CALLING ALL PEOPLE WHO WANT TO COLLABORATE WITH OTHERS, CREATE NEW PRODUCTS, FIGURE OUT THE BEST WAY TO MAKE THEM, CONTINUALLY LEARN, AND BE WELL-REWARDED FOR IT.
That’s what the fast-evolving world of manufacturing is looking like more and more each day and…
The Manufacturing Marketplace
Fueled by today’s continual demand for new, improved and more customized products and coupled with a long list of evolving technologies, American manufacturing is going through an incredibly positive and rapid metamorphosis. And yet remarkably few people are aware of the good news and the many opportunities.
Success in manufacturing is no longer…Who can make it cheaper? It’s…Who can make more new and customized stuff better and faster? New, better, faster is simply where growth and profitability are to be found. And as a result, literally every aspect of manufacturing – jobs, skills, knowledge, management practices, leadership, tools and technologies, how people work together, and the environment they work in, is evolving to align with this new and exciting world of continual improvement and innovation.
What’s becoming increasingly clear is that those manufacturers whose people are most engaged in these improvement and innovation practices are winning. No other factor, not reputation, current market share, revenues, assets, company size, talent, experience or hard work; Nothing is more predictive of future success than the enterprise-wide / everybody all-in ability to continually improve and innovate.
The Creative Enterprise
We might call that “the creative enterprise”. And perhaps the best way to describe it is that all employees have three “jobs”.
- To perform their work.
- To contribute to process improvement and product innovation.
- To continually learn and develop new skills and knowledge to contribute more in their other two jobs.
Any company that enables their people to do all three of those jobs well is going to rocket past competitors that have people only performing job one. No matter how hard they try or how effectively they do that job.
So, let’s recognize that in today’s marketplace ideas are the currency of sustainable success. And a company’s ability to generate ideas and effectively implement them is both the mark of leadership and far and away a company’s most valuable asset. And finally, if we want to attract and retain today’s best and brightest and get the greatest level of contribution from them, the creative enterprise is the way to go.