History attributes to Henry Ford the autocratic utterance that people could have any color of Model T they wanted just as long as it was black. Marketers point to this incident as an example of Ford's color blindness to consumer tastesóone man's imposition of his taste on the marketóthe ultimate no-no in the age of customer-focused organizations.
What that group of marketers doesn't realize is that with no competition from the Japanese in the early part of the century and little from domestic competitors, black was the logical choice for a man obsessed with efficiency. Not only was it less expensive to manufacture cars of one color versus a rainbow of possibilities, cars painted black dried faster than those painted other colors. So, with cars spending less time getting painted, Ford could put more cars through the assembly line in any given period of time. More cars using the same resources meant lower per-car costs and therefore greater profits.
If Henry Ford's canny excites you, if your brain is cranking away at the solution to dozens of problems, you might be well suited to work in the manufacturing industry. But the manufacturing cosmos entails far more than optimizing assembly lines. At a basic level, manufacturing is the process of making things from materials and delivering a physical product. This allows for significant latitude in what you can call manufacturingówhich is a good thing once you have been in the industry for a while and want to move laterally. However, for our purposes, we tighten the scope of manufacturing to include companies whose products require a degree of technical or engineering skill to either develop or produce. Also, in this Insider Guide, we look more closely at firms that produce discrete productsówidgetsóversus firms that have continuous productionóvats of acid, for example.
The constellations in manufacturing include, for example, Skunk Works projects a la Lockheed to develop state of the art military aircraft, projects at automakers to develop cutting-edge composite materials to lighten today's ever-larger SUVs, or projects in medical technology firms to develop precision machinery to replace or augment human parts, all in addition to the challenging problems involved in making production more efficient and quality driven.
People in manufacturing are forever dreaming up better mousetraps for whatever rodential problems are plaguing humankind and then executing those dreams on production lines throughout the world. Whether you want to develop these products, bring them into production, or market them, the manufacturing sector offers youóas a PhD, MBA, or undergraduate, technologist or businesspersonóample opportunity to challenge yourself and to do good for humankind.
Major Players
3M
BMW, Ford, and Toyota
Boeing, Honeywell, and Lockheed Martin
Boston Scientific and Medtronic
General Electric
Dow and DuPont
Whirlpool
Xerox
Job Profiles & Hiring
Research and Development: R&D; Fellow, R&D; Engineer
Product Design and Development: Human Factors Specialist, Product Development Manager, Product Design Engineer, Test Engineer, Product Design Sculptor/Modeler
