Trucking Association Reports Continued Growth

Truck Tonnage Up – Morrison Responds to Robust Demand
The American Trucking Association’s forecasting ability has the respect of their members and the US government. As economic trends are determined, the ATA monthly Truck Tonnage Report is an important indicator of the transportation sector health, and also of general economic stability.

Using the latest available report, an interesting trend is apparent: the trucking industry is booming. The ATA’s seasonally adjusted tonnage index has risen for the fifth consecutive month. This growth is also reflected in the Index of Economic Indicators (a measure of future economic growth) report which rose sharply over the past five to six months.

Another indicator of transportation sector growth is the Commerce Department’s Total Retail Sales report. Durable and non-durable goods consumption continues to grow at an 8% rate in a year-over-year comparison.

What does this all mean? The trucking industry is scrambling to keep pace with increased demand.

The ‘transportation’ vertical market, as defined by Morrison Company, has seen a considerable increase in business. Clients who supply component parts to truck manufacturers are struggling to keep up with demand. Whether the components are brakes, axel assemblies or electronic circuits the major over-the-road truck manufacturers are clamoring for more production volume.

“Significant changes are occurring in the transportation industry vertical”, says Jim Green, President at Morrison Company. At the same time the demand for trucks is increasing, the government’s EPA standards are getting stiffer requiring manufacturers to retool. “This duel pronged challenge forces our clients t to rely heavily on our ability to install new material handling systems while they are in full production”, added Green.

Morrison’s “report card” has been good. Time and time again Morrison Company has demonstrated its ability to work in partnership with clients to devise an implementation schedule that allows for uninterrupted service. Many times this means performing work in off shifts or on weekends.

Is your organization facing the need to expand, but without interrupting existing operations? A Morrison Company representative can discuss options to respond to your business challenges.

US Chamber of Commerce Lobbying Efforts

Class Act Fairness Act
Frivolous lawsuits are on the rise and are having a devastating effect on our small businesses. While small companies take in 25% of America’s business revenue, they bear 68% of business tort costs—a staggering $88 billion!

America's legal crisis is crippling companies, driving down shareholder value, putting employees out of work, raising consumer prices and making a handful of plaintiffs' lawyers’ millionaires overnight.

Here’s the bottom line: A single frivolous lawsuit can ruin a business, small or large. The good news is that we are fighting back- in Congress, in the states and in the courts. Together we can work to make America's civil justice system simpler, fairer and faster for all by enacting meaningful class action reform.

About the Legislation

The Class Action Fairness Act is a moderate, well-measured bill that will ensure a simpler, fairer, and faster legal system by:

• Helping move large, multi-state class action lawsuits from state to federal court, preventing widespread "venue shopping" by trial lawyers.
• Limit settlements in which class members actually lose money to pay attorneys’ fees.
• Ensuring the fair and even distribution of damage awards to all plaintiffs.
• Helping protect class members from getting coupons of little or no value while attorneys make millions of dollars.

You Do That?

Demag Cranes and Hoists
Any operation that has a static weight to move is a potential customer for a crane or hoist. Customized load carrying devices, remote control systems and the utilization of adjustable frequency technology allows most companies adapt how equipment is moved.

Demag cranes include single and double girder overhead and under running cranes. Capacities for double girder over running cranes range from up to 700 tons and spans up to 200 feet. Single girder capacities and spans range up to 30 tons and 100 feet. Capacity and span range for single girder under running cranes are up to 15 tons and 80 feet.

Enclosed rail systems also provide customized material handling solutions. From simple cranes and monorails to completely automated systems Morrison Company has the solution. Whether the load requirements are 50 lbs. or 7,000 lbs., five different track sizes are available to exactly match the overhead system requirements.

Lift assists provide the perfect ergonomic solution and greatly reduce the effort required by the worker in today’s manufacturing environment. Less fatigue means higher means higher production, fewer injuries and reduced time loss, while providing safer working conditions.

Hoist units are the key components in many materials handling applications where loads are moved, lifted, transferred or positioned. Hoist units are available in capacities from 1 to 100 tons.

Justifying the investment of a crane or hoist must also be based on maintenance costs. Demag products are extremely reliable and a supported with a quick ship parts program through Morrison Company. Whether your application calls for a manual or robotic directed solution, Morrison Company has extensive experience understanding your manufacturing goals and recommending the components to provide years of trouble-free service.

To set up an evaluation of your facility, select facility assessment.

Operations Manager Issues

Leadership vs. Management
Do you wand to be a leader or a manager? You need to make a choice as there is a huge difference. "The world is full of managers and desperately short of leaders - real leaders."

Today's World Realities

In today's new economy, the old ways of management no longer work and will never work again. The magnitude and pressure of environmental, competitive, and global market change we are experiencing is unprecedented. It's a very interesting and exciting world, but it's also volatile and chaotic. You cannot address these new challenges with more of the same management solutions – successful change requires leadership.

Psychological research has shown that "under circumstances of uncertainty or unusual challenge and difficulty, people look for help in understanding questions about what matters, what to do, what direction to take, and what they should not do. Providing people with the answers that help them with these difficult questions is the essence of leadership."

Leading Change

Leadership is about getting people to abandon their old habits and achieve new things, and therefore largely about change - about inspiring, helping, and sometimes enforcing change in people. "While there can be effective management absent ideas, there can be no true leadership."

To Lead or To Manage?

You need both. The old proverb says that leadership is doing the right thing; management is doing things right. The difference between the two is not as sharp as the saying would suggest, and both are required for effective corporate growth: leadership risk creates opportunities while management strictness turns them into tangible results.

However, "if your organization is not on a journey don't bother about leadership - just settle for management", advises John Adair. John Adair is the world’s leading authority on leadership and leadership development. Over a million managers worldwide have taken part in the Action-Centered Leadership programs he pioneered.

"There is a direct correlation between the way people view their managers and the way they perform. Strong leadership is imperative for shaping a group of people into a force that serves as a competitive business advantage."

Lesson from Jack Welch

Jack Welch's goal was to make General Electric (GE) "the world's most competitive enterprise." He knew that it would take nothing less than a "revolution" to transform that dream into a reality. "The model of business in corporate America in 1980 had not changed in decades. Workers worked, managers managed, and everyone new their place. Forms and approvals and bureaucracy ruled the day." Welch's self-proclaimed revolution meant waging war on GE's old ways of doing things and reinventing the company from top to bottom.

Jack Welch is all about leadership, not management. Actually, he wanted to discard the term "manager" altogether because it had come to mean someone who "controls rather than facilitates, complicates rather than simplifies, acts more like a governor than an accelerator." Welch has given a great of thought to how to manage employees effectively so that they are as productive as possible. And he has come to a seemingly paradoxical view. The less managing you do the better off your company. Manage less to manage more.

Welch decided that GE's leaders, who did too much controlling and monitoring, had to change their management styles. "Managers slow things down. Leaders spark the business to run smoothly, quickly. Managers talk to one another, write memos to one another. Leaders talk to their employees, talk with their employees, filling them with vision, getting them to perform at levels the employees themselves didn't think possible. Then (and to Welch this is a critical ingredient) they simply get out of the way."

Business School Book Review

Northwestern University
Are you a reader? If so this article will feature book reviews by some the county’s best and brightest business school professors. While they’re recommendations may not always be about business, the books do have something to say about perseverance and integrity. This month’s featured professor is David Dranove the Walter McNerney Distinguished Professor of Health Industry Management at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

Professor Dranove’s favorite books are:

ECONOMICS, ORGANIZATION, AND MANAGEMENT by Paul Milgrom and John Roberts

"There are more ideas about strategy and organizations on any one page of this book than there are in a hundred pages of most every other strategy book. These Stanford professors were the first to translate modern microeconomics into a book about business strategy. The book may be rough sledding for the casual reader, but the payoff is enormous. This is the book that inspired many other academics, including David Besanko, Mark Shanley, and myself at Northwestern, and Garth Saloner, Andrea Shepard, and Joel Podolny at Stanford, to write a new generation of economics-oriented strategy texts and change the way that strategy is taught at top business schools."

CO-OPETITION by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff

"The traditional MBA teaching of business strategy begins with Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy. In Porter's classic work, firms are surrounded by threats from competitors, entrants, powerful buyers and suppliers. In sharp contrast to Porter's gloomy view of the firm's environment, Brandenburger and Nalebuff introduce the concept of complementors- the same firms that might threaten your own firm's profitability can, under the right circumstances, enhance it. They also introduce the concept of the value net - the set of firms which, collectively, determine the overall value of the goods and services delivered to the market. This is a must read for any firm that is wants to succeed by making peace, not war."

WHO SHALL LIVE? by Victor Fuchs

"Written 27 years ago, this seminal book about the U.S. health care system addresses two questions that will likely never go away: How can we afford to provide all the medical care that patients and their physicians would like to have? How do we evaluate a health care system whose success depends more on the health behaviors of consumers than on the decisions of providers and insurers? To this day, regulators in the public sector and managed care organizations in the private sector continue to wrestle with the provocative questions posed by Fuchs."

Industry Trends

The Case for Interstate II
The transportation sector is an important market for Morrison Company. As such we stay close to trends in this sector. The following is an excerpt of a presentation given at the Intermodal Transportation Institute in July of 2006.

Fifty years ago, the United States embarked upon building an ambitious Interstate Highway System. We constructed 46,000 miles of multi-lane routes, most without any kind of stoplights or at grade crossings for rail traffic. It was a grand achievement that catered to our nation’s mobile population that is wedded to vehicular traffic while providing greater mobility for the then population of about 152 million people. It also provided greater capacity for the movement of freight and contributed to our economic growth.

Today, however, with a population approaching 300 million with vastly increased urban concentration, that grand achievement has become a highway system congested by traffic, insufficient capacity and rising gas prices dictated by our geopolitical global oil dependency. The original interstate system no longer works efficiently. In recent years, we have reinvested billions of dollars in repairing and maintaining this aging highway system only to create a small amount of additional capacity while simply moving road congestion from one place to another –– with all costs borne by the general taxpayer and consumers in the form of higher prices.

It has become clear that we cannot solve the complex transportation needs of the 21st century by just throwing more money at a no longer efficient or sustainable highway system that does not address our nation’s real transportation needs in what has now become a global business environment.

Today, vastly increasing international trade, emerging economies and greater consumer consumption is driving a demand for a global, interconnected intermodal transportation system that can provide much more service- and cost-efficient freight delivery methods than our existing interstate system. This new system would link all forms of freight and passenger transportation into an efficient, high-speed system that is focused on speed, safety, reliable scheduling and economic efficiency –– and is a must. I call this new type of transportation system Interstate II. In this type of interconnected system, we would meet the needs of our nation’s railroads for increased capacity and decreased operating expenses, while helping the trucking industry offset its dependency on volatile fuel prices, rising insurance and labor rates and driver shortages. Such an intermodal transportation system will throw off our old ways of thinking modally and build upon the strengths and versatility of each mode, to move cargo, which will provide an increasingly seamless and more efficient transportation network between all our major cities and beyond as global trade continues to increase.

Some of the movement toward an a seamless, interconnected multi-modal transportation system is beginning to take place, albeit with funding primarily by the nation’s private sector, as new “logistics parks” are beginning to spring up around railroads, with connections to ports, ground transportation and air cargo facilities.

These modern, highly efficient, high-capacity intermodal terminals are the key to Interstate II, providing almost seamless interchanges between modes of traffic. And while the technology exists to create a high-speed rail system and while some national discourse has been generated about the need to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure to make all modes interconnected; unfortunately, much of the talk is falling on deaf ears in Washington. We still have no coordinated national transportation program in place to address the nation’s transportation problems.

The Department of Transportation and most state DOT’s still have a modal mindset, with employees still highway-oriented, with little thought toward an integrated intermodal system.

The same mindset is also true of the planning and funding processes, the vast majority of which are directed solely toward highway development. Yet, estimates indicate that with increasing population and consumer consumption –– much of it products coming from Asia –– the next 20 years will generate a 50 percent increase in transportation activity. There is no way our existing highway system can sustain the kind of growth to support this capacity.

We have a huge railway system that connects most of North America. This continental network serves 90 states and provinces with 240,000 miles on right-of-way already owned by the railroads. It serves almost 400 million people. With emerging technologies and investments in grade separation, double and triple tracking, this transportation system could enable a double stack train to run at speeds of up to 90 miles an hour in GPS-controlled corridors and replace 280 trucks on our crowded highways while creating nine times greater fuel efficiency.

A thoughtful national transportation policy is needed that would provide a tax-exempt railroad bond program to finance the upgrading of the railroad rights of way that connect all of our major cities and transportation modes. The operational and economic efficiency of an interconnected intermodal freight rail system would conserve fuel, increase capacity, benefit our economy and reduce environmental impacts. Interstate II would provide a significant solution for our 21st century transportation system.

Gil Carmichael is a former Federal Railway Administrator and now serves as senior chairman of the board of directors for the Intermodal Transportation Institute at the University of Denver.