Why The Consumer Electronics Show Needs More American Entrepreneurs And Businesses

The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is coming to a close today in Las Vegas.  By all accounts, this year’s show as more interesting than it has been in a few years.  New gadgets, new prognostications about technology saving the world and lots of parties.

Before I focus on the CES, I wanted to join the chorus of people paying their respects to the departed Stuart Scott.  I have watched Scott on ESPN since he joined in 1994 and enjoyed his gregarious personality.   One of the facets of a successful organization is finding talented people, and then giving them the platform to succeed and bloom.  And Stuart Scott was the latest in a long line of dynamic personalities that ESPN has supported and helped flourish – including Chris Berman, Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann and Craig Ferguson.   It reminds all of us as managers, leaders and entrepreneurs to appreciate the talent we work with and give them space to perform.

Now, back to CES.  I have had the privilege of attending past shows, and I highly recommend that everyone in the technology industry try to attend it once.  It’s Las Vegas at its best, with lots of parties, entertainment and over-the-top exhibitions.  And it’s a never-ending buffet of new gadgets, technologies and visionary presentations about the future of the world.

Last year, as I walked the exhibit floor, one of the things that struck me was the low proportion of American companies at the event.  Outside of Intel , Qualcomm and Cisco, there are not a whole lot of large American companies with a big presence at CES.  Most of the companies are from Asia.  And I am not just talking about Samsung or Sony.   Walk past the large booths and one sees that almost all the smaller tech companies, the manufacturers, the accessory makers and the professional services providers either are Asian companies, have their operations in Asia, or in the case of service providers, are there to help you set up your operations in Asia.

For Asia, this is a triumph of several decades of dedicated effort to build a consumer electronics industry.   For the United States, the loss of an entire industry is displayed at CES with brutal honesty.  We might host the event, we might throw a great party with Hollywood and Silicon Valley’s biggest celebrities, and our press may put out a week’s worth of stories about the great gadget’s coming out this year, but that’s all we get.

So, while there has been a lot of legitimate excitement about manufacturing returning to the United States, the exhibit hall at CES also reflects how that may be to do for some industries, like consumer electronics.   Not only do most of the major consumer electronics companies manufacture in Asia, but even the startups at the show expect to manufacture in Asia.  Even if legitimate opportunities exist to manufacture in the United States, most of the companies at CES aren’t buying it yet.

Secondly, America will also need to rebuild its workforce in industries like consumer electronics.  We no longer have a class of managers with the experience running consumer electronics enterprises and factories.  Certainly we have the world’s best cadre of technology executives, and many of them manager global enterprises with significant Asian operations, but we have lost the middle management in consumer electronics that now resides entirely in Asia.  And on the worker side, many of our educational institutions no longer even teach some of the technical skills required in fields like consumer electronics – instead moving towards degree/certificate programs in subjects like advanced manufacturing, robotics and software programming for manufacturing.  Of course all of these challenges can be addressed. But if there is a real opportunity to bring back consumer electronic manufacturing to the United States - perhaps to integrate with new fields like the “Internet of Things”, then a broader section of government, business and education will need to mobilize around skills development, management and regional planning.

We saw the same thing happen in call centers.  When many companies realized that offshoring their call centers was not the best way to serve elite customers with more complex needs, they began to move those call centers back to the United States.  Many of them found that they had to start from scratch – hiring and training a new generation of call center operators and managers.  They had been away too long to rehire their former employees, and few institutions provided any training in the field.

Like I said, go to CES. See the coolest products in the world.  You can buy a glow-in-the-dark cover for your iPad that also charges it. You can buy yourself a personal drone.  But don’t expect to find a whole lot of job opportunities unless you are ready cross the pond to Asia.