The Dead Company Club

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Alton Jefferson and Sgts. Ronald Williams and Jeremy Squires, all from Bravo Company, 173rd Special Troops Battalion, conduct final checks on a Shadow Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) on Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, March 17, 2008, prior to its launch. A UAV is used to track enemy activity. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Tyffani L. Davis) (www.army.mil)

Manufacturing experts wanted

5th in a series about What Matters Now

Looking for a job in manufacturing or design?  Hold up. Make sure you understand the stampeding herd that is threatening the industry.  But first, let’s talk about your hobbies.

Break time

Let’s say you love planes and want to resume flying lessons as soon as you have a secure paycheck. In the meantime, you kill time online with other airplane nuts and post some design questions for a remote-control plane.

The engineer types and experienced fliers give you plenty of advice on your design, send you links to inexpensive electronics and tweet a rousing brainstorm to come up with new things you can do with your plane. They also tell you where you can get a prototype made, dirt cheap.

The job market still stinks and you’re getting tired of spending all day at the screen, so you order the prototype and add the electronics when it arrives from China a week later. You take it out to the dusty field nearby and let it loose. With the camera and GPS onboard, your little drone flies over the countryside taking snapshots and filming the flight while you control your recon mission with your iPhone. Fun, huh? Who needs Northrop Grumman?

Back to work

OK, back to that manufacturing job. Here are a few facts you need to know:

1. You no longer need a big employer to do design and manufacturing. Collaborative design, open-source components and micro-manufacturing put control in your hands, if you want it.

2. That big company becomes more vulnerable every day as barriers to entry keep falling, and they can’t staunch the tide. Do your homework before you sign on.

More about that UAV

Chris Andersen, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine, is a firm believer that the web is transforming manufacturing. He should know. He founded DIY Drones and has been spreading the message about DIY manufacturing. Here’s a short video about his experiment building drones and interacting with the U.S. Government – unintentionally – as a result.

The longer video of the entire presentation by Chris is fascinating. It includes the tale of his tangle with the U.S. Government at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and a gleeful story about how he busted Google. Great stuff and well worth the 20+ minutes to watch.

If you want to catch up on the trends affecting the working world and society, read the eBook, What Matters Now. It might just be the smartest thing you can do for yourself this year as a survivor of corporate destruction.

Laurie Phillips is a snow-bound freelance writer with cabin fever.

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