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 cal