"Make it in America"

On a recent road trip to the east coast, I took with me a new book that promised to speak to the issues that I wrote about last month - some of the same ones that NTMA Chairman Grady Cope spoke to this past spring: Marketing Manufacturing to America.

But more than speaking about the importance of manufacturing in America and doing the public relations piece, Chairman and CEO of The Dow Chemical Company, Andrew Liveris, presents a national strategy to revive American manufacturing.

In Make It in America, Liveris discusses among many other things:

• Why ideas follow where manufacturing goes (a very real potential for American "brain drain")


• Fighting offshoring (to which he devotes an entire chapter)


• Reforming our educational system


• The need for an emphasis on Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines on a national level


• Overhauling tax policy


• Preparing the "next-gen" workforce


• Getting trade agreements off dead center and implemented

All that in under 175 pages.

While none of us will agree with all of his analysis and prescriptive advice, all of us will agree with most, I believe. Pick up a copy - it's worth the time.

As an aside, we at TCI are participating in a program presented by the South Bay Science Foundation and the South Bay Workforce Investment Board promoting STEM education which includes the mentoring of students and inviting them to our shop to "shadow" our people and processes.

Other worthwhile reading and viewing related to American manufacturing was prolific in the past month. All of the links below are brief and worthwhile:

A segment ran recently on NPR highlighting the National Robotics League (an NTMA venture), called "Robot Wars Prepare Kids for Manufacturing Jobs".

Mike Rowe of Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs" fame testified in May before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Finally, NTMA 2008 Chairman Roy Sweatman and president of Southern Manufacturing Technologies, Inc. is interviewed by the Tampa Bay Business Journal and talks about how he found his way into the aerospace precision custom manufacturing business.

Until next month...

-John Belzer