Ghost Town Sage

Hunting for an Engineer

Available from Amazon:
$16.75 - Soft Cover - 175 pages, 5.5 x 8.5"
Amazon: Hunting for an Engineer

This book is simply my observations and stories about businesses passing or failing on the three rules of execution that are listed in the book introduction. Plenty of other books talk about these same ideas, but life in the real world is never quite as rosy as most authors want you to believe.
And that is the difference here. These ideas are described with real-life anecdotes and examples that hopefully explain why these ideas don't always work the way people think they should. The stories and solutions in this book mostly take place on the various production lines where I've worked on over the years. But the lessons don't just apply to the production line, these ideas of team management will work just as well in the office and at home.

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A few years ago, during one of our quarterly all-hands meetings, the VP asked us: " We had a hundred thousand dollars in process improvements last year, why don't I see a hundred thousand dollars more profit this year? " This is an embarrassing question that gets asked by managers everywhere. Documented improvements don’t turn into measured improvements. He wasn't asking anyone in particular, but as a manufacturing engineer he could have been asking me. I thought about that over the years because I had been suspicious too. Even though the math added up on these improvements, I didn't really believe they would have the impact that the documents claimed. It was just a gut feel and I couldn't really put my finger on it, but I knew something was fishy about their process improvement techniques and calculations of cost savings. Over the years I saw others making the same mistakes and listened to their horror stories, and I slowly realized what was going on.

Two things were happening. First, the labor hours on paper are not the labor hours on the shop floor. That might sound obvious but the reasons for the discrepancies are not obvious. Second, everywhere I've worked and from stories I've heard from others, the people on the shop floor are not being used effectively, negating a lot of the expected improvements. There are dozens of books that describe process improvement techniques, some are very useful, and others not so much. Most of these books describe a lot of the same techniques but with their own personal twist. However, most are misleading about the effectiveness of these techniques. For example, techniques such as 5-S and 5-Y are tools you can use to improve your workplace. They are not goals. The goal is to reduce cost and increase quality, and 5-S is a good tool to help you get there. Yet, the last few places where I've worked, they had put more effort into charting and enforcing 5-S than in verifying process improvements.

That's the point of this book. Businesses everywhere are doing a poor job of running their production lines and don't understand why they're struggling. The stories in this book describe a lot of those struggles as I've seen them over the years. Hopefully these are the same stories that people are seeing elsewhere, and will lead others to similar conclusions on their own production lines. Books everywhere espouse their own particular theories on how to best run a business, but the bottom line in every case is simply: Execution. Somehow people will have to get the job done with efficiency and quality. Finding the best people to put in charge is a good idea, but to run a business profitably, your people will have to deliver regardless of who is in charge.

In the course of writing this book, I came up with three rules for running a business. Rule #1: Open up the communication channels. Rule #2: Find your best people and put them where they will do the most good. Rule #3: Use process improvement tools effectively, according to cost vrs benefit. These three rules are the theme through out this book, nearly all examples are based on an event passing or failing one of these rules.