The mechatronics of government helping manufacturing…

Organizational change consultants say the first requirement for change is a shared sense of urgency, but without leadership, urgency is an opportunity gone to waste. So it goes with our current congressional leadership.

Meanwhile, American manufacturing is being aided by a rare example of government at work.

Three months ago, $500 million in grants were awarded to American community colleges to develop local employer partnerships and expand job training. The grants are the second installment of a $2 billion, four-year initiative that was legislated fairly early during Obama’s first term in office. For more about the grant program, visit http://www.doleta.gov/taaccct.

Manufacturers are seeing the impact of this program by way of job training in many areas, including mechatronics, a term coined to mean the convergence of mechanics and electronics. Mechatronics is a key path for manufacturing innovation and one of our clients, Siemens Industry, is a leader in this area. Siemens is collaborating with community colleges to develop 2-year training curriculums that will address their desperate need for skilled manufacturing labor.

Talk about a shared sense of urgency, American manufacturing now experiences an estimated shortage of 600,000 skilled employees nationwide. Whether on the precipice of a skilled labor crisis or a fiscal cliff, government really can work when the mechatronics of leadership aren’t jammed.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com

When “marketing” becomes an action verb...

Industrial leaders know manufacturing when they see it. It’s a process in motion, something you can measure, understand and improve. Manufacturing is an action verb, it is what your company was founded to do.  

Then there’s marketing.

For so many small to mid-size manufacturers, marketing is not an action verb. Marketing doesn’t at all perform or look like your manufacturing operations. Its pieces are not engineered in three-dimensional space, you can’t get your hands on it to make it work right, to maybe replace the old manual hand wheel with a five-axes CNC package.

That’s not to say marketing is entirely elusive. “Marketing” is a title on at least one business card in the company. In fact, you may have several folks with product marketing in their titles. And you know exactly where to find them. Marketing is down the hall across from sales. You know where marketing is. You just don’t know where it’s going.

For many manufacturers, marketing is not at all like sales.

Sales is an action verb. Marketing is too often a noun. Your sales manager reminds you of this all the time and every once in a while, you check it out. You walk down the hall, open the door to the sales office and the sales people are out selling. But every time you go down the hall into the “marcom” office what do you see? You see a lot of big ideas swirling around, all seemingly going nowhere.

When marketing and branding become action verbs, they will perform in ways sales cannot − by building new sales opportunities and building new market share.

When marketing and branding becomes action verbs, knowledge management and content development will also become action verbs. So will web marketing, social media, event marketing, editor relations and even advertising.

When marketing and branding bring all of these disciplines together, you can see what an engineered marketing communication program looks like. You can put your hands on it, tweak the controls and improve on it.

When your marketing and branding become action verbs, your business will thrive.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com

Selling to an engineer? Use video…

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Those who have studied the engineering mind can tell you: If you want to sell to an engineer, then you need to understand the engineer’s communication cycle – or rather, buying cycle.

In 2004, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published a 179-page report called Communication Patterns of Engineers. Juxtapose the findings of this text and others since with the advancement of today’s visual media, and you are struck by a profound revelation:

Showing by way of video is not only better than traditional tell-and-sell. Video is the essential way to show, educate and sell to a new generation of specifying engineers.

The text published by IEEE documented the now often mentioned phenomena of “heads-up” and “heads- down” learning among engineers, and the steps that occur within an engineer’s well-defined problem solving process. When engineers are in a heads-up mode, they are essentially conversing with colleagues, consultants, clients and vendors. When engineers are in a heads-down mode, they are studying a range of information related to products, codes, newsletters and available research.

We are talking about a process that now begs for the kind of visual information only video and video animation can provide. Most every step of the problem-solving process can be enhanced by video-based information delivery.  This is not traditional product line-card selling, but is a truly consultative and educational approach, because when videos address engineers’ problems within their three dimensional frames of reference in ways they can see, your communications are no longer limited to the two dimensional confines of tell-and-sell.

The IEEE text referenced above conveys five categories of tasks ranging in complexity and information-seeking patterns. These are: Initial Sources, Early Sources, Sources for Details, and Final Sources. More specifically, the types of information needed by the process can range across many points of entry, including: Previous Designs, Design Rationales, Similar Product Information, Known Problems in Products, Component Specifications, Standards and Norms, Working Procedures, Production Line Characteristics, Information on New Materials and Components, Literature and Research Results, Relevant Persons, and Project Documentation.

For any of these buying cycle steps, you can see the power and potential of video to most effectively convey the information engineers are looking for.

If you’d like to “see” such information sharing, including new product teaser videos, viral videos, new product introduction videos, how-to instructional videos, customer testimonial videos and more, check out some of the video based communications our firm has produced for Siemens to support their growth in the machine tool and motion control marketplace:

Videos for Siemens

jb

Are the presidential campaigns teaching us how NOT to go to market?

America’s manufacturing leaders can take a lesson from the marketing and branding failures of our two presidential campaigns.

The marketing campaigns coming out of these organizations have not been about any deep insight into customer circumstances; so their sales pitches come across as line-card ideologies, as self-interested arguments in favor of poorly conceived products that are out of touch with customer pain and circumstance.

This is bad marketing compounded by bad branding. It’s bad branding, because both campaigns have set out to confuse their prospects into buying from them, by always attacking their opponent’s line card ideology rather than attacking their customers’ many problems. This communication behavior is characteristic of marketers who have no better solutions to offer customers, but who are desperate to strike back in an attempt survive.

Adding to the marketplace’s “uncertainty” are the political analysts who bring few analyses of value, beyond drawing into the open the opposing views of either political side.

Ahead of the presidential debates this week, you would think these political analysts would do a better job of it by insisting on intellectual honesty, an open discussion of the facts, and maybe some honest attempts at “solutions”. Instead, we hear such remarks as from DNC Chair John Dean today on one of the Sunday morning political talk shows, saying that the purpose of any campaign is not to educate about such things as the facts. 

It’s a view equally held by both parties it seems, and a view held by many VPs of Sales. After all, the purpose of selling is to get the sale, right? 

Yes, the purpose of selling is to get the sale. But if republicans and democrats could agree that the purpose of marketing is to create customers, then perhaps they would do a better job of marketing themselves. 

This week, during the presidential debates, we hope to see such leadership.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com

What really creates manufacturing job growth…?

The October edition of Inc. magazine reports some interesting facts regarding job creation in America, and it’s not what our politicians seem to think.

Politicians have always been fond of playing up to small businesses. Small business creates most of the jobs, they say. But the statistics have long shown that new jobs actually come from young companies, not small companies. And specifically, new jobs come from young companies that are best managed and marketed. Moreover, because politicians misunderstand this situation, federal and state governments try to fuel job growth by way of direct financial assistance. This was the case with Solyndra, the green company over-funded by the federal government, which went on to fail in the areas of marketing and management, and so went under.  

One of the few people documenting the statistical reality in all of this is a research fellow of the Edward Lowe Foundation’s Institute for Exceptional Growth Companies. Gary Kunkle consults with state governments on the proper way to support job creation, and he has documented that among weaker-managed and marketed young companies, three things occur when government tries to fuel them with money:

1) They lose the incentive to manage their utilization rates and end up with too much capacity.

2) They use cheap government capital to take chances on products and services without pre-requisite marketing and market justification.

3) They build up more debt than they can handle.

So what is Mr. Kunkle telling state governors regarding effective government action for job creation? For starters, he’s telling them to stop treating job training like it’s a social program. Here again, he points to the facts:

High growth companies can usually find entry-level people, Kunkle notes. But they are having a hard time finding supervisors for these entry-level people. So if government really wants to be constructive, politicians need to recognize that what young companies need is not the funding of entry-level training to fill more entry-level jobs, but the funding of training for current hourly workers to grow them into supervisors who can get the most out of their operations and workforces.

Similarly, government needs to understand how the marketplace works. It works when young businesses grow based on good marketing management.

On this point, Inc. reports on how government actually works in such communities as Littleton, Colorado. The government there exists not just to tax its manufacturing base, but to invest in the better management and better marketing of that base by providing manufacturing leaders information on marketing, competitive intelligence, and industry trends – and by funding training and seminars in advanced management techniques.

Better management. Better marketing. These are the disciplines that create jobs.

Perhaps both political parties can agree on this at some point. After all, republicans like the idea of supporting entrepreneurs and with less government, and democrats like the idea of social equity when it comes to training.

Now, if only our politicians had the managerial and marketing know-how to see this.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com

When bad advertising wins, who loses?

Voters in the swing states for the presidency have been accosted for some time now by political attack ads. So if you are of voting age in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia or Wisconsin, then you are witnessing the power of marketing and branding communications to do more harm than good.

It’s a lesson that applies to B2B marketing and especially brand identity development. When our firm sets out to build a manufacturing client’s brand identity, we would never think to do it by tearing down somebody else’s brand. Yes, we do use positioning strategies to help a customer segment distinguish the greater value that our client offers, versus the competition. But our method is all about value definition and value recognition, achieved through strategically honest communications.

But wait a minute, that’s what B2B marketing and branding does. And we are talking about political attack ads, which are centrally not about strategically honest communication. Attack ads are crafted to distance, discredit and divide election votes. So a good attack ad is not designed to appeal to your intellect, but to your fears and suspicions, your paranoia and perhaps even your prejudices. A good attack ad does not build an argument around “the issues” or set out to explain a candidate’s plan for change.

There’s always candidate fodder for attack ads, because no candidate’s history is as saintly, successful, so perfectly managed or perfectly lucky as to not have some scar capable of being reopened by exaggerated scrutiny. A good attack ad finds such scars and stabs its thumb into them.

A good attack ad then, is not just an attack on a candidate’s credentials or ideas, so much as it is an attack on the human condition, an attack on all of us who are not perfect, but who are otherwise of good character, intent and have the capacity to do great things.

Attack advertising is as old as America, because in some circumstances it works. But why is that? Perhaps the answer says more about the segment being marketed to, than the quality of the marketing and branding behind the ads.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com

When is the next tipping point?

Comes a time, a tipping point, whether in the course of our personal lives, our businesses, or even our government, when a convergence of facts and insights forces a clearheaded sense of urgency that can no longer be ignored.

These are healthy events, vital events, because unlike so many rituals aimed at preserving the efficiency of sameness, these are transformational events powered by a feeling of urgency that demands change.

And yet the very word − change – has become a clanking cliché. The mantra of political candidates for decades, “change” is an emotional word and hence its short-term effectiveness. “Change” is a word made impotent in the long-term, for lack of any disciplined process for follow-through.

During a tipping point, new insights, facts and opportunities compel true leaders to ask themselves how the business model must change, whether the existing framework and its interdependent workings still serve the greater potential of the enterprise. This is not a question of changing the business charter of an industrial manufacturer or changing the U.S. Constitution by which our politicians are empowered to govern. It is a question of leadership and the use of a change process predicated on intellectual honesty and agreement, a process for change that is almost never based on a consensus as to the solution.

The process for progressive change has been documented well enough in the business world. It is a process characterized not just by a gathering of insights and facts and a resulting sense of urgency, but by agreement among a company’s leaders as to how the company’s business model must change.

This seems to be the impasse experienced in our government, and often enough in the boardrooms and corner offices of American industry. It is a tipping point that cannot be overcome by such activities as IT, accountancy, HR or even sales. It is a tipping point that is centrally managed by the disciplines of marketing and branding.

Yes, marketing and branding.

Guided by truly effective marketing and branding, a business leader can evaluate when and how to change the present business model. Guided by marketing and branding, a business leader can build a core coalition, establish the company’s vision and mission, communicate and empower change, document and celebrate the resulting victories, and ultimately grow a winning culture that thrives.

All by managing the tipping points for change.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com

Is willful indecision unpatriotic?

We are beginning to realize that America’s economic malaise will not be solved by the November election. In a year, indecisive business managers across the land will have seen the enemy, and it will have been them. Perhaps then, the boards, stockholders and staffs of these organizations will stop looking to Washington for the certainty and leadership that must come from within their own organizations.

The real uncertainty now is whether business leaders, especially manufacturing leaders, will get tired of their indecision and decide to lead.

Bank loans to businesses grew 10 percent last year and the estimate of available cash is over one trillion. But much of the loan growth comes from lines of credit, not traditional loans; and instead of using these lines of credit to build competitive advantage, to expand or develop production – to hire people – many manufacturers continue to wait.

Here in Illinois, uncertainty has been an especially reasonable explanation for indecision, because our state has been business-unfriendly for many years. Boards of directors here may be more easily persuaded that indecision is the right decision. You can bet that for many manufacturers, the marketing plan for growth is centrally driven not by the rare marketing opportunities afforded by our times, but by the apparent prudence of total risk avoidance. For them, it is not about addressing major marketing opportunities, it’s still about operations tweaking.

What you can bank on in the year to come is that only a few, true manufacturing leaders will cash in on the rare marketing opportunities afforded by this market environment.

Business leadership researcher Jim Collins (author of Good to Great, and his most recent work Great by Choice), speaks with authority on this topic of mediocrity versus greatness. See last month’s edition of Inc. magazine for a remarkably in-depth interview by Bo Burlingham.

The interview reminds us that business leadership is damn difficult, that it combines creativity and discipline, and it is a worrisome endeavor for anyone who attempts it. Nevertheless, good companies become great not because they are luckier, but because their leaders determine the right things to worry about, and so, they make better choices.

The most successful companies will be guided by business leaders who continue to make bold decisions -- without deferral, without cloaking themselves in the popular paralysis of uncertainty.

“It’s easy to spend a lot of energy on things that really don’t make a difference,” Collins concludes in the Inc. article. “Yes, you need to pay attention to how your world is changing. But it can also lead to confusion. There is a great simplifying power being able to say, ‘We need to start first with whatever problem we have.’ ”

Behind the biggest marketing problems are the biggest marketing opportunities. Manufacturing leaders who focus on such opportunities will be the heroes of America’s economic recovery.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com

Is growth about to kill your manufacturing business?

Our firm recently sponsored a business lecture by Doug Tatum, author of No Man’s Land, a survival manual for growing midsize companies. Tatum was a compelling speaker at our event and his book brings insight and clarity to the challenge of business growth. You can bet many of the business owners and leaders in our audience understood the seemingly counter-intuitive problem Tatum spoke about:

Growth can kill your business.

As Tatum convincingly documents in his book, scaling up a business is dangerous work. Sooner or later, every adolescent business will enter a no man’s land where money for essential, next-level growth runs out and entrepreneurial zeal alone will no longer see your business through. Tatum’s message resonates with business owners who are looking for venture capital, or who are thinking about near term growth and personal exit strategies. But that is not the larger audience for this message. The larger audience, those others who were also leaning forward in their seats during our event, were the business CEOs and managers who simply wanted to take the right steps to lead their companies forward. And the advice Tatum had for these business leaders was this:

Money is not the most basic challenge facing you.

You have to manage and lead your business based on what Tatum has documented to be the three prerequisite determinants for successful growth: 1) market alignment, 2) management, and 3) a clear economic model.

Get these three steps right and the money will follow.

But you have to get the first step right – market alignment – if you want to grow. And in our experience, getting the first step right is very difficult for industrial manufacturers, because what owners and managers are typically best at is NOT marketing. They are great at engineering. They are great at machining and operations. They understand the measurable, how-to workings of their electromechanical endeavors. But when it comes to “market alignment” these come across as nebulous and useless terms, because in the owner or CEO’s experience, no VP of marketing, no “marcom” manager has ever convincingly defined for them the process of market alignment.

Market alignment will remain a vague and meaningless concept for industrial manufacturers especially, so long as the process for achieving market alignment remains undefined for them. If you are a manufacturing firm challenged to bring to market a highly engineered product, and you are worried about how to make the transition through “no man’s land” to help your company grow, then it’s time you took the first step.

Don’t let anything or anyone stop you from adding the skill set your business requires, in order to take that first step.

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com

Leadership, IT and the future of American manufacturing…

Our firm has long had the privilege of documenting American manufacturing innovation in the course of producing customer testimonials for Siemens and other technology clients. These articles and videos have in the main reported the application of emerging motion control technologies to next-generation machine designs. Along the way, we’ve interviewed dozens of titles ranging from CEOs to machinists, across many sizes of companies, and they share a common trait: These are growing, winning companies whose engineering teams are encouraged by top leadership to ask “What if…”

These are also companies with higher expectations -- of everyone.

When you interview these manufacturing professionals, they convey an understanding of collective purpose, because their leaders have worked to build brand identity; and that identity is guiding employee performance, helping the organization to cash in on market opportunities. For these American manufacturers, things ARE getting better. The glass IS half full -- and it’s rising! These are companies that are building winning teams at every level and within every discipline, whether your job is engineering, sales -- or dare we say, IT.

Yes, IT – a discipline potentially as innovative as design engineering, IT must get on board if American manufacturing is going to really hit its stride. But here again, such change is dependent on leadership. Ten years from now, the best-led companies will boast IT efforts that move beyond information security management and infrastructure maintenance. Among the best-led manufacturing firms of the future, IT will be vitally supportive of brand building, marketing, sales and customer relationship management.

In other words, IT leadership has a long way to go.

Information Week recently published their first-ever “IT Spending Priorities Survey”. You can get the full report free with registration at informationweek.com/reports/itspending

One of the findings was that the CIOs surveyed were mainly concerned about getting more money to improve security, increase server virtualization and to pay for network infrastructure upgrades. In contrast, endeavors related to the larger purpose of the organization -- that of creating and keeping customers, were below the CIOs’ radar. For example, only 2% of them mentioned the need to upgrade or launch an enterprise social networking platform in the coming year.

Among better-led American manufacturers, you can bet IT will be expected to do more in the coming year as their companies collectively will their way out of this recession.

You can bet IT will be challenged to vitally contribute to the endeavors of engineering, manufacturing, branding, marketing, selling, and customer relationship management. As this happens, the objectives of IT will move beyond improved information security, increased server virtualization, and the upgrading of everyone’s laptops to Microsoft Office version 2010, which includes SharePoint.

As though SharePoint can suffice for leadership, higher expectations, real innovation, and organizational change.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com

Communication is the big idea nobody can own…

Back in my ad agency days as a copywriter, we “creative” types tended to defy the shackles of any sort of creative process. Barely tolerant of management’s insistence on our reading creative briefs, we drew the line at this, feeling it was a constraint to the creative process to make it an actual, well, process. After all, our clients didn’t in the main hire us for marketing insights, or for such organizational needs as sales and marketing alignment. They hired agencies much as they do today, for big ideas, and as any marcom manager would tell you, imposing a process on the birthing of big ideas just wouldn’t be, well, creative.

After all, David Ogilvy had taught us long ago, that from the creative individual’s subconscious, once filled with the facts on any matter, fresh new ideas would reliably spring forth. So too, wrote Leo Burnett, who counseled us to listen to the “wee small voice” within each of us when it came cultivating the big ideas that would change the fortunes of clients – the same clients who were quite willing to pay a lot of money (and still do) for a lot of ideas and not a lot of “process”.

And yet, in recent years, studies have shown that creative actions in business are almost never left to the singular genius of a single individual. It is a collaborative process, incremental, building on the exchange of information and ideas, fueled by discussions of what-if scenarios.

You know, communication.

If only such a process were followed by more business leaders, or for that matter by our nation’s leaders. But then, in the case of our government, such process management would require a skill most of them seem to lack, which is the ability to communicate. Instead of following a process for honest discovery and collaborative problem solving, the people we have elected worship the singular genius of their singular parties; and so they vote on unilaterally conceived big ideas ahead of shared insights and communicated analyses, and at length their failure is the same failure of any organization that worships ideas ahead of insights.

There is no effective leadership, nor can there be effective followers, when there is no process for effective communication.

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com

"Creative Destruction" and the growth of industrial manufacturing...

If you are the CEO of an industrial manufacturing firm, then you may have found the Republican caucuses to be mildly entertaining, though of scant relevance to such immediate needs as business tax reform. You can listen for only so long to a debate seemingly centered on which candidate is the most conservative.

But now comes this controversy over "Creative Destruction" and it gets your attention.

Turns out the concept of creative destruction has been around a long time, with origins in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their 1848 work, The Communist Manifesto. But let's not get derailed by this fact. Much talk as to Mitt Romney's conservatism has centered on his approach to "creative destruction" while he was the leader of Bain Capital, the private equity endeavor he led early in his career. Regardless the popular debate about Romney's role, the root question here is this:

Is it the business of a business to employ successful people or to make money?

The answer must be both. It is not DESTRUCTIVE for a private equity firm to buy a company and to then let people within the company go, if that is the right CREATIVE approach to bringing greater value to the marketplace. To the extent Romney's Bain Capital did this while he was at the helm, there may be some debate, but this is not the important debate when it comes to an industrial manufacturing company's growth.

Organizational change is often necessary to improve value definition and value delivery, so as to build value recognition in the marketplace. In any organization, it is the people and not the product line card that make the company a success: Any failure of management to bring value to the marketplace is not the fault of the private equity group cleaning up after them.

The misfortune that befalls employees in these creative destruction scenarios is directly attributable to the people at the top. Ultimately, the success of any industrial manufacturer depends on value delivery: If your company is not generating value to your end customers, then it will not generate returns to your stakeholders.

And isn't this a more relevant definition of "destruction"?

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com