A Famous Visitor (Wednesday/Thursday, August 22/23, 2012)

We had a famous visitor come to Clinton on Wednesday morning, renowned New York Times columnist and prolific book author Tom Friedman. The visit originated because Tom is good friends with a venture capitalist who has invested in a start up robotic company, with a somewhat revolutionary concept for a new worker type robot. We have been a beta site and worked closely with the company, Re-Think Robot to help them enhance and debug the product. During his 90 minute visit, he met with Gordon, myself, our head of Technology and a couple other folks, along with the Re-Think team. Tom became fascinated with our company story and took copious notes with lots of interesting discussion along the way. He was amazed that a company in Clinton, Ma. (housed in an old mill building making Bigelow Carpets in the 1860s) is  global player in the plastics manufacturing world and wanted to know how we compete. He then visited the site of the robot and concluded the visit with a short tour. It led to an Op-Ed piece he wrote in the Sunday New York times (August 26) though the bulk of the article was devoted to Re-Think with some mention of us. It would have been nice to get more air time but we appreciated the publicity nonetheless. And we appreciated his pearls of wisdom.

Some of my key takeaways from his nuggets included:

–       The concept of outsourcing or insourcing is a 1990s concept- now it all about global sourcing. There are good, better and best companies anywhere in the world and only the best will survive

–       Countries that will thrive in the future need to HIE (High Imagination (and Innovation) Enterprise countries; Low Imagination Enterprises and countries will fail. He still believes US is near the top of the HIE list while China has a way to go.

–       He said that he took over James Reston’s office (the famous columnist of the 60s and 70s) and Reston would come to work everyday wondering what his seven competitors are going to write (ie his competition at the Washington Post, LA Times etc). Tom comes to work everyday wondering what his 70,000 competitors on line are going to write. It is global competition we all face

–       His advice to High school students

• Think like an immigrant- they don’t believe they have any legacy entitlements- they have to earn everything they get
• Think like an artisan- in the Middle Ages an artisan made every product individually and carved his initials on it to show he was proud of his work. We all need to think as if our initials are carved in our work
• Change is inevitable- accept it and learn how to make yourself as valuable as possible in a rapidly changing global environment

There was much more but and I found the conversation stimulating and enjoyable. He asked what we would tell Romney and Obama if they came to visit us. Our main answers- support education (particularly engineering and sciences), eliminate immigration barriers that persuade talented overseas folks to stay in US and get states to stop competing to pull jobs away from each other and instead focus on how we can compete against rest of world. An interesting 2 hours.