The Price of Grandeur

Newsletter: The Price of Grandeur

There’s a lot of talk going around right now about Steve Jobs outsourcing of Apple products to firms on mainland China, to employers who work their employees like slaves, to the extent of exhaustion and injury, to satisfy Jobs’ need for speed at low cost. In China when one employee falters there’s always another to take his of her place. And they specialize in getting things done in a hurry, so the product can be put on the market for hoopla and sale. (In the fourth quarter of 2011 Apple sold 37 million iPhones (128% over sales for 2010), 15.43 million iPads (110% better than the previous year), and 5.3 million iMacs (a 26% increase over 2010). Apple’s profit in the fourth quarter was $13 billion, their best ever, if I remember correctly.)

To gain some perspective on this question of the price of grandeur, let me make a couple of comparisons. Pushing human energy to the limit of endurance has been done many times throughout history and often the results have been spectacular and long lasting. The Taj Mahal for example, an extraordinary marvel of architectural beauty and engineering. No one would argue with the exquisite quality of it as a work of art. It was built in the middle of the 17th century in India, in honor of the deceased wife of the Mogul Emperor. So what did it take to build this magnificent memorial and an everlasting token of the emperor’s love for his wife? Twenty thousand laborers were forced to work day and night for twenty years. A ramp ten miles long had to be built just to move materials up to the 187-foot-high dome. The budget had no bottom line, nor was any value put on man-hours put into the project. God knows how many workers fell by the wayside in this herculean effort. As Steve Jobs guided his products from design through marketing, it was said that the Emperor Shah Jahan played a major part in overseeing the design and building of the Taj Mahal. Both can be seen as autocratic rulers who got results.

A Chinese admiral by the name of Zheng He supervised the building of a fleet of 317 ships constructed of the finest woods available; indeed, it took three hundred acres of forest to build one ship that was four masted and four times longer than Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria. Zheng’s flagship had nine masts, four decks, and was as long a football field; and altogether the ships could carry 28, 000 men and ample supplies, including live animals. One ship was just for drinking water. Columbus’s three ships carried 150 sailors and were puny in size by comparison. This awesome fleet set sail 87 years before Columbus embarked on his journey to the New World; moreover, it made seven separate voyages through the waters of the Indian Ocean, East Africa, the Middle East, and around south Asia, showing the inhabitants of the region the reach and power of the Ming dynasty. It is said Zheng died on the seventh voyage. Nothing in Europe at the time compares with this fleet and its range of travel. Size mattered, money did not, and once again little is know what kind of manpower was used to build the fleet, to maintain it, and to sail it. But in China there is never a lack of bodies and helping hands.

Steve Jobs is taking a lot of heat posthumously over the outsourcing and the apparent rough and sometimes inhumane treatment of the Chinese employees. Jobs was out to change the world and made no apology for his decisions as a capitalist, which helped him to realize his goal with his game-changing “fleet” of products. His decisions from the business point of view only made sense and brought about great results, namely, huge profits and enormous influence in the technological realm. However, from the viewpoint of a moral imperative we can be critical of his decisions and methods. His actions seem elitist and uncaring, lacking in compassion. The Pope and the Dali Lama would lecture him on that point. On the other hand no one can argue with the man’s genius or the fineness of Apple’s line of products, which are indeed changing the world. Do we have to take the dark with the light; is that an inevitable part of the deal? Does his brilliance balance with the cruel element in his business acumen? Or is there some kind of middle path that could be adopted? Do we marvel at the Taj Mahal less because we know the workers were forced to do the work? Does that taint its exquisite beauty? And do we stop admiring Zheng He’s fleet and all that it took to create it when we think of all the laborers that exhausted themselves in the construction of something way ahead of its time? How do we measure the price of grandeur?