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Emily Elizabeth is managing director US at MTL Precision and she recently wrote an article for Quality.

Michelle:  So, I really loved your article. And to start off with, can you tell us how you decided to write about this topic?

Emily: I'd love to. So, I work with aerospace manufacturers on a day-to-day basis. I attend conferences, all of us get together, and we talk about how to do things faster, better, leaner, and, a lot of the times, where we get stuck is there's not enough solutions on the table or the solutions everyone's bringing to the table are solutions we've been doing for the last 40 years.

And I come from a background where I'm always trying to challenge status quo, challenge different ways of thinking. You know what I did yesterday, was there a better way I could have approached it? And so, I've started thinking about if we approached everything that we did from a completely different perspective.

What kind of results could we get? Could they be better? Could they be different? And in my role, I tend to look outside our industry for advice and recommendations because I feel like having a different perspective helps you craft how you respond to challenges that you have in this world. And in my article, I kind of took some leads from Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla and X and “The Boring Company.”

And if anybody's read his biography, you get a glimpse behind the scenes of how he thinks and how he approaches challenges to what he's trying to accomplish. And he is so dedicated and focused on what he wants to accomplish that he will essentially figure out how to move mountains to make it happen. And my thought is, why aren't all of us doing that?

Why aren't all of us coming to the table every single day and you see how many mountains you have in front of you? Why don't we come at climbing over those mountains from different ways? And so that's kind of how I got to the contents of this particular article.