How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late: Andy Grove
July 11th, 2010
An amazing article by Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, that puts things in perspective. A country’s economy must be based on manufacturing and the jobs it creates. It’s not about the designing and developing. It’s about the manufacturing (and the jobs). End of story.
This one’s worth the read.
Please pass this one around.
Posted in Manufacturing Competitiveness, Robust Economy | 
Tags: Fix Manufacturing, Manufacturing Competitveness
3 Responses to “How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late: Andy Grove”
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Mike Shipulski
If all the other competing countries have sophisticated planning and financial support systems to create and maintain the viability of their manufacturing economies, why are we the dummies who are giving it all away? The US government has a role to play here that will be counter to what the globalized corporations want, but the responsibility to our citizens remains. Or are we truly a government by and for the global corporate entity?
Big thoughts from a munchkin.
Mike…Great article from Andy Grove you put up on Monday. I forwarded it around to key places here at my company. Wow. Great (and in some cases militant) reaction. I’m glad Grove put his story into a long format. He was able to get pretty detailed that way. But for some reason the excited conversations that it created here cooled and died out as quickly as they began. Curious.
So the answer to the “why?” question might go something like this: It’s likely the same reason that we, here in this country, have allowed our industry to be handed to off-shore manufacturers. We have become…for multiple reasons…profit-centric. Not the “work-to-be-the-greatest-centric” we got fired up about from Grove’s article. One of the reasons from out of the “multiple” group I just mentioned is surely that we are just plain lazy. We come up with this great idea and maybe work to develop the function to fit a large market, then we hand it off to low-cost regional labor to manufacture it so we can maximize our profit margin and get rich. Just like Andy says. We won’t go the extra mile to make a few adjustments to our idea that keep the employment part of the equation here with us.
Since the wedge of the pie that represents labor cost in the scheme of things is so small in comparison to materials and overhead, it should not take us much work to make our greatest idea in the world more efficient to manufacture here in our own country. No matter how much we try and analyze this economic-industrial quagmire we created, sooner or later the solution has to be to just roll up the sleeves and work hard to keep the work on our own soil. History has proved to us, time and again, that the road to a strong economy is through sustainable manufacturing. Take our ingenuity to the next level (like we used to). Like running the 440 yard event. You can’t possibly win the race if after the last turn in the track the finish line comes into view so you stop running.