The National Association of Manufacturing released a recent report on manufacturing strategy and competitiveness. There are two problems. First it is a laundry list, not a strategy. Second, the laundry list items don’t actually identify the root causes of manufacturing decline with solutions. Third, it facilitates distraction by proclaiming the same “export and innovate” trade approach that has already failed in the past.

On the first point, there is a lot of talk about a “strategy” for manufacturing these days. That is fine and good. But if you want a strategy, you actually need a detailed course of action designed to achieve a goal. Which leads us to the second point.

That second point is the lack of cause and effect analysis. The NAM plan does not evaluate any causal link between any of their laundry list items and manufacturing decline. Let’s look at exports. We doubled exports between 2002 and 2008. But our trade performance was the worst in history. So do you want to focus upon expanding exports more? Or is there something else you should do because of the past failure? Take another example of taxes and deregulation. Is there data showing a direct causal link between past tax or deregulatory changes and the improvement of manufacturing competitiveness at the macro level? Or is this just an intuitive leap, based upon the fact that taxes and regulations are irritating at the micro level? And how about this… What are the top three or five top causes of manufacturing decline in the past 15 years? Let’s address those. But the report does not answer that question.

Lastly is the elusive and dangerous issue of distraction. When you put effort and rhetoric behind attractive, feel-good solutions that are not solutions, you gum up the works of any effort to go after real solutions. That is because the distraction is so hard to combat in an effort to achieve clarity of purpose. ”Export and innovate” is not objectionable in a vacuum, but we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a dynamic world where foreign protectionism is decimating us through currency manipulation, VAT tariffs, and many subtle strategic mechanisms employed by state-managed economies of China, Japan, Germany and others.

We need clarity of purpose now more than ever. We cannot afford distraction.

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