Why Leaders are Displacing Managers

Each month, Tony Uphoff, visionary CEO of Thomasnet.com, joins
Cloud Wars Live for a recurring segment. “Uphoff on Industry”
will explore the innovations, upheavals, and breakthroughs
reshaping the world of manufacturing and industrial markets. Join
Tony and me as we discuss disruptive new trends in the
digital-industrial world. These include how we design, source and
manufacture products. And also the new ways in which industrial
companies are getting up to speed on marketing, sales and
customer experience.


Episode 9


In this episode: Tony and I begin by discussing our recent
experience at Carnegie Mellon University. Our Digital All-Star
Sean Ammirati, who founded the Corporate Startup Lab, invited us
to participate in a day-long event that touched on Disney+, the
industrial IoT, data silos, and a host of other topics.


Tony was with a company called Rodon, and they were launching a
new product called “SillDry.” It’s for a commercial building
where if you’re putting in windows you can make sure they stay
dry. They built a rubber unit that goes into the application, and
it fits in cleanly and easily.


Later, he says he implemented the Harvard strategy of “Jobs to be
Done” as a research methodology and formalized process. He says
it was exhaustive, and Thomas did five-hundred 90-minute
interviews. But, he says, the qualitative analysis is helping
ThomasNet put the data into perspective, so they can see the
patterns a little better.


Tony talks about how workers on the factory floor are looking at
real-time data and are better able to make decisions. They’re
looking at customer orders, customer needs, and how many orders
are shipping and where they’re being shipped. Everyone knows
what’s going on.


Finally, he says we don’t need managers – we need leaders.


You can see the Thomas Industry Update podcast on every major
platform – and on Thomasnet.com.


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