One Summer of One Hundred
Ridge Tool Company celebrates it 100th anniversary this year. Prior to its founding, a portion of the plant was home to Bender Body Company, the coachmaker for Willys-Overland. Most people think of Willys as the precursor of the Jeep but drag racing fans will recall the Willys cars of the 1960s with a certain wistfulness.
I know about the Willys history because I had to learn it. Ridge Tool is located in my hometown of Elyria, Ohio (shout out to any E-town subscribers) and during the summer of 1981 I worked as a production planning trainee there. Part of my job required me to visit every department in the plant on a daily basis, including the old Willys shop. To say that the job changed my life is not hyperbole, it's a fact.
It was at Ridge Tool that I learned about how a business actually worked and - more importantly - how people worked. It also gave me a chance to recognize that I was a decent problem solver. There was one situation that I recall vividly in this regard, and it involved - of all things - electric motors. Ridge made many of their own and parts and there were lots of machines used to make those parts, many of which used electric motors. Most of the time, if a motor stopped working it was just replaced. After many years of this practice, there was a giant pile of motors that the plant manager wanted removed but nobody knew what to do with. I made a call to a local recycler who bought them all because of the value of the copper windings. The lesson I learned was that a good idea can come from anyone, including a nineteen-year-old meathead. I certainly remembered that when I was at sea a few years later and was surrounded by equally arrogant nineteen-year-olds, a few of whom were extraordinarily talented and just needed someone to listen to their ideas.
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The other thing I recognized was that managing and directing staff is pretty simple: be respectful and learn the real motivations that people have, not what you (or your organization) think they have. This one I experienced in a very focused, very intense two-day event called annual inventory. I was - shockingly - named a team lead for the inventory and was assigned a team that included two employees who were parents of kids I had played sports with. Of course, I did all the nerdy things that were unnecessary and had a team meeting, etc., all of which was a total waste of time. These people knew what to do and wanted to get it over with and go home, which totally surprised me, since they were getting paid by the hour. I realized this was the case after about the first fifteen minutes, so I stopped everything (what an arrogant punk) and basically told them that if they finished the count and the count audits they could leave. I didn't ask for permission, I just did it. Chris Keith will likely recall that I used this same approach to address an inventory challenge with the Georgia Health Partnership over twenty years after my summer at Ridge.
I think that the fact I learned these lessons at a young age are important, but I think that where I learned them was equally so. Manufactuing generates lots of operational challenges that require agile thinking. Strategies to address these challenges can be assessed almost in real time, meaning that they can be changed back or modified just as fast. In other words, it's a great environment in which to "fail quickly" and learn from it.
In today's hyper-transaction-driven, cloud-based, AI-enhanced world "failing quickly" likely means "getting terminated quickly." That's a shame, because it makes the adage "We all learn from our mistakes" simply of figure of speech. I'm certainly glad I had the opportunity to work in manufacturing, where I was truly allowed to learn from mistakes.