Douglas R. Oberhelman Quotes

Douglas R. Oberhelman — American Businessman born on February 25, 1953,

Douglas R. Oberhelman is an American businessman. He is the CEO of Caterpillar Inc. in Peoria, Illinois... (wikipedia)

I, for one, struggle a little bit with a $250,000 education for a philosophy degree. They are a wonderful people, but we can't employ philosophers in manufacturing in the United States. We need a one- or two-year technical add-on for a high school.

Why is Caterpillar bad if we create a new job in India or China to receive U.S. exports? It makes no sense to me. We want to drive all the exports we can from the United States. We want to concentrate on all those consumers, outside contractors, customers outside the United States that we possibly can.

Caterpillar exported $20 billion of goods in 2011, all by American hands and American workers, to all over the world. In order to do that, we have to create jobs in all those countries that we export to, to be able to sell there.

All of our competitors around the world, every country is investing more in infrastructure as a percentage of their GDP than we are. And down the road our children and grandchildren will have to compete with that more and more.

We spend a lot of time training and retraining. It's heartbreaking because our education system has failed all of us. And again you go to China, even Mexico, Brazil the education systems are valued - ours are not in this country at K-12 level. It's amazing how that change has transpired in my lifetime.

Douglas R. Oberhelman Quotes

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