Friday's Internet Edition, May 09, 2008.
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“Maintenance is something that, when all goes well, nobody acknowledges it exists,” Leonard said. “When something goes bad, we say we don’t have any. When money’s involved, we say it’s unnecessary, but when it doesn’t exist, we agree that it should.”
Maintenance is a profession that, Leonard says, is not glamorized and not given the attention that it should because of its importance to our infrastructure and industrial base.
Recently, Leonard has played key roles in activities in Brussels, Belgium, and Washington, D.C. His trip to Brussels, in mid-April was to the European Engineering and Maintenance Conference, in which he became the first American to serve as its keynote speaker.
“There were 1,200 attendees from 51 different countries,” Leonard said. “Europe has very strong networks of resources that are working to make things happen. In Holland, they are creating maintenance ‘valleys,’ like the Silicon Valley.”
Leonard went to Washington last week to interact with the Council on Competitiveness. This nongovernmental organization bills itself as “the only group of corporate CEOs, university presidents and labor leaders committed to the future prosperity of all Americans and enhanced U.S. competitiveness in the global economy through the creation of high-value economic activity in the United States.”
Part of that meeting included an interaction between Leonard, others with the council and some prominent federal lawmakers.
“I suggested to Ted Kennedy that Harvard and MIT MBA programs ought to teach the value contribution of maintenance,” Leonard recalled. “He looked at me dumbfounded. Then I told him that other countries are using reliability programs as a competitive advance. He asked for a copy of the speech I gave in Europe.”
Leonard does not write speeches nor has copies of them, but he did provide the long-time Massachusetts senator with Power Point information and copies of some of his articles. The Greensboro resident, who used to work for Thomasville Furniture Industries, also spent some time with Sen. Richard Burr.
“Sen. Burr was congenial and proud about the role North Carolina was playing in all this,” Leonard said. “He was thankful and quite pleased that I set this up.”
Leonard was surprised and delighted when the gospel version of “The Maintenance Crisis” song was played as he was on the panel at the Council on Competitiveness meeting.
The Council was addressing Congress on its latest report, Thrive, the Skills Imperative. The gist of the report was that national action is needed to improve U.S. workforce skills as a means to raise our country’s standard of living. Joining Leonard on the Council of Competetiveness panel, which met with the senators and spoke to the council members, were Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp., James Spohrer, director of research for IBM, and Judith Cardenas, president of Lansing (Mich.) Community College.
“I was the only non-millionaire-non-Ph.D. on the panel,” he said. “I was out of place and scared out of my mind, but after a while my nerves calmed down and I offered my two cents.”
The MPACT executive will not be holding a job fair this summer, due to his other activities, which are designed to increase jobs in this area. Leonard has consistently stated that there is an opportunity for North Carolina to replace jobs lost to outsourcing if it concentrates on training people in maintenance skills and gains a pool of strong maintenance workers.
“Companies are needing qualified fuel technicians and the areas that develop technicians with these skill sets will have an edge,” Leonard said. “If we can get more talent developed, there will be more jobs coming in.”
Staff Writer Kevin Reid can be reached at 472-9500, ext. 230, or at reid@tvilletimes.com.