What went wrong

At the very start of my career - actually when I was fresh out of secondary school before I went to University - I worked for a well known UK based engineering company. They made everything from missile casings to wind turbines, i.e. they made the sort of stuff that today would be selling like proverbial hot cakes.

This company no longer exists. Well, the remnants of it got bought for a pittance and the huge site became derelict in the early 2000's.

At the time I was there they had invested around ï¿¡50 million in their main production facility, with fancy CNC machines and the latest manufacturing tech. It was before anyone had really heard about 5S, but it was new, clean and shiny, with all the trimmings of what we might now consider 'lean'. Except it was largely idle.

Highly skilled, highly paid operators stood around with nothing to do.

The Production Director at the time had a reputation as a bit mean spirited, but in hindsight that was grossly unfair, and more to the point he was just a typical smart person under pressure, trying his best with what he had, and a more measured description might be that 'he didn't suffer fools gladly'. Possibly (certainly) as a last resort, he one day asked me, pimply student, bright but clueless, why his unit was failing. He himself was doing all the right things but productivity was clearly appalling - "write me a report on what's going wrong" he asked.

The report

So I did. I was up all night with it. I can't for the life of me recall what i wrote, but i remember being ever so proud of my report when I landed it on his desk.

Now you might just assume that the reason for this lack of activity was that there simply wasn't any work to do, but that would be wrong. In fact, there was a lot of work that those machines could and should have been doing. What was happening is that all the work was being subcontracted out to small engineering firms around the country. I know this because one of my rotations was in the "Quality" department whereupon I was tasked with visiting said subcontractors to inspect and approve their outputs. In other words, the work was there, the revenue for what was being made was there, but it just wasn't being done in our factory, by our people.

It turns out that the way they did their costings, they loaded all the factory costs (and investment depreciation etc) onto anything made in the factory, so it meant that on paper that a component made in our factory cost many times that of any like for like cost quoted by a subcontractor. It meant it was too expensive to make anything in this newly minted production hall, and much cheaper to simply get someone else to make it.

Mad, right?

Now, if you haven't spotted the madness in this logic, don't be concerned. It's definitely crazy, wrong, even stupid, but the reason you should not be concerned is that this isn't where the madness I want to focus upon lies.

The real insanity is not that a time-served, capable and clever leader, and his boss the Industrial Director, together with the Finance Director, and all their heavyweight Director colleagues right up to the CEO couldn't fathom the lunacy of their accounting logic.

The madness is that they turned to this pimply, clueless idiot for answers.

Some years later, after I'd been inducted into the world of Honda and its world class manufacturing ways, whilst both might have had shiny painted floors, the differences couldn't have been more stark, the reasons for failure more obvious. Over the years I've also 'learned through doing' the actions, leadership and management required for transformation from one state to the other, in many different businesses.

The point is, you need this kind of experience to know the answers about what to do and how to do it (not the same thing).

I know it can't be done alone.

It can't be done by people who've not done anything meaningful or relevant yet.

It can't be done by people who don't see the problem, or the urgency of the problem.

Lone Riders

Whether a consultant, an interim, or an individual person in an organisation up to and including the CEO, it stands to reason that there needs to be a cooperation of intent and conviction of action in anything that needs to change. Junior, inexperienced actors don't have the authority to effect meaningful change, whilst at the other end of the scale, even rock stars need teams behind them to be successful, from roadies to promoters. Beware the ego.

Meaningful and Relevant

You really can't expect a pimply schoolchild, no matter how bright or promising, with but a handful of years experience in one or even two companies, to have anywhere near the kind of knowhow to drive fast, sustainable change. People at that stage of their career need exposure, to make mistakes, to absorb. They are on a learning path, and should be nurtured with that in mind, protected even, and that needs investment of management time you might not possess, plus an experienced hand to steer, unless you want those necessary mistakes to bite you. That's why it's not as cost effective as it might appear to fill those roles with cheaper, less experienced juniors. Beware the consultants who show up with a team of graduates fresh out of college, and beware relying on some junior employee to transform the performance of your operation.

Not seeing the urgency of the problem

There's a well known analogy regarding 'boiling a frog'; not for the squeamish but it's only a thought experiment, I promise: you put a frog in a pot of cold water, bring it up to the boil, and it won't jump out until it's too late. However, try to drop that same frog in a pan of already boiling water and it'll leap straight back out again.

This analogy helps to put into perspective the situation in so many businesses. Those within it often don't see the urgency. Yesterday is not so different to today. Same level of busy. It takes a real shock, or a leader with either a fresh perspective or the right attitude to recognise that the water is ALWAYS BOILING, whether you feel it or not.

20 years in a company is more rare nowadays, and it's not a bad thing. However, it's important firstly to ensure it's not the same year repeated 20 times and moreover secondly, to put that experience to work: to contextualise - not block - fresh perspectives. It's exactly that experience, used in the right way, that helps a new CEO, or people like me, be effective and valuable, by helping to navigate organisational obstacles and enablers much more quickly, to get done what needs to be done, fast.

Epilogue

The company I worked for back then went the way of so many like it. Clearly, it wasn't - couldn't have been - just the mad accounting practice that led to its demise, but it certainly helped. As might be guessed, when it disappeared, so must a lot of smaller engineering firms that had been supplying it. This was at a time when great swathes of UK manufacturing was dying ostensibly in the so called 'switch' to a service economy (for which read 'finance and retail'). For those who think those days are long gone, we must consider that the next "UK" phase was to offshore everything, the equivalent of subcontracting everything out to someone who could do it cheaper. The UK hasn't really ever stopped that phase, and we should wonder if that's turning out any healthier for UK plc than it did for my old company. Many of those highly skilled, highly paid machine operators I saw standing around will be retired now. If not, they'll either be working in Costa or a warehouse somewhere packing a box with stuff from China.