GAWDA Edge Blog 
  

My name is Devin O’Toole and, as the editor of GAWDA Edge, I will be writing the blog you see before you. I am taking over for Dan Vest, who was gracious enough to act the Edge’s interim editor while I familiarized myself with the industry and GAWDA’s member companies a little bit better.

As I get to know you, here’s a little bit about me. I am 25 and relatively new to the gases and welding environment. With your help, I hope to learn everything there is to learn and pass it along to you. Through this blog and in the magazine, I want to share your stories in fun and interesting ways. There’s nothing I love more than words. (Did you know? The word blog comes from the phrase “Web log.” Think of it like a log book for the Web.)

Now, share with me something I don’t know about gases or welding.

As I see it, the Edge is the voice of young professionals in the gases and welding industry. This blog is an extension of the magazine—a place where you can interact and make your voice heard.

Whether you are a follower of the blog or you simply stumbled across these pages, I invite you to take a moment to comment on my posts. Together, we can turn the blog into a great community, a place to share ideas and stay on top of everything going on in the industry.

As an Editor for a niche industry, one of the things I like to do is keep my eye on what the mainstream business world is talking about. I find it is a great way to stay informed and also to cultivate ideas for gases and welding articles. Well today I stumbled upon an article that I found very interesting.

What CEOs really Want is the name of the article and Frank Kern wrote it for BusinessWeek. It touches on the one quality that American CEOs most commonly identified as important in a prospective job candidate. Surpriingly, it wasn’t work ethic, knowledge, assertiveness or people skills. It was creativity.

Here’s an excerpt from the article, which can be found here.

“There is compelling new evidence that CEOs’ priorities in this area are changing in important ways. According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value (NYSE: IBM – News), CEOs identify “creativity” as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.

Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude. It is consistent with the study’s other major finding: Global complexity is the foremost issue confronting these CEOs and their enterprises. The chief executives see a large gap between the level of complexity coming at them and their confidence that their enterprises are equipped to deal with it.”

So does that carry over to gases and welding? I would say it does. Not only do customers demand new, creative solutions, but you have to be creative to find new customers as well. What do all of you think? How important is creativity in your industry?

Let me know!

Good morning everyone. I hope your weeks were all outstanding. Before you head off for the weekend, I wanted to make sure all of you knew about the brand-new issue of GAWDA Edge that hit the Web yesterday. It’s a jam-packed issue with articles on several different topics that i think all of you will find relevant.
The cover story for the issue is about the new movie Iron Man 2. For those of you that didn’t know, Lincoln Electric was involved with the production of the movie and several of their machines are used throughout. I saw the movie for last week and it was outstanding. The welding and welding equipment was also featured rather prominently. Kudos to Lincoln for getting the industry out there for the public to see!

That’s not all that’s in this issue, though. It also features an article about creating accountability by Mike Scott. He was one of the recent GAWDA SMC’s most popular speakers. I didn’t get to hear him speak, but I’ve been told he was both “Awesome” and “Amazing.”

This issue also features a photo recap of the SMC that shows many of the association’s young executives in action. Combine that with a piece on spicing up a showroom and following up on a trade show and you’re left with a full issue. So please, take a minute to head over to http://www.gawdaedge.org and give it a look. Then, let me know what you think! Your feedback matters to me.

Have you seen it? I don’t know how many of my readers have taken the opportunity to check it out, but last week GAWDA launched a fantastic new website. The address is still the same, www.gawda.org, but almost everything else has been changed for the better.

The site is an eye-popping yellow page that integrates all the information you could ever need about the association with some of the best available website design and technology. Of course, all of the improvements and updates were designed with one thing in mind—making it easier for the GAWDA membership to participate in the association.

Aside from upgrading the overall look and layout of the page, several other changes were made to the site. For instance, it now features a “Get in the Game” section, the latest industry news headlines and a database of association members. The updated look of the site has bolder graphics and large menus that make the site more user-friendly. It also features more pictures of members and the latest industry news. So if you haven’t checked it out yet, head over to www.gawda.org and check out what your association is up to!

Technorati token: P8B97N3BP57F

Hello everyone, I apologize for the slow updates the last couple of weeks, but things have been very busy at the GAWDA Edge HQ. Fear not, though, busy is good and busy means that we’ve come up with some great content that the gases and welding industry should find very useful.

The next issue of the magazine comes out on May 20 and we just went into final production on it today. There’s one article in particular that I thought was pretty neat and I want to share it with you today. I don’t know how many of you have been to the theatre and seen “Iron Man 2” since its release last Thursday, but if you did , you certainly weren’t alone. It was #1 at the box office by more than $100 million over its closest challenger.

What you might not know is that GAWDA member Lincoln Electric Company received some serious screen time on the film. As fans of the franchise know, welding was featured several times. A little over a year ago, production began on Iron Man 2. The producers knew that they wanted to feature welding again, but they wanted to go about it differently. Instead of using the same welding machines that were used in the first film, they decided that something a little more high-tech was in order. Since they had a successful relationship with Lincoln from the first film, the producers gave the company a call. Lincoln suggested using an Electric Power Wave i400 welding power source and a FANUC ARC Mate 100iC robotic arm. The producers liked the idea and made the decision to move forward.

Of course, if a robotic welding arm was going to be used in the film, someone was going to have to program it. That’s where Brian Simons, a robotic programmer with Lincoln’s Automation Application Group, stepped in. “The company sent me to the set to help out with the programming,” says Simons. “In total, I spent about seven days on set over the course of two visits.”

Brian had some very neat experiences during filming and in the next issue of the magazine, we discuss them in depth. So be sure to stop by www.gawdaedge.org on Thursday, May 20 to check out what went down and also be sure to stop by your local theatre to check out your industry in action!

In case you haven’t checked it out yet, the April issue of GAWDA Edge is now available on the Web at www.gawdaedge.org. It’s got a “spring training” theme and is jam-packed with articles that will help you do your job better. One such article deals with the gases and welding industry’s constantly changing rules and regulations.

Much like Major League Baseball clubs have to manage an ever-changing rulebook, gases and welding distributors have a lot to keep up with. Unfortunately, in the industrial environment, there’s much more than just one committee to worry about. From the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to the Internal Revenue Service, regulatory bodies of all shapes and sizes are constantly updating and implementing procedures, regulations and mandates.

Ideally, it is incumbent upon management to make sure that employees understand and abide by these changing regulations. However, much like in baseball, each player or employee is ultimately responsible for his or her own compliance with the rules.

This article will help you do just that. So head on over to www.gawdaedge.org and check it out!

This morning I came into work and found a message in my inbox. It was from Bank of America. There had been failed attempts to access my account and they were going to shut it down indefinitely if I didn’t login within 48 hours to with the correct information. They even included links for me to do just that.

The message looked pretty good. It had a Bank of America letterhead as well as its legal information and several links to what it claimed was the Company Web site. However, after further inspection, there were a few problems with the message.

I’m always leery of “Phishing” so I relied on some time-test techniques to bust the “phishers.” First, I checked the e-mail address of the sender. If it was truly from B of A, it would have a B of A e-mail address. Of course, it didn’t. It was a generic yahoo.com address. That was red flag #1.

 After #1 I wanted to further confirm what I already knew to be true, so I hovered my mouse over the “B of A Web Site” link. Of course, it wasn’t a link to www.bankofamerica.com, it was a link to what was most likely a phishing site designed to look like the B of A site. I didn’t click it to find out. Red flag #2.

Of course, I really didn’t even need to investigate the e-mail because I noticed the biggest red flag of all the second I opened the e-mail. I don’t have a Bank of America Account!

So what’s the moral of the story? It’s not hype, there are people out there actively trying to steal your account information. It’s not just via e-mail either, phishers are all over social media sites. If you check out the March issue of GAWDA Edge, I’ve offered some advice for avoiding the traps.

Stay safe out there!

If you were busy last night celebrating one of the two holidays (opening night for Major League Baseball and Easter) with your family, you might have missed your industry getting some major publicity on CBS. Last night welding was featured prominently on the network’s hit show “Undercover Boss.”

 For those of you that aren’t familiar with the show’s premise, it features CEO’s of major corporations who infiltrate their own companies posing as entry-level employees. Typically, the episodes center on four or five employees who invariably have a touching story that they share with the CEO who is, of course, predictably moved by hearing them.  Then, at the end of the episode the CEO announces changes, promotions and the like based on what happened.

 So what does this have to do with welding? Well, I’m glad you asked! This week’s episode focused on RotoRooter. In one of the segments, the CEO of the company tried to learn how to weld. The results—not so nice. In an interview with the Des Moines Register, the welding instructor, Dan Nicholson, described the CEO’s welding ability “I had a real hard time teaching Hank how to weld. I told him that I had an easier time teaching my kids how to weld,” he said, adding that he taught his own brood when they were just 8 and 12 years old.

 Chock one up for the welders!

 To read more from the Des Moines Register, visit this page.

 Also, you can stream last night’s episode of Undercover Boss here. (The welding segment begins around the 27:00 mark)

It has been a busy day at the GAWDA Edge offices. I’ve been feverishly putting the finishing touches on the text for the next issue of the magazine. I just finished up and decided to share with you exactly what it is that I’ve been working on.

The April issue is going to be GAWDA’s “Spring Training” issue. It’s jam-packed with articles that will teach readers strategies for maximizing effectiveness and generally doing their jobs better.

There is an article on regulations and rule changes that every distributor should know. There is an article on maximizing you effectiveness and another on GAWDA’s many training opportunities. There is also a baseball-themed article by Jim Caple of ESPN fame that shows you what you can learn about co-workers at the company softball game.

It’s scheduled to hit the Web in two weeks, so be sure to head over to www.gawdaedge.org and check it out!

For today’s blog entry I wanted to take some time out to give a shout out to an underappreciated gas application—neon signs. They may not be as useful or as prevalent as they were a few decades ago during their heyday, but neon signs are an indelible piece of Americana.

 The signs are essentially glass tubes that are bent into specific shapes. Then, special machines draw out all of the air from the tubes and replace it with a specific noble gas to achieve the desired color. Argon glows blue, but it can be made purple by mixing it with phosphors, neon glows red and helium glows yellow.

After the gas is injected, the tubes are sealed with gas plugs. The plugs contain thin electrical wires that are connected to a power source and Voila! A sign is born. As an homage to all things neon, I found a picture of the country’s most famous neon sign.