The Manufacturing Executive

If you were to interview a variety of successful manufacturing leaders and analyze their respective approaches to effective leadership, I think you'd find a lot less directing than you would enabling. In this episode, Jason Riley, COO of the additive manufacturing company Fabrisonic, draws on his experience both as a military leader and a manufacturing leader to break down what he refers to as "5 Key Principles for Creating a Culture of Initiative". We'll talk about what it means to lead with intention, delegate, empower decision making, maximize collaboration and create meaningful process documentation.

Adam Keating, Co-Founder of CoLab, discusses tackling challenges in new product development. They explore the evolution of design reviews, the importance of customer needs for transformative solutions, and the impact of CoLab on customer success. The podcast also focuses on incremental change and cultural transformation in manufacturing.

When people talk about you years down the road, what will they say? "Oh yeah, he (or she) was a good manager or employee?" Or will there be something more? In this conversation, manufacturing leader and author, Mosongo Moukwa, talks about how to leave a meaningful and lasting mark on your organization. Or in his words, how become "a leader of significance."

From skills to work ethic to understanding chain of command, veterans bring so much potential to the manufacturing workforce. In this episode, Lt Col Kathy Lowrey Gallowitz will talk about how manufacturing leaders can go from unaware how to tap into the veteran community to being veteran-friendly to being veteran-READY.

Automation can be intimidating. What if the sizable CapEx investment we make doesn't generate the return we expected? What if our people struggle with operating the robots? And how will they deal with this kind of operational change in general? All fair questions and real concerns for manufacturing leaders today. In this episode, Saman Farid, CEO of automation provider Formic, will talk about how they're lowering the barrier to entry through outcome-based robotics solutions, and shifting the investment from CapEx to OpEx.

In this conversation, Gorilla 76 Content Director James Boeckmann and Gorilla 76 Senior Writer Rose Hansen go deep on content marketing for manufacturers. Collectively, these two journalists have interviewed hundreds of subject matter experts in the manufacturing sector – from owners to engineers to technical experts on the shop floor. Both have extracted vast amounts of knowledge from the brains of these experts, packaged it up as written content time and time again, and watched it drive growth for a wide variety of manufacturing organizations. In this discussion, they'll specifically dive into five things that are holding today's B2B manufacturers back from creating exceptional content. And they'll explain why now is the right time to change that.

When ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2022, terminology like "generative AI" became a regular part of our vocabulary overnight. Just a little more than a year later, it's hard to open your favorite news source without seeing headlines about generative AI, machine learning, deep learning and so on. But what does all of this terminology really mean? And for the manufacturing leaders listening right now, how does it all apply inside of your businesses? In this conversation, CEO and Co-Founder of Allie Systems, Alex Sandoval, will help you make sense of it all.

It's hard enough to get a business of the ground and sustain it across one generation. But it's another to grow and evolve a business across three generations. Market needs change. Technology changes. The people inside of your organization (and your customers's organizations) change. There's so much to balance between staying true to what got you where you are today and being willing to evolve and adapt. In today's conversation, Greg Hartwig, a third-generation manufacturing business owner, will take you through his family's version of this story.

In this episode, CEO of Encube, Hugo Nordell, will tell you that it's a labor of love to go from design intent to what the actual manufactured outcome will be, without breaking the bank. And one of the things standing in the way today is the decades-old technology that much of the design engineering community is still running on. As he'll tell you, especially in light of the labor crisis, a rapidly changing supply chain and sustainability requirements that manufacturers are facing today, the industrial sector is ready for a fundamentally different approach to unlocking productivity growth.

I've consulted well over 200 B2B manufacturing organizations throughout my career on marketing strategy. And without question, one of the biggest problems I've observed time and time again is a lack of alignment between sales and marketing. In today's conversation, Founder of Brjr.io John Joyce will talk about why these silos emerge, what dangers and missed opportunities they create, and the role your marketing and sales technology stack can play in tearing them down.