Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1538540
What paradigms do you think, be it technical, institutional, or cultural, we must dismantle before progress can be made? Sometimes we must tear it down before we can move forward. Tearing anything down sounds destructive, and there's a lot of sentiment right now in this country to tear stuff down. I don't like to tear down as much as I like to be inclusive. I have a friend who's a political consultant, and he likes to say you get more from addition than you do from division. When you come up with a new way of doing something, you're adding to it, and eventually, if people adopt it, that's good. Maybe the people who are doing things the old way may adopt and find different ways too, so you're not really tearing down anything. It's a much more creative, constructive, additive process. That sounds like circuit boards again. How do you look at market share? Over the years, people would ask, "Ed, what's SEL's market share?" I would say, "I don't know, and I don't care." Then they look at me like I'm a fungo from Mars. One way to approach market share is to start trying to fight with your compet- itors to expand the market share by doing what they do. Make sense? The me-too strategy? Yes, or, "I'm better than you," and you can grow the pie. The pie is not fixed. Almost all of this is creativity. Oftentimes, it's a new market space that the others didn't even recognize. It's the value that you bring to people who don't even understand the value they need yet. In a previous interview, you said you saw another supplier's part on a repair bench. Their system was down, and they were waiting a long time for replacement parts. What did you say? I asked him, "What's the warranty?" He said, "Who the hell cares? It'll take them a year to get us a replacement." In that moment, you saw a new value you could bring to your customers. About one minute later, I set up the SEL product hospital, a 72-hour turnaround to get to the root cause for the customer, and boy, did we learn a lot with that. You plow it back into other stuff, how the customer is using it, what we could have done bet- ter, what a supplier could have done better. It's the ability to recognize that and take action, to add new value. 12 PCB007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2025 S c hwe i t ze r E n g i n e e r i n g L a b o rato r i e s' 1 6 2 K- s q u a re -fo ot , $1 0 0 M m a n u fa ct u r i n g fa c i l i t y i n M o s c ow, I d a h o. ▼