LEOMA and the US Laser Industry E-Book

C. Breck Hitz

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 325

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This book describes the approaches, both successful and not, to the political and infrastructure issues addressed by the trade association. The intent is to provide guidance to those confronting similar issues, and help them avoid unsuccessful approaches. * Includes end-of-chapter summaries * Example of documents and approaches that LEOMA used successfully are included and could serve as a guide to other trade associations. * Chapter 5 includes figures presenting the unique and effective graphical approach that LEOMA use to improve US national-security export controls

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Chapter 1: LEOMA and the U.S. Laser Industry

The Benefit of Hindsight

Chapter 2: Professional Societies and the Photonics Community

OPTCON

CPO

Chapter 3: International Laser Standards

The Benefit of Hindsight

Chapter 4: Educational Issues

Yuba College

Irvine Valley College

San José City College

The Benefit of Hindsight

Chapter 5: Export Controls

COCOM

Wassenaar

The Benefit of Hindsight

Chapter 6: The Federal Government

The Benefit of Hindsight

Chapter 7: Intra-Industry Affairs

The LEOMA Executive Seminar

The LEOMA Economic Survey

The LEOMA Compensation Survey

The LEOMA Human Relations Seminar

The Alternative Dispute—Resolution Agreement

The Benefit of Hindsight

Appendix 1: LEOMA Officers

Appendix 2: ISO Laser Standards

Appendix 3: LEOMA Executive Seminars

Appendix 4: The LEOMA ADR Agreement

The Laser and Electro-Optics Manufacturers' Association

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Table 1.1

Table 1.2

Table 2.1

Table 2.2

Table 3.1

Table 4.1

Table 5.1

Table 5.2

Table 6.1

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

Figure 1.4

Figure 1.5

Figure 1.6

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2

Figure 2.3

Figure 2.4

Figure 2.5

Figure 2.6

Figure 3.1

Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2

Figure 4.3

Figure 5.1

Figure 5.2

Figure 6.1

Figure 6.2

Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

Figure 7.3

Figure 7.4

Figure 7.5

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Chapter 1

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LEOMA and the US Laser Industry

The Good and Bad Moves for Trade Associations in Emerging High-Tech Industries

C. Breck Hitz

Copyright © 2015 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. All rights reserved

Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN: 978-1-118-01024-2

Preface

As its title suggests, this book examines some of the issues that confront a trade association representing a newly developed high-technology industry. In the late 1980s, the US laser industry had sales approaching a billion dollars, but was lacking any form of internal cohesion. Perhaps there will be emerging industries with those characteristics in the second and third decade of the 21st century, and hopefully this book will be helpful to those seeking to guide those industries.

For the U.S. laser industry in 1987, the stimulus was the sudden appearance of several challenges that demanded a coherent response for all the companies involved. The Laser and Electro-Optics Manufacturers' Association (LEOMA) was created, and was mostly successful in addressing those issues. This book describes those issues and how they were addressed, and continues to tell how the lack of subsequent, pressing issues ultimately led to LEOMA's dissolution.

In creating this narrative, it has been advantageous to have worked from the same office—an office with something over 100 ft of bookshelves—for a quarter century. Everything is still here. All the old LEOMA newsletters, all the minutes from LEOMA Board meetings, all the agendas from laser standards committees, all the minutes from conference steering-committee meetings…there is even a DOS 1.0 manual on those shelves somewhere.

And it is a good thing those old documents are still available, because the human memory is not a particularly reliable mechanism. In reviewing my notes and memoranda, I discovered that in 1989 I attended a three-day meeting of officials from State, Defense, and Commerce in Albuquerque. The meeting had been precipitated by LEOMA's lobbying for reform of export controls, and apparently it was pivotal to achieving the successful reform described in Chapter 5. I have absolutely no recollection of that meeting. Had I not recently read my own notes from that meeting, I would have denied that it ever took place.

A reviewer of the manuscript for this book complained that the first chapter gives away the ending. Indeed, it does. In fact, I guess I gave away the ending in the second paragraph of this preface. The first chapter gives a bird's-eye overview of LEOMA and its activities. Each of the subsequent chapters examines more closely one of those activities. My hope is that the entire book will serve as an accurate record of this small part of U.S. business history.

C. Breck Hitz

1LEOMA and the U.S. Laser Industry

Trade associations are funny things. They bring together companies of different sizes and shapes to address common issues. But unlike political parties or social networks, whose members also address common issues, trade associations bring together entities that not only compete with each other, but also often dislike and even distrust each other. Andrew Procassini, the long time executive director of the Semiconductor Industry Association, titled his book1Competitors in Alliance, and that is exactly what a trade association is: an uneasy, awkward alliance of often-fierce competitors.

The U.S. laser industry has historically been very competitive. The second major laser company created in the United States, Coherent—or “Coherent Radiation Labs” in those days—was formed in 1966 when Jim Hobart parted ways with the first company, Spectra-Physics, and set up his own shop developing and manufacturing carbon dioxide lasers. The personal animosity between Hobart and one of Spectra-Physics' founders, Herb Dwight, flavored the industry for many years.2

Nonetheless, by the early 1980s, several issues were emerging that underlined the need for a trade association among U.S. laser manufacturers. Industry leaders were mulling over the logistics of launching some sort of trade association. A 1983 editorial3 in Lasers & Applications magazine—at that time one of the leading trade publications in the industry—explicitly called for the creation of a trade association, citing several pressing issues.

Highest on the Lasers & Applications list was the need to disseminate information about lasers to the nation's manufacturing base. Although lasers could perform many tasks better than conventional tools, manufacturers in general were reluctant to adopt lasers because they were too unknown and unproven. A trade association could be more effective in moving laser techniques into widespread use than a loose and uncoordinated collection of manufacturers, each hawking its own products and often denigrating the products of its competitors.

Export controls, imposed on lasers because they have military as well as civilian applications, were a major hindrance to the growth of international sales in the 1980s. Individual companies lacked the resources required to launch a major revision of those controls, but a trade association, supported by the entire industry, might undertake such a task.

Legal matters and litigation were another important issue. Although the laser was invented in 1960, the U.S. Patent Office issued several basic patents two decades later. Attorneys for Gordon Gould, the inventor who had been awarded the patents, initiated a lawsuit against a small company, General Photonics. Burt Bernard, the president of that company, gave up in despair because he lacked the finances to mount a plausible defense. The lawsuit succeeded and General Photonics went out of business. Armed with that victory, the attorneys took aim at other lasermakers. “A laser trade association might facilitate a more equitable settlement of this dispute,” Lasers & Applications said, “than the individual skirmishes now taking place.”

Many trade associations act as spokesmen for their industries to the U.S. government, and here again a trade association could amplify the voice of the laser industry in matters ranging from safety and education to taxation and regulation.

At about the same time the Lasers & Applications editorial was published, one of the industry's professional societies, the Laser Institute of America (LIA), formed a subcommittee, christened the Laser Industry Council (LIC), to address industry concerns. One of the subcommittee's early meetings was held at the California home of Milton Chang (see Figure 1.1), then president of Newport Corporation. Glenn Sherman (see Figure 1.2), who was president of Laser Power Optics and was beholden to Chang for his investment in Laser Power, was invited (“summoned” was the word Sherman used, chuckling, as he described events to me recently) to the meeting. When Sherman arrived, he was met by several key LIC players, including Dean Hodges of Newport and Dale Crane of Uniphase, who congratulated him on being the new president of the Laser Industry Council.

Figure 1.1 Several of the earliest organization meetings that led to the creation of the Laser Association of America, and ultimately LEOMA, took place in Milton Chang's house.

Figure 1.2 Glenn Sherman—shown here at the groundbreaking for his new company, Laser Power Optics—was the LAA's first president.

“It reminded me of the old joke about the sergeant asking for volunteers,” Sherman told me. “Everybody but the new recruit took a step backward.”

But Sherman took his new responsibility seriously, recalled Jerry Glen, who was the LIA's technical director at the time. There were many meetings at Chang's house, Glen told me, including one that lasted a whole weekend. One of Sherman's first tasks was to increase the membership beyond the few initial members. He realized that the LIC would never get any traction without the presence of the two industry giants, Spectra-Physics and Coherent. But the animosity between those two companies' leaders—Herb Dwight at Spectra and Jim Hobart at Coherent—seemed to preclude their working together within any organization.

Sherman's solution to this contretemps was to appeal to Coherent's second-in-command, Hank Gauthier (see Figure 1.3). There was no animosity between Gauthier and Dwight, and in fact Dwight had attempted to recruit Gauthier to Spectra years earlier, before Gauthier had joined Coherent. Gauthier liked the idea of an industry association, he recalled recently, because it could enhance the industry in general. “I always thought you had to develop markets first, market share second.”

Figure 1.3 Hank Gauthier's decision to have Coherent join the LIC was critical in getting the organization started.

And Gauthier had no problem convincing Hobart, his boss, of the merits of the LIC. “Hobart could care less,” he recalled. His boss's entire focus was on the technical development of new products; he wasn't interested in political issues like government regulations and trade associations.

Gauthier's concluding that an industry association could be more effective than individual companies at achieving needed reforms closed the deal, Sherman told me. Coherent joined the LIC, as did Spectra-Physics, and the LIC had achieved critical mass.

But the LIC faced obstacles in addressing industry problems because the LIA's status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit prohibited lobbying or grassroots political activity, which is precisely what the LIC needed to do. At an LIC meeting in Los Angeles in January 1985, Moe Levitt, the publisher of Laser Focus magazine, and Dave Belforte of Belforte Associates argued that the LIC ought to separate from the LIA and become an independent 501(c)(6) nonprofit, whose political activities would not be restricted.

I was on the LIA Board of Trustees in 1985, and I recall a particularly stormy board meeting at the CLEO conference in Baltimore in May of that year. Milton Chang was LIA's president, and he and Hank Gauthier, another LIA board member, were in support of a motion to dissolve the LIC and create a separate entity, a 501(c)(6) nonprofit, in its place. The new corporation would not be hamstrung by the LIA's restriction on lobbying and other activities. It was a contentious issue, and several board members were strongly opposed to the concept because it would diminish LIA's involvement with the laser industry.

The LIA board meeting was simultaneous with the conference reception that evening, and it was deemed politically unwise for the entire board to skip the reception. So in the middle of the LIC debate, the meeting was suspended for an hour so that the participants could put in an appearance at the reception. When the board reconvened, the mood was mellower (wine and beer had been available at the reception) and the opposition to dissolving the LIC had lessened. The board approved the creation of a new entity, the Laser Association of America (LAA), which would apply to the IRS for 501(c)(6) nonprofit status. The LAA's initial officers were Glenn Sherman of Laser Power Optics as president, Ron Kirschner of the Institute of Applied Laser Surgery as secretary, and Kathy Laakmann of Laakmann Electro-Optics as treasurer. There were 16 founding members (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Founding Members of the Laser Association of America

Apollo Lasers

Burleigh Instruments

Coherent

EG&G

Institute of Applied Laser Surgery

Laakmann Electro-Optics

Laser Focus

Laser Mechanisms

Laser Power Optics

Lasers & Applications

Laurin Publishing

Newport

Oriel

Quantronix

Spectra-Physics

Uniphase

In 1986, I was executive editor and a partial owner of Lasers & Applications magazine—which by that time had changed its name to Lasers & Optronics—and my colleagues and I were entertaining offers to sell the magazine. (We completed the sale a year later, and the entire editorial staff departed.) I was teaching my course, Understanding Laser Technology, frequently at laser companies, and working on several consulting contracts. But I was intensely aware of the LAA and its activities, and it seemed to me that it was floundering for lack of manpower. The all-volunteer LAA Board of Trustees, composed of people who all had full-time jobs running companies, lacked the time to effectively address all the issues on the table. Glenn Sherman, whose multiyear presidency began with the LIC and continued to the LAA, devoted so much time to that undertaking that his company suffered from his absence, he recalled in a recent conversation.

In August 1986, I phoned Jon Tompkins, an LAA board member whom I knew well from my years at Lasers & Applications and Laser Focus, and asked what he would think of my serving as part-time, paid staff for LAA. “Very positive,” Tompkins responded. And that conversation marked the beginning of an undertaking that would occupy the next 20 years of my professional career.

My previous commitments to teaching and consulting prevented my starting at LAA before June 1987, and even then I had to restrict my involvement to half time. But at its January meeting that year, the LAA unanimously approved my appointment as executive director and raised dues significantly to cover the new expense. For large companies, annual membership went from $1200 to $5000, and for small companies, from $300 to $500, where “large” and “small” were defined as over $20 million in annual sales and under $600,000, respectively. Dues for companies between those extremes were raised similarly.

Probably the most-pressing issue for laser companies in early 1987 was the Gordon Gould laser patents. A decade earlier—but almost two decades after the laser had been invented—the U.S. Patent Office awarded two fundamental laser patents to an inventor named Gordon Gould. During the early years of the laser industry—the 1960s and 1970s—companies had been paying modest royalties to a patent held by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes, who had filed their claim in July 1958. Gould filed a claim in April 1959, which had been denied due to the earlier claim by Schawlow and Townes. But Gould pressed his claim, arguing that his notebook entries predated the work by Schawlow and Townes, and in 1977 the Patent Office awarded Gould a patent on optical pumping, one of two primary methods of energizing a laser. In 1979, the Patent Office awarded Gould a second patent, the so-called “use” patent, which covered virtually every use that a laser could be put to. Moreover, Gould had additional patents pending on collisional pumping—the other primary method of energizing lasers—and Brewster windows, a crucial optical element in many lasers.

During the ensuing years, battles raged over the laser patents, with the Patent Office reexamining the original Gould patents and countless appeals launched in courtrooms across the country. The stakes were huge: Gould and his associates demanded much larger royalties than had been paid on the original Schawlow–Townes patent, and laser companies' sales were many times greater than they had been in the early years.

Then, on July 11, 1986, a federal judge directed the Patent Office to issue Gould a patent on collisional pumping, raising the stakes for laser manufacturers even higher. And in November of the same year, the Patent Office Board of Appeals validated Gould's original patent on optical pumping, but rejected the “use” patent. Gould and his associates appealed the rejection, and launched a major effort to enforce the optical pumping patent.

So in January 1987, the members of the Laser Association of America were extremely concerned about the Gould patents. Richard Samuel, the president of Gould's patent-holding company, Patlex, addressed the April 1987 meeting of the LAA board, arguing that the years of legal battling were coming to an end, and advising the companies to accept the fact that they would soon be paying significant royalties to Gould.

There was talk of banding together under LAA to negotiate more favorable terms than could be obtained by individual companies. But the reality was that it was too late. In July 1987, the first major laser manufacturer—Lumonics, a Canadian company—signed an agreement with Gould and his associates to pay royalties on optically pumped lasers sold in the United States.

Another blow landed in August 1987, when the Patent Office announced it would not appeal the earlier court decision to authorize the issuance of the collisional pumping patent. Between the collisional pumping and optical pumping patents, Gould and associates now held patent rights on the vast majority of lasers manufactured in the United States.

Other companies began signing agreements to honor the Gould patents: Kodak, Amdahl, Chrysler, EverReady, and Union Carbide. And in a stunning development in December 1987, a major laser manufacturer—Control Laser of Orlando, Florida—lost the patent-infringement suit Gould and associates had brought against the company years earlier. Gould and his associates wound up with 54% of the company's stock, effectively taking control of the company.

Historians may never decide whether the Gould patents were truly appropriate.4 But by the time LAA could begin addressing the issue, it was already too late to have any effect. The momentum against the industry was too great, and by August 1987, the LAA agreed that its only role would be educating the industry about the patents. At an industry-wide conference in January 1988, LAA organized a seminar for companies where speakers discussed the inevitability of the Gould patents. During the ensuing months, virtually all the U.S. laser companies signed agreements honoring the Gould patents.

But the Gould patents were not the only issue facing the U.S. laser industry in 1987. Export controls, imposed by the government in the name of national security, were burdening the industry with tens of thousands of dollars in administrative costs, and were making U.S. lasermakers less competitive in the international market. Export controls had been a seminal issue in the formation of LIC, and were high on the priority list of the LAA in 1987. Chapter 5 is devoted to the industry's largely successful efforts over two decades to reform U.S. export controls on lasers and optics.

“Conference proliferation” was the catchphrase for the second major concern of laser and electro-optics manufacturers in 1987. As the number of universities and laboratories doing laser research grew, and as applications for lasers expanded, each of the laser-related professional societies expanded its conference schedule. Manufacturers felt compelled to participate in all the exhibitions held in conjunction with these conferences, lest an absence would be seen by potential customers as an indication of diminished competitiveness.

A single exhibition can cost a company tens of thousands of dollars in terms of personnel costs and shipping fees. From the manufacturers' perspective, it was far better to have a few large conferences/exhibitions in a year, than to have many small ones. But the trend was exactly the opposite: Each of the four professional societies was launching new, initially small conferences addressing different topics. Participation in all these exhibitions became a major expense in companies' annual budgets. Chapter 2 relates the tale of industry's dubious attempt during the next several years to alleviate this problem by consolidating many small conferences into one big conference.

But before either of these issues could be tackled, LAA membership had to be increased, and I was directed by the LAA board in June 1987 to make recruiting my first priority. Brochures were designed and printed, and board members were tasked to visit or telephone CEOs of nonmember companies to twist arms. And the promise of addressing two of the most pressing issues the industry faced was a potent recruiting argument. By the end of 1987, more than two dozen companies had joined the 16 LAA founders (Table 1.2).

Table 1.2 More Than Two Dozen New Companies Had Joined LAA by the End of 1987

Allied

Cascade Optical

Codman & Shurtleff

Continental Laser

Cryogenic Rare Gas

CVD Inc.

Diaguide

Directed Energy

ESI Inc.

Ferranti Electric

Image Engineering

KEI Laser

Kontes Glass

Koppers Co.

Labsphere

Laser Alignment

Laser Corp of America

Laser Machining

Laser Photonics

Laser Science

Lasermetrics

Liconix

Lumonics

Melles Griot

MIRA Inc.

Omnichrome

Quantrad

S.E. Huffman

Synrad

Questek

Two-Six

Wilson Ventures

XMR Inc.

By January 1988, I was able to increase my involvement to three-quarters time, and devoted my efforts to the three major LIC projects that year: recruiting, reform of export controls, and reduction of “conference proliferation.” Members of the board were also heavily involved. John Wheeler, of Melles Griot, was named recruiting chair, and at the April 1988 LAA board meeting, set the goal of recruiting 25 new members, representing at least $25,000 in new revenue, during the year. By June, we had nearly a dozen new members, but after that the recruiting effort began to saturate. Five additional companies had signed up by the end of the year. LAA membership now comprised more than 60 companies, and several LAA board members calculated that LAA members manufactured at least 93% of the lasers manufactured in the United States.

Other LAA board members were taking a longer-term view, speculating on other projects the LAA might address after export controls and conference proliferation had been settled. A long-range planning committee was created, with Dean Hodges (see Figure 1.4) of Newport as its chair. The committee initiated a poll of members, asking about the industry's most-pressing needs. The potential project receiving the most positive response was a compilation of market data, so that companies could have a better perspective of the marketplace they served.5

Figure 1.4 Dean Hodges was instrumental in LEOMA's creation and in guiding it through many undertakings.

Taking over from Jon Tompkins as LAA's president in 1989, Hodges convinced the board that the LAA should not limit its focus to lasermakers, but should also include a broad swath of companies involved in lasers and electro-optics. A new name was needed to emphasize the LAA's broader purpose.6 After considerable discussion and a vote of the membership, the LAA renamed itself as the Laser and Electro-Optics Manufacturers' Association—LEOMA—at the June 1989 board meeting. Shortly thereafter, the charter was expanded to include “North American” laser and electro-optics companies, rather than U.S. companies.

As described in other chapters, the work with conference proliferation and export controls was moving rapidly. But all the time and travel associated with these projects was expensive, and the LEOMA found itself running out of money. For the fiscal year that ended in March 1989, we had spent nearly $80,000, but revenue from dues had been only $60,000.7 LEOMA's reserves were shrinking at an alarming rate. Another issue, articulated by Mark Dowley of Liconix with the support of many smaller members, was the “nonlinearity” of the dues structure. While the absolute value of dues paid by larger companies was larger, smaller companies' dues represented a significantly larger percentage of their sales.

Treasurer Bob Gelber of Coherent proposed a major revision of the LEOMA's dues structure, which previously topped out at $5000 annual dues for companies with sales in excess of $20 million. But several companies—including Gelber's—had sales significantly in excess of $20 million. Under Gelber's plan, companies at the large end of the revenue spectrum, those with revenues in excess of $200 million, would see their dues increase 160%, to $13,000. At the lower end, the dues increase would be far less, only 10% for companies whose revenues were less than $6 million. From the entire membership, there was only one vote against Gelber's proposal, which went into effect in the summer of 1989. Although the structure still was not linear—dues for smaller members still represented a larger percentage of their sales—it was closer to linear than it had been. Dale Crane, the founder of Uniphase, was LEOMA's president-elect that year. In a recent interview, he reflected on the size disparity between the two largest companies and the rest of the industry. “If [the dues] had been truly linear, Spectra-Physics and Coherent would have been paying for everything and the rest of us would have been coasting along for free.”

And even as LEOMA was making headway with conference proliferation and export controls, another potential problem for the industry presented itself: “Europe 1992.” The European Union was being formed, and along with a host of economic reforms, the Europeans were creating continent-wide standards organizations that would create standards for everything from automotive safety to screw sizes and included in the mix were new standards on lasers, laser optics, and other laser accessories. The industry viewed these new standards with alarm, and the LEOMA board was quick to add this issue to their association's agenda.

Initially, in the LEOMA board's view, the most efficient course would be to retain an attorney in Brussels, the seat of the European Union, to represent the U.S. laser and electro-optics industry in all matters European. That was an expense not anticipated in LEOMA's budget, but the LEOMA board viewed it as crucial. To cover the additional cost, the board passed a voluntary “standards assessment,” effectively doubling the dues of those companies that agreed to participate. All the larger members did participate, and I was sent to Brussels, where I interviewed several attorneys who were eager to add LEOMA to their list of frightened U.S. clients.

But even as the LEOMA board was considering their various proposals, we were becoming more involved with the international standards bodies, the International Organization for Standards (ISO),8 and the International Electrotechnical Committee (IEC).

Chapter 3 describes LEOMA's successful efforts during the ensuing decade—and beyond—to influence the evolution of international laser standards.

The LEOMA board still identified recruiting as one of the association's most important activities. At the urging of LEOMA's 1990 president, Dale Crane of Uniphase, the LEOMA board members agreed in May 1990 to launch a major effort to recruit larger companies that use lasers, companies like HP, IBM, and others. These companies, the reasoning went, would be concerned with laser standards and export controls because they used so many lasers. A committee of past LEOMA presidents was tasked to design a plan for approaching these companies.

But at the next LEOMA board meeting, the past presidents reported that they were unable to design a viable plan for reaching these large companies. True, such companies may have been huge laser users, and they may even have been concerned with laser standards and export controls. But from their perspective, they wielded more political power by themselves than all of LEOMA put together could muster. They saw no benefit in joining LEOMA. “I can imagine the futility of that [recruiting] effort…now,” Crane mused in a recent interview. But at the time, he and everybody else associated with LEOMA were intent on evaluating every growth mode possible.

At about the same time, LEOMA experienced another disappointing recruiting effort with a group of companies that manufactured laser machine tools. These tools are large instruments that use lasers to cut, weld, and otherwise process metals and other materials in automotive manufacturing and other heavy industries. The manufacturers of these tools wanted to have a trade association, and contacted LEOMA seeking information on how LEOMA might meet their needs. The board agreed that LEOMA could form a special section for these companies, and dispatched me to Chicago to deliver LEOMA's pitch at a conference of machine-tool builders.

But LEOMA's projects—standards, export controls, and conference proliferation—were not aligned with these companies' needs. They were interested in knowing how their products could penetrate an existing market that for decades had used conventional, non-laser, techniques for heavy manufacturing. Despite my assertion in the Lasers & Applications editorial nearly a decade earlier, this was not something with which LEOMA could help. I returned from Chicago empty handed.

Despite these recruiting disappointments, LEOMA was making substantial progress in its other projects. There was light at the end of the tunnels—or at least the end of the tunnel was in view, in the case of conference proliferation. Flush with these successes, the board began considering what challenges LEOMA could take on next.

The long-range planning committee put forth several ideas, including a market survey and enhancing the industry's interface with the federal government. Enhanced worker training was also discussed. But all these lacked the immediate urgency of the issues that had precipitated LEOMA's creation in the first place.

In September 1991, several members of the board and I visited Washington in search of inspiration for new LEOMA projects. We had appointments at the American Electronics Association (now AeA), the nation's largest high-tech trade association, where we hoped to learn about its activities that we might join or emulate. We also had appointments with several government agencies and departments, where we hoped to learn how LEOMA members could benefit by LEOMA's serving as an industry interface with the federal government.

At AeA, Bob Gelber of Coherent, who was LEOMA's president-elect that year, and I met with AeA president Dick Iverson and several other AeA officials. Iverson bent over backward trying to be helpful, and when our 11 AM appointment ended, he took us to lunch to allow an extra hour of conversation. He identified export controls and international standardization—two areas where LEOMA had already made significant headway—as issues of vital importance to any high-tech trade association. He explained that the AeA's interaction with the federal government was also important. But he identified the collection and distribution of market data as the most-appreciated function his organization performed. That, also, was a project that we had discussed at LEOMA, but after visiting AeA we realized that it could be a significant benefit to our members.

We visited several officials at the International Trade Administration (ITA) to evaluate how LEOMA might enhance its members' international sales through closer ties with the ITA. But we concluded that, while the international market was important to LEOMA, the ITA dealt with issues that were larger than the relatively small volume of sales in lasers and electro-optics. We saw no benefit to our members from interacting with the ITA.

One undertaking under discussion at LEOMA in 1991 was the possibility of organizing a research consortium among U.S. electro-optics companies. At the Commerce Department that September, LEOMA's 1991 president, Bob Pressley of XMR, and I met with several officials to discuss Commerce's support of such a project. The officials were very positive about industry's creating such a consortium, but they were not encouraging about Commerce Department funding.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a part of the Commerce Department. While we were at Commerce, Pressley and I asked about NIST funding for LEOMA's work in international standardization, emphasizing that the United States was the only delegation at the ISO Laser Committee that lacked funding from its government. The best we could get from this discussion was a promise to look into the issue and get back to us.

When those of us who had visited Washington presented our findings to the whole LEOMA board, the reaction was mixed. Some board members were enthusiastic about launching new projects, while others were more dubious. But clearly, these proposed new projects lacked the urgency of the original issues LEOMA had been formed to address. In a memorandum to the LEOMA Executive Committee in late 1991, I summarized the question that hung over these deliberations: “Assuming that the issues of export control, international standards, and [“conference proliferation”] have been dealt with, does the laser/E-O industry still need a trade association?”

During the decade or so following its invention, the laser was often referred to, half jokingly, as “a solution in search of a problem.” Now that the initial issues had been addressed, had LEOMA itself become a solution in search of a problem?

During the ensuing months, the momentum generated by LEOMA's successes in its original projects convinced its members that the industry did, indeed, still need a trade association. In the spring of 1992, the LEOMA board approved a new mission statement that identified several new directions for the association. Building from the results of our initial visit to the nation's capital, and especially our visit with the American Electronics Association, we would seek to establish constructive contacts with the federal government. Over the subsequent years, this project would yield several important successes, as described in Chapter 6.

The dubiousness of the previous autumn had been dispelled, and in an enthusiastic, unanimous vote, the board launched a project to create a quantitative study of the laser/electro-optics marketplace. The initial survey was distributed in May 1992. It was an overview of sales data that members had submitted, in full confidence, to the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche. Deloitte compiled the raw data and prepared a summary that described the overall marketplace, without including any company-specific information. Two years later, a second survey would be added to LEOMA's agenda, this one studying the compensation levels of engineers and technicians in the laser and electro-optics industries. The full story of these surveys, and of other intra-industry projects LEOMA addressed, is told in Chapter 7.

Meanwhile, international standards remained a concern, but one requiring much less effort than in previous years. Accordingly, the “standards assessment,” begun in 1989, was discontinued in the spring of 1992. However, LEOMA's other projects were a drain on the association's assets, so a dues increase was passed at the same time. The larger companies' dues went up 15%, while the hike was smaller for smaller companies, all the way down to 5% for companies with revenue less than $600,000. That boost soon proved to be inadequate to fund all LEOMA's activities, and a second increase—this time 67% for larger companies, down to 15% for smaller companies, was approved before the end of 1992.

Of course, it was preferable to increase revenue by adding new, dues-paying members, rather than by increasing the dues for existing members. Newport's Randy Heyler, still leading LEOMA's recruiting effort, oversaw the creating of new recruiting materials emphasizing the new projects. He also solicited the two leading trade publications, Photonics Spectra and Laser Focus World, to run free advertising describing the association's new projects and their value to the industry. LEOMA was rewarded with five new members by the end of 1993.

Despite the dues increases in 1992, LEOMA's financial resources continued to diminish during 1993 as expenses associated with the new projects exceeded dues income. In early 1994, I proposed to the board that my short course, Understanding Laser Technology