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Revitalizing Industry

manufacturingindustry

Here are some thoughts from the Reindustrialize conference:

Industry is incredible.

It transforms raw, simple things into more complex and useful things through the literal application of thought to the world. Industry requires the real world, it's anti-made-up. When so many things are soft and arbitrary, industry is all about hard constraints and real results. It's not moving a box from here to there, it's not about consumption and feelings, but creating capabilities. Working in industry is real work, the work and the result are right there in front of you.

In the past we took industry for granted, since there wasn't a real alternative. Like, are you not going to build a house and keep living in the bush? But now, in many ways we are too modest and soft-spoken. It is better to make things than to consume them, industrial employment is more important than the service sector. If your company leads your industry, every facade of your building should exclaim that. Make your employees proud to work there and involve them in the drama of competition.

But now there are alternatives to industrial work, alternatives that look like they can provide equivalent or better social standing. So we must answer why should we or I make something when they can and will do it for me and I can merely consume it? We must call attention to the benefits of industry beyond the mere goods themselves and beyond the explicitly monetary. Yes, Industry makes goods, but Industry also makes communities and people.

But how do you enter into industry? How can your unique talents and interests, your person, be brought to bear on the products you help make? After all, Ford took great pains to remove craftsmanship from his assembly lines, dividing work into shoulder-to-shoulder-sized tasks for increased productive density. This legacy continues, and it leads to real problems, not of the product, but problems in the people and processes making them. Throughout most of the 20th century, the product was all that mattered.

But now in the 21st, with tight labor and competitive international markets, these other problems are just as important to solve as those of the product. We can't reasonably expect a problematic production process to produce consistent products. Dead-end jobs and cycles of dependence are incompatible with Reindustrialization. The task of industry is not mere production, but creating integrated and sustainable production systems. If we are to Reindustrialize in any obvious way, more than widgets must flow out of the factories, but also good ideas and fulfilled people. The opportunity to work on a high-performing assembly line can, and should, have many of the same personal benefits to playing on a sports team, though requiring less natural talent and fewer years of training. Why don't we celebrate our wins?

The most visible problems are those of personnel, equipment, and product. But as Boeing had better of learned, failures in management, structure, and incentive are far more damaging and difficult to discover, diagnose, and correct. Reindustrialization is not just about making things in America, but making companies that can make things competitively, through processes that are sound and scalable and that don't take advantage of workers and are not premised on temporary market distortions.

Is your goal to make widgets, to enable applications using widgets, or to support flourishing communities by providing widgets that enable certain capabilities? Belief in and recitation of your company's reason for being is key. If this can't be defined or convincingly said, it's no wonder your teams flounder. And if your company really is superfluous, find something better to do!

It's not a level playing field. International competition is subsidized and offshoring is rewarded by our markets. At present, we simply have to accept this, and to use these realities to focus our efforts on understanding our products and finding product models that compete on different, durable bases. Our goal is not to preserve our margins and thwart commoditization at every turn, but to race to commoditization, to find what determines that commoditized price and then leverage our proximity to customers. Making the market move faster is key.

Lastly, Made-in-America does matter, but why would you limit that investment to a small flag icon when instead you can show the whole process and all of the people involved in it? People, consumers crave relationship. And while it's hard to have a relationship with a cardboard box, faces, scenery, and stories all matter in a customer's brand relationship. Internet influencers and retailers show how easy digital branding is; why can't we get excited about the things we make, people we employ, and communities we build?