A minute is a long time

Well the football season started in earnest this past weekend. Know that I am a fan, and only a very pleasant New England Fall weekend kept me away from the day games on TV. But I did manage to catch some of the more important late afternoon and evening games and one thing popped out at me; timing is everything. Well the football season started in earnest this past weekend. Know that I am a fan, and only a very pleasant New England Fall weekend kept me away from the day games on TV. But I did manage to catch some of the more important late afternoon and evening games and one thing popped out at me; timing is everything.

Two of college level’s top head coaches at Notre Dame and Ohio State showed a decided lack of awareness of this fact. Shame on you Charlie Weiss; a former professional team offensive coach (Patriots) should be a master of the clock. He let Michigan back into the game by not burning time off the clock with six minutes left in the game. As a consequence, a freshman quarterback saved the day for Michigan with a long drive.

Meanwhile down in Columbus Jim Tressel, the coach at OSU, not managing the clock well (an OSU trait), let Pete Carroll and his Southern California Trojans steal a potential upset game with a freshman quarterback conducting a 90 yard drive with 1 minute to go. Now Carroll, a former professional coach (Patriots again), knows that 60 seconds is an eternity in a college game.

Back to the timing thing; I just got through reviewing a bunch of new products that will be shown at the November FABTECH show in Chicago as their suppliers have timed introduction into the 2010 market by showing products in late November. Because this was the only big fabricating equipment show left this year it’s not a bad venue to catch the wave of the anticipated rising tide of business in the first quarter of next year.

Talk about great timing, Barron’s (September 14) reports that 50 economists, recently polled, are upbeat about the economic outlook. They now predict that the recovery will be over in the fourth quarter of 2010 (when real GDP exceeds the peak of the second quarter of 2008) The not so good news is that unemployment will be down by then but not by much as the number of jobs will not grow faster than the labor force.

Now to my weekly harangue. Pete Engardio writes a very interesting article in Business Week on manufacturing exodus from the U.S. It is a well documented eye opener and worth your time to read it. In explaining why companies are abandoning the U.S. for cheaper manufacturing sites he lays out all of the compelling reasons that we have heard ad nauseam and he has many suggestions for possible correction, but he ignores the one that really bugs me the most.

Innovative technology companies that use U.S. tax dollars to develop a product should be required to return that investment by manufacturing it here in the U.S. In other words, if you take public funds to create a product, you should payback the country by producing employment here not in a cheap labor country that only offered a tax break while gaining employment for its citizens. I’m not preaching isolationism. Simply, if you are building a company using taxpayers’ money they should benefit when you go to production. You have the option, Take funds from Singapore, for example and manufacture in Singapore. That's fair and not isolationism.