Middle Management Blues

Expectations are a terrible thing.  The gulag, my last place of work, was/is a Fortune 500 company and a very large manufacturing entity in the region, and the #1 taxpayer in its county.  Most people in this thriving midget metropolis know where it is and what it does.  If you sell something, it is the #1 stop to make, because if you can make it there (albeit temporarily unless you are a huge BKL ), you can make it anywhere.  As the place is populated by whiskers and tails in the management ranks, and sometimes below that, if something goes wrong they always (and I mean always) look for someone to blame.  It’s most convenient to blame the vendors and the contractors, since by their very nature they are transient.  If we ran one of them off, whether it was their fault or not, there was always another willing to take their place.  And there really wasn’t any point for them to make a fuss about it, because they become nobody really quickly. In these lit...

In which I can’t stop bitching about our EPC… Maybe because I’ve always been on the owner’s side of the equation, I have an owner’s outlook on how a consulting engineer (or in this case an EPC) should perform.  It goes something like this: Dude, I’m paying you to make my life easier.  If I had the time I would do it myself.  I can forgive the odd mistake or two because I am not perfect.  I’m not infinitely patient, though.  I’ll give you plenty of feedback along the way.  If your calculations show I need four bolts to hold something together, I want four bolts; not five, not six, not eight; four.  If I tell you I want the design done on Thursday, I don’t want it delivered on the following Wednesday, but if I’m being unreasonable I want to know about it.  Don’t blow me off.  If a vendor screws you over, tell me and then figure out what it will mean down the road.  I want all the documentation the vendor sends to you.  If y...

I got into an argument with my boss this afternoon.  He gets his Sports Illustrated delivered to work for a reason I have not been able to fathom, and he was reviewing their list of the fifty highest-paid athletes.  I have admitted that I generally don’t read SI until it has been sitting on the coffee table for a week because it often hypes the athletes in ways that defy reality.  But anyway, this was a straight-up list of who makes how much - salary, incentives and endorsements.  The second jock listed was LeBron James.  He made $56 million last year.  For “playing a dam game,” as my boss pointed out.  Now I must admit that I am not a James fan in the slightest.  I certainly appreciate his gifts and how he has made himself into the best basketball player in the world.  Without him his team would be good, but not so good they’d be marching toward their second straight title in June.  Does that make him worth $56 MM?  Bill Simmon...

Click here for part 1 New liaison, new priority.  Screw doing it right - we need to save money.  Thus... “I know the pipe spec calls for 316 stainless, but we can save some money if we…” “I know the pump spec is for [insert good pump manufacturer] but we can save money if we…” “I know the design called for a redundant spare, but we can save money if we…” “The DCS vendor wants too much money.  Let’s go with these other guys…” “Nobody told us we would have to interface our PLC with your DCS…” I just picked five at random.  There were many more.  Let’s focus on the second one for giggles.  The difference in purchase price between the pumps was $1000.  Great – we saved a grand.  BUT.  Now the EPC writes an ECN (Engineering Change Notice), re-designs the piping or the base or even the electrical, and now your $1000 savings might have only saved $200 and now you are stuck with a sh_tty pump (since start up I've already had to...

As you might remember from previous posts, our plant is nearly brand new.  We had the usual start-up issues but we’ve also had a ton of duh issues owing to a half-assed project management, both from us and from our design engineering firm.  We should have done better but the company was worried about money; the design firm should have done better but they were more focused on taking our cash. I do have some bona fides for this sort of thing.  I started life as a design engineer and quickly determined my interests swayed more toward project management.  The nice thing about the switch was that I had enough design experience that I could divide my time between directing the design and actually running the project.  I had always thought that design and management were nearly one and the same but they aren’t.  The designer is the pilot and the PM is the air-traffic controller.  If the pilots are flying around on their own without much direction you ...

It’s looking like our dear little start-up is going to survive.  According to the latest AP reports (that would be Anonymous Perceptions, not the other), all that’s left is for the lawyers to nod and the checks to clear.  Which would be a relief to my family and many others… I’ve taken advantage of our hiatus by catching up on all the “nice-to-dos” that I did not have time to complete when I was playing all the parts on Sgt. Pepper’s at the same time.  We hope you will enjoy the show.  I feel a little guilty about it, but it looks like things will ramp up to 11 again soon. Those of us who survived the purge sat down and reviewed all the tasks necessary to get the plant back up and running.  Towards the end of the bogsat we discussed the changes we thought we needed to make to ensure things go more smoothly than before.  We’d like to take you home with us; we’d love to take you home.  The longer it went, the madder I got. If you have ever read b...

For some reason I was drawn to the recent headlines from various financial rags about the cash “hoarding” going on among American companies .  You might recall similar headlines prior to the US presidential elections, which one side blamed on the other, and we’ll get to that in a few paragraphs.  The amount of money is staggering.  One writer compared it to the GDP of Germany (Deutschland uber alles except Cisco and Microsoft, so there). The last time I looked at my local credit union I was getting about 0.11% on my savings, and I’m old enough to remember 5% was a common rate.  I’m not so naïve to believe these companies are getting the same return, but they can’t be getting that much more.  Why the heck save your money for virtually nothing?  I’m not any kind of a macroeconomist, but if you are barely beating inflation, why not invest it in something that will make money?  Like rebuilding your assets?  Or some promising little start-up? ...

I don’t watch much TV anymore.  I’ve subscribed to Sports Illustrated since I was 19, but I don’t pick it up until it’s been lying on the coffee table for a week.  Even my favorite radio show, Gone Phishing on SiriusXM , isn’t a must-listen anymore.  Everything is so contrived.  Everything is hyped far beyond my ability to tolerate.  The DJ on Gone Phishing, a guy named Jonathan Schwartz (who I actually enjoy), starts or ends the show with how “awesome” that night’s set was.  [BTW Gone Phishing is a replay of a set of a Phish show going back to when they played random small (read: never heard of them) colleges in Vermont and going forward to shows played only weeks ago.]  I like Phish, but life is a bell curve.  Not all the shows are “awesome”.  Some of them suck.  A show broadcast recently featured the keyboardist, Page McConnell , doing a cover of Elton John’s Rocket Man, which Jonathan breathlessly previewed by saying Page “knocked i...

In the last post I wrote a little bit about how I see one of my roles as the middleman in communication between upper management and everybody else.  The honchos tend to speak differently.  A skilled communicator (and you don’t get to the upper echelons without people believing that you are one) realizes that the language and sometimes even the cadence are totally different than that of, say, regular guys in middle management.  They obviously love buzzwords , and buzzwords convey little to the techs and operators.  At the gulag they loved EBITDA , you know, earnings before interest, taxes, blah blah blah.  I never ever heard a tech say the acronym.  Never.  They could not possibly care less.  But, if I wanted to communicate with an upper manager and have them understand it I would use lots of buzzwords (and lots of very short words to fill in).  In a way it’s a sellout, because buzzwords are a crutch and I’m not a crutch kind of guy.  T...

I have somehow become the father confessor in my office.  Co-workers amble into my office, slouch in one of my too-comfortable chairs, and confess.  “Bless me father, for I have come to complain.”  From the operations superintendent: “Why doesn’t the plant manager like me?  I’m working my butt off but all I hear from him are complaints about housekeeping.” From the lead tech: “The contractors are lazy.  Get rid of them.  We’re better off hiring more people.” From the lead operator: “The engineers don’t listen to me.  They think they know everything.” From the plant manager: “Why don’t the operators take initiative?  They should have known better than to do what they did.” Taken as a group, it seems like I work with a bunch of whiners.  But we all whine.  If you’ve read many of these posts you might come away with the thought that Manager X should really be Manager W, because all I ever do is snivel.  Your saving grace is that you c...

This is a true story.  This has nothing to do with my usual manager-type ramblings, but it's so good it has to be shared.  The names have been changed because all the names get changed. To appreciate this story, it helps to know the victim, who is a sliderule-using, pocket-protector-wearing, tape-across-the-nose-of-his-glasses type of engineer.  Not a bad guy, but d efinitely a nerd .  Here we go... I was lucky enough to meet RJ Mentes at my first job.  I was straight out of college and pretty clueless in both life and plant engineering, and he was kind enough to help show me the ropes in both.  I haven’t seen him much since I took the job at the gulag, but I think of him every so often when something really funny happens, because he has a sense of humor like a knuckleball – you never knew where it was going and its effects left its victims scratching their heads. When RJ was a young man in the early 1970s, the US was involved in Vietnam , and yo...

No meetings, no vendors, I focus and things get done; Alas they have found me, I squint into sun. Sorry.  BSME, not BA – Eng. As I noted in the last post, I bailed out on the yuk of my last job and joined up with a much smaller, more electric place to ply my trade.  It’s a start-up and my responsibilities are much more diverse, which of course means I get involved in more than my title would lead one to believe.  After six months, it is beginning to get more like whack-a-mole than I’d like, though still fun as hell.  Given a few minutes for reflection, I harken back to the good old days, a few short months ago, the halcyon times when I could work, uninterrupted, not on the things I have to do but on the things I wanted to do. This is where the screen goes fuzzy…and then… My first day of work I was given a badge and a tour (which took maybe 15 minutes).  The plant manager led me back to my new office, shook my hand, and said, “Have at it.”  Th...

It’s been a good long time since I added any thoughts to this blog.  I have a couple good excuses.  I quit my job.   After years of trying to change the organization from within, I gave up.  The signs were all over all my previous posts, and I’d wager that most readers figured it out before I did.  I’m sure more spite will spittle into subsequent posts now and again.  Anyway, I spent what was left of my genius trying to find a job. If you read the posts then you know that I live in a moderately rural part of the country and jobs that fit my skills are rarer than Kobe Bryant assists.   Eventually I hooked on with a much smaller org.  In addition to responsibilities in maintenance and engineering, I became the de facto purchasing manager, warehouse manager, relief supervisor, relief plant manager, part-time receiving clerk, etc etc.  It’s as much fun as I’ve ever had working. However, people are still people, and people make orgs. ...