Ken Boyer joins the podcast to discuss his book, "The Electric Vehicle Revolution: Five Visionaries Leading the Change," which explores the transformative impact of electric vehicles on the automotive industry. He highlights the challenges and breakthroughs of key figures in the EV space, including Elon Musk and Mary Barra, as they navigate the shift toward a greener future. Ken emphasizes the importance of innovation and collaboration in overcoming obstacles faced by consumers and manufacturers alike. The conversation also delves into the historical context of electric vehicles and the potential for a sustainable automotive ecosystem. With a focus on visionary leadership, Ken aims to inspire listeners to consider the benefits of electric vehicles for both personal use and environmental impact.

The conversation with Ken delves into the profound shifts within the automotive industry, particularly as it transitions to electric vehicles (EVs). Ken shares personal anecdotes, including the invaluable advice received from a hospital leader about the importance of hard work and collaboration over being the smartest in the room. This principle has shaped his professional journey and informs his insights into the evolving landscape of the automotive market. He emphasizes the role of visionary leaders in this transformation, detailing how figures like Elon Musk and Mary Barra are shaping the future of EVs. Ken's recent book, 'The Electric Vehicle Revolution: Five Visionaries Leading the Change,' serves as a foundation for the discussion, highlighting how these leaders are not only driving innovation but also addressing the significant challenges associated with the widespread adoption of electric cars.

Ken elaborates on the key initiatives undertaken by these leaders, shedding light on Musk's groundbreaking approach to scaling production and Barra's commitment to a greener General Motors. He draws parallels between the current electric vehicle revolution and historical shifts in transportation, underscoring how societal acceptance and infrastructure development are critical to the success of EVs. The episode reveals an optimistic outlook on the future of electric vehicles, suggesting that while challenges exist, the momentum towards a sustainable automotive industry is undeniable. Ken's insights encourage listeners to reconsider their perceptions of electric vehicles and recognize the potential for innovation and growth in this sector.

Takeaways:

• Ken Boyer emphasizes that you don't need to be the smartest person in the room to succeed.
• Working hard, getting along with others, and asking good questions are vital traits.
• Elon Musk, while influential, was not the original founder of Tesla and faced many challenges.
• The electric vehicle revolution is still in its early stages, with many advancements ahead.
• Building the infrastructure for electric vehicles is as important as the vehicles themselves.
• The future of electric cars depends on consumer choice and acceptance, not just government push.

Links referenced in this episode:

• www.amazon.com
• www.barnesandnoble.com
• www.linkedin.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• VinFast
• General Motors
• Nestle
• Honda
• Shell Oil
• Monolith Materials

Well, we welcome Ken to the podcast.

How you doing today, Ken?

I'm doing great.

Thank you for having me.

Well, it's good to have you.

I'm looking forward to this conversation.

This is a really relevant topic in our day and time, so it should be a fun conversation.

Yeah.

So let's jump into it.

I like to ask my guest this question to kind of get you started.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Best piece of advice I've ever received.

Well, pretty simple, that you don't have to be the smartest person in the room.

You have to do three things.

You have to work hard, get along with people, and be reasonably intelligent.

You don't got to be the best at any of those.

You just don't have to be a jerk.

And you have to work pretty hard and try to be intelligent, ask good questions.

Oh, I love that.

That's really good.

And you remember where you got that advice from?

It was a leader of one of the hospitals at Ohio State University talking to some of our MBA students like 10, 12 years ago, and I borrowed it from them.

I've used it ever since.

I love that.

That's so cool.

I'm always curious of my guests.

If you think back in your life, who are some people in your life who served to either be an inspiration or a mentor for you?

You know, that's.

My parents were both academics.

I've been influenced by several different academics who advised me on my career.

Professor Roy Lewicki, Professor Peter Ward.

And I've had the opportunity to work with many, many different people in different business backgrounds to do research and to do teaching on supply chain management.

That is really neat.

I love that.

You know, you wrote this book.

I want to kind of get into with you today because that's why we really got you on here, because this is kind of one of those.

One of those books that you kind of is on the forefront of so many people's minds.

And I think it really was a big topic during the last election.

But the name of your book is the Electric Car, the Electric Vehicle Revolution.

Five Visionaries Leading the Change.

What inspired you to write this book?

Okay, well, first off, I'll give you a picture so you can see the book.

Oh, I love it.

Love the COVID.

Well, so as an academic, I get an opportunity to do a sabbatical every seven or eight years where you do a research project.

And I have a friend who was the founding provost of the university in Vietnam.

And so it started off as basically a good Reason to go to Vietnam and visit another country.

The founder.

So my book, the secondary title is Five Visionaries Leading the Charge.

So students of American or Vietnamese history will know that Nixon was essentially trying to bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Ages.

And so Vaughn grew up dirt poor, but made a huge mark.

He went to Moscow to study.

He was very smart, stem oriented.

And then he went to Ukraine after he graduated and starts a restaurant.

But he figures out he can't scale it real well.

So he buys noodle making equipment, builds a noodle making business and sells it to Nestle for $150 million in the late 90s, goes back to Vietnam, continues building things.

His biggest company is VIN Group, which does real estate, hotels, different ventures in that arena, but they've got all these different companies.

Vinai, Vin, vinmek, Vin Mart, VIN schools, Vin University.

They started the university, which my friend invited me to visit it.

Then they started a car company, Vin Fast.

Wow.

And Mr.

Bong went and hired Jim DeLuca, who was the head of all manufacturing for General Motors.

He gets a call from a recruiter who would not take no from an answer and talked him into moving to Vietnam for four years.

They built a car company from scratch.

They built an auto assembly plant east of Hanoi, 90 miles east of Hanoi that was on ocean floor reclaimed from the sea in 18 months.

In Western countries, you couldn't even get a permit to begin that construction in 18 months.

Right.

And Mr.

Vaughn decided we're going to go all electric and killed off the gasoline cars.

Now, that's either the dumbest decision in the history of mankind or the smartest.

I'm not a billionaire, so I'm not the one making it.

Right.

But today, VinFast is a company.

It's traded on American stock exchanges, on the nasdaq, I think, and it is in the business of making cars.

It's not excelling right now.

It's facing a lot of struggles.

But that's one of the companies that I profile in my book.

I'm curious, you picked five visionary leaders in your book.

Why did you pick those five?

Because, I mean, there's so many people you could have picked.

But what about those five attracted you to put them in the book and highlight them?

Well, I mean, the car the book is written to be about the electric vehicle revolution.

So Elon Musk is clearly one of the visionaries.

He proved the concept, made himself one of the richest people in the world.

What many people don't realize is he's only one of five co founders of Tesla.

The other four guys came first.

Martin Tarpenning, Mark Eberhard, ian Wright and J.B.

straubel.

And they had to sue Mr.

Musk to be named co founders.

What he did is he brought the money that he made from selling PayPal and he invested over half of his fortune in the early stages of Tesla.

So he has a controlling financial interest, so he's very willing to commit to this concept.

So he's clearly one of the visionaries.

He showed us that a world of electric was possible.

Okay, so now we're up to two, three visionaries we've covered.

Jim DeLuca of General Motors went to Vinfast, Pham Nafuang.

I may be off a year.

But first, CEO of a major car manufacturer, and she's led the company very well.

She dealt with a recall of Chevy Bolt batteries very well in the first three months of her presidency.

But she also made motions early in the process to start General Motors on a greener, more electric future.

So at this point, they have billions of dollars committed to investments, to going electric.

It's a struggle because in America there's some resistance to electric cars.

But General Motors broke records in quarter three.

Their sales went up year over year of electric vehicles by 60%.

Now, it's still a relatively small fraction of their cars, but they have made major investments because of the Inflation Reduction act passed by the Biden Administration.

Manufacturers have made something like $300 billion in investments in taking the world electric in America.

Right.

That's impressive.

So your book delves into breakthroughs, struggles, the broader implications of their work in automotive industry.

You also examine the green transformation into the global auto parts supply chain.

There are people who are, and I've heard this a lot, who are concerned about consumers adopting to the EV market.

How do you address those concerns that people may have about the EVs?

Well, several ways.

So I've got two chapters that are loosely tied to cars, but aren't exactly on cars.

One chapter is on power sources.

And so power sources is my attempt as a supply chain scholar to kind of understand where does the power in our world come from.

And Herb Simon, a Nobel winning economist, once said there are two primary things that Drive our economy, information and energy.

And we're in the midst of an energy transition.

So the cost of renewable power, and here we're talking largely wind and solar, has come way down so that new installations are cheaper.

Nuclear probably needs to be a part of it, but we need storage because the sun doesn't shine all the time, the wind doesn't blow all the time.

So there's all kinds of people doing research on battery chemistry, on improving how cars work.

And by the way, electric cars in general work better.

They have some problems.

But we've had 140 years to figure out internal combustion engine cars.

Right.

We're early in the first stages of the electric vehicle revolution.

So in my Power sources chapter, I examine battery research, range anxiety, how the cars work.

There again, major initiatives by both the federal and state government to install more chargers.

They had to carry their own gasoline because there were so few gas stations.

And there was an exponential number of gasoline cars.

So in this case, chicken and egg.

The egg was the gasoline station caught up to the cars.

Makes sense.

I think we're going to see much the same thing with electric cars.

I love that.

As you think about the market in front of us, what are some potential roadblocks to that?

You see, besides the charging stations to widespread EV adapt adoption?

Well, one of the things is people have to believe that they have a choice and that they're pulling toward this choice and they're not being pushed towards this choice.

I think you see part of that in the election.

There are a lot of incentives on the table for consumers to adopt these cars and for producers to make the cars.

But Americans like their freedoms.

So I think part of it is going to be giving it a few years for people to experiment, try the new cars.

There are over three dozen models of electric cars out this year and many, many are experiencing high sales.

Okay.

But it's important to do a worldwide comparison.

China, because of investments that are covered in chapter two of my book, the electric vehicle revolution is the gears of change.

China made a number of policy changes and things 20 years ago that promoted electric cars.

So China this year is on track to be 50% of the cars are electric vehicles.

Norway is on track to be 90%.

So people of the Gen X generation may know the band.

Aha.

The lead singer of A Ha in the 90s made it a personal crusade to encourage electric cars.

He built his own electric car.

He had a group of people, and they went around leading demonstrations and advocating for electric cars.

Norway again has put in a place a lot of policies where 90% of the cars are electric.

And part of what I talk about in my book is that Norway in some ways looks a lot like America.

It's spread out, it's cold.

The cars work there.

They can work.

So one of my concerns is that Americans ignore this revolution at their peril.

The rest of the world is going electric.

The Chinese certainly are going electric.

And no matter what President Trump does with tariffs, the cars are going to find their ways into America.

Another chapter in my book is on Honda, and I call Honda the nervous Giant.

Why?

It was already the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in the world, but it came and it built plants near my house In Ohio, about 45 miles northwest of me.

Today it has the world's biggest internal combustion engine plant in anna, Ohio.

Makes 11 million gasoline engines a year.

Wow.

They just introduced their first electric car earlier this year.

The prologue.

It's selling pretty well.

But guess what?

They also announced $11 billion of investment in Canada.

They've invested multiple billions of dollars.

They're building a battery plant south of Columbus.

The nervous giant is turning to be very good at electricity.

Now, it may take some years, but they're going to get there.

Yeah, it's impressive.

When there's a.

When there's a will, there's a way that we always say, right, exactly.

And I want to get the fifth visionary out.

It's.

It's again, another sort of shift in gears.

So I have a chapter on tires.

Many people don't realize that the first automobile tires were white.

That's why the Michelin man is white.

Oh, I didn't know that.

What turned black was a substance called carbon black, which is essentially soot.

It's burned off of petroleum and it's carbon, and it's mixed into tires.

It makes up 30% of the weight of every tire on the planet, of which we use 2 billion tires.

And it's very hard to recycle tires.

They're not great for the planet.

So my fifth visionary is Rob Hanson, who is one of the co founders of Monolith Materials.

So, long story short, Monolith is doing well in Nebraska.

It's been supported by government money from the Department of Energy loans.

It is getting ready to scale up for even higher mass production.

And it's doing good things for the environment and hiring people in a very red state with dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act.

Wow, that's impressive.

So we've covered a couple of things.

I'm curious from your research, what technological advancements in your book excite you the most?

Well, to be clear, I'm.

I have an engineering degree, but I haven't used in three decades.

Okay.

There are thousands if not millions of people around the world doing research on, on two things.

Battery storage, different forms of storing energy in cars and for power plants so we can use renewable energy.

I'll give you an example.

His name is John Bannister.

Goodenko.

He won a Nobel Prize for research.

His advisor was Enrico Fermi, who invented the first nuclear reaction.

Professor Goodenough did research on lithium ion batteries that made them much more powerful and able to do more things.

Forty years ago, he won the Nobel Prize.

Later in Life, at age 98, he was the oldest Nobel Prize winner.

Now, unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago.

And I don't think this is how you pronounce his name, but it's spelled good enough.

Do you think he was good enough to do that research?

Sounds like it.

He very much was.

So my point is in the theme of my book in the Electric Vehicle Revolution is that I think human beings are endlessly creative.

We come up with good ideas, but often the good ideas have some bad things that go with them.

What we need to do is then figure out how to mitigate the problems with the bad parts of the ideas we come up with.

If that makes sense.

It does.

We talked a little bit about the how it's not hasn't caught on so far in America.

If you were a salesman trying to convince Americans this is a really, really good investment or a good climate protecting event for the future, what would be your pitch to America?

Well, it's pretty simple.

First off, do what works for you.

The companies have to make products that are attractive to the customers, which I think the car companies now are making.

There are many very good options out there.

The second is it's got to be profitable.

So in my years of change, I've got three gears.

It's willingness to commit.

It's essentially marketing.

How are you trying to convince?

Who are you trying to convince to do what?

What levers are you using to do it?

How are you talking to these people?

Are you using government incentives and so on?

But the second gear is ability to profit.

Somebody's got to make money.

Somebody's got to pay for this stuff.

That's the financing.

And then the third gear is transforming supply networks.

We need to do more working together across different suppliers.

So here's an example.

Circular supply chains.

One of the things we need to do is figure out how to recycle all the lithium ion, cobalt, manganese.

There's a lot of metal ingredients that come out of the earth that take a toll when you're mining them.

Sure.

But there are many companies looking.

Two of them include Service Solutions and Life Cycle Redwood Materials.

At developing a way to recapture these car batteries at the end of life.

And I'll give you two competing examples.

One is lead acid batteries, which is the basic 12 volt battery that starts every car on the planet.

Almost all of them in the US Are recycled.

Hmm.

Why?

The industry got behind it and said, okay, I can't deal with 50 different versions, so we're going to adopt.

I think it was Massachusetts.

And almost every lead acid battery is recycled in the United States.

Now here's the crazy thing.

Most of them are shipped overseas for processing.

Why?

Because lead is bad for us.

And people figured out along the way that they could ship the batteries to other countries where human rights standards were lower.

So there's a lot of bad things associated with that.

Okay, so that's one example.

Second one is catalytic converters.

Almost every catalytic converter on every car in the developed world is recycled.

Why?

Because it's got rare earth metals that are very valuable.

So there's a profit incentive for this.

So if you capture the batteries or capture the catalytic converters, you can reclaim the valuable metals and it's profitable.

But that's Also why about 5% of catalytic converters are stolen each year by thieves who crawl up under your car and cut your catalytic converter.

Another good reason to go electric.

You don't need a catalytic converter in an electric car.

Makes sense.

I want to dig in a little bit deeper into some of your visionaries.

I'm curious because we've Heard a lot about Elon Musk.

I'm curious, what are some of the key initiatives that Musk introduced at Tesla that have significantly impacted the EV market?

I try to be a little careful here.

Elon Musk has clearly changed the world.

He's got a huge amount of influence.

Early in his career, he was, he was a second follower.

He was not the first mover on anything.

Like I said, he was one of five founders for Tesla.

He came along, saw it was a good idea.

He benefited from a lot of government largess.

There was a almost $500 million loan to Tesla 15 years ago from the Department of Energy to help them become successful.

He's partnered with China and had subsidies from China to build plants.

Musk law.

Tesla and Musk has benefited from laws in California that require car makers to make cleaner cars.

Other car makers can't do it.

So Tesla makes cars and then sells the credits to other car companies.

Okay, so again, Elon is brilliant.

That's when he was focused on making Tesla be able to make cars at scale.

And he was highly focused on Tesla at the time.

One of the things that I see today is he's not as focused.

He's got like seven different companies.

He's running X, he's running space X.

He's considering or being considered being on President Trump's cabinet.

This is not a man who's focused.

And no matter how good you are at something, you need some focus in your life.

That makes sense.

You mentioned Mary Barra and her how she's leading General Motors towards carbon neutrality.

What are some of the major initiatives that she has implemented?

I know you touched on a couple.

Well, so one of their goals is they, they developed a single platform, the Ultium battery that they were going to use for every one of their cars.

Now they're migrating away from that a little bit.

But if you think about it, it helps to be able to have sort of plug and play parts so that you don't have to do multiple things.

One of the things the legacy automakers are struggling with right now is different power trains.

So they have to make gasoline cars, electric cars.

If they're trying to do hybrid cars, and then plug in hybrid, that's four different powertrains.

So part of the thing that Mary Barr did is invest in battery research and has formed some partnerships with like Honda and some other manufacturers.

The Honda Prologue is actually built on a GM chassis.

So again, that goes to My gear of transforming the supply network is critically important.

Companies want to compete with each other, but they also have to figure out how to strategically help people help each other get across a finish line somewhere in the future.

This is an interesting topic and I'm curious.

I know when I did my book and I did my research, I always found some surprising and enlightening discoveries.

What did you find in research in this book that was most surprising to you?

The ability to build electric cars has been around forever.

There was never any certainty that we were going to be driving gasoline cars.

Why did we end up with gasoline cars?

Primarily because Henry Ford figured out how to make them on an assembly line with a system that could make them very cheap so that the average person, middle class person, could raise themselves up in the middle class and afford a car.

Okay, so my book is filled with stories of brilliant people who did brilliant things but had unintended consequences.

So for example, I'll ask you, have you ever heard of Marcus Samuel?

No, many people have not.

You've heard of John Rockefeller?

Yes.

Yes.

Marcus Samuel goes to Azerbaijan, Baku, which I think is now it's Azerbaijan, it's sort of the Middle East.

Biggest oil field in the world was putting out something like 20 million barrels a day.

So much oil that we at the point, at that point we didn't even know how to cap an oil well.

So there were just these vast oceans of oil.

The problem was that John D.

Rockefeller with Standard Oil had built monopoly and they used a strategy of cut to kill.

So they had basically cut down to size the Rothschild brothers, which were the bankers of Europe, very well off people, and they had reached an agreement that they were going to ship to Asia oil, which at the time wasn't even used in cars.

It was used for heating in lamps in tiny little tins like this big, 4 inches long by an inch high by 2 inches wide in a wooden ship.

So by now your listeners, your watchers can probably figure out what Marcus Samuel did.

He figured out how to build the first viable oil tanker and he hired a company out of Britain.

He put in a whole bunch of safeguards to make this ship very safe.

One of his brilliant moves was the president of the ship company was on the board of Lloyd's of London, because you wanted to be able to go through the Suez Canal and they didn't want a timber ship that might catch on fire going through the Suez Canal.

So he builds the ship, the Murex, which is another seashell.

And he became fabulously wealthy.

He was the founder of Shell Oil company.

He also got a knighthood because the British Navy had a battleship go ground in the Suez Canal and get stuck and along comes this oil tanker and pulls it off the bank.

And very embarrassing for the British Navy, but they gave him a nightlife because of it.

And we see again today.

We had a ship a year or so ago get stuck in the Suez Canal and block a lot of things.

The more things change, the more that they stay the same.

In some ways I love that.

So you hope people buy this book.

What do you hope, readers?

How do you hope they're influenced by the reading of this book?

Well, I hope it's a series of stories and again, I'll show you a picture so everybody can tell Electric Vehicle Revolution Five Visionaries.

And it's got many more stories in it of human beings are endlessly innovative.

They try new things, but in almost every new thing there is a bad thing and we figure out new things.

And so I'm an optimist in general, I believe the world can move towards better for people, for planet and profit.

I hope I've given some maps of ways that companies can move and people can move us towards better for our children, for our grandchildren, for our great, great greats.

I love that.

I love to ask my guest this question.

This is my second favorite question.

What do you want your legacy to be?

I would like to have a legacy where people said he asked a lot of questions, he talked to a lot of people and got them thinking about how to do things better.

I'd like my children, my students, to think of me as having tried to nudge some changes in the world.

That's impressive.

So where can people find your book the Electric Vehicle?

Five Visionaries Leading the Change.

Easy.

It's on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.

It's published by Roman and Littlefield.

You can find me on LinkedIn.

Ken Boyer, Ohio State University, Google me.

I'm easy to find.

I'm at that school that likes to beat up on Michigan.

So just look up Ken Boyer out of state and you should be able to find me somehow.

So Ken, as we wrap this up, what key takeaways do you want to leave with my audience from our conversation today?

1.

Don't prejudge consider looking at an electric vehicle.

There are some challenges, but again, we're in the early days.

We're in the first inning of at least a nine inning game.

Manufacturers have invested a lot of money in building out this network.

There are a lot of things that we can do that are better for us as consumers and better for the planet and better for people.

And I think buying an electric car is one of them.

They're fun to drive, by the way.

They accelerate very fast.

They've never driven one.

It looked like.

It looked like a lot of fun.

Zero to 60, faster than almost anything.

Wow.

Well, Ken, thank you so much for taking the time to do the research for this book to give us information.

And I love the fact that you focus on visionary leaders because I think leadership is how we get to the next step in our, in whatever our journey is.

But the fact you highlight them and kind of talk about the impact they've had and you help us to think about cars differently and EVs differently and the future differently.

So I appreciate the work you did to be on there and I appreciate you coming and sharing that with my audience.

I love, love talking with you, Keith.

So much fun.

Well, Ken, thanks so much.

And for those, my family is from Michigan, part of my family.

So I hope that Ohio State is kind to them a little bit this year.

Thanks so much, Ken.

Okay, so what's the schedule on producing this or whatnot?