A caustic reaction

You would think that if your chosen management style was to act decisively after bad things happen (in other words, being reactive) then you would be pretty good at it.  You would think that if you declare for all to hear that your management style is being pro-active, then you wouldn’t be reactive.  You would think that it would be impossible to combine to naturally opposing management styles, but I’m here to tell you all that it is indeed very possible and astoundingly bad.

Bad in this case is called over-reacting.  One of my favorite sayings around work is that there’s no use reacting when you can over-react.  It purports to show your underlings that you are in control (even though you’re not) but what it really shows is that you are clueless.  Here’s the story…

The Mardi Gras of the plant calendar is the week we shut the boilers down for maintenance.  Since the plant barely operates without steam, every department gets in on the act and does their once/year maintenance chores also.  When you have hundreds of semi-invited guests earning up to $100/hr for a week, the tab gets run up awfully fast.  Combine that with an artificially lowered budget (due to executives VPs being smarter than us and unilaterally slicing off the top) and you are welcomed to Overrun, USA. 

Generally these things happen in the middle of the year, so we cinch up the belts and try for the rest of the year to get back to the black.  It never happens but we give it the old college try and there are handshakes all around at the end of the year because, well, the dragon ate us but we gave him heartburn, the bastard.

This has happened in each of the last five years and probably for many more before that.  But this year all hell broke loose.  The brilliant exec VP, the most brilliant one, saw that our preliminary spending was $1MM over and decisively decided to bring in an auditor to see where all that extra money went.  An auditor, at least a good one who understands office politics, will search until he finds something, and this one decided that we weren’t accruing all the costs we should have been.  He was right, sort of.  For some reason one of my peers “forgot” to accrue a major job in his area, so corporate figured where there’s French fries there’s a McDonalds, and bored in to find more misses. 

As many of you know, there’s not necessarily and right way and a wrong way.  Sometimes there’s a conservative way and an aggressive way.  (See also, Enron and Arthur Anderson).  Turned out we were a wee bit to the aggressive side.  We should have been whole hog on the conservative side (though I suspect if we were a wee bit to the conservative side we would have been pushed the other way…)  Additional accruals meant we were even more over budget, and it looked like we were trying to hide it (to managers who don’t trust their folks).  Our plant manager, controller, and my boss were all summoned to the great management temple, HQ, and re-programmed.  There’s nothing like a having a few large bites out of your backside to wake you up in the morning.

Long story somewhat shorter, our trio of characters from a Hank Senior song trudge back home and immediately kill all spending.  Contractors?  Gone.  Materials?  Send them back.  Rentals?  OMG send it back yesterday what the hell is wrong with you don’t you know what is happening here you freaking moron you’re two more mistakes away from the unemployment line if I don’t kill you first.

Right now we are just a shell.  We’re avoiding everything.  Yes, it will come back, and we’re hoping it comes back before the equipment around the plant starts dictating terms. 

Management thinks they are being proactive by reducing spending to the bare minimum, but they’re really just reacting to the pressure from corporate.  We all know what they are doing but they doth protest otherwise.

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A reasonable reaction…no, hell let’s do this the right way…

A proactive manager would have reviewed the proposed spending before we spent it (novel idea, right?) and if the budget was really that big of a deal he would have made the hard decisions necessary to get us back into line.  We actually made that request but the schmuck designated by the plant manager to make the cuts punted.  He wouldn’t cut anything.  Just maybe he could not communicate the cuts he wanted to make because his lips are permanently attached to the exec VP’s backside, but y’know it would be really cruel to point that out.  Maybe he’s just too much of a weasel and lacks courage.

So that’s option one.  Unfortunately it requires a spine.  If you’re a manager you need one of those; not enough of us have one.  Option two would be to react reasonably.  In years past I’ve been guilty of a big mistake when this situation arose.  I told the supervisors and engineers that we had to cut (for example) $1 million out of the budget for the remainder of the year.  Since they are human (mostly) they looked at the guy to their left and the guy to their right and thought, “Good luck, fellas.  You better cut big because I aint cutting nothing.”  (No Rhodes scholars here.)  If I’d have had the chance to make the policy this time I would’ve taken the budget delta, assigned a corresponding portion to each department, divided it up into weekly portions, and showed the supervisor his new weekly budget.  I’ve considered doing it into daily budgets, but that gets a little tough to sustain, because people get budget fatigue (just like diet fatigue).  A week is manageable in both concept and reality.

Next time I’ll try to write a little bit about reactivity and troubleshooting when the plant starts to fall apart.  I'm guessing I’m going to get a lot of practice very soon.