Why Leaders are Displacing Managers

Each month, Tony Uphoff, visionary CEO of Thomasnet.com, joins Cloud Wars Live for a recurring segment. “Uphoff on Industry” will explore the innovations, upheavals, and breakthroughs reshaping the world of manufacturing and industrial markets. Join Tony and me as we discuss disruptive new trends in the digital-industrial world. These include how we design, source and manufacture products. And also the new ways in which industrial companies are getting up to speed on marketing, sales and customer experience.

Episode 9

In this episode: Tony and I begin by discussing our recent experience at Carnegie Mellon University. Our Digital All-Star Sean Ammirati, who founded the Corporate Startup Lab, invited us to participate in a day-long event that touched on Disney+, the industrial IoT, data silos, and a host of other topics.

Tony was with a company called Rodon, and they were launching a new product called “SillDry.” It’s for a commercial building where if you’re putting in windows you can make sure they stay dry. They built a rubber unit that goes into the application, and it fits in cleanly and easily.

Later, he says he implemented the Harvard strategy of “Jobs to be Done” as a research methodology and formalized process. He says it was exhaustive, and Thomas did five-hundred 90-minute interviews. But, he says, the qualitative analysis is helping ThomasNet put the data into perspective, so they can see the patterns a little better.

Tony talks about how workers on the factory floor are looking at real-time data and are better able to make decisions. They’re looking at customer orders, customer needs, and how many orders are shipping and where they’re being shipped. Everyone knows what’s going on.

Finally, he says we don’t need managers – we need leaders.

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