Waterloo John Deere

My wife and I spent the day today at the John Deere tractor assembly plant in Waterloo IA watching her brothers 8330 4x4 tractor built on the assembly line as part of their "Gold Key Program". Giant facility, over 1K workers, lots of automation, and a lot of huge tractors. I need to get a blog written on the book "1776" that I just finished, but suffice to say that the manufacturing capability that we take so much for granted wasn't available in 1776, and for long after ... Henry Ford in the early 20th century kicked it off. It works very well today.

We had a retired assembly worker assinged to the four of us all day long. We got some heavy duty steel to wear around our shoes, safety glasses and gloves, and were able to mix right in with the assembly workers on the line. We got to put on a decal, attach a fender, put the lug nuts in on a wheel, and the brother-in-law got to start it up and drive it off the assembly line. An excellent piece of customer relations by John Deere, and a very enjoyable day for me.

It again reminded me of how human the supposed "faceless corporation" is. I've traveled to a number of different sites in this country and overseas in my own 28-year corporate career, and there are remarkable similarities. Corporations are all made up of pretty normal people, generally from a lot of fairly humble backgrounds. From the levels of people that I've been able to get to know in some depth over a so-far ("bottom" to upper mid-level), they are generally pretty dedicated, have a decent level of persistence and have a basic understanding of what business means ... providing a quality service or product in a manner that a profit can be made so stockholders are willing to keep investing in the business, and customers are willing to keep buying.

They also tend to generally be "nice people", a great part of that I suspect coming from they see the "system as working" since they are playing a part in it, and are very willing to be friendly with certainly customers, but quite commonly other people in general, and often even competitors. That doesn't mean they don't compete, any more than baseball players shaking hands after the game means that the game is somehow "rigged". It means that they understand that competition and alternatives are key to our (and increasingly the world) economy.

A marked contrast to the "angry left", a few of which even manage to work inside companies. Since they are pretty much convinced that "everything is broken" ... Economy, society, family, gas prices, business in general, stock market, foreign policy ... you name it, they can only have any sort of relationship with you if you are as mad as they are. Seeing any glass at all as "half full", or "improving", let alone "good enough" is in direct conflict with their world view, and enough to label you as someone not worthy of their association.

There still is real manufacturing in the USA with at least a few thousand jobs that I got to see personally, and since the orders for the tractors are backed up 5-6 months, it seems to be going very well, no matter what the media might like to tell you.