Winning B2B manufacturers are leading execution

In the hard-edged world of mid-sized B2B manufacturing, corporate “culture” is a soft concept, one of those nebulous notions akin to “branding” or “marketing”. Most C-level managers here understand the disciplines of engineering, manufacturing and in-your-face feature-benefit selling. But they would rather delegate the “culture” stuff to HR.

HR meanwhile, often sees its role to be that of recruiting and managing the best and the brightest. The assumption being, if you employ the smartest people and give them adequate incentives to engineer, manufacture and sell, your company will be the best.

What’s missing from this approach is leadership, the kind that unifies people around company vision and mission (brand identity), the kind that welcomes intellectual honesty and true dialogue about solving deeper customer problems (marketing), leadership that moves the business strategically forward.

One of the first things a business leader will tell you is that it’s not the super-smart people who make a business succeed. It’s the focused and diligent believers who know how to execute.

American manufacturing needs leaders who expect more from their people, and people who expect more from their management.

jb