$1.50 an Hour in a Cornfield: How One CEO Detasseled His Way to Factory Standards

At age 11, the leader of the Global Electronics Association earned $1.50 an hour detasseling corn in western Illinois — and he says that summer job still drives how he builds industry standards today.

In a first-person essay, the association's chief executive describes walking corn rows for 10 to 12 hours a day in the dead of summer heat, pulling the feathery tassel off the top of each plant to prevent self-pollination and encourage cross-pollination. Workers wore long sleeves because dew-covered leaves could slice through exposed skin. He and his friends caught a school bus near the town square at 5:30 every morning, sack lunch and water jug in hand.

His hometown held maybe 10,000 people when Western Illinois University was in session. Raised by a single mom, he had to earn any spending money he wanted — "a deep and early seeded lesson in the value of work," he writes.

What does a cornfield have to do with electronics manufacturing?

Everything, by his account. A cornfield looks impossibly large from the head of the row, and so do the electronics industry's technical and legislative goals, with "seemingly endless agendas and implications that interconnect in very complex ways."

The field lesson: break the task down. "You tell yourself if you can go down and back 12 times, that gets you to lunch. You take it one tassel at a time. That's the only way to finish that row — and field."

He applied that mindset when a new wave of automation hit his member companies. Most plants ran a mix of equipment brands, each with its own software and protocol. Nobody bought everything from one vendor, so manufacturers paid for time-consuming, costly middleware to make the machines talk to each other.

The Global Electronics Association, which creates and implements technical standards used across electronics manufacturers, proposed a communications standard that would cut integration to roughly 20 hours of work. The Connected Factory Exchange, or CFX, was born.

How did a standard that drew one company reach 200?

The launch flopped. The initial "Let's detassel this whole cornfield!" ambition "landed with a thud," especially among suppliers that wanted to keep selling their own software solutions. The first meeting attracted a single company.

Then one OEM fell in love with CFX — the first tassel in hand. The association worked down the row one industry player at a time. Two years later, 200 companies gathered in one room to put the finishing touches on the standard they had built together.

The payoff was concrete: CFX was practically free, manufacturers could connect all of their equipment regardless of brand, and equipment providers could still layer in their own innovations.

Why does the CEO insist on fun at work?

The second cornfield lesson: "you can always have fun. I pretty much insist on it."

The detasseling work was grueling and mind-numbing, but workers stood close enough to hear each other. He and his friend Randy, both big Steve Martin fans, got down their rows by trading lines from Martin's routines and cracking each other up. They memorized every routine on Martin's early comedy albums — the writer doesn't claim to have become a great detasseler.

That habit survives in the association's leadership meetings. When someone mentioned they always have a song pop into their head fitting the situation, the room caught on — "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones came up. Now it's traditional. "Someone will always pipe up, 'So what song are we in?'" he writes. It energizes the team when momentum flags and breaks the ice in tense moments.

The stakes are real: the association's government-affairs work can help determine whether companies succeed or fail, whether natural resources are protected for future generations, and whether decent jobs exist. He takes the mission seriously and says his team takes it personally, too.

His closing formula is plain: "Break the impossible task down until it's just the next tassel, the next conversation — and have fun while you're doing it." Those two ideas, figured out by an 11-year-old over a summer of blistered hands and "Wild and Crazy Guy" bits, built a career — and, he hopes, meaningful progress for an industry that other sectors depend on.