Page 19: of Marine News Magazine (November 2020)

18 20

And Veth really jump-started us into long time, and it didn’t move much, a team and maintain your culture when diversifying away from oil and gas be- but now we’re starting to see it move. everything is remote? That is a chal- cause they had very little involvement Also, we’ve had a lot of retirements lenge. It’s meeting the things that we in it. We have product development in and some restructuring in the last six need to do strategically, but maybe not industrial and certainly developing the months during the pandemic, and being able to do it in the way we had hybrid and electri? cation product lines we don’t know how much longer the before where we can all sit around the for projects like Maid of the Mist and work from home model will continue. table and brainstorm. Working remote-

Great Lakes Towing. It’s easier to maintain a culture, and a ly and trying to team-build are things

The other thing we have to do is team, working in the same of? ce when that we weren’t talking about last year lower our cost structure and look at our you’ve had a chance to meet and get to when we presented our strategic plan, assets, whether it’s machine tools or fa- know colleagues in person. Can you re- but they are at the top of the list on our cilities, and determine whether they’re place the people that have retired, build plan to the board for December.

really adding value and if we can do

Two aluminum catamaran tourist ferries equipped with two VL-200 L-drives and without them. We’re opening a facility controls from Veth Propulsion by Twin Disc. The utilization of Veth’s high-ef? cient in Lufkin, Texas where our industrial electric driven thrusters powered from Li-ion batteries storing hydroelectric energy sourced from the gorge of the Niagara Falls, makes Maid of the Mist the ? rst zero business will be going after leaving Ra- emission all-electric passenger vessel in North America. cine, Wis., and we’re looking at selling our corporate headquarters here. With the work from home shift and some of the restructuring we’ve done, we have two other facilities in the immediate area, meaning we can consolidate.

ABB

We want to be a better performing company in both the top and the bot- tom of the cycle. And this cycle—the three-headed monster we touched on earlier—has been unlike anything we’ve seen. I would say it’s a combina- tion of the early ’80s and the Great

Depression. We’re rationalizing a lot of what we do and some of the para- digms that we’ve held and challenging them to see if we can operate differ- ently going forward.

And what would you count as your greatest challenge, and what are you doing to address it?

The greatest challenge is to stay up on the technology. It’s our greatest op- portunity and our greatest challenge to make sure we are one of the preferred partners in all of our markets, not just marine. As things go to electri? cation and hybridization, we aim to make sure that we are an integral part of that and a very reliable provider. These things are changing very quickly.

We’ve been talking about hybrid for a 19 www.marinelink.com MN