Cultivating a Scarcity Mindset

[S]ustainable economic expansion was thanks to atypical restraint on compensation increases [which] appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity.

Earlier this month, days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador met in Mexico City to discuss bilateral strategies to combat fentanyl trafficking and production, about a dozen banners ordering the fentanyl ban were hung from overpasses, billboards and construction sites in Culiacán.

“In Sinaloa, the sale, manufacture, transport or any kind of business involving the substance known as fentanyl, including the sale of chemical products for its elaboration, is permanently banned,” the banners read. “You have been warned. Sincerely yours, the Chapitos.”

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One operator of a fentanyl lab who stopped working three months ago after the bodies were found said that he buried his remaining chemical supplies, fearing a crackdown by the Chapitos. He said he knows of five people, two brothers and three cousins, who were killed because they defied the ban.

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About a dozen people in Sinaloa have been kidnapped and gone missing over the past 10 days, most of whom were likely involved in the fentanyl underworld

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A midlevel Sinaloa cartel operative confirmed that the group is killing those who won't follow the new dictate “Some stopped producing. Others kept producing, and we are killing them. Others have fled,” he said. “He told me he couldn't sell any precursors because if he moved them, they would kill him,” said the lab operator. “Without precursors I can't do anything.” It is now too dangerous to transport the chemicals in drums in his pickup from Culiacán to his lab outside the city. “If I run into a road checkpoint, they will kill me,” he said.

Modern firms face a dilemma in being organized and run like communist dictatorships and drug cartels but lacking the violent means available to those institutions to motivate their workforce and enforce their rules. Unfortunately the days of calling the governor to send in the national guard to simply murder troublesome strikers and the pre-internet days that made workers much less likely to be aware of their rights or able to seek counsel are behind us. Modern generations of workers exacerbate the difficulties of management further by having fewer economic hopes and prospects every generation, making them less likely to respond to intimidation or threats of unemployment.

The ideal report is one who is literally afraid for their lives or livelihood should they lose the job, but we are unable to threaten them directly. It has also, despite many efforts, also proven too difficult to screen for the kind of perfect employee that thinks they will probably perish under a bridge with their whole family without the beneficence of their job creator. Millennials and Gen-Z are culturally resistant to deference and have little to lose.

As in so many things, these challenges can be addressed with the right kind of company culture--one that we have termed a 'scarcity mindset.' Doing this effectively can replicate many of the efficiencies of the Sinaloa Cartel's dictates with legally defensible techniques.

Here are some ideas to get you started toward cultivating subconscious insecurity:

• When you are out for a medical appointment of any kind, be sure to mention how you don't know what you would do without a job that provides insurance when you return to help implicitly associate lack of job == lack of doctor == dying of treatable issues.
• Find and share links about the increasing cost of living, raising a child, medical care, how much one needs to retire and how many people are only a few paychecks from poverty to inculcate the subliminal idea that your staff are closer to the homeless than they are to you.
• "Jokingly" use dire threats and then laugh them off. There is a famous story about the Costco founder:

  I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, 'Jim, we can't sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends.' And he said, 'If you raise the fucking hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.'

  Try out things like

  • "If you miss your sales quota, I'll cut your head off."
  • "If you break the website, I'll abduct your family and throw their dead bodies down a well."
  • "If there are more than 5 customers waiting in line today I'll throw your dog in a vat of acid."