I’ve been reading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets for most of my adult life. My relationship to it has evolved the way great long friendships do. There are years I stay in touch and years I drift away. When I come back, the poem hasn’t changed, but I have. Different passages come in and out of focus depending on where I am in my life and the day I am reading. A line near the end of “Little Gidding,” the last of the quartets, summarizes this sustained experience of the poem itself: We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.
When I was first invited to join what would become the Strategic Networking Leadership Forum (SNL)—then in its earliest meetings as the Future Leaders Council—I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. I was a relatively new face in the association, still finding my footing in a room full of other young owners and executives, eager to learn from each other. But I showed up, and that decision changed the trajectory of my involvement with this organization in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.
Most gearbox repair follows a familiar sequence. A unit shows up damaged, the shop measures what’s worn, makes replacement parts, reassembles, and ships it back. Scott Franks, P.E., spent decades inside that world at Lufkin Industries and came to believe it wasn’t enough.
One of my favorite events each year is the Car Training Institute (CTI) Symposium USA in Novi, MI. The program brings together engineers to discuss and debate the current state of the North American automotive market from a powertrain, transmission, and electrification perspective.
The Motion + Power Manufacturers Alliance (MPMA) has released AGMA 948-A26, Electrified Vehicle Drivetrains, a comprehensive design guidance document for engineers developing geartrains and mechanical systems for hybrid, battery-electric, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Approved by the MPMA Board of Directors on April 23, 2026, it marks a significant milestone as the industry navigates one of the most consequential transitions in vehicle engineering.
Humanoid robots, eVTOL aircraft, and additive manufacturing at production scale. Each of these technologies will create real demand for precision gears and bearings, and real disruption for the manufacturers who supply them. The question is whether our industry helps shape that transition or reacts to it afterward.
In the third century BCE, the Greek geometer Apollonius of Perga asked: How many circles can be drawn to touch three given circles, each at exactly one point? He answered it in his treatise Tangencies, concluding there are exactly eight distinct solutions to a single geometric constraint. The original text was lost, though a fourth-century report by Pappus of Alexandria preserved the result. When François Viète reconstructed the proof in the 1590s, the answer held. The problem endured not because it was abstract, but because it showed how much order hides inside a simple arrangement of curves.
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