from rusting, and the cleaning stage on the line worked some days and not others. Then he told me about the booth. It was clogged with excess paint. The air moved so poorly that on some shifts he walked out every ten minutes to breathe. Then he looked back at me and asked, “And you’re worried about paint blisters?” Here is what I knew about Selvam. He walked to work, thirty minutes from a house deep inside Tiruvottiyur. He lived with his brother’s family. He wanted to marry and rent a room of his own. He was trying to save, and he could not. He was a temporary worker. I thought of him in October 2026, when a chart came down my LinkedIn feed. A brokerage had ranked countries by what they pay factory workers. Germany was first at $33,000. India was thirteenth at $2,500. The chart asks what a worker costs. Selvam was asking what his wage could buy: a room, a wedding, air. A wage is two numbers. One is a cost, read at the exchange rate by the firm that pays it. The other is a life, bought at local prices by the man who earns it. I managed the first number. Selvam lived in the second. The firms that manage both, with secure years and a wage that rises on proven skill, buy their people a far better life and do not fall behind for it. That’s the argument. Two rates for one wage The exchange rate tells you what a rupee fetches at a bank. As I write, a dollar is ₹96.3, or €0.89. That is the firm’s rate, because a firm counts its wage bill in the money it sells in. Purchasing power tells you what a rupee fetches at a market stall. It takes about ₹19.9 in India, or €0.72 in Germany, to buy what a dollar buys in America. That is the worker’s rate. Selvam’s rice and the room he wanted were priced in Tiruvottiyur, not in Ohio. Take India’s average factory wage today, ₹2.28 lakh a year. At the bank it is $2,400, the number on the chart. At the stall it buys what $11,500 buys in Ohio, or what €8,200 buys in Bavaria. It is a thin life. It is also nearly five times the one the chart drew. So every wage below is shown three ways: rupees at Indian prices, euros at German prices, dollars at American prices. Find your own currency. That is the life. Six wages I looked for firms that already give secure years and a rising wage, one on each of three continents, and set each beside its local base. The Ohio and Lincoln rows are from 2021. The Bavarian annual figures are my estimates from the monthly tariff. Read down the rupee column. A permanent worker at ELGi, the compressor maker in Coimbatore, lives close to the life of the average Ohio factory worker, on four times his own country’s base. Lincoln’s production worker earns one and a half times Ohio’s. In Bavaria the skilled grade is 1.3 times the entry grade, and the step between them is public: three years as an apprentice, then an examination set by the chamber of commerce and not by the employer. Now read across. The base runs from $11,500 to $57,900, a fivefold gap. The recognised worker runs from $46,100 to $73,700, a gap of 1.6. Countries set the bottom of each pair. Firms set the top. It did not cost those firms their growth. In their latest full year Lincoln outgrew ESAB, its rival in welding, and ELGi outgrew Kirloskar Pneumatic, at margins level with their rivals’ or behind them. One year and two pairs prove little. They do answer the man who says the premium can’t be afforded. Why Selvam was temporary None of those rows was open to Selvam. I don’t remember what we paid him. I remember what we fed him. There was free coffee on the floor, and breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria. I looked forward to it every day, along with Selvam and everyone else. It was the bright moment of the day. We fed them. The record tells me roughly what he took home. In 2009-10 the average Indian factory worker earned ₹75,277 a year, about ₹6,300 a month. A study of the phone factories west of Chennai at that time put contract workers and trainees at ₹4,100 to ₹5,500 a month, beside permanent workers on ₹6,000 to ₹11,700. I would guess a temporary painter in the north of the city was near the bottom of that range. At that year’s prices, ₹5,000 a month bought about what $4,100 a year bought in America. We fed him, and he still could not save for a room. Selvam stood on the short side of that gap, and there was a reason. Under Indian law a permanent job was very hard for an employer to end. So plants like mine kept the permanent roll small and filled the line with temporary men. It was rational, and it was common. But the statute did not clog the booth. That was my plant. He was right, and I was worried about paint blisters. In time the hand-spray booth gave way to an automated paint shop built by Dürr. The company went from about fifty thousand motorcycles a year to more than a million. Since 2010 the average Indian factory wage has tripled in rupees. Measured as a life it has hardly moved: one study found the real wages of directly employed factory workers grew 0.4 percent a year over two decades. I can’t tell you whether Selvam’s life got better. The averages say not to assume it. The table we already keep Firms know how to read a wage as a life. I know, because mine was read that way. From 2006 to 2009 I was an American expatriate, first in Stuttgart and then in Chennai. My employer paid for an international school for our three children in both cities, a company car in both, and part of the housing in both. There were R&R trips every year. Nobody read my pay at the exchange rate. For India there was a hardship allowance: I was paid extra to live in the city where Selvam lived with his brother’s family. We own the lens. We point it at the top of the org chart. The ledger says the lens is cheap to turn. Across India’s registered factories, wages to workers are about 2.3 percent of output. On the firm’s books the wage is small change. In the worker’s kitchen it is everything. The books make it worse in one more way. What a plant spends forming a painter is expensed in the year it is spent, so a temporary man is all cost and no asset. Nobody defends a cost. A middle rung Selvam had two possible lives at that plant: temporary for as long as it lasted, or permanent for life. We offered him the first. In Bloom we call the rung between them Water. It is three secure years, with a wage that steps up each time someone qualified confirms the skill, and a table on the wall that says what each step pays. The worker gets a runway long enough to rent the room. The firm gets an end date, and three years to earn back what it spends forming him. India’s new labour codes now allow a fixed term on the same pay and benefits as a permanent job. That is the opening. I have not found a firm that puts all of it together. ELGi shows the destination exists. Lincoln has guaranteed the job from a worker’s third anniversary since 1958. Bavaria shows the step can be public. Bloom has a first draft of the ladder, and it is a draft. I don’t know the right steps for a foundry in Coimbatore or a moulding shop in Ohio, and I would rather be corrected by the people who run them. If you run a plant, work out one number this week: what your newest temporary worker’s wage buys at the prices in your own town. Could he rent the room? The Long Game. Then work out the other number. What percentage of your P&L is wages? What movement in that number can you correlate with growth? Try Bloom! The painter’s name is changed. Nothing else is. Venki Padmanabhan is a co-founder of the Capabilit… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelonggameforall.substack.com

  8. Oct 21

    What the Buyback Bought

    On Tuesday, GM’s board approved $20 billion to buy back its own stock. Let me tell you about a man who helped make that money. Jim, an operator on my line at Buick City in Flint, kept a good book beside him and read between jobs. I once gave him my statement of purpose in life. He gave it back with careful notes. I still have them. His job card asked for parts installed on time. It never asked for what he gave me in those margins. Jim did not buy either story he was told. Management told one to investors. The union told another to the rank and file. He heard both for decades, and he kept asking the same question: who knows the real story on the floor? Over thirty years, on a line building fifty-five cars an hour, Jim grew his judgment, his knowledge and his ideas many times over. On the day the plant closed, the last car went by, and Jim stayed on his stool, looking down the line as if another one was coming. The buildings and the tooling had lines on the balance sheet, and somebody wrote them down. Jim had no line. There was nothing to write. Jim was one man in a long line. In the five years after 2002, GM cut its U.S. workforce by about 40 percent. Then came the 2009 bankruptcy. By 2019, GM had roughly 49,000 UAW workers left in the United States. Every one of those exits was booked as a saving. Not one was booked as value going overboard. That $20 billion is now a fight between GM’s CFO and the union president. Neither asked what made it. Jims made it, and no ledger counts them. Until a board can count what formed workers make, it will keep handing the cash back. That’s the argument. Tuesday, two men On Tuesday morning, General Motors reported record third-quarter revenue of $50 billion and net income of $3.3 billion. It raised its free cash flow forecast for the year to as much as $12.5 billion. It had finished January’s $6 billion buyback, and its board approved a new $20 billion authorization with no end date. Before most plants finished first shift, chief financial officer Paul Jacobson was on television explaining it. The buyback, he said, was driven by “stellar free cash flow generation.” The stock was undervalued, near the bottom of the S&P 500 on earnings multiple. GM has averaged about $7.5 billion a year in buybacks for four years and cut its diluted share count by 37% since 2023. Within hours, UAW President Shawn Fain answered. He called buybacks “legalized mass looting,” said GM had sold its soul to Wall Street, and promised the union would remember it in 2028. Two men, one morning, one subject: the cash. Jacobson says it belongs with the owners. Fain says it belongs with the workers. Neither asked what made it. Jim would have recognized both stories. He believed neither. The middle For thirty-six years my jobs sat in the middle: supervisor, shift leader, plant manager, chief operating officer. Every one of them stood between the finance office and the floor. The middle is not where the power is supposed to be. But it is the only place you can see the asset both men are fighting over. The CFO sees cash. The union president sees wages. The plant manager sees Jim. From the CFO’s chair, a formed workforce is a cost line. From the union hall, it is a membership and a contract. Only from the floor do you see what it is: thirty years of judgment, built on company time, paid for in wages, owned by no one, recorded nowhere. That is the power in the middle: sight, not authority. Jim had it from his stool. I came to it from the other side of the line. Neither of us bought the story told up to investors or down to the rank and file. The hurdle Jim can’t clear GM’s capital rule is plain: reinvest where the money earns a 20% return, keep the investment-grade rating, return the rest. It is a disciplined rule, and a blind one. A return needs a denominator. Every press and robot has one, because it sits on the balance sheet. Jim does not. When one company buys another, U.S. accounting folds the assembled workforce into goodwill. Inside the company it is not recorded at all. Training shows up as an expense. Formation shows up nowhere. So formation never clears the 20% hurdle. Not because it fails the test, but because it can never be entered. The cash goes back to shareholders by default. Jacobson even told analysts one reason cash came in higher this year: capital spending ran below plan. Nobody in this story is a villain. The system is extractive by design, not by malice. I know, because I ran it for years. What each man misses Jacobson’s case rests on a stock the market undervalues. Maybe it does. Or maybe the market sees what the books cannot show: an asset that walks out the door every time a Jim retires, with no write-down, no disclosure, and no line for an analyst to question. A buyback priced off a ledger that cannot see the workforce is a bet made with one eye shut. On Tuesday the market heard the $20 billion and sold anyway: the stock fell about 8% during the day, on doubts that this year’s cash would repeat in 2027. Fain’s case rests on fair share. He is right that the people who build the profits share less of them than their parents did. But a fair-share argument sends boards to the bargaining calendar. Every contract becomes a fight over a fixed pie, and the pie stays smaller than it could be, because half of what baked it was never measured. One says the cash belongs to the owners. The other says it belongs to the workers. From the middle, the question is what the cash was made of. Counting it We have fixed a blind spot like this before. Until 2019, a public company could lease billions of dollars of buildings and equipment and keep most of it off its balance sheet. ASC 842 brought those leases on as right-of-use assets. The profession decided that an asset a company depends on, but does not own, belongs on the books. A formed workforce fits that description better than a leased forklift. I am not asking for a GAAP rewrite. I am asking for management accounting. The Bloom is one way to build it: a capability account kept beside the capital-return schedule, a three-year runway, pay that rises with capability, and a statement with each worker’s name on it recording what they actually moved. That takes nothing from Jacobson’s shareholders and writes no clause into Fain’s contract. It gives the board the denominator. And the denominator pays. Invest in formation, wire it into the P&L, and the same people throw off more cash, year after year. Today that capability sits on the floor unused, languishing and wasting away, while the board buys back shares. A buyback returns cash. Formation makes it. Before 2028 Between now and the next contract, every automaker board will approve another buyback, and every one will hear about it from the union hall. Some of them will want a third voice: not the CFO, not the union, but someone who stood where the cash was made. I own no GM stock and sit at no bargaining table. I have two books coming that make this argument at length. Jim stayed on his stool, waiting for a car that was not coming, still asking who knows the real story on the floor. If GM’s board could see that line from where he sat, what would it still choose to buy back? — Venki Padmanabhan is a co-founder of the Capability Capital Institute and the author of the forthcoming Built to Extract and Already Paid For (Capability Capital Press). He writes at thelonggameforall.substack.com. Written with AI assistance. The argument, the judgments, and the floor testimony are the author’s own. Capability Capital Institute — the case for counting what working people know: capabilitycapital.org This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelonggameforall.substack.com

See All (126)

About

Every week a working person does something a machine cannot, and no ledger anywhere records it. This show is about what that costs — and about why the people closest to the work have the best solutions. Venki Padmanabhan spent thirty-six years on manufacturing floors. General Motors at Buick City, Lansing Grand River and Lansing Delta Township. Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart. Royal Enfield in Chennai. Ather Energy in Bengaluru. He now writes about the thing he watched on every one of those floors: the capability of the people doing the work is among the largest assets a company owns, and the only one that appears nowhere on its balance sheet. Each episode is a single essay, read aloud. Many are about manufacturing — plant floors, supervisors, line operators, maintenance, automation, lean, the arithmetic of a launch. Others follow the same argument into healthcare, logistics, construction and hospitality, because the accounting problem is identical wherever people know more than their job description admits. No interviews. No panel. One argument at a time, built from people the author stood next to and can name. From the Capability Capital Institute, and the author of the forthcoming Built to Extract and Already Paid For. Written at thelonggameforall.substack.com. thelonggameforall.substack.com

Information