Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Together We Can Do It

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...Do you feel stuck? Do you feel like it’s getting harder and harder to make a living in the circuit board industry? When was the last time you told someone that business was great, that things were going wonderfully? When was the last time you were happy about going to work?

Why is that? Why don’t you feel like you can do something about it? Why don’t all of us feel like we can do something about it? It seems like we've not been able to find a way to break out of our doldrums.

As far as I can remember it has been over 20 years now since we were on top of the world when it comes to our industry, the PCB industry.

So what now? Do we just give up and call it a day? Just resign ourselves to the fact that the Asians have taken over, that they do it better, and look for the next best thing?

Listen to what some very famous, very smart people said when they felt their business world was at a crossroads just like ours is right now:

• I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. -- Thomas Watson Jr. IBM
• There is no need for any individual to have a computer in his home. --Ken Olsen Digital Equipment
• Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? -- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers
• The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. This device is inherently of no value to us. -- Western Union Internal Memo 1876
• Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value. -- Marechal Foch French war strategist.
• No matter what he does he will never amount to anything. -- Albert Einstein’s teacher
• Drill for oil? You mean drill in the ground to try to find oil? You’re crazy. -- Leading oil drillers in 1859
• Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. -- Irving Fisher Professor of Economics Yale University 1929
• We’re selling about five pacemakers a month now. I think we’ve saturated the market. -- Earl Bakken, Founder of Medtronic
• Louise Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction. -- Pierre Pachet  professor of Physiology in 1872
• I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked to the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out this year. -- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall in 1957
• We don’t like their sound and this guitar business is on the way out. -- DECCA Records rejecting the Beatles

And my all-time personal favorites of the dumbest things smart people have ever said:

• Everything that can be invented has been invented. -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents 1899.

These guys were all wrong and not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong!

So, what are people saying about our industry today? Have you heard people saying things like:

• We have lost all sense of innovation.
• It costs too much to build boards in this country.
• The PCB business has been lost in this country and will never come back.
• Nobody buys boards in the United States.
• Soon there will only be three large PCB companies North America.

I hear and read these things all the time. Many people, including some of our customers and vendors, have given up on us already, but we have to ignore them. We must look for ways to make things better and find a way to matter.

I am confident that we will find a better way to do business, to build products of the future, to again believe that we are the best. We are Americans after all; and Americans always find a way.

But to do that we can only rely on ourselves and each other. We have to work at being innovative; we have to look at doing things differently, uniquely, and creatively; we have to keep moving and never lose our passion for success; and we must never give up.

Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing great or small, large or petty--never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. -- Winston Churchill, October 29, 1941

I don’t know about you, but that’s good enough for me because it’s only common sense.