Manufacturing Leadership Council Lifetime Achievement Award
Goes to MSSC Chair and CEO Leo Reddy
 On June 14, the Manufacturing Leadership Council gave its coveted Lifetime Achievement Award to Leo Reddy at its Gala Awards Dinner in Huntington Beach CA. In introducing Leo, the Council commented, "Throughout his long and distinguished career, Leo Reddy has been an inspiring and continuous source of leadership, founding and growing institutions that continue to benefit the manufacturing industry while also serving his country with distinction."
His career played out in two acts.
Act One was a career in the Cold War. He began with service as a Naval Officer on destroyers in the Sixth and Third Fleets. Following a stint as a CIA Soviet Affairs analyst, he then rose to the top ranks in the Career Foreign Service as a specialist in NATO and arms control.
He served on the NATO Desk at the State Department and on U.S. delegations to NATO in Brussels, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki, the NATO-Warsaw Pact Conventional Forces talks in Vienna, and the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) talks in Geneva. He chaired the successful State Department INF Treaty Ratification Task Force in 1998.
Act Two began when Leo was detailed to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington in 1998 under the Diplomat-in-Residence program, where he headed a study on the post-Cold War future of the nation's defense industrial base. This research with many of the nation's leading defense contractors and automation companies led to an invitation to serve as CEO of the industry-led, non-profit National Coalition for Advanced Manufacturing (NACFAM).
Serving as a corporate-led voice in Washington for advanced manufacturing, NACFAM advocated a series of federal programs and policies with lasting impact, including: dual-use policies to give the defense industrial base more flexibility; lab-industry-university manufacturing research collaborations; the national Manufacturing Extension Partnership; and national skill standards for the manufacturing sector.
The latter led to Mr. Reddy's current role and as Chair and CEO of the Manufacturing Skill Standards Council (MSSC) since 2005. MSSC has become the national leader in training and certifying individuals for front-line work in advanced manufacturing and logistics. MSSC delivers its Certified Production Technician (CPT) and Certified Logistics Technician (CLT) certifications through a network of nearly 1900 MSSC-trained instructors and over 1000 MSSC-authorized test site, mostly at community colleges and secondary schools, in 49 states.
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