That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [53]
DuPont recently installed a company-wide production-management system that is based on inviting every employee to help improve a product or manufacturing process. “Every worker has to be engaged,” she explained, “so we now spend a lot of time thinking about how we as leaders create a better environment for that—so we can get the best out of our employees, our equipment and plants, and our company.”
Kevlar, a synthetic fabric used to make protective vests, is one of DuPont’s signature products. Only by using the assets of the whole company has DuPont been able to maintain its lead in that product area. According to Kullman, “The Kevlar we make today is vastly different from two decades ago in terms of tenacity and how lightweight it is. It took researchers working with engineers and with production employees to make the whole system better. We had to. The world doesn’t wait for you. We have competitors who are very aggressive. I was recently down in one of our plants in Texas and you had a cross section of maintenance workers, operators, and engineers all in one room—ten of them—working on a real problem: How did they reduce the turnaround time for the maintenance of one of their machines and get more production time out of every day? To see them all work together, each getting up at the drawing board and talking about it, trying to solve the problem together, is something to watch.”
DuPont does not operate with cheap labor. “Our plants are made up of big equipment,” explained Kullman. “One of the big factors we look at in locating a plant is the availability of an educated workforce. Our plant in Spruance that makes Kevlar has three criteria for hiring a line operator: You need to have more than a high school degree, either a community-college degree or a vocational-college degree; or you have to have had experience at another company; or you have to be a military veteran. You have to have two out of those three. And we partner with community colleges to make sure that we have the right opportunities to get that training. [Also], we interview them differently than we did decades ago. They have to be able to communicate with engineers. They have to be able to bring their thinking into the job.”
Carlson’s Law
If we step back and take all these stories together, some very important trends in today’s workplace become clear: the people on the bottom rung of the workplace are becoming more and more empowered, which means more innovation will come from the bottom up, rather than just from the top down. Therefore it is vital that we retain as much manufacturing in America as possible, so our workers can take part in this innovation.
“People think innovation is the idea you have in the shower,” said Ernie Moniz, the physicist who heads MIT’s Energy Initiative. “More often it comes from seeing the problem. It comes out of working with the materials.” To be sure, there is some pure innovation—coming up with a product or service no one had thought of before. But a lot more innovation comes from working on the line, seeing a problem, and devising a solution that itself becomes a new product. That is why if we don’t retain at least part of the manufacturing process in America, particularly the high-end manufacturing, we will lose touch with an important source of innovation: the experience of working directly with a product and figuring out how to improve it—or how to replace it with something even better.
“A lot of innovation now happens on the shop floor,” said Hewlett-Packard’s CEO, Léo Apotheker. Indeed, if you open a factory, and are doing things right, “it will be more productive a year later because the workers themselves