NC State of Business

This past week, I saw some of the famous “green collar jobs” so often talked about as the key to America’s future prosperity. Charlie Parrish spoke of them extensively in his post on 4/18/09 – What are the Green Jobs? The interesting part is that these jobs I saw did not stand out, and I would not have known the difference between these jobs and the traditional “blue collar jobs” had I not been told.

I was visiting a local cable and wire assembly plant to discuss their need for coaching in some advanced quality tools such as FMEA and Control Plans. This place was loaded with good news. They had new customers, increased orders and quantities, and INCREASED EMPLOYMENT LEVELS. There were only a few workers called back for now, but some optimism exists.

Ok, back to the green jobs. During a tour of the plant, I was told that the company had orders to produce wind turbine wiring assemblies now and were discussing assemblies that would support new solar energy applications. Since no special training for the workers was required to follow the fabrication and assembly requirements for these orders, the “green collar” jobs are simply “blue collar” jobs in disguise. A point to make here is that many NC manufacturers are already participating in the new green economy and plenty of others are ready based on well proven capabilities. So bring on the technology…

It would be nice to hear of other jobs like these in North Carolina. So let me know about what you are seeing.

On a similar note, next week I will attend a venture capitalist function in Durham called the SJF Summit on the New Green Economy. Ahh…now this is the place where I could hear of the new green inventions that would use those wiring assemblies I saw last week. Maybe I will see you there.

As we climb out of this economic morass -- and we will climb out of it -- will the new economy look that much different from the old one?

Some big industries, we expect, are going to look quite a bit different in the new economy. The big three automakers, for instance, have yet to cut their costs and lower their prices while producing vehicles that consumers actually want to buy -- although Ford's stock price rose 16 percent yesterday because they've restructured their debt while avoiding taking bailouts. Considering the Chrysler-Fiat fiasco-in-the-making (it still could cost taxpayers $6 billion), U.S. automakers may well find their industrial empires broken apart and distributed among new owners -- the way the British Empire broke apart as its former colonies gained their independence.

But I think for most companies, the new economy will look pretty much like the old economy. I think about it this way: you're making a product that is useful today; why should you expect something to happen in the economy drastic enough to make your product less useful tomorrow? And if your product is still useful, shouldn't you be able to find a market for it?

With that in mind, there may be some changes to how you go about producing your product. It may be harder to get the financing you need in order to install a new machine, so you may end up continuing to do some things the old-fashioned way. Or you may find some things are different in your market; for example, it may be more beneficial for you to pursue new opportunities in the export market, or to look for other ways that you can modify your product or change your approach to your market. (In contrast, I heard David Brooks talk at the 2009 Emerging Issues Forum about what he called a "new localism" that may also influence how you produce and market your product.)

A few months ago I wrote a blog entry about my belief that manufacturing will continue to be of prime importance as our economy develops:

If you're reading this on a computer screen, every link in the virtual chain from me to you was manufactured by somebody: the screen, the CPU, the copper wires or fiber optic cables the Internet signals ran on -- everything. Even if somebody printed out this blog entry and handed it to you, we're linked in a chain of manufactured items: the paper, the printer, the ink. For all that we live in the information age and work in the "knowledge economy," manufacturing makes that economy work.

My core belief has not changed: a knowledge economy can't be sustained without an industrial economy as its foundation. The question is how that industrial economy will look and behave as the economic turmoil settles down.

At the Emerging Issues Forum, David Brooks also talked about the power of recessions and economic difficulties to spur people to creative solutions to difficult problems. Like it or not, we're likely to be part of an economic rebirth -- and like childbirth, it'll be painful, bloody, and traumatic before it's joyful and triumphant.

So I ask you -- since you got this far -- to let me know if you have any other insights into how the new economy may be different. What are you seeing that I may not be seeing? And how are you preparing to survive in the new economy?