Zhang Yin

Below is an inspiring story of a truly extraordinary woman.I found the original post here : http://invincibleprobity.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/the-american-spirit-now-comes-from-china/ 

The story is a must read for entrepreneurs and would be entrepreneurs, women and anyone interested in a human interest story.

When I have some down time I usually hang out at my home in the Rocky Mountains of northwest Montana, USA.  This is a wonderful place of very few people and lots of big mountains and beautiful scenery.  It’s a special region of rivers and streams and lakes … and billions of trees.  As opposed to the eastern part of this huge state, where agriculture and cattle reign, northwest Montana has long depended on its biggest industry – timber and wood products.  But this industry, faced with steadily increasing restrictions on logging in our national forests and steadily rising competition from cheaper products from overseas, has been in slow decline for the past forty years.  It seems like another small lumber mill that had been around for a century is closed down every few months. 

In 2009 even big corporate mills started closing.  One of these was the Smerfit-Stone Container mill in Frenchtown near Missoula.  A second Smerfit-Stone container mill also filed for bankruptcy in Canada at the same time, and Smerfit-Stone mills in Arizona and Quebec had closed earlier.  The company naturally cited “the unprecedented global economic recession [which] has weakened demand for packaging”, but a major portion of the truth has been left out of the Smerfit-Stone rationalizing, including the fact that it had failed to upgrade its equipment to meet modern advanced capabilities and had retained its dependence on expensive freshly logged timber to manufacture its cardboard containers.  This is another American industry that has long been locked in the past while taking profits for today and failing to improve its competitiveness in the arena for tomorrow.

Like so many American industries that were forged by great visionaries of the past, the American wood products industry is a microcosm of the nation as a whole over the past forty years.  It all seems like an ingrained resistance by today’s Americans to learn the lessons of generations that went before.  If perhaps not for Americans, however, the Greatest Generation definitely did set an indelible example for others. Read more of this post