Welcome to Manufacturing Minute!

I'm glad you're here.

Let's get to it.

🚨In the News

2025 was supposed to be the year American manufacturing roared back. Instead, we watched it bleed.

63,000 to 76,000 jobs gone. Eight straight months of decline. Manufacturing employment sitting at 12.7 million – down from where we started.

The pitch was simple: tariffs would bring jobs back, protect American producers, level the playing field.

Instead what we are seeing is higher input costs.

Supply chain chaos.

Domestic producers scrambling because they still rely on imported components.

Layoffs instead of hiring sprees.

I keep seeing these photos of gleaming, modern American factories… advanced automation, skilled workforce, real innovation happening. And they're operating in the middle of this mess.

It's not that we can't manufacture here.

We absolutely can, and we do it well.

The problem isn't capability.

It's that policy was sold as a silver bullet without understanding the complexity underneath.

We need manufacturing jobs. We need domestic production capacity. But pretending simple solutions exist for complex problems doesn't bring jobs back.

It just creates different problems.

Maybe 2026 can be different.

But first, we need to stop selling easy answers to hard problems.

🏭 Manufacturing Minute: Invest in your engineering team

I've watched this movie play out dozens of times...

Smart engineering team identifies a problem.

They run a pilot.
Deploy a sensor.
Get real data.

The results are awesome.

Leadership applauds.
Excitement builds.

Six months later? Nothing.

Everyone blames "organizational resistance" or "lack of vision." But your engineers aren't stuck because they don't know what to do next... they're stuck because they're simultaneously managing a capital project, troubleshooting that machine that's been acting up since March, training the new guy, and attending 14 meetings this week about stuff that could've been emails.

You can have all the strategy, all the budget, all the leadership support in the world... but if your execution bandwidth is maxed out, nothing scales.

This is why the "just start small and iterate" advice is directionally right, but often fails to deliver transformational change.

The pilot isn't the hard part.

Sustaining focus while running the business is.

As promised, tactical manufacturing in a minute,

Ryan

P.S., if you are in the Columbus area on February 26-27, the LNS Research COO Council is hosting a Council Meeting at the Owens Corning Science & Technology Center. It’s going to cover Industrial AI: Successfully Scaling Across the Supply Network. I can't name names yet. But the caliber of people confirming seats is... impressive. Find out more here.