I don’t consciously think about my first job when I meet with leaders in the electronics industry to talk about trade policy. But my young days in an Illinois cornfield will always shape how I view, and do, work.
My hometown in western Illinois had maybe 10,000 people if Western Illinois University was in session. I grew up with a single mom and things were tight. If I wanted a little spending money as a kid, I had to earn it; a deep and early seeded lesson in the value of work.
Detasseling corn for $1.50 an hour over the summer was my first job at the ripe age of 11. My friends and I, sack lunch and water jug in hand, would hop on the school bus that waited for us near the town square at 5:30 every morning. The workday ahead was not easy, but it was a common Midwest ritual.
For 10 to 12 hours, we walked down the corn rows towering over our heads in the dead of summer heat, pulling off the feathery tassel part at the very top of each plant. (Farmers do this to prevent the plants from self-pollinating and encourage cross-pollination.) Despite the heat, you wore long sleeves because the rows were lined with dew-covered leaves sharp enough to slice right through exposed skin.
The Field Looks Endless
Like the objectives we try to accomplish for industry, a cornfield seems impossibly large when you’re looking down that long row. The idea of detasseling even one acre of corn just doesn’t compute in a helpful way. Achieving a technical or legislative goal for the electronics industry, and all the industries that depend upon it, can feel like a similarly Herculean task; seemingly endless agendas and implications that interconnect in very complex ways.
In the cornfield you have to stick to it. You tell yourself if you can go down and back 12 times, that gets you to lunch. You take it one tassel at a time. That’s the only way to finish that row—and field.
One Tassel at a Time
This mindset is just as effective when helping electronics manufacturers advance and embrace the future. A few years ago, there was a new wave of automation adoption at our member companies. Most plants run a mix of equipment brands, each with their own software and protocol; it’s great if you bought everything from one brand, but no one did. Manufacturers were saddled with time-consuming and costly middleware to make it all work together.
Our organization, the Global Electronics Association, creates and implements technical standards and solutions used across electronics manufacturers. We enthusiastically proposed a communications standard that would radically minimize time and cost for manufacturers; invest 20 hours, and you’re done. The Connected Factory Exchange, or CFX, standard was born. But our initial “Let’s detassel this whole cornfield!” ambition landed with a thud, especially with the suppliers that wanted to sell their own software solutions. Our initial meeting attracted one company.
Eventually, we got one OEM to fall in love with CFX and we had our first tassel in hand. Together, we worked our way down that row one industry player at a time. Two years later, 200 companies gathered in a room to put the finishing touches on a standard we built together.
CFX was practically free, manufacturers could connect all of their equipment, and the standard allowed equipment providers to layer in their innovations. By putting in the hard work we were eventually able to step back to see that we had accomplished our mission.
You Can Always Have Fun
A second lesson I learned from my adventures in the cornfields is that you can always have fun. I pretty much insist on it. That’s true of our work at the association, too. We focus on serious and highly complex issues. In government affairs, we understand that how effectively we advocate for one legislation or government action can have very real consequences. It can help determine whether some companies succeed or fail, whether natural resources are protected for future generations, or whether there are decent jobs for people to support themselves. I take our mission very seriously and I know my team takes it personally, too.
The cornfield was grueling and mind-numbing work. But you were close enough to your friends to hear each other. My friend Randy and I were big Steve Martin fans, and we would get down that row by trading lines from his routines, cracking each other up.
I don’t look back and think that I became a great detasseler. But I do recognize that Randy and I memorized every comedy routine on Martin’s early comedy albums. We found a way to bring joy into our very mundane task, which made it bearable in the hot summer sun to finish that long row!
In a leadership meeting not long ago, someone mentioned they always have a song pop into their head that applies to the situation at hand. That notion really resonated with everyone, with people asking what song we were in—“I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones came up—and cracking each other up with comments. For me, it was Steve Martin all over again.
Now it’s traditional. Someone will always pipe up, “So what song are we in?” It energizes us if we lose steam and provides a much-needed ice breaker in a tense moment. I truly value working alongside people who appreciate that while the work can be challenging, having fun along the way makes it all worthwhile.
Finishing the Row
Those two lessons from the cornfield never really left me. Break the impossible task down until it’s just the next tassel, the next conversation—and have fun while you’re doing it. I’ve built a career, and I hope meaningful progress for the electronics industry, on those two ideas an 11-year-old figured out over a summer of blistered hands and “Wild and Crazy Guy” bits. Turns out they go a long way to get almost anything done.