Welcome to the Industrial Executive!

I’m super glad you’re here.

Let’s get to it!

Commerce Department just kicked off a Section 232 investigation on September 24—robotics and industrial machinery imports are now under the microscope for "national security threats." Translation: potential new tariffs by Spring 2026 on CNC machines, metalworking equipment, laser cutters, water jets, industrial robots. You know, all the stuff manufacturers actually need to run plants.

NAM's CEO Jay Timmons isn't mincing words: these tariffs would "significantly increase costs" and "stall investment" in US facilities. He's right. The US can only produce 84% of the inputs manufacturers need domestically. That other 16%? We have to import it. Period.

So let me get this straight: We're hemorrhaging 78,000 manufacturing jobs over the past year. John Deere is laying off workers citing $300M in tariff costs. And now we're investigating whether to slap more tariffs on the very equipment manufacturers need to modernize, compete, and—oh yeah—keep people employed?

This is policy whiplash at its finest. We say we want to revitalize American manufacturing. We talk endlessly about Industry 4.0, digital transformation, staying competitive. Then we make it prohibitively expensive to buy the tools that make any of that possible.

Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: you can't will a domestic robotics industry into existence overnight with tariffs. You just price out the manufacturers who are barely hanging on. The small and mid-market shops that need automation to survive but can't afford to wait 3-5 years for domestic alternatives that may never materialize.

Meanwhile, China and Germany aren't sitting around debating this stuff. They're building, iterating, and eating our lunch.

Want to actually strengthen manufacturing? Invest in workforce development. Simplify grant programs. Make it easier—not harder—for manufacturers to access the tools they need. Empower the engineers and operators who already know where the problems are instead of waiting for some mythical future where we produce everything ourselves.

Policy should enable progress, not strangle it.

(Mind the gap.)

Ever spend 45 minutes complaining about your maintenance schedule being ignored by production supervisors?

You're not dealing with a respect problem.

You're dealing with a negotiation you didn't know you were in.

Most manufacturing leaders think negotiations only happen during vendor contracts or salary reviews. That's about 5% of the actual negotiations happening in your plant every single day.

The other 95%? Those are the invisible ones that are quietly killing your operational efficiency.

When your shift supervisor decides which work orders to prioritize. That's a negotiation.

When your maintenance team "agrees" to defer PM schedules. That's a negotiation.

When IT says they'll "get to" your SCADA upgrade request. That's a negotiation.

The difference between good leaders and great ones? Great leaders recognize these moments for what they are and show up prepared.

I've watched plants lose hundreds of thousands in unplanned downtime because leaders treated daily interactions as casual conversations instead of the negotiations they actually were.

Here's the real cost breakdown:

A deferred maintenance schedule isn't just an inconvenience. It's a negotiated acceptance of increased breakdown risk. When that equipment fails during a critical production run, you didn't have bad luck. You had a bad negotiation.

A "quick fix" from engineering instead of the proper solution isn't efficiency. It's a negotiated technical debt that compounds with interest.

The budget meeting where finance "suggests" cutting your automation project? That's not a directive. It's an opening position in a negotiation where you need to come with better data than they have.

After 20+ years in manufacturing and industrial IT, here's what I've learned: Every conversation where someone wants something from you, or you want something from them, is a negotiation. Period.

The plant manager from Tennessee? I walked him through how to reframe his maintenance schedule conversation. Instead of presenting "the plan," he started negotiating trade-offs with production supervisors. "You need the line Tuesday? Fine. But I need six uninterrupted hours Thursday, and we document this as a joint decision."

Three weeks later, his PM completion rate went from 67% to 94%.

The framework is simple. The execution requires discipline.

I've mapped out the most common scenarios where leaders don't realize they're negotiating until after they've already lost. Each one includes the real stakes, what success looks like, and the specific approach that works.

Because knowing you're in a negotiation is only half the battle. The other half is knowing what you're actually negotiating for.

The best part? Once you start seeing these patterns, you can't unsee them.

And that's exactly the point.

Bottom line: Your operations aren't failing because of bad equipment or lazy teams. They're failing because you're losing negotiations you didn't know you were in. Fix that, and the rest starts falling into place.

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And that’s all folks!

Till next week,

The Industrial Executive