Burning Questions

It was a little after 6PM and I was in my boss' office talking through all our problems, and we had been there since 6AM that morning. As he was ranting about customers, labor challenges, middle management failures, and the abysmal P&L, I was fuming over the mountain of customer complaints on my desk, the multiple HACCP deviations and GMP violations reported to me that day by my disillusioned FSQA team. To top off the absurdity, I was to attend a supplier quality summit at a customer's corporate headquarters the next week to put our best foot forward. I was also contemplating the wisdom of having accepted this position and the prospect of a long commute home to a family who were increasingly becoming estranged. Sound familiar?

It was then that I blurted it out. "Jeff, how can you think about that when Rome is burning?!" Other than the fact that it felt like the plant was figuratively on fire, it wasn't a well placed analogy. As the story goes, in 64 AD a fire swept through Rome over several days destroying large parts of the city. Emperor Nero either intentionally had the fire set to clear space for his new palace, or was so disinterested that he casually played the lyre as the fire raged on. I think the historical reference was mostly lost on my boss - the plant was Rome and he was Nero, fiddling around with bad outcomes while the root cause raged on. Considering how the burning analogy shifted his focus and that he didn't fire me on the spot, I think it sort of worked.

"How can you think about that when Rome is burning?!"

This truly is the question we all face in dealing with food safety and quality risks in food processing. Every day there are dozens of problems competing for our attention. Yet if we do not focus on the main thing, we will be inefficient at best, and dangerous at worst! If we are not focused, we rush around putting out fires here and there, leaving us too busy to address the issues fueling the fire or the arsonists setting them!

Maintain a clean, safe environment in which to produce food. Take good care of your employees. Produced according to a sound, science-based food safety plan.

If you are working on anything that cannot be tied to those three main goals, then you are likely lacking in effectiveness. Do you really need to wordsmith that customer complaint response, or does your team need to see you on the floor? Do you really need to attend the budget meeting, or can you simply email your report? Should you spend the hour listening to a vendors sales pitch for a new monitoring device, or would that time be better spent doing on the floor training on the existing equipment with middle managers?

If you feel like you are scrambling and firefighting, step away and reset your focus. Walk the perimeter of the property if you have to. When you get back, politely remind others of your key role for the company and why you can no longer attend to everyone else's. Now, muster up the grit necessary and follow the cause map back to its root. Remove the fire fodder, the arsonists, and kick Nero to the curb. And by all means get help if you need it. Call me, and if I cannot help you through your particular situation I'll find one of my contacts who can.