This Cummins newsroom catch-up covers the corporate shit TCAP missed while life was throwing furniture. Since 16 June, Cummins has pushed data-centre generator hunger, service-network capture, natural-gas aftertreatment, John T.’s empathy profile and another Clessie-adjacent corpse parade. Same newsroom, stench and polish.
Cummins Newsroom Catch-Up : TCAP Is Still Watching
TCAP has not done a proper Cummins newsroom catch-up since 16 June.
That is on us. Life has been throwing furniture. The wider series work, partner scandals, shareholder lanes and customer-side rot have not gone away, but the newsroom matters because it is Cummins speaking in its own voice. Nobody has to leak anything. Nobody has to speculate. Just read the corporate copy. The machine confesses in headings.
So consider this Cummins newsroom catch-up a pulse check.
TCAP is not fully back to its normal rhythm yet. The body is still buffering. The teeth, however, remain installed.
Since the last newsroom spin, Cummins has dropped another tray of corporate shit. A high-horsepower generator set for 50Hz markets. A “one network, one contact, one goal” service sermon. A natural-gas aftertreatment pitch. A purpose-and-empathy profile on John T. And, because apparently the company archive has started smelling again, another founding-history article dragging the old Cummins corpse around the room for applause.
Different wrappers. Same shit.
Engines. Service capture. Fossil-gas continuity. Culture varnish. Founder worship. Data-centre power dressed as responsibility. A dead industrial ancestor propped up like Weekend At Clessie’s.
Cummins calls it newsroom content.
TCAP calls it the company diary left open on the mortuary table.
The QSK78 : AI Needs Power, Cummins Has A Diesel Sermon Ready
First up, Cummins Power Generation announced the latest high-horsepower Centum Series generator sets for the 50Hz market, powered by the QSK78 engine platform.
That is the headline version.
The less perfumed version is simpler: the data-centre boom needs stupid amounts of power, AI demand is eating the grid like a drunk at a buffet, and Cummins is standing nearby with a 78-litre V18 engine in a clean shirt.
Cummins says the QSK78 platform delivers up to 3500kVA and 3300kVA standby power at 50Hz. It is aimed at data centres, healthcare, wastewater treatment and other mission-critical applications. There are references to fast response, robust load handling, PowerCommand controls, remote monitoring, seamless integration, power density, compact footprint and the usual modern-energy vocabulary soup.
Then the sustainability dressing arrives.
The product is compatible with paraffinic fuels such as HVO, Cummins says, allowing operators to reduce lifecycle carbon emissions without engine modifications. Lovely. The engine is still the engine, but now it has a little green napkin tucked into its collar.
Nobody is saying backup power is unnecessary. Hospitals need power. Water treatment needs power. Data centres need uptime. However, the problem is the corporate theatre where every combustion-adjacent sale gets marched past the camera as if it is a climate breakthrough because someone whispered “HVO” into the brochure.
Destination Keep The Generator
This is the Cummins playbook now.
Sell the heavy iron. Say resilience. Wave at AI demand. Mention data centres. Add sustainability. Close with Destination Zero. Try not to cough while the generator starts.
TCAP will try not to laugh too hard when AI, powered by Cummins gensets, starts working out how to run without Cummins gensets. At the rate the thing is improving, it has probably already found cleaner answers and filed them somewhere the diesel priests cannot reach.
Until then, Cummins can ride the latest buzzword cart around the showroom. AI needs power. Data centres need backup. Mission-critical customers need reassurance. And Cummins, bless its fossil little heart, has arrived with another giant engine wearing a future-shaped hat.
That is not a revolution.
It is the old machine learning to say “artificial intelligence” before the invoice lands.
It is the old kitchen finding a new queue.
The funniest thing about these pieces is how often the company has to tell you it is doing something noble. Every product has to arrive with a little sermon. All engines gets a hymn sheet. Every generator gets dressed for church. If the thing was as clean and visionary as the copy suggests, Cummins would not need to keep spraying it with moral Febreze.
But the newsroom keeps doing it.
High-density power. Modern energy ecosystems. Sustainable strategies. Lifecycle support. Energy transition. Destination Zero. The same keywords come back like flies to a bin bag.
TCAP reads them as confession.
One Network, One Contact, One Leash
Then came One Network, One Contact, One Goal.
Cummins Sales and Service North America, or CSSNA, is presented as a lovely national support blanket. A nationwide network. Facilities across regions. Experienced professionals. Sales, service and support where customers need it. A single point of contact. A direct line to experts. A streamlined experience. A trusted partner.
The usual warm bath.
Strip the bubbles off and the thing underneath is obvious. Buy the equipment. Join the network. Need uptime? Pay Cummins. Need support? Pay Cummins. Need a national account structure because your assets are scattered across the map? Pay Cummins in a more organised way.
That is not necessarily stupid. Fleet operators, hospitals, data centres and industrial sites do need service. Machines break. Generators sulk. Engines demand attention like Victorian children with coughs.
However, the sales pitch is the point.
The article talks about national accounts, account setup, billing, ordering, invoicing, service processes and master service agreements. That is not just care. That is infrastructure around the customer relationship. It is the product after the product.
Translation: the first sale is only the first bite.
The real meal is the ecosystem.
Buy The Engine, Pay The Priest
This is the old Cummins service-capture model with a customer-care candle burning on the table.
One network. One contact. One goal.
That goal is not spiritual enlightenment. It is keeping the customer attached to the Cummins machine long after the engine has been sold.
A Cummins generator without Cummins service is just a generator with abandonment issues. CSSNA exists to make sure the relationship never really ends.
Buy the engine.
Pay the priest.
Return for blessings.
This is why the generic “we are a good company” tone matters. The article is not just selling service. It is selling dependency as partnership. It is turning the commercial leash into a friendship bracelet and hoping nobody notices the clasp.
Cummins does this constantly.
It sells the machine. Then it sells the support. The network. The digital layer. Then it sells the long-term relationship. By the end, the customer is not buying a product. The customer is living inside a Cummins subscription with doors.
Natural Gas Aftertreatment : Fossil Gas In A Better Waistcoat
The natural-gas aftertreatment piece is another familiar hymn.
Cummins says its natural gas engines use a simplified three-way catalyst system on the X15N, ISX12N, L9N and 6.7N. The pitch is lower maintenance, no routine catalyst service, strong uptime, lighter packaging, less weight than diesel aftertreatment and lower total cost of ownership.
Then the numbers start acting respectable.
Cummins says the three-way catalyst reduces NOx by over 99%. It says X15N aftertreatment can weigh up to 150 pounds less than diesel aftertreatment, and that the X15N can offer roughly 500 pounds of weight reduction compared with the X15 diesel engine. It says the latest natural gas aftertreatment is compliant with strict 2027 EPA and California Air Resources Board emissions requirements without DEF, which it says averages around $4 a gallon, or regular DPF cleanings, which it says can cost more than $1,000.
Fine. The engineering point may be real. Simpler aftertreatment can be commercially useful. Nobody needs to pretend diesel aftertreatment is a picnic. DEF sensors, DPF cleaning and maintenance intervals have not exactly been sent from heaven wrapped in silk.
But the larger move is still obvious.
Cummins is not trying to bury combustion. It is building better arguments for keeping it alive.
Destination Keep The Fucking Engine
Natural gas gets framed as cleaner, cheaper, lighter, simpler and less annoying than diesel. That is the sales lane. Not zero. Or clean. Not a break from the fossil machine. Just fossil gas in a better waistcoat, politely explaining that the old addiction has switched brands and should therefore be congratulated.
The article says natural gas combustion provides a thorough burn and reduces the work needed from aftertreatment to further eliminate emissions. It talks about air-fuel ratio control and keeping the catalyst happy.
Keeping the catalyst happy.
There is the whole Cummins era in one phrase. The planet can wait. The customer can pay. The catalyst must be emotionally supported.
TCAP has seen this routine before. Cummins sells transition by making the old machine sound sensible. Diesel looks messy. Natural gas looks cleaner. HVO gets a mention. Hydrogen sits somewhere in the showroom wearing expensive shoes. Accelera waves from the loss-making future.
Meanwhile, the combustion business keeps finding ways to remain the adult in the room.
That is not Destination Zero.
That is Destination Keep The Fucking Engine.
John T. And The Abbreviated Humanity Trick
Then came Leading With Purpose : How John T. Creates Impact Through Empathy At Cummins Inc.
Cummins chose to call him John T.
That is not accidental-looking anymore. It is a tactic.
These people get used as proof of Cummins’ warmth, purpose and humanity, but the company trims them down to first name and initial. Full face. Full emotional marketing payload. A full story about empathy, belonging and leadership. Half a name. Enough identity to make the company look human. Not enough search footprint to give the person the full public accolade when someone looks them up.
That is a shame, because John T. seems like a nice guy on the face of it.
TCAP is not here to pretend he is the villain of this piece. He is not. The obvious problem, from the outside, is who he works for and how Cummins is using him. The company has taken what appears to be a decent internal human story and turned it into another strip of culture varnish for the machine.
John T., described by Cummins as Leader of Global Escalations & Insights, has been with Cummins for nearly 16 years. The article talks about empathy, trust, connection, customer needs, belonging, mentoring, professional and personal support, LGBT Safe Leader training, tuition assistance, the Employee Assistance Program and leaders who listened when he needed it most.
On a human level, fine.
Nobody is sneering at a person finding meaning in work, supporting colleagues, mentoring people or helping others feel safe. That would be cheap, and not even in the fun way.
The target is not John T.
The target is the corporate use of John T.
Healthy Enough For The Brochure
There is another ugly little layer here.
John T. appears, on the face of it, to be a healthy and functioning employee. He is therefore useful to the Cummins story. He can be photographed, praised, softened, packaged and turned into evidence that the company cares. Proof that empathy lives here, somewhere between the service network and the natural gas catalyst.
But TCAP has seen the other side of the machine.
When workers become inconvenient, ill, impaired, difficult, distressed or legally awkward, the “empathy” language tends to become harder to find. Suddenly the company is not writing glowing stories about belonging. It is building files, managing risk, applying pressure, laundering conduct through process and pretending the cruelty has a policy number.
TCAP covered that in Cummins Confidential : Six Months Of Alleged Hostility And Steve Morley Still Wants To Cosplay Competence.
That is why the John T. article lands the way it does.
The company wants applause for empathy when the employee is safe enough to display. But if the person becomes a problem, the same machine can change temperature fast enough to crack the glass.
Maybe John T. really is everything the article says he is. Good. Let him be. Give him have the full credit. Let people find his work if they search for him. Stop turning employees into half-indexed props for corporate warmth.
Because this is what Cummins does.
It finds a person. Frames the person as proof. It turns individual decency into institutional perfume. One employee’s warmth becomes a scented wipe over the wider machine.
Look at the nice man.
At the mentoring.
Look at belonging.
Look at the safe leader training.
Do not look at the engines too hard. Don’t look at the litigation ledger. Do not look at the legal departments. the factory floor. Do not look at the people TCAP has already written about.
The Culture Soup
The funniest bit in the John T. piece is not really John T. at all. It is the placement.
After generator sets. After service networks. Before natural gas aftertreatment. Around another founder-history séance. The newsroom becomes a buffet where Cummins alternates between selling heavy machinery and offering little bowls of emotional soup.
Big engine.
Nice employee.
Service capture.
Dead founder.
Natural gas.
Purpose.
Empathy.
Uptime.
It is not random. It is rhythm. Corporate comms understands texture. You cannot just shout “buy our engines” every day without sounding like a man in a car park with a laminated sign. So the newsroom needs softeners. It needs culture stories. Human faces needed. It needs proof that the machine has a heart, or at least a department capable of writing one into a headline.
Again, John T. may be perfectly sincere. He probably is. That is why the article works.
Sincerity is the best raw material for corporate laundering because it does not look like laundering while it is being wrung out.
Cummins gets the warmth. The employee gets used as evidence. The reader gets invited to confuse a decent person inside the machine with the moral condition of the machine itself.
That is the trick.
TCAP is not buying the soup.
The Clessie Corpse Gets Dug Up Again
Now for the grave robbery.
On 17 June, Cummins published The Man Who Turned Vision Into Reality, a short article about William Glanton Irwin, the Columbus banker and industrialist who provided financial backing and business oversight to Clessie Cummins.
The piece says Cummins is often defined by Clessie Cummins, but without Irwin the company might never have existed. It says Irwin hired Clessie in 1908 as a chauffeur and mechanic, recognised his talent, supported his engine work and helped lay the foundation for Cummins Engine Company in 1919. It also says Irwin served as primary investor and business head, pushed for hard decisions during the Great Depression and at one point urged that the company be shut down.
Fine. History matters. Founding capital matters. The archive has value.
But sweet suffering Christ, let the dead rest.
TCAP has already mocked this tactic. In Cummins Confidential : HELM – Rolled Out More Times Than Clessie’s Corpse, we called Cummins HELM a corpse trolley with product segmentation because the same basic trick keeps getting wheeled through the newsroom with a fresh label and a cleaner collar.
Here they are again.
Different coffin.
Same smell.
Weekend At Clessie’s
Cummins keeps exhuming Clessie like the old boy owes them quarterly content. Every time the present starts smelling difficult, the newsroom wanders down to the corporate cemetery with a shovel and a ring light.
Up comes Clessie again.
The origin myth reeled out.
Up comes the bank, the garage, the visionary mechanic, the financial backer, the diesel dream, the grit, the survival story, the Great Depression, the bold demonstrations, the over-100-year company. Cue sepia. Reverence. Cue another article implying that the modern machine is still somehow spiritually connected to the brave little workshop where it all began.
It is corporate ancestor worship.
The kind where the living board gets to borrow the virtue of the dead without having to answer for what the company became after the funeral.
Cummins should be honest and rename the history series Weekend At Clessie’s.
Every few weeks, someone props up the founding myth, drapes an old photograph across it, pulls a little string in its back and makes it say “innovation”. Then the modern company stands beside the corpse and asks for applause.
The Irwin article is especially funny because it is not even fully Clessie worship. It is Clessie-adjacent corpse work. Cummins has dug up the man behind the man. The financier behind the founder. The banker behind the engine. The corporate genealogy has gone full ancestry dot com with a parts catalogue.
Stop Shaking The Family Tree
Why stop there?
Next week: the woman who made the sandwiches during a 1917 engine test.
After that: the horse who looked suspiciously at the first diesel prototype.
Then: the floorboard that supported Clessie’s boot during a moment of engineering courage.
Anything to keep the present from becoming the subject.
And that is the problem. Cummins history content is not harmless when it keeps functioning as moral camouflage. It asks readers to feel the grit of the founding story while the current company sells fossil continuity, service lock-in, data-centre generator hunger and polished culture copy from the same newsroom.
The dead cannot defend themselves.
They also cannot answer TCAP’s questions.
Convenient.
The Pattern Is Not Subtle
Put the June pieces together and the map is obvious.
The QSK78 article says the AI and data-centre world needs more power, and Cummins has high-horsepower hardware ready for the hunger.
The CSSNA article says national customers need service, support, billing, account management and one neat Cummins contact point to keep everything attached.
The natural-gas aftertreatment article says combustion can be simpler, cleaner, lighter and cheaper if you pick Cummins’ gas route instead of diesel pain.
The John T. article says the company has empathy, belonging, support and purpose.
The Irwin piece says the company has noble origins, founding discipline and a century-old myth still worth polishing.
That is not five disconnected articles.
That is one corporate machine speaking in five costumes.
Power demand. Service capture. Fossil-gas transition. Human varnish. Founder worship.
All of it points back to the same centre: Cummins wants the market to believe the old industrial machine is still the future, still morally serious, still technically necessary, still culturally warm and still historically blessed.
TCAP’s answer remains: show us the ledger.
The Newsroom Is A Confession Booth With Better Lighting
Corporate newsrooms are useful because they accidentally tell the truth.
Not in the sentence they want you to read. Usually in the pattern. The repetition. The order. The product categories. The words that keep coming back like flies to a bin bag.
Cummins keeps saying resilience.
Uptime.
Cummins keeps saying transition.
Sustainability.
Cummins keeps saying service.
It keeps saying purpose znd history.
Meanwhile, the actual business keeps showing itself. Engines. Generators. Components. Aftertreatment. Service agreements. National accounts. Data centres. Natural gas. Customer capture. Lifecycle support. Fossil continuity wearing a better shirt.
That does not make every product bad. It does not make every employee insincere. It does not make every service offering pointless. TCAP is not a toddler throwing soup at a wall because a company used the word innovation.
The issue is the moral packaging.
The Constant Self-Praise Gives The Game Away
Cummins keeps trying to sell routine industrial continuity as if it is a spiritual transition.
It wants applause for making combustion more tolerable. Credit for servicing the machines it profits from. It wants reverence for dead founders. Culture points from employee profiles. It wants data-centre growth without the smell of energy gluttony.
Most of all, it wants to be believed.
That is why the constant self-praise gives the game away. Good companies do not need to stand in the hallway every morning explaining that they are good companies. Clean futures do not need this much copywriting disinfectant. Genuine accountability does not arrive as a service-network article, a founder myth and a smiling employee profile.
If Cummins were what Cummins keeps saying Cummins is, the newsroom would not have to keep putting the same moral wig on every product launch.
But it does.
Again and again.
Article after article.
Engine after engine.
Service after service.
Founder after founder.
It wants the benefits of the old machine and the vocabulary of the new world.
That is the scam.
Still Digging
TCAP has been slower than usual.
That will happen. There are days when the project is running on fumes, spite and whatever counts as breakfast. There are days when the Cummins newsroom can wait because real life has kicked the door in and started throwing plates.
But quiet is not dead.
Cummins should not mistake a pause for peace.
Page and Cepac should avoid getting comfortable too. So should the shark legal teams still circling the tank, mistaking temporary quiet for oxygen. TCAP has not forgotten the redactions, the bundle games, the litigation theatre, the costs stunt, the recruitment stink or the polite little professional hands that helped dress it all up as process.
The regular series work will return. Partner and shareholder lanes will return. Customer-side scandals will return. Page, Cepac and their hired knives will get their turn again. The longer digs will return too. TCAP will be back to normal soon enough, and when it is, we will dig up more bodies than Cummins exhumes Clessie.
Maybe we will leave some of it until after the World Cup.
Seems sensible. We would not want bad press around a major American company to soil a tournament being staged across North America. That would be terribly unfair. It is not as if TCAP has been spending much time watching it either.
Honest.
For now, this is the catch-up.
Cummins has spent the back half of June doing what Cummins does. Selling engines into the power hunger. Service sold as partnership. Selling natural gas as a cleaner old habit. Faking culture through John T. Selling history through a graveyard shovel.
Same newsroom.
And machine.
Same smell under the polish.
TCAP is still watching.
And the shovel is already back in the boot.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cummins Power Generation Introduces The Latest In Its High Horse Power Centum Series Generator Sets To The 50Hz Market With The QSK78
- Leading With Purpose : How John T. Creates Impact Through Empathy At Cummins Inc.
- Profitable Uptime And Lower TCO For Natural Gas Aftertreatment
- The Man Who Turned Vision Into Reality
- One Network, One Contact, One Goal
- Cummins Confidential : HELM – Rolled Out More Times Than Clessie’s Corpse
- Cummins Confidential : Six Months Of Alleged Hostility And Steve Morley Still Wants To Cosplay Competence