Australia, New Coke, Boeing, and the Future of Manufacturing in America

Lean Coffee Talk (formerly known as Lean Whiskey)

In Season 2, Episode 2, Mark Graban and Jamie Flinchbaugh begin with Mark sharing about his Australia and New Zealand workshop tour with the Association for Manufacturing Excellence. Even koalas find their way into the conversation.

Episode page with videos and more

We then shift to our coffee selection of the day - pour overs. This old school method has found a resurgence not for being inexpensive but for giving you more control over the extraction process making it the best method for the best coffees. Jamie explains and demonstrates the process with enough details to get you going.

We then get to our main topics, beginning with some interesting statistics. 80% of Americans believe we’d be better off with more people working in manufacturing, but 25% of them believe that they would be better off if they worked in manufacturing. Whether skilled trades or engineers, we discuss why jobs in manufacturing are still getting a bad wrap. Continuing with manufacturing, we discuss the possible defunding and impact of the Manufacturing Extension Partnerships, a nationwide network of support centers for small- and medium-sized manufacturing businesses, which gets a significant amount of their funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Boeing is announcing a new, or refreshed, culture in an effort to turn the company around from a seemingly never-ending parade of crisis issues over several years. Are declarations of values enough? Do they need to be better defined? How do you back them up? We discuss all of this, including a mention of Jamie’s video course on culture change. While discussing blue chip names, this is the 40th anniversary of New Coke, an introduction that was likely never needed. Was it a mistake, and how do you recover when the product and the brand is this iconic? We do not include a taste test of New Coke or Coke Classic.

Links From the Show:

• Reflections from Mark’s world tour
• Pour over methods explained by coffee expert James Hoffman
• The Chemex and V60, two popular pour over options
• Manufacturing Extension Partnerships and their role supporting small manufacturers, their potential defunding written about by IndustryWeek, Manufacturing Dive, and an Op-Ed by the Urban Manufacturing Alliance
• Being is resetting their culture
• Jamie’s Learning Lab course on shaping culture
• 40 Years Ago, New Coke was introduced, and Mark’s take on the mistake
• Watch The Americas with Tom Hanks and Sea Lions of the Galapagos
• Podcast feed at LeanCoffeeTalk.com or jflinch.com/leancoffeetalk
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