The more manufacturing leaders you talk to, the more opinions and perspectives you'll hear about why we're struggling to pull young Millennials and Gen Zers into the industrial sector workforce:

– General awareness issues

– A perception of dirty, dark and dangerous jobs

– Negative associations among youth (and their parents) with a career path other than "go to college and get a white-collar job"

In today's conversation, you'll hear directly from the source.

Jacob Sanchez is a Gen Zer whose energy and passion alone make this episode worth listening to.

He's been in the manufacturing workforce since he was fifteen years old and his perspective about why we're missing the boat with Gen Z will get you thinking.

If you were to interview a variety of successful manufacturing leaders and analyze their respective approaches to effective leadership, I think you'd find a lot less directing than you would enabling.

In this episode, Jason Riley, COO of the additive manufacturing company Fabrisonic, draws on his experience both as a military leader and a manufacturing leader to break down what he refers to as "5 Key Principles for Creating a Culture of Initiative".

We'll talk about what it means to lead with intention, delegate, empower decision making, maximize collaboration and create meaningful process documentation.

New product development today is more complex than ever before. With teams spread out across the country (or the globe), decentralized product data, supply chain challenges and more demanding customers, design engineering is just plain hard.

Adam Keating, Co-Founder and CEO of CoLab, has been building the software and the company that's working to solve these problems.

In this conversation, he'll dive into the challenge and hand and how they're addressing it.

When people talk about you years down the road, what will they say? "Oh yeah, he (or she) was a good manager or employee?"

Or will there be something more?

In this conversation, manufacturing leader and author, Mosongo Moukwa, talks about how to leave a meaningful and lasting mark on your organization. Or in his words, how become "a leader of significance."

From skills to work ethic to understanding chain of command, veterans bring so much potential to the manufacturing workforce.

In this episode, Lt Col Kathy Lowrey Gallowitz will talk about how manufacturing leaders can go from unaware how to tap into the veteran community to being veteran-friendly to being veteran-READY.

Automation can be intimidating. What if the sizable CapEx investment we make doesn't generate the return we expected? What if our people struggle with operating the robots? And how will they deal with this kind of operational change in general?

All fair questions and real concerns for manufacturing leaders today. In this episode, Saman Farid, CEO of automation provider Formic, will talk about how they're lowering the barrier to entry through outcome-based robotics solutions, and shifting the investment from CapEx to OpEx.

In this conversation, Gorilla 76 Content Director James Boeckmann and Gorilla 76 Senior Writer Rose Hansen go deep on content marketing for manufacturers.

Collectively, these two journalists have interviewed hundreds of subject matter experts in the manufacturing sector – from owners to engineers to technical experts on the shop floor.

Both have extracted vast amounts of knowledge from the brains of these experts, packaged it up as written content time and time again, and watched it drive growth for a wide variety of manufacturing organizations.

In this discussion, they'll specifically dive into five things that are holding today's B2B manufacturers back from creating exceptional content. And they'll explain why now is the right time to change that.

When ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2022, terminology like "generative AI" became a regular part of our vocabulary overnight. Just a little more than a year later, it's hard to open your favorite news source without seeing headlines about generative AI, machine learning, deep learning and so on.

But what does all of this terminology really mean? And for the manufacturing leaders listening right now, how does it all apply inside of your businesses?

In this conversation, CEO and Co-Founder of Allie Systems, Alex Sandoval, will help you make sense of it all.

It's hard enough to get a business of the ground and sustain it across one generation. But it's another to grow and evolve a business across three generations.

Market needs change. Technology changes. The people inside of your organization (and your customers's organizations) change.

There's so much to balance between staying true to what got you where you are today and being willing to evolve and adapt.

In today's conversation, Greg Hartwig, a third-generation manufacturing business owner, will take you through his family's version of this story.

In this episode, CEO of Encube, Hugo Nordell, will tell you that it's a labor of love to go from design intent to what the actual manufactured outcome will be, without breaking the bank.

And one of the things standing in the way today is the decades-old technology that much of the design engineering community is still running on.

As he'll tell you, especially in light of the labor crisis, a rapidly changing supply chain and sustainability requirements that manufacturers are facing today, the industrial sector is ready for a fundamentally different approach to unlocking productivity growth.