Welcome to the Industrial Executive!

I’m super glad you’re here.

Let’s get to it!

J&J's betting $2B on North Carolina manufacturing.

They’re using this investment to expand their Holly Springs operations ahead of potential import tariffs.

Also, they are signing a facility partnership with Fujifilm Biotechnologies to let them move fast without carrying all of the balance sheet risk.

Here’s to (hopefully) seeing more of these announcements in the near future.

This week’s executive is Patrick Gaughan!

Patrick is a Managing Partner at Axiom Systems, and has over 34 years of leadership experience at Fortune 100 companies. Let’s just say he knows a few things about being an industrial executive.

Patrick is a true wealth of knowledge and is one of the most articulate fellas I’ve ever had the pleasure of chatting with.

Enjoy this Q&A with Patrick:

1. What's one belief about leadership or operations that you held for years that you now realize was completely wrong?

In my youth I believed that the managers were in place because they were the smartest, most informed and hardest working people in the organization.

I respected these people because their positions commanded respect.

Over time, I grew, read voraciously and studied people every minute of the day, and I learned that many people landed in positions of leadership by circumstance, and that often, they lacked the skills necessary to truly thrive.

They may have been great at one level but floundered in the next.

Evolutionary success is about constant learning, engaging all levels of an organization, enabling success all around you, swallowing your pride and pushing others into the spotlight of success, all while honing new skills along the way. 

2. What's the most effective way you've found to get buy-in from plant floor operators when implementing new systems?

In what could be best described as the simplest method ever, involve the operators in the design, listen to their concerns, build what they need but most importantly EXPOSE them to all the best technology. They cannot re-imagine what they have not seen, so share openly and let their imagination run wild. They can handle it, I promise you. I find that the operators really enjoy the opportunity to explore and seem to be shocked when someone asks.

3. How do you communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders without losing them or oversimplifying the problem?

In this case, I have to default to the behavior of others’ I have worked with. I have worked with a number of excellent people and one key lesson that I learned from the best is to turn situations into graphics. If you can break things down into graphical representations, people can grasp it far more readily.

Admittedly, I am not great in this area, as I have trouble drawing stick figures, but I still do my best to embrace the ideals of rendering things graphically.

The process enables you to introduce one graphic element at a time, and bring the room along a a manageable rate.

4. You've been in manufacturing for a while. What's one piece of conventional wisdom that's completely wrong in today's environment?

The current trend that Globalism is wrong and dead is very misguided in my opinion.

What people fail to realize is that what you pay for things is as important as what you make in income.

There should always be geographic areas of strength that are able to produce at rates that cannot be matched anywhere else, and that is a good thing. While it sounds like the smart play to say that we will make everything here in the US. If we do so by alienating the rest of the world, then we will kill opportunities abroad, and that is just plain silly.

How did that work out for pre 1980s China? 

We should focus on the emerging trends and stay on the right side of technology and encourage local investment, while others do the same. For those that cannot do so, celebrate their success in excelling at the low technology capability that they can leverage. Its time to let go of the pearl clutching, in my opinion.

Competition is a great thing, Americans can talk about leveling the playing field, but stacking the deck, irrespective of consequence or equivalency is lazy and foolish.   

5. What's the best way to improve communication breakdowns between siloed groups of people, leadership to operations, etc?

I believe in the lost art of facilitation.

Having a person that can bring together different groups pf people with differing viewpoints (even though goals may be similar) to talk through what they share in common and explore why there are differences.

Ultimately, the goal is to gain consensus. That doesn’t mean that everyone agrees with the solution, but that they can SUPPORT the solution.

The key is to drive that stake in the ground that results in a single answer that can be supported and end the cycle of dissention, because everything has been disclosed and discussed.

6. What's your process for staying current with industry trends without getting distracted by every shiny new technology?

I am not sure anyone can be current, there is simply too much development happening globally to be “current: in the classic sense.

I read a lot about a lot of different things.

I try not to get too far down any one rabbit hole, and immediately throw out writings that defy physics, have a clear detrimental agenda in their communication purpose, or are simply not interesting to me.

Last, I refrain from the ANTI crowd to the extent I can. There is no shortage of people who are happy to share opinions about why everything else is bad that doesn’t align to their singularity thesis. I find this approach short-sighted and disinteresting.

I believe that success happens everywhere and seek not to demean whatever means people use to achieve success, even if it’s not how I would have done it. If its “My Way” or the “Highway”…..let’s start that travel now.

7. If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?

Not to sell 100 shares of Amazon after making 100% profit

Research why cryptocurrency has utility in advanced markets (e.g. buy a bunch of bitcoin and Ethereum when it was measured in pennies) 

Be fearless much earlier in my career

Identify the shakers and movers much earlier and force your way onto their transformational projects; they need help, and if you attack problems, you will get noticed.

Best lesson as a manager, openly tell the laggards that will not change, and wonder why they are treated “different”, “As soon as you behave and perform like (insert star name here), I will be happy to treat you the same way as I do them……….. Rarely do they rise to the challenge…….but I have been pleasantly surprised on a few occasions!!!!!!

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And that’s all folks!

Till next week,

The Industrial Executive