Complete Rough Draft

Josiah Crow Loam, a supply chain engineer from Arizona, shares his journey from a construction family to pursuing a career in electronics. He joined the United States Air Force and traveled around the world, eventually working for Intel. He learned valuable leadership skills in the Air Force and applied them in his career. Josiah emphasizes the importance of determination, hard work, and adaptability in leadership roles. He advises future STEM workers to be curious and strive to understand the reasons behind things. This episode also mentions upcoming guest Christine Borden-Payne, a professor from North Dakota. Welcome to this episode of Read with the Beast. In this episode, we feature Josiah Crow Loam, who is a supply chain engineer who lives in Gilbert, Arizona, and works for Intel. Josiah Crow Loam now lives in Chandler, Arizona, with his wife and son, while his two daughters are away at college. He didn't always live in Chandler, Arizona, though. He knew he was meant for something bigger. He grew up in Vista, California, to a family of construction workers, as a child of divorced parents with four siblings. He never knew what, for sure, he was going to do when he grew up, but he just knew that it had to do with electronics. I am not quite sure what I would have done. I've always just picked a path, electronics. I knew coming out of high school was going to be an industry of the future, and so I put myself in the best position possible. And from there, I just went to where I saw the best opportunities and the places that I could learn and be effective. Even though he wanted to be a marine biologist growing up, he just knew that he had to get out. That led him to join the United States Air Force and become an avionics engineer and technician. Yeah, not to sell them short, I come from a construction family. They all ran their own small businesses, but never really got outside of that, never expanded, never grew, much less none of them had ever left the local area. All my uncles, my grandparents all grew up in the same place, and I knew that I had to go and learn something different. I knew that I had to go and create a new path for my family that we would eventually get started. He went all around the nation and the globe as a part of the United States Air Force from California to North Carolina to Texas to Alaska, then to Saudi Arabia. As he left the United States Air Force, he got a job with Applied Materials or AMAT and then got a job and many jobs more with Intel Corporation. He considers himself an expat as he has gone across the globe to work with Intel to places like China, Israel, Ireland, Thailand, and many more. But I left that job to take an equipment engineering and systems owner job in China and basically build a brand new factory from the ground up, a whole new workforce, and train them, get them up to speed, teach them the Intel way of doing business, and making that factory successful. That was a very big turning point in my career because I went from not having a real leadership role or impact to being a systems owner and an area manager to where I had expats and local workers. I had suppliers and I had all the associated construction personnel that I had to interact with, that I had to problem solve with, that I had to work with and develop. That really changed my outlook on the engineering world and the engineering role and that's when I truly knew that the engineering role was for me. From there I became an equipment engineering group manager and led that for about nine years and then transitioned into the supply chain role that I have now. The leadership skills he learned in the Air Force have stuck with him today like the ones he is about to describe. It gave me an opportunity to grow, it gave me an opportunity to learn, and it really taught me a lot of the fundamentals that I needed for the rest of my career. Building confidence, consistency, getting respect from your peers, following and ultimately leading other people was what I really took away from the Air Force experience. Also in the Air Force, Josiah held some small leadership positions while on deployment in Saudi Arabia. During this time he learned better leadership traits and developed a better work ethic as a result of it. You can lead details, which is doing menial chores, cleaning the routine items that you have to do when you're in the military. Being the leader of that is something that they will do regardless of rank. You can be the assistant to certain people based on how hard you work and what you do. Really it just showed me that one, you have to have determination, two, you have to work hard, and three, you have to have that consistency and that urgency to getting the actual job done or you won't be able to get into those types of positions. And as Josiah finished his time at the United States Air Force, he used this new work ethic and new leadership abilities in the workplace at ANA and Intel where he learned how to be a charismatic and respectful leader while also being able to read new leadership situations like situational leadership and carry on in a new way. There's going to be times where you need to learn and you need to listen and you need to follow even though you are the leader. And then there's other times where you need to step in, you need to take control of the situation because it might not be going the way that it needs to go. And so really each situation is unique. Sometimes you show up to a site and they're functioning perfect, better than you've ever seen before. And in that situation, you don't step in to change anything, you step in to learn how are they doing that, why are they doing that, and how can you implement that or improve other areas with those scenarios. So at the end of the day, most people want to be treated with dignity and respect. They want to work hard. They want to do a good job. And if you enable the environment for them to do that, you'll more than likely be very successful. And after learning all these new leadership abilities, new ways to look at leadership situations, and new ways to be able to utilize my leadership skills in different ways, he gave some advice to future STEM workers. So I would say the one thing is to be curious and to learn to the highest capability possible. Particularly cause and effects and why something works a certain way. Not just that you can regurgitate and memorize for a short period of time and then dump, but truly understanding why something's a certain way so that you could learn it to your best ability. I think that's what I would recommend for anybody going into STEM is learn everything you possibly can. Thanks for listening to this episode of Lead with the Beavs and our story featuring Josiah Carlon who shared his story about breaking generational patterns, joining the United States Air Force, being a part of Intel, and talking about his leadership skills that he has learned throughout the years. Tune in for our next episode featuring Christine Borden-Payne who is currently a professor at Minot State University and lives in Minot, North Dakota with her partner and her child.