Manufacturing Talks
There are millions of cool stories in manufacturing. Your host, Jim Vinoski, helps share them by talking to the people who are making them happen. Manufacturing is where the rubber meets the road. There's no hiding. You're either making good products people will buy for enough to keep you in business, or you're not. Meet the amazing folks who thrive in that survival-of-the-fittest world.
Manufacturing Talks
John Broadbent on Future-Proofing Manufacturing with Industry 4.0 and Leadership Transformation
Are you curious about how manufacturers can keep up with the rapid advancements of the digital age? Join us as we chat from afar with Australian John Broadbent, the visionary behind Realise Potential. John shares many insights into the evolution of Industry 4.0, from the early days of PLCs and automation to today's AI-driven innovations, but you may be surprised as his recommendations for the best path forward for manufacturing leaders seeking to future-proof their operations.
Through our conversation, you'll uncover the essential steps in implementing Industry 4.0, starting with the foundational task of connecting equipment and gathering data. We tackle the challenges organizations face when diving headfirst into AI without a robust data foundation, and explore how incremental improvements can drastically enhance operational efficiency. John shares real-world examples, like reducing packaging errors, to illustrate the tangible benefits of integrating data-driven insights into everyday processes. We also confront the hurdles operational leaders encounter in championing innovation, particularly when met with resistance from higher management.
Shifting gears, we delve into the leadership dynamics within the manufacturing sector, emphasizing the transition from proof of concept to proof of value. John discusses the pressing need for strategic leadership and long-term planning, contrasting it with the short-term mindset often driven by the corporate or private equity mindsets. Finally, we explore John's personal advocacy work, especially his commitment to supporting men, whether in dealing with midlife struggles or needing to foster deeper connections. His journey of personal growth and dedication to service is both inspiring and a call to action for others in the industry. Don't miss this insightful episode with a leading figure in manufacturing transformation.
Chapters:
00:00 - introduction
13:45 - unlocking the advantages of Industry 4.0 with digital transformation, whether through factory digitalization or work process automation
19:41 - challenges in manufacturing leadership and strategy
29:08 - empowering men through advocacy, service, and connection
John's book site: https://manunplugged.com.au/
Realise Potential website: https://realisepotential.com.au/
Welcome to Manufacturing Talks with Jim Vanosky. Industry has a million cool stories and Jim talks to the movers and shakers who are making them happen. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, welcome back to Manufacturing Talks. I'm Jim Vanosky, your host. I'm glad to be joined today by John Broadbent. He is a director and founder at a company over in Australia called Realize Potential an industry 4.0 and digital transformation manufacturing consultancy. Welcome, john.
Speaker 3:Good afternoon for you, jim john, good afternoon for you, jim, and good morning for me yes, good morning tomorrow.
Speaker 2:In fact, I'm sure you get that a lot when you talk to americans yeah, people ask me for the lotto numbers what's going to happen. Yeah, I guess so very, very glad to have you on, because we, in talking beforehand, you know we were hitting on all these points that are your interests, that are so closely aligned with what we cover here, so got a lot to talk about. Before we do, though, why don't you just tell us about yourself and how you got doing what you're doing today?
Speaker 3:wow. Um started a mechanical engineering cadetship in 76 um, so this year actually started manufacturing, the end of 75, so this is my 50th year in australian and international manufacturing. But interestingly, in my early roles as a cadet I took a deep interest in programming and when PLC's programmable logic controllers finally emerged on the scene, in the factory that I was working as a maintenance and projects engineer young projects engineer we didn't have anybody who was capable of doing the programming side, so I very quickly adapted into the automation space. Yeah, um did some incredible projects. Um worked on dcs's distributed control systems as well.
Speaker 3:So I became an absolute automation nut a bit of a propeller head, I'm sure at the time, and then ended up during the 90s building factories in Southeast Asia for an Australian building materials company. So we did work in Malaysia, china, then Thailand, and each project was about a year long. So I got a huge amount of experience in the integration space 2000,. Read a book called who Moved my Cheese and recognised my cheese pile was getting smaller. So we elevated the company that I had at the time called Millennium IT into a role where we became a distributor for a company out of Pennsylvania who had a very clever tool that allowed you to mine content in SCADA's PLCs and other systems that didn't normally talk to each other and act basically as an integration hub.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:We brought that product into Australia in 2001. Sap acquired the company in the US in 2005, just as we were getting traction. So my company then had product and no pipeline because we lost our distributorship and SAP then had product and no pipeline because we lost our distributorship. And SAP Australia had pipeline and sorry had product and no pipeline. And we had pipeline and no product. So I got an introduction to SAP here in Sydney to keep their door in and struck a deal where I would be their free pre-sales functional specialist that could then help them sell the product, but we would get the services work. And that's what happened. We did probably 10 to 12 major projects for the likes of BHP and Rio Tinto and other big organisations food and beverage as well and so we got a really good experience on how to integrate manufacturing data that we've spent my life in, but putting it into in in a meaningful context so that people could then use what they call, you know, buzzword actionable insights.
Speaker 3:And then in 2017, I left that that business partnership, uh to go out on my own again and found and realized potential, because I was recognizingising that Australian manufacturing in particular was certainly behind the eight ball. I reckoned that probably 80% to 85% of our manufacturing was being done on already fully depreciated kit. Most companies were sweating their assets so much they were dripping, and so I wanted to encourage companies to consider the whole thing around Industry 4.0, but I didn't really understand much of its history and what it meant. So I spent the whole of 2018 in a very deep dive, understanding the features and benefits, only to realise that my first smart factory in 2011 for Coca-Cola complied with all the Industry 4 maturity phases, but we built it from the ground up as a grid field site. So that was a big aha moment for me, and that then set me on the journey of helping other companies do the same.
Speaker 2:Wow, that is a heck of a history. And it brings us right up to the next question, and I saw in looking at you know, your information online and the stuff about realized potential. You've got the tagline that you're about future-proofing manufacturing, so tell us more about the company and how it delivers on that.
Speaker 3:So organizations. I hearken it back to what they call the emergence of the second industrial revolution, which is the electrification. So we had mechanisation in 1784, with what we call the industrial revolution and the weaving loom and steam, and then in 1870, tesla and Edison were having an arm wrestle.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Between AC and DC and Tesla won. And it's almost like looking at digital transformation and Industry 4 today as being in the 1870s and said, oh, this electricity thing is newfangled, I'm going to stick with steam.
Speaker 3:And I think that's why Germany, in 2011, coined the term Industry 4.0, because they could see that it was a convergence of. It was almost inevitable that it was a convergence of. It was almost inevitable because it was a convergence of very three, three very different concepts. Um, in terms of you know, cyber physical systems, which is basically your car's dashboard, where you take signals from somewhere, you put them into a form that we can consume them as humans cloud computing, and the emergence of the industrial internet of things. Cloud computing and the emergence of the industrial internet of things. Once those three converge as Germany said, it was inevitable, but we would then amalgamate those into the way to do things in a more modern context. And the biggest frustration I see is that the large majority of manufacturing people are what I call below-the-line knowledge workers.
Speaker 3:So, the front office has had know two screens, three screens on their desks, access to sap oracle you know whatever your flavor of erp is and all that information pretty well at their fingertips. But the poor manufacturing people are still working off old time, untimely information, pieces of paper being passed around, different layers of the plant and equipment, as we said, that could be you know, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s that isn't computerized and isn't able to be connected to a network to extract data from it. So I see a lot of factory-based operational people production managers, engineering managers, operation managers really struggling with um getting the information they need when they need it in the form that they need it in to make good decisions. And so my view is that if we're going to become more sustainable across the board, then we have to learn how to do more with less, and that means using less energy, less raw materials, less people where appropriate and minimizing waste and maximizing finished goods output.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's the only way we in the developed world are going to be competitive anyway.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I mean the Coca-Cola factory that I mentioned is run effectively on the factory floor by five people. It's a fully integrated SAP to factory floor. There's 23 different systems in that organization and the manufacturing hub sits in the middle and talks to all of those. So SAP is just one of the spokes, which which means they can do upgrades and patching and service packs and all that sort of stuff. And as long as that link between the two is the same, or even if it changes, you don't have to change a plethora of background stuff to regression test. You simply have to make sure that the data being passed backwards and forwards along that pipe is the same. But if it changes you just have to change one thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now you talked about companies over there in Australia sweating the assets, so insanely I would submit that we're, you know, in very much the same boat here in America, where we're running aged systems and still loaded up with people to your point. You know in very much the same boat here in America, where we're running aged systems and and still loaded up with people to your point, you know, um very manual approach and labor intensive. What are the biggest opportunities you see? Uh to to modernize factories and bring that that industry 4.0 and digitalization to bear on becoming competitive in the global marketplace.
Speaker 3:So if we the analogy I often use is that you're driving your car, you have no dashboard, the windows are blacked out, the view in the rearview mirror is where you were a month ago and the managing director or president is sitting in the rearview mirror is where you were a month ago and the managing director or president is sitting in the passenger seat asking are we there yet? And sadly, that's the way most manufacturing businesses are running, and I'm in awe to be honest that so many organizations can continue to function like that and still stay in business.
Speaker 3:Because if our CFOs chief financial officers here had any idea of how much money I call it being left on the table, I think they'd need a defibrillator in every boardroom. Boardroom.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, and that, I think, is the huge disconnect is. I mean, I've been having this discussion with some executives over here just in the last few weeks about how, whether it's private equity or corporations, they're so short-sighted they don't want to put capital into manufacturing, and yet that means, to your point, we've already been behind.
Speaker 3:Now we're falling farther and farther and farther behind and, interestingly, enough if you look at the global consumption of robotics, purchasing of robotics. We were sold the story in Australia that we had to move all our manufacturing offshore to Southeast Asia. For us predominantly China, Malaysia, Thailand, predominantly China, Malaysia, Thailand, and in that, offshoring.
Speaker 3:we did nothing more than export out inefficiency Right yeah, and in doing that we then lost our skill set. We lost supply chain issues, which certainly became self-evident during COVID, and it's made reshoring the option of bringing that manufacturing back to Australia much more difficult. You guys outsourced a lot of your manufacturing, as far as I'm aware, to sort of Eastern Asia as well, across the Pacific for you guys, and to bring that back to Australia firstly, you can't now bring a 1980s piece of equipment that you move because of the inefficiency, because of the lower-cost labour base overseas. Now that labour rates are starting to increase in those countries, you can't bring that 1980s piece of machinery back. So now you have to find new land, build a building, buy new equipment. Then you have to find new land, build a building, buy new equipment.
Speaker 3:Then you have to find the skills for people to run it um and before we got on this call, we were talking quickly about reassuring and I know that trump's down office in america has been talking about trying to do that. Yep, my concern for that is it's what I call chicken and egg. Um, the biggest issue is, if we can't get the skills, the skills that we do have in the diminishing pool is going to be a supply and demand response to that and therefore the cost of labor is going to increase because there's such a scarcity in the STEM area, engineering area, tool making, all those skills and we're not attracting young people anymore to manufacturing, because I don't think we've made it sexy enough.
Speaker 2:What are some other kind of focus areas that people ought to think about as they look at that digital transformation, whether it's in existing or in new?
Speaker 3:look at that digital transformation, whether it's in existing or in in new.
Speaker 3:Well, if you, if we look at, just simply looking at the what I call the four phases of maturity, or the four stages of maturity of industry 4.0, the first one is being able to see the information on your factory floor without having to go to the piece of equipment and have a look.
Speaker 3:And the example that I used, jim, that a lot of people are familiar with, particularly from the food and beverage industry, is a piece of equipment and have a look, and the example that I used, jim, that a lot of people are familiar with, particularly from the food and beverage industry, is a piece of equipment called a check wire. Um, a check wire weighs product as it travels across it and confirms that it's within certain weight tolerances. Now, in any, in any factory that has a check repair, I can go down to the check wire and look at the display and watch the pack weights, see them going across. But industry 4.0 is firstly being able to see that information away from the equipment. So if I then have that check way, a computerized, and that's on a network, and I can mine that check way for information, I can now start extracting those pack weights and, for example, put them into a trend or a statistical process control chart or a database.
Speaker 3:I can do with it, what my processor story and I can do with it, what I process the story and I can do with it what I will. So let's assume I'm making a 500 gram jar of coffee and in order to know that I'm making a 500 gram jar of coffee, I need a standard to measure it against. So the second step of industry four is the context piece. It's like driving your car I'm doing 60 kilometers an hour, but if I'm doing 60 on the motorway at 120 limit I'm in trouble, and if I'm doing 60 in a school zone which is 40 kilometers an hour.
Speaker 3:I'm in trouble, but for different reasons.
Speaker 3:So we need, we need, we need context of that information in order to show us where we are.
Speaker 3:So we may then have the standard of that pack weight, the 500 grams, coming from an ERP system, for example, like SAP, so we can now compare what we're measuring to what we should be. So that's the second stage. The third stage is then going well, based on the data that I'm collecting, that I now trust and I now have a standard to measure it against, I could, for, for example, create a statistical process control chart that will show me, through a proper sampling regime, where my pack weights are and my natural variation and as long as within my upper and lower control limits and my standard deviations, etc. Happy days. But if a system then starts to go a little bit um awol, um, I can see that I'm now starting to increase my pack weights over time, so I need to make a little bit um awol, um, I can see that I'm now starting to increase my pack weights over time, so I need to make a correction to the control system and I can go and do that manually.
Speaker 3:And that's the level three, or the third phase of maturity, which is um, which is predict, which is predicting where the process is going to go. What a lot of people miss is that the fourth step is the only part of the industry four journey where you then close the loop. So when you start to collect that data, for example, and you see that you're about to make out a specification product, the supervisory control system automatically makes the adjustment, so say the filling system, to put the product back into specification. And that's the optimise and adapt piece. And that's where AI and machine learning can really come of age. But I'm seeing organizations in manufacturing miss the scene, the understanding and the predicting piece, and going straight to market and going oh, we want to go AI, we want to go AI. And it's like hang on, guys, that's the last step. You've got to start at step one first, to make sure you can connect to your equipment and get the data from it in the first place.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, hence your point about a lot of ground to cover if you're going to reshore.
Speaker 3:Very much so. But what people don't realize, jim, is that you can apply that industry four staged approach to a single piece of equipment, and that's why I use the check wire as the example, because you don't have to apply it to the whole company at once. You can apply it to individual pockets, and each one you do, you will improve your visibility and responsiveness, and what you effectively do is you shorten the time between an issue, a issue, and the discovery of that issue. The classic example is ready meals. Someone goes to the supermarket, buys a ready meal, gets it home, looks inside and realises what's on the pack is not what's in the pack. So they now take that back to the store for a refund because it might be. They bought butter chicken, but it's chicken satay and they have a peanut allergy. So there's a risk. And in Australia a third of recalls are for undeclared allergens. I used to be quite confused by that and think how would a company not know it's got particular allergens in its food?
Speaker 3:And it's not that it's undeclared, it's undeclared because it's wrongly packaged yeah so the time between when that product was made and the time it was discovered on the shelf at a supermarket could be two weeks yeah if we have a in-line packaging and label verification system, using barcoding or 2d barcoding cameras, for example, to look at the actual pack itself, knowing what to look for. The moment someone puts the wrong sleeve on the wrong product, the line stops.
Speaker 3:So, we've still had the same issue, but we haven't waited two weeks to discover it. We've captured it a few seconds down the line, and that compression of time between incident and discovery is when that time is long. There's a significant loss of value. When the time is short, there's a significant loss of value. When the time is short, there's much less loss of value, and you can only do that through connectivity and integration.
Speaker 2:Yep, got it. Now let me shift gears on you, because I know another thing that you focus on is leadership development and how that fits with all this too. So how does that kind of play with this modernization effort that you're trying to help lead?
Speaker 3:There are a number of companies that I know of and I'm sure it's the same in the US where people at the factory floor level again the operational level, engineering managers, production managers, operations managers have great ideas about what they could do if they had some funds and they will start to run a proof of concept pilot. I'll come back to that in a sec. They will then hit an approval ceiling. Someone further up the food chain will look at that often. Uh, people my age, what I call the gray-haired ceiling and they'll suppress. They'll suppress that um and so that they, the company, ends up multiple plants you know around the country and they end up stuck in what they call pilot purgatory.
Speaker 3:Firstly, proof of concepts are no longer required. We have been collecting data, storing it, displaying it and disseminating it for 30 to 40 years. We know we can do that. What we need to show is is can we have a proof of value? Because ultimately the president of finance, vp of finance, the cfo, is going to have a look at that and say um, yes, it's going to save us money, no, it's not, and they're going to sign the check. But the um, the way that those projects are done when they're driven from the factory floor up is, they will inevitably hit that ceiling. What needs to happen is that the leadership of the business needs to say we don't have a strategy. We need a strategy for the next three to five years to know where we're going and then give the mandate to the people who are going to do the actual work of implementing these projects and funds to be able to go and do that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's. It's. It's a top-down lead, but bottom up delivery um modality, if you like. And in fact, recently I was on a call with a large company here that I was talking about digital transformation and the guy interrupted the call and he said you know, john, you're not really convincing me that this is a journey we need to take. And I went hey, no, hang on a minute here, that's not my job. If your leadership isn't telling you that you need to digitally transform your business, it's of no consequence to me. That's not my job, that's the job of your leadership.
Speaker 3:I'm not here to convince you of anything.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And therein lies the challenge. Most organizations don't have a strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that point about the lower-level leaders needing to help foster that, I mean I can tell you straight up on our side of the pond it's very rare that you've got that kind of development.
Speaker 3:Yes, and it was Hillary Clinton, back in 2015, 16, I think it was, who coined the term quarterly capitalism. She read somewhere, somewhere that fortune 100, I think it was. Uh, ceos were interviewed and the question was if you could make a decision today that would have significant impact, positive impact in your business in two years time, but it took a penny off the stock price. Would you do it?
Speaker 3:and they all said no yep and, and clinton, you know, rang one of the ceos. She happened to know and goes please explain. And he said well, if I make a decision today and it takes a penny off the stock price, my head will roll. Yep, yeah. So you can see how that Wall Street mentality is driving poor decision-making with this almost quarterly capital cycle and therefore long-term strategic thinking isn't happening. And I read only a few years ago, Jim, that Toyota's strategic plan, the long-term plan, is 200 years. I can't even conceive of that, but that's what they do. So Japanese investment, for example, is often very good at the long game 10 to 20 years worth of thinking about where they're going to go. I worked with a company here a few years ago and their return on investment requirement was eight weeks.
Speaker 2:Right yeah.
Speaker 3:And they wondered why nothing got done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's very typical over here that capital projects aren't approved unless they pay off within a year or two, which is still ridiculous.
Speaker 3:It's tough, really tough, yeah, because that level of low hanging fruit has usually gone a long time ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's not setting you up to compete down the road.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I applaud that approach.
Speaker 2:I don't necessarily have the answer on how we fix our corporations and our venture capitalists and all that, but at least we start talking about it right.
Speaker 3:I think it's important to raise it because there will be people out there listening to this and maybe someone might go. Actually, I do need to lead, I do need to understand where this organization. There's a classic line that says when you don't know where you're going, any road will do Right. Yeah, and I'm staggered that so many organizations don't have a manufacturing transformation strategy.
Speaker 2:And unfortunately they don't have people who know manufacturing, who have a voice even within the company leadership. In fact I would submit that a lot of our supposed manufacturing leaders, if they ever knew much about manufacturing, they've been off the floor for so long they've forgotten it. But you know, you look at Boeing, where it was the bean counters and the finance people who were kind of driving the bus, and you see that everywhere. So Boeing is kind of that tip of the iceberg example of how things go seriously, seriously awry. But we're all in the same unfortunate boat to some degree.
Speaker 3:We will have a COO chief operating officer in a bank heading up operations, but we won't have a COO in the manufacturing business. We'll have a CEO and a CFO. The CTO and CIO will often sit under the CFO, and the person usually isn't a head of manufacturing. But anybody who does head manufacturing is way down literally the food chain, and so they don't get a seat at the table.
Speaker 2:So here's an interesting thing I've just come across recently. I talk to a lot of executives in private companies and I've seen how they've been afraid to speak up about these things, and I actually just challenged one here recently trying to get him to lend his voice. I was offering to you know I do the manufacturing coverage for forbescom and I wanted to write an article talking about. He was talking about this very thing, the way that for him it was private equity companies that are buying up people in his sector and not investing in manufacturing, and I wanted him to talk about it. He wouldn't go public with it. So to some degree we've all in manufacturing gotten in this defensive crouch over the last two or three decades and we have to get out of it.
Speaker 3:What really staggered me is I'm reasonably active on linkedin and I did a video series a few years ago that sort of got me traction and, you know, reputation. Um is that at the end of last year, someone that I know quite well opened a center of excellence for 3d metal printing and he said to me hey, would you mind coming over for the opening? There'll be about 60 people there. Could you give us 10 minutes of your time to do a bit of a keynote? And I thought okay.
Speaker 3:I thought well, what am I going to talk about? So I did a bit of research and discovered, in Australia, for example, that in 1960, manufacturing contributed 30% to our GDP. In 1990, it was 14% and in 2023 was 5.4%. It's an 80 to 85% reduction. After I finished my talk, many people in the audience came up and said oh, thank you so much. You're speaking exactly what we believe is the issue, what needs to change, because we used to be a good manufacturing country. Two days later, I decided to put a cheeky little post out onto LinkedIn where I showed the graph of that decline and where I'd normally get anything between 800 to maybe 2,000 impressions, as they call it, and a few comments this thing hit 45 000 impressions.
Speaker 3:Uh, it had, I think, about um 40 or 50 reposts. Uh, it had probably nearly 200 comments. I was flat out just responding to the comments to this thing and I I sent the link to our um minister for industry, uh in the government and said if you really want to check the pulse of Australian manufacturing, just read this damn thread. It tells you everything you need to know.
Speaker 2:And it shows that we're not alone in understanding where the problem lies. But unfortunately there's still that hesitance of so many people in manufacturing to raise their voices about it.
Speaker 3:Yes, unfortunately, they don't seem to have any ears. And young engineers. I've done a few, you know, keynotes and workshops and bits and pieces, and I've lost count of the number of young engineers who have come up to me and said how do we get past you old blokes? Because I've got these digital natives, I've got these great ideas about machine learning and AI and vision and all the sort of stuff that they want to play with. And my generation is, and slightly younger are going no, no, we don't need to do that. We've always done it this way and it's just not going to work. So what I mentioned before about robotics, if you look at the spread of robotic purchasing, we were sold the idea that, well, let's go to China. You know cheap labor, southeast Asia, but China, I think, is the second or third biggest country for users of robots.
Speaker 2:Well, why would they be?
Speaker 3:doing that if labor is so cheap.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, and they're doing it when their labor still is much cheaper than us, and they're doing it when their labor still is much cheaper than us, and yet here we are not even keeping pace.
Speaker 3:And I think the spread is in the top 20.
Speaker 2:Yep. Another piece I want to hit on before we wrap up your book is about the plight of men, right, yes, which is a whole other topic I've covered, kind of interweaving with my manufacturing coverage and kind of separate. But I definitely want to hear your perspectives on you know, the state of men in the Western world today and what you think the needs are and what you propose we do.
Speaker 3:So the original title was called man Unplugged Exploring the Inner man, and it was published in 2014 and realised it was possibly a little bit esoteric, but during the last 10 to 12 years, I've been through significant personal growth lost both parents, been through a divorce. My kids are growing up so I've had to parent them through teenagehood. I've got a lot more involved in men's work. I run retreats both here and overseas for men, week-long events, and I decided it was time to do a bit of a rewrite. But this time I changed the tagline from Exploring the Inner man to Secret Men's business for men and those who love them, and the reason and the reason I did that is because when a man, particularly through midlife, hits the wall, which typically happens in F40, we call it the midlife crisis, but it doesn't have to be, as men, who generally don't don't share what's happening for us, we keep that to ourselves and we process inwardly where women process outwardly through dialogue. So when a man then discovers something that is a is a positive for him in how to navigate that time, he doesn't share that with people, with other men, because he thinks well, I'm just robertson crusoe, because no one talks about this stuff.
Speaker 3:So a lot of what I I've shared in the rewrite of the book is secret to men themselves and I wanted to broaden its reach so that men, particularly in the Western world, could have a read. And I had someone just review it the other week and his comment to me which will be on the book as a testimonial was it's the most male-friendly book I've ever read. So I'm happy that it's landing the way that I wanted it to land and it's really a guidebook for any man who wants to be a better man and what gets in the way of us being able to do that? But certainly encouraging men to get out more, get more male friends, because loneliness for men is one of the biggest issues.
Speaker 3:Some of the forums that I'm on there are men in the States all over the world saying I don't have friends. I don't have friends. I don't have friends, but I want quality friends. I don't want the friends that go down to the pub or the bar and, you know, just drink copious amounts of alcohol or I want to have deep and meaningful conversations. But we seem to have lost the capacity to do that and social media hasn't helped no, that's for sure.
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree with you more, though, um, and I'll have a link to your book in the show description. So I do highly recommend everyone check that out, because, just based on what you're saying, I'm definitely getting a copy and we'll be plugging it far and wide.
Speaker 3:It's about thank you. It's about probably two to three months from publication. The website currently has the PDF and the audio of the original book from 2014. I've got my good old, trusty podcast mic, so I'll be sitting and doing a book read over the next few weeks to make sure the audio book is ready to go at launch as well.
Speaker 2:Okay. So one last question then what do you think the big opportunities for you are down the road?
Speaker 3:Whether it's through manufacturing or whether it's through men's awareness, the biggest thing for me is advocacy. I'm an advocate for local manufacturing. I'm an advocate for education and I'm an advocate for men to understand why we are as we are and what we can do to live a more fulfilling life. So all of those roles require me to be in a role of service. It took me until I got to my 50s to discover my purpose and I realised that when I'm in a true role of service I'm in my happy place. So as long as I can continue to do that and the workshops that I run in Bali are a week long for men over 55 to step into the more formal role of eldership and that's something that I've been embracing for the last five to 10 years, and for me that's going to continue because I love being in that role. It feeds my soul.
Speaker 2:You know clearly I'm biased. We obviously have several areas where we're in violent agreement on things, so I'm glad you're out there doing that and advocating for things I care about too.
Speaker 3:Well, likewise for you, jim. I know it's a hard road, running up a podcast and getting guests and being sometimes a bit of a voice in the wilderness, but the more voices in the wilderness, the less of a wilderness it is.
Speaker 2:Well, put Yep Any last points before we wrap up.
Speaker 3:No, but it's interesting just for me to reflect that in a conversation with a guy from Montana about six months ago, he and I had a very similar conversation. He was waxing lyrical about the state of manufacturing in the US. I was like well, canada, like you know, it seems to be, uh, the bane of the western world, but we, we either have to make a decision to do something about it or just get off the bus and become a services economy. Um, I'll go down screaming if that fighting.
Speaker 2:if I was just gonna say I'm not taking that sitting down and I know, know, you're not either, so we'll go down kicking and screaming if that's the way it's headed.
Speaker 1:We will.
Speaker 2:Good deal. Well, John Broadbent, thank you so much for being with us on Manufacturing Talks today.
Speaker 3:Thanks, jim, appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 2:And, as always, thanks to you guys in the audience. You're why we're here. We're here every Tuesday and sometimes even more. So keep an eye out. We got more episodes coming with. You know, more great guests. I can't say that they're all going to have. You know the violent agreement on things that we all care about that John does, but they're all going to be in violent agreement on at least something. So tune back in. We'll be here at Manufacturing Talks and I'm Jim Vodovsky signing off.
Speaker 1:So long. Thanks for tuning in to Manufacturing Talks with Jim Benosky. Watch for new episodes dropping every Tuesday. Don't forget to like, share, comment and subscribe you.