"My wife is very smart and knows the business," explains Tam, 50, at his crowded factory in Eagle Rock, outside downtown L.A. "This way we save money and control quality. The customers like to work with us."
As in the garment business, Asians are increasingly represented in the brain pool in California's huge high-tech industries. But perhaps more important than brainpower are the attitudes brought by the Asian immigrants. At a time of growing pessimism even in normally optimistic California, Asian-owned and -operated companies have been among the most aggressive about competing directly in the industrial sphere against companies from Japan and Southeast Asia. Solectron Corp., for instance, has emerged in recent years as one of the most important contract manufacturing operations in California, with a compound annual growth rate of 67% and 1990 sales of $205 million. Solectron, in San Jose, does the "dirty work" of high tech: the assembly and testing of printed circuit boards, the wiring of computers and disk drives -- work often disdained by Anglo-dominated corporations.
The ethnic element in the Silicon Valley culture is certainly not lost on Taiwan native Winston Chen, the company's 50-year-old chairman and CEO. Chen credits much of Solectron's success to the values of its mostly immigrant management and work force. "We have a lot of cultural assets here," Chen says, in his modest office. "It's not easy to manage this diversity -- we have Iranians, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese workers, and they all tend to be cliquish. But they work hard and attend to detail."
Chen maintains that those attitudes clash with the sort of mind-set that prevails at many companies in the valley, in which innovation is prized above all else. Frequently companies develop a great product and fill a niche but then fail to improve their quality and performance as others begin to attack their market. The result, he points out, has been a history of corporate supernovas that have shone brightly but briefly.
"They have a short-term mentality," asserts Chen, who has lived in Silicon Valley for about 15 years. "Our type of company is process-oriented. We are very humble -- we always want to learn and improve what we are doing."
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Attitudes like Chen's, Vinny Gupta believes, are more a reprise than a replacement of the national spirit that many suspect we lost long ago. "What we have found is the success formula for the next American revolution," Gupta says as he inspects a piece of company-built equipment in his Orrville foundry.
In the 1830s the Germans came to the area of northeastern Ohio that Gupta now calls home. Then the Irish came to build canals. By the 1880s immigrants had come from southern and southeastern Europe. And by the turn of the 20th century, those newcomers had helped transform the region into one of the world's industrial powerhouses.
Ferdinand Schumacher came from Hanover, Germany. His company, which eventually became The Quaker Oats Co., started manufacturing cereal during the Civil War, employing some immigrant labor. Other immigrants carried on that tradition. Led by Goodyear founder Frank Seiberling, himself the descendant of German immigrants, Akron emerged as the world center for the tire business and remained the headquarters for four of the world's five largest tire companies until as late as the mid-1960s. Other industries, such as printing, oil, and steel, all thrived, providing employment for thousands of European immigrants.
That dynamic entrepreneurial tradition was all but dead by the time Vinny Gupta arrived in the Rustbelt. The key businesses in the region, notes George Knepper, professor of history at the University of Akron and a leading expert on Ohio's industrial growth, had floated far from their original entrepreneurial moorings.
Today it is Gupta's ideas, more than those of the local corporate establishment, that seem most in keeping with the old values of midwestern industrialism. Gupta rarely purchases a machine if he can manage to build one in-house; recently he and his staff at Technocast fashioned their own sand-mixing machine, saving the company about $1 million. Gupta has also become adept at scavenging, traveling to liquidation sales to purchase fresh supplies of pig iron -- at 10¢ on the dollar -- and buying used furniture and equipment wherever possible.
Such an emphasis on frugality, says historian Knepper, would have been commonplace among Ohio businessmen of a century ago. "The old entrepreneurs," he says, "were guys who always knew how to make do."
Equally important, Gupta has brought back a sense of entrepreneurial control to a region that has seen generations of hierarchical management and, increasingly, absentee ownership. Gupta, like the early Ohio industrialists, works hands on; he habitually arrives on the job first and often leaves last. As he walks through his Canton facility, he seems well acquainted not only with all the key workers but with the details of their work as well.
That dedication, notes Technocast vice-president and general manager Gary Minor, rubs off on everyone from managers to line workers at the Orrville plant. Minor, who came to Ohio from the hill country of Kentucky, has spent three decades in the foundries and has never seen anything like Gupta's enthusiasm.
"The management now is part of the company. It makes a difference if Vinny gets here before you at 4 in the morning," the 51-year-old manager explains. "You don't have a president of the company sitting in his office and saying, 'Do this,' and, 'Do that.' It's an atmosphere where if there's a problem, you solve it -- even if you have to work 12 hours, you do it."
For his part, Gupta sees all that as merely upholding an American tradition. "It's nothing that hasn't been seen before," he says, walking through the dingy old expanse of the mid-19th-century plant. "Immigrants bring fresh thinking, yes, but we also bring back the orthodoxy, the attitudes that got this area going in the first place."
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