The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (6 page)

It’s a good cigar.
For a connoisseur of tobacco, it might be a little dry, since it spent several weeks inside my suit jacket. But I
sniff
it with pleasure during Peach’s big meeting, while I remember that other, stranger, meeting with Jonah.
Or was it really more strange than this? Peach is up in front of us tapping the center of a graph with a long wood pointer. Smoke whirls slowly in the beam of the slide projector. Across from me, someone is poking earnestly at a calculator. Everyone except me is listening intently, or jotting notes, or offering comments.
". . . consistent parameters . . . essential to gain...matrix of advantage...extensive pre-profit recovery . . . operational indices... provide tangential proof. . . .’’
I have no idea what’s going on. Their words sound like a different language to me—not a foreign language exactly, but a language I once knew and only vaguely now recall. The terms seem familiar to me. But now I’m not sure what they really mean. They are just words.
You’re just playing a lot of games with numbers and words.
For a few minutes there in Chicago’s O’Hare, I did try to think about what Jonah had said. He’d made a lot of sense to me somehow; he’d had some good points. But it was like somebody from a different world had talked to me. I had to shrug it off. I had to go to Houston and talk about robots. It was time to catch my own plane.
Now I’m wondering if Jonah might be closer to the truth than I first thought. Because as I glance from face to face, I get this gut hunch that none of us here has anything more than a witch doctor’s understanding of the medicine we’re practicing. Our tribe is dying and we’re dancing in our ceremonial smoke to exorcise the devil that’s ailing us.
What is the real goal? Nobody here has even asked anything that basic. Peach is chanting about cost opportunities and "productivity’’ targets and so on. Hilton Smyth is saying hallelujah to whatever Peach proclaims. Does anyone genuinely understand what we’re doing?
At ten o’clock, Peach calls a break. Everyone except me exits for the rest rooms or for coffee. I stay seated until they are out of the room.
What the hell am I doing here? I’m wondering what good it is for me—or any of us—to be sitting here in this room. Is this meeting (which is scheduled to last for most of the day) going to make my plant competitive, save my job, or help anybody do anything of benefit to anyone?
I can’t handle it. I don’t even know what productivity is. So how can this be anything except a total waste? And with that thought I find myself stuffing my papers back into my briefcase. I snap it closed. And then I quietly get up and walk out.
I’m lucky at first. I make it to the elevator without anyone saying anything to me. But while I’m waiting there, Hilton Smyth comes strolling past.
"You’re not bailing out on us, are you Al?’’ he asks.
For a second, I consider ignoring the question. But then I realize Smyth might deliberately say something to Peach.
"Have to,’’ I say to him. "I’ve got a situation that needs my attention back at the plant.’’
"What? An emergency?’’
"You can call it that.’’
The elevator opens its doors. I step in. Smyth is looking at me with a quizzical expression as he walks by. The doors close.
It crosses my mind that there is a risk of Peach firing me for walking out of his meeting. But that, to my current frame of mind as I walk through the garage to my car, would only shorten three months of anxiety leading up to what I suspect might be inevitable.
I don’t go back to the plant right away. I drive around for a while. I point the car down one road and follow it until I’m tired of it, then take another road. A couple of hours pass. I don’t care where I am; I just want to be out. The freedom is kind of exhilarating until it gets boring.
As I’m driving, I try to keep my mind off business. I try to clear my head. The day has turned out to be nice. The sun is out. It’s warm. No clouds. Blue sky. Even though the land still has an early spring austerity, everything yellow-brown, it’s a good day to be playing hooky.
I remember looking at my watch just before I reach the plant gates and seeing that it’s past 1
_P
.
_M
. I’m slowing down to make the turn through the gate, when—I don’t know how else to say it—it just doesn’t feel right. I look at the plant. And I put my foot down on the gas and keep going. I’m hungry; I’m thinking maybe I should get some lunch.
But I guess the real reason is I just don’t want to be found yet. I need to think and I’ll never be able to do it if I go back to the office now.
Up the road about a mile is a little pizza place. I see they’re open, so I stop and go in. I’m conservative; I get a medium pizza with double cheese, pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, green peppers, hot peppers, black olives and onion, and—mmmmmmmm —a sprinkling of anchovies. While I’m waiting, I can’t resist the
Munchos
on the stand by the cash register, and I tell the Sicilian who runs the place to put me down for a couple of bags of beer nuts, some taco chips, and—for later—some pretzels. Trauma whets my appetite.
But there’s one problem. You just can’t wash down beer nuts with soda. You need beer. And guess what I see in the cooler. Of course, I don’t usually drink during the day . . . but I look at the way the light is hitting those frosty cold cans. . . .
"Screw it.’’
I pull out a six of Bud.
Twenty-three
dollars and sixty-two cents and I’m out of there.
Just before the plant, on the opposite side of the highway, there is a gravel road leading up a low hillside. It’s an access road to a substation about half a mile away. So on impulse, I turn the wheel sharply. The
Mazda
goes bouncing off the highway onto the gravel and only a fast hand saves my pizza from the floor. We raise some dust getting to the top.
I park the car, unbutton my shirt, take off my tie and coat to save them from the inevitable, and open up my goodies.
Some distance below, down across the highway, is my plant. It sits in a field, a big gray steel box without windows. Inside, I know, there are about 400 people at work on day shift. Their cars are parked in the lot. I watch as a truck backs between two others sitting at the unloading docks. The trucks bring the materials which the machines and people inside will use to make something. On the opposite side, more trucks are being filled with what they have produced. In simplest terms, that’s what’s happening. I’m supposed to manage what goes on down there.
I pop the top on one of the beers and go to work on the pizza.
The plant has the look of a landmark. It’s as if it has always been there, as if it will always be there. I happen to know the plant is only about fifteen years old. And it may not be here as many years from now.
So what is the goal?
What are we supposed to be doing here?
What keeps this place working?
Jonah said there was only one goal. Well, I don’t see how that can be. We do a lot of things in the course of daily operations, and they’re all important. Most of them anyway . . . or we wouldn’t do them. What the hell, they all could be goals.
I mean, for instance, one of the things a manufacturing organization must do is buy raw materials. We need these materials in order to manufacture, and we have to obtain them at the best cost, and so purchasing in a cost-effective manner is very important to us.
The pizza, by the way, is primo. I’m chowing down on my second piece when some tiny voice inside my head asks me, But is this the goal? Is cost-effective purchasing the reason for the plant’s existence?
I have to laugh. I almost choke.
Yeah, right. Some of the brilliant idiots in Purchasing sure do act as if that’s the goal. They’re out there renting warehouses to store all the crap they’re buying so cost-effectively. What is it we have now? A thirty-two-month supply of copper wire? A sevenmonth inventory of stainless steel sheet? All kinds of stuff. They’ve got millions and millions tied up in what they’ve bought —and at terrific prices.
No, put it that way, and economical purchasing is definitely not the goal of this plant.
What else do we do? We employ people—by the hundreds here, and by the tens of thousands throughout UniCo. We, the people, are supposed to be UniCo’s "most important asset,’’ as some P.R. flack worded it once in the annual report. Brush off the bull and it is true the company couldn’t function without good people of various skills and professions.
I personally am glad it provides jobs. There is a lot to be said for a steady paycheck. But supplying jobs to people surely isn’t why the plant exists. After all, how many people have we laid off so far?
And anyway, even if UniCo offered lifetime employment like some of the Japanese companies, I still couldn’t say the goal is jobs. A lot of people seem to think and act as if that were the goal (empire-building department managers and politicians just to name two), but the plant wasn’t built for the purpose of paying wages and giving people something to do.
Okay, so why was the plant built in the first place?
It was built to produce products. Why can’t that be the goal? Jonah said it wasn’t. But I don’t see why it isn’t the goal. We’re a manufacturing company. That means we have to manufacture something, doesn’t it? Isn’t that the whole point, to produce products? Why else are we here?
I think about some of the buzzwords I’ve been hearing lately.
What about quality?
Maybe that’s it. If you don’t manufacture a quality product all you’ve got at the end is a bunch of expensive mistakes. You have to meet the customer’s requirements with a quality product, or before long you won’t have a business. UniCo learned its lesson on that point.
But we’ve already learned that lesson. We’ve implemented a major effort to improve quality. Why isn’t the plant’s future secure? And if quality were truly the goal, then how come a company like Rolls Royce very nearly went bankrupt?
Quality alone cannot be the goal. It’s important. But it’s not the goal. Why? Because of costs?
If low-cost production is essential, then efficiency would seem to be the answer. Okay . . . maybe it’s the two of them together: quality and efficiency. They do tend to go hand-inhand. The fewer errors made, the less re-work you have to do, which can lead to lower costs and so on. Maybe that’s what Jonah meant.
Producing a quality product efficiently: that must be the goal. It sure sounds good. "Quality and efficiency.’’ Those are
two nice words. Kind of like “Mom and apple pie.”
I sit back and pop the top on another beer. The pizza is now just a fond memory. For a few moments I feel satisfied.
But something isn’t sitting right. And it’s more than just indigestion from lunch. To efficiently produce quality products sounds like a good goal. But can that goal keep the plant working?
I’m bothered by some of the examples that come to mind. If the goal is to produce a quality product efficiently, then how come Volkswagen isn’t still making Bugs? That was a quality product that could be produced at low cost. Or, going back a ways, how come Douglas didn’t keep making DC-3’s? From everything I’ve heard, the DC-3 was a fine aircraft. I’ll bet if they had kept making them, they could turn them out today a lot more efficiently than DC-10’s.
It’s not enough to turn out a quality product on an efficient basis. The goal has to be something else.
But what?
As I drink my beer, I find myself contemplating the smooth finish of the aluminum beer can I hold in my hand. Mass production technology really is something. To think that this can until recently was a rock in the ground. Then we come along with some know-how and some tools and turn the rock into a lightweight, workable metal that you can use over and over again. It’s pretty amazing—
Wait a minute, I’m thinking. That’s it!
Technology: that’s really what it’s all about. We have to stay on the leading edge of technology. It’s essential to the company. If we don’t keep pace with technology, we’re finished. So that’s the goal.
Well, on second thought . . . that isn’t right. If technology is the real goal of a manufacturing organization, then how come the most responsible positions aren’t in research and development? How come R&D is always off to the side in every organization chart I’ve ever seen? And suppose we did have the latest of every kind of machine we could use—would it save us? No, it wouldn’t. So technology is important, but it isn’t the goal.
Maybe the goal is some combination of efficiency, quality and technology. But then I’m back to saying we have a lot of important goals. And that really isn’t saying anything, aside from the fact that it doesn’t square with what Jonah told me.
I’m stumped.
I gaze down the hillside. In front of the big steel box of the plant there is a smaller box of glass and concrete which houses the offices. Mine is the office on the front left corner. Squinting at it, I can almost see the stack of phone messages my secretary is bringing in my wheelbarrow.
Oh well. I lift my beer for a good long slug. And as I tilt my head back, I see them.
Out beyond the plant are two other long, narrow buildings. They’re our warehouses. They’re filled to the roof with spare parts and unsold merchandise we haven’t been able to unload yet. Twenty million dollars in finished-goods inventory: quality products of the most current technology, all produced efficiently, all sitting in their boxes, all sealed in plastic with the warranty cards and a whiff of the original factory air—and all waiting for someone to buy them.
So that’s it. UniCo obviously doesn’t run this plant just to fill a warehouse. The goal is sales.
But if the goal is sales, why didn’t Jonah accept market share as the goal? Market share is even more important as a goal than sales. If you have the highest market share, you’ve got the best sales in your industry. Capture the market and you’ve got it made. Don’t you?
Maybe not. I remember the old line, "We’re losing money, but we’re going to make it up with volume.’’ A company will sometimes sell at a loss or at a small amount over cost—as UniCo has been known to do—just to unload inventories. You can have a big share of the market, but if you’re not making money, who cares?
Money. Well, of course... money is the big thing. Peach is going to shut us down because the plant is costing the company too much money. So I have to find ways to reduce the money that the company is losing....
Wait a minute. Suppose I did some incredibly brilliant thing and stemmed the losses so we broke even. Would that save us? Not in the long run, it wouldn’t. The plant wasn’t built just so it could break even. UniCo is not in business just so it can break even. The company exists to make money.