Niles Schurle, product manager for large boats, stands out at Cobalt because of his degree in mechanical engineering. But Schurle, too, grew up on a Kansas farm, where at age 13 he had to overhaul the engine on his father's 1949 Frazer. Otherwise, he couldn't have played freshman football: He needed the car to drive himself home from practice, which he could legally do when he turned 14.
Schurle returned to the farm in his mind not long ago to help solve a nagging boat-building concern. He was unhappy with the standard industry method for ruling out potentially dangerous cracks between the engine compartment and the cabin, cracks that could conceivably allow carbon monoxide to collect in the cabin. Shining a light in the customary fashion, he realized, would catch only a line-of-sight flaw. What if a gap involved a jog?
"We'd never had a problem, but I wasn't satisfied," he says. "I wanted a better way of testing." One day he remembered starting the old diesel tractor on the farm inside a metal shed. On cold mornings, the old warhorse would belch thick black smoke until it warmed up. That smoke, Schurle recalled, used to leak out of the shed through small gaps in the sheet metal and rise skyward. He developed a smoke-based testing system for Cobalt, surely the only boatmaker inspired to excellence by an old farm tractor.
For Paxson St. Clair, the real story here, more important even than the engineering breakthrough, was Shurle's junkyard-dog pursuit of a better testing method -- in advance of any problem. "How often," asks St. Clair, "do company owners lament, 'If only I could get my people to think like me, think like an owner.' Or, 'If only I could clone myself, then the job would get done right.'
"Farmers are owners of their own businesses," he says. "They understand that things have to get done and get done right or you'll pay for it later. They have this sense of ownership because they've been there."
Not every company has the good sense to leverage the uncommon skills of a work force. Keith Launchbury, a consultant on manufacturing systems to scores of Fortune 500 companies, has spent three or four days a month at the Neodesha plant in the past two years. He's also consulted at companies that function much differently.
"A farmer," Launchbury says, "has to be an entrepreneur, a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of all trades as well: an engineer, a mechanic, a veterinarian, a biologist, an economist, a meteorologist." Too many companies in rural America and Canada, he believes, when fortunate enough to possess such workers, treat them like robots. "They ask them to check their brains when they come to work and pick them up when they go home. I worked with one company that hired farmland people as machine operators and said, 'Don't touch that dial, don't touch that switch' -- to a person who on the weekend is rebuilding an eight-year-old John Deere tractor engine. I think what Cobalt has done most successfully is harness the creativity and ingenuity of the people in that part of Kansas."
Jeff Wright heads Cobalt's metal shop and supervises 19 employees. He lives in an 1870 farmhouse, previously owned by his grandfather, on three acres of land -- an island, if you will, on several hundred acres of prairie he once farmed with his father, land now owned and farmed by someone else.
At Cobalt Wright has found a replacement for the creative problem solving of farm work. He tells of his father instructing him as a teenager to come up with a bale spear for a front-end loader and then disappearing. "That's like my job here in the metal shop," Wright says. "They want a set of bow rails for the new 343 model, say, they don't give me no drawings. Very seldom do I get an actual blueprint. They brought me the boat. I started bending the tubes, cutting the standoffs. There are some good challenges on the new boats -- but that's when it gets fun."
Driving home from the Cobalt metal shop, Jeff Wright often looks wistfully at a tractor plowing fields he used to plant and harvest.
Still, driving home after a day's work in the Cobalt metal shop, nearing his house, Wright often looks wistfully at a tractor plowing fields he used to plant and harvest. "It's especially hard in the spring when everyone is starting to work their ground, and again in July, harvest time for wheat. I get real homesick for it," he says. "I loved being outside, being my own boss, loved working the ground, smelling the dirt, loved the livestock."
Prairie farmers help each other. They all know what it is to battle unpredictable weather, contrary bankers, and malfunctioning machinery, and they think nothing of arriving unsolicited en masse to help get in the harvest should a neighbor take ill or suffer a debilitating accident. Help comes just as naturally on the factory floor. At Cobalt, observes hull designer Sean Callan, an extra pair of hands or point of view in problem solving is as close as the nearest co-worker. "We do very little team building training at Cobalt," Callan says. "It's not something we need to create."
Recently, Callan happened upon two workers arguing so vehemently he assumed one of them had stolen the other's wife or girlfriend. The dustup, however, proved entirely work-related. One assembler, a farmer, was making it clear he wasn't happy with some component. The other assembler, also a farmer, was a bit slow in seeing the light. But eventually the second assembler said, "You know what, that's not right. Give it back to me, I'll do it again."
"It amazes me how often I hear that: 'It's not right, I'm going to do it again," says Callan, who left a boat builder in Michigan to join Cobalt. "It's one thing to come to Kansas knowing Cobalt is a good company, another thing to actually see how much people really care."
They care so much that 200 or 300 of them drive down to the Tulsa boat show each year to stand proudly by the boats they fashion. "I like to see what everybody else's boats look like," says vinyl worker Joyce West, a 23-year Cobalt veteran. "You can see where the others leave jagged screw heads, and the paint lines aren't so good, and the caulking -- when we caulk it has to be a perfect bead. I know. I caulked."
West grew up on an 80-acre farm, helping with the chickens and hogs and the milking of 50 cows. "Our chores had to be done before we could do anything else," she says. "The livestock ate before you did, that was the rule. Some nights it was 10:30 before we had dinner. I had to grow up young and be responsible."
A person with a prairie resume can be a little tough on new workers. "You need to work a little faster," West will tell fresh hires, or "You need to make sure it's what you'd want to buy yourself." Just recalling such moments riles her up a bit. "I worked a lot of years to help get this built up and I don't want somebody coming in here and messing it up," she says. "We work hard every day to keep that. I feel like I do." I
