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