I’ve always heard that batting is the hardest thing to do in
sports. The guys who are very good at it
make it safely to base 40% of the time (aka on-base percentage or obp). (According to espn.com, only seven majorleaguers have an obp above .400 at this point of the season.) This also means that the best in the world
FAIL 60% of the time.
How about soccer (or football in the rest of the
world)? Argentinian Carlos Tevez led Man City
American football?
There would be very little controversy if you proclaimed that both Tom
Brady and Peyton Manning are among the best ever to play quarterback, and yet
neither of them succeeds more than two times out of three, and Manning actually
gave the ball away about once every 40 times he threw it.
What do you think their bosses think of their performance? Do you think Roberto Mancini pulled Tevez
aside and said, “Look, lad, you missed a hundred shots last year. You need to make them all, or else we’ll sell
you to Wigan .”
(No he probably wouldn’t, least of all because he’s Italian.) Bill Belichick would never have that
conversation will Brady, because Bill barely speaks anyway and would trade
Brady to the Seahawks in the middle of the night just for fun (and get awaywith it). All that BS, but really these
athletes are as close to perfect as we can get.
Yes, they “fail” more than they succeed, but they are better than anyone
else.
What if you were the best in the world at fixing pumps on a
factory floor? Could you fix one hundred
pumps perfectly, so that every of the one hundred pumps runs without failures
until one of the wear parts fails? Without
a doubt you could. But lets say each of
the one hundred pumps must wear out despite the fact that the operators running
the pumps have a nasty habit of starving them (causing cavitation), or pumping
heavy metal objects that have no business in the pumps, or allowing them to run
dry. Now we’re talking some difficulty,
yeah. What if we said that all those one
hundred pumps have to run perfectly to a wear-part failure, but you must now be
able to predict with close certainty the time the pump will fail so that it can
be taken out of service (and rebuilt) before it fails so that it will not
interrupt the process flow. Now how many
people can do that? What if we said
there were more than one hundred pumps?
How about 570 pumps? And
conveyors and motors and mixers and lift trucks and (you get the picture)… The expectation has not changed. Each of these must live to wear-part failure,
but their failure must be predicted prior to gunnysack. That’s a pretty tough job.
There are factories out there where this is a near reality,
where a management team can lead a maintenance group into perfection. Ours is not one of them. We would certainly like to be perfect – we
are savvy enough to know how much that would add to the last row of numbers on
the balance sheet. We have the
germinations of a clue of how to get there, but we lack the confidence of
experience. We also lack the management
style that would allow it to happen.
Consider Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). The passenger plane industry came up with
this system and you’ve got to believe it has been very successful because you
can fly across country or ocean and give failure very little thought. Can the plant go the same amount of time
without a failure? Hell, no. We put resources and time into RCM and had a
smidgeon of success, but not near enough to sustain the effort. We figured out later that the consultant who
was helping us had barely more of a clue than we did, but that’s our
fault. We would have been better using
RCM+, which is less rigorous and is faster to implement, but by then we had
worn out management’s patience and used up our allowance. Because we were not getting the results we
had optimistically promised, the manager was fired and the new guy, who needed
hooked on phonics to get through Playboy but was politically savvy, had no
interest in following in the old guy’s steel-toed boots. We dashed off in some other direction, which
ended up being something along the lines of trying to blame all our failures on
inept operators. You may have noticed
that I hinted earlier at the lack of expertise some of our operators have
exhibited, but I would stop short of using them as my own version of communists
in a red scare. For a maintenance guy, a
good operator can make you look really good, and a devious, twisted, cynical
bad operator can make you wish you’d been cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril.
So that was a missed opportunity to make ourselves
significantly better. Unfortunately our
mgmt style does not do second chances, because they buy into sample sizes of
one whenever it makes their point. If
our managers ran the Colts they would have cut Peyton Manning after his first
INT. David Ortiz would be spitting intohis hands in Pawtucket
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