The Resurgence of American Manufacturing Jim Vinoski Episode #DCLXVII The Doctor of Digital™ G. Mick Smith, PhD

But before we talk about the book, the consulting work or the companies that you've studied, I want to go back to the beginning.

You spent years studying hundreds of manufacturing companies long before it became part of the national conversation.

What did you start noticing about the leaders and organizations that quietly performed everyone else?

Yeah, I did.

And my study goes back to having the opportunity to write about manufacturing for Forbes, which I did for seven years and then launched my own Substack after that.

But going through that, I mean, I just started out really wanting to tell what American companies make because so many people think we don't make anything anymore.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

And as I dug into that, you know, I myself had a multi-decade career front lines of manufacturing.

So I've seen lots of things up close and personal, but one person in manufacturing only ever touches the tiniest little sliver of everything going on.

So that opportunity with Forbes allowed me to see companies in all kinds of different areas of manufacturing all over the country and in fact, all over the world.

And what really rose to the top for me is the ones that have been around generations and continue to outperform no matter what vertical they're in, whether it's highly automated or highly manual, they're all very focused on keeping their people engaged, happy, retaining them.

developing them, really treating people as individuals versus just the workforce.

So before the books and the consulting, what pulled you into manufacturing as a focus in the first place?

Yeah, well, there's a couple of things.

One is as a teenager, I got very heavily into bicycling.

both riding and the mechanical aspects have always been mechanically inclined.

And that mechanical side is kind of what led me to my career direction.

I went and got a mechanical engineering degree and then was recruited for my first job into the chemical industry.

So, you know, could have done a bunch of different things with that degree, but landed in plant that made PVC down in the middle of Mississippi and immediately came to learn that, yeah, that degree gave me a lot of knowledge that plenty of people don't have.

But at the same time, when you're in a factory, the true experts are those people who've been running the machines and fixing the machines their whole lives and so gave me that personal appreciation for people as individuals and then i had the opportunity to branch out from there and go into several different areas of manufacturing most of my career being with general mills and food and beverage

so you've studied over 500 industrial companies when did you realize that there was a larger story unfolding

The first indication was early in my Forbes work, just seeing a real divide between private companies and public companies, because private companies have the advantage the the luxury really of taking a much longer view you know one unfortunate thing of publicly traded companies it's it's all about the next quarter and it's all about showing the right numbers that whatever the the investors and the money people are focused on at that given instant and so to me what i found was that that led to some bad decisions that you know number one just had us not as competitive overall as as an industry in America but really in the worst cases led to a lot of the offshoring and and loss of whole segments of our industry um and then that kind of led into okay what are those those companies that take the longer view focused on and that's where it really made the the difference in understanding that people aspect

There's a lot of talk about re-industrialization.

What are people getting wrong about that?

I don't think it's so much people getting wrong.