I grew up in the midwestern part of the United States
around a lot of the blue-collar workers and laborers.
At the time, Chinese labor was less than a dollar per hour,
and that was far, far more competitive
than basically anywhere else on the globe,
and the pool of labor was immense.
And it was devastating for communities.
But that's not the way it will look in ten years.
In that rush to China,
what we saw was basically Economics 101.
The jobs went, more demand went,
and that drove up prices.
There are regions that are just as competitive
as China today for certain types of manufacturing.
The end of the story isn't
that one country dominates all global manufacturing.
The end of the story is actually that we come back
to a world where manufacturing's more distributed
and manufacturing and supply chains
become more regionalized.
In this world where the economics are evening out,
the promise of the bionic company is immense.
The work changes from getting a task done
to designing the work that needs to be done,
often by a robot or an algorithm,
and that creates a totally different structure.
Instead of a hierarchical organization
that works from the top down
and the bottom person executes,
you actually need small teams that are agile
to come together to define
and design how that work should get done in the future
and then build the systems
to actually execute against it.
I interviewed recently a manufacturer
of stainless-steel trash cans,
and they had moved production from China
to Jacksonville, Florida.
They had actually created an entire production line
that only had nine people,
because much more of what they were making
was roboticized and had been automated,
versus even what they did in China,
where the factory line had 60 or 70 people.
But I actually think that's good.
That's unleashing more innovation.
That's freeing up more capacity and labor
to invest in new things and learn new tools.
And as we deploy that technology,
we're going to have to be
constantly upskilling the workforce.
Not once in their life do they receive an education,
but we're going to have to find a way to do that
over and over and over again.
The leaders will be much more proactive in doing that.
They will find competitive advantage in their workforce
that will drive them to invest in that workforce
in a much more holistic way.
They won't be as reliant on community colleges
and technical schools and universities to train people.
They'll say, "We need to take the future in our hands
and actually equip our people to be resilient
no matter what the technology is we deploy."