The Demise of Manufacturing in North America

Introduction

The note below comes from one of the foremost experts in Robotics in the world.  He was a senior scientist at GM Research in the days when GM was investing heavily in research and development.  Here is his short story about what happened to one of the key technologies that dominate high volume manufacturing.

 

GM seemed to lose its way when it substituted financial people for car people.  They hired armies of MBAs on a consulting basis and they reported to the very top with no contact with the process or the people.

 

We will continue to look at these first hand stories over time because they have direct influence on daily lives all over including the Saugeen Basin 

 

Luckily, the writer became very successful and sold his company, but that too was lost in the acquire and merge rage of the dot com era and the technology is now dominated by the far east and less so by some German companies.

 

I've never had much patience with GM's army of MBAs. MBAs have no good way of judging the merits or strategic importance of a technology. And, because of their power, they can do even more damage than lawyers. Sure, lawyers cost us all plenty, but at least they keep each other busy and leave the engineers alone. MBAs, on the other hand, get in way of productive people and can destroy whole companies and industries.

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I saw some of that at GMF Robotics, the joint robotics venture between GM and Fanuc in Japan. The Japanese routinely milked GM of its robotics technology.

This was a major factor in the demise of the industry in the US. Industrial robots were first developed in the US, led by MIT and Stanford and GM, and for a while the US dominated the field.  I gave lectures on robotics at many universities, telling auditoriums full of eager students to get into this promising new field. Well, I misled these poor guys. By the time they graduated there was no US robotics industry left. We had given it away. Fanuc in Japan had become the largest robot company in the world.

 

GMF was responsible for the majority the give-away. And I, as VP of R&D, played a big part in it. Although I tried hard to warn GM, all the way up to Roger Smith, it was to no avail. GM's MBAs only gave me blank stares, and I pissed off the Japanese in the process. Fanuc, run by engineers rather MBAs, understood full well, and they respected me. And I respected them. But they were smarter than our MBAs.

 

My disappointment at GM's give-away of our robotics industry was one of the reasons I quit GMF and started my own company.