Mark Twain said, “Humor is the good-natured side of a truth”. One of Geolean’s principles is to have fun at work, to the extent that we don’t call our customer visits meetings, we call them field trips. These field trips allow us to experience truth and humor from our customers’ perspective. Consistently hearing the same themes across industries, geographies, and hierarchy (along with a re-read of Jeff Foxworthy) generated the idea for this blog series. We see our customers working hard every day to improve their operations and create results for their customers, but it’s a difficult job and the results are not immediately visible. Know that you don’t struggle alone and that even when the system seems absurd, if you can see the humor in it, you have the first insight into solving the problem.
You might have a backwards manufacturing operation if…
- Your corporate improvement audit awards point to things that have zero impact on results
- Finance determines when product ships instead of the customer because of “numbers”
- You manage inventory with three different systems, and none of them match reality
- Your strategic initiatives are the same every year and the achievement plan is “try harder”
- Your strategic initiatives change every year and they reverse what was done the previous year
- Corporate’s idea of support is a quarterly plant visit and a reduction in your capital budget
- The improvement program is full of interns and rotational program employees
- The solution to your ancient IT system is a new IT system… from the same vendor that still doesn’t work
- You can’t figure out how to fix a key part of your process, so you just outsource it and move on
- You have more accountants than engineers