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I was once in a uni class where the prof was a very expensive consultant. He said that a large % of his jobs for companies like GM or Ford was to grab a notepad
by freeopinion 6y ago
I was once in a uni class where the prof was a very expensive consultant. He said that a large % of his jobs for companies like GM or Ford was to grab a notepad and walk the floor. He would ask line employees why they did things the way they did and what they would change. He got reams of suggestions, typed them up, submitted them and collected a giant paycheck.
Sometimes they were blindingly obvious things. One employee would drive two bolts, quickly change heads, then drive a third bolt. While the carcass advanced to the next station, the emloyee would change back to the original head and be ready for the next carcass. That employee's suggestion: Make all three bolts the same size so I don't have to change heads.
Of course, that is just a fun anecdote. All such efficiencies have been implemented long ago... for auto assembly. But the point is still valid. Your employees know a ton about your business. Even the ones who do the most mundane tasks. Listen to them. Or... pay a very expensive consultant to listen to them.
- motohagiography 6y agoThird generation expensive consultant here. Clients don't pay you for your time, they pay you for theirs. There's a level of abstraction in orgs that you need to be able to navigate and influence. The Twitter hire I get, it's strategic. Man, we all got old.
- rorykoehler 6y agoConsultants are often hired to sign-off on decisions already made but impossible communicate as such without causing internal division.
- rahoulb 6y agoAbsolutely this. One of my friends runs a market research firm that works for big retailers. She says 90% of their work is about producing evidence for the decisions that have already been taken - so they can be implemented without causing complaints.
- freeopinion 6y agoToday, those three bolts are done by robots. Perhaps a modern very expensive consultant builds the AI to "interrogate" the robots for useful suggestions.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoDo you really put it past a big company to have two robots with different screw heads on them for the three bolts? Some maintenance guy who works the floor knows they don’t need two of them but no one will listen. There is still room for a highly paid consultant.
- azinman2 6y agoIs that actually true? My understanding is that there is still a lot of human labor necessarily baked in, and attempts to robotize everything largely have failed for a multitude of reasons (Tesla most famously so), but the most unsolvable is that of flexibility to change something fundamentally on a dime.
- njarboe 6y agoElon Musk said the thing that was really hard to automate was putting in wiring. Tesla has now developed a whole new type of wiring system that is much more amenable to automation.
- ancientworldnow 6y agoTesla uses more workers per car in assembly than other major manufacturer. By a lot. They are not the people to look for in terms of automating auto assembly anecdotes despite their PR efforts.
- anchpop 6y agoI googled but didn't see anything, source?
- 6y ago
- throwaway201103 6y agoBolts may need to be different sizes due to the forces on them. Other solution might have been give the employee two wrenches, one each of the proper size.
- freeopinion 6y agoClassic. Fictional employee. Fictional scenario. But you still assume that the employee isn't smart enough to know why bolts are different sizes and whether a bigger bolt could work in the place of the smaller bolts. You assume you know more about this fictional car than the fictional employee actually (um, I mean fictionally) building it. You should apply for management.
- jacobsenscott 6y agoThere's really no reason to think the person turning the bolt knows what size the bolt needs to be. It isn't insulting to the employee, it just isn't there job. In the same way a web dev doesn't know how docker works, or how their OS's memory allocate works, or how a C programmer doesn't know how the hardware works, or how an EE can't write readable code to save their life.
- reificator 6y ago> In the same way a web dev doesn't know how docker works Reductively it's CoW snapshots + chroot. Guess I need to find a new job.
- jhardy54 6y agof u l l s t a c k
- jacobsenscott 6y agoContainers and a layered file system is closer to the mark
- jhardy54 6y ago
- lukifer 6y agoI'm reminded of Robert Anton Wilson's SNAFU Principle: "Communication is only possible between equals." [0] Formal hierarchies can create perverse incentives that discourage passing vital information up the chain, lest you make someone in power look bad, or stick your neck out as a troublemaker / "not a team player" / etc. While a good manager can mitigate the problem by cultivating mutual trust, individually and culturally, the problem gets compounded when hierarchies become nested, and the org scales beyond the Dunbar Number. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU_Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU_Principle
- m463 6y agoyes, equals. a consultant can talk to the ceo as an equal. however, a consultant can also talk to the mail clerk as an equal.
- reader_mode 6y agoI mean if you talk to a bunch of developers about what they would change in a project you will get valuable feedback. You will also get a lot of stuff that's just wrong, stuff that ignores the big picture and business goals. If you can recognising which is which that's worth a lot of money because acting on a bad idea can be far more costly than not acting on a good one.
- DangitBobby 6y agoYou can also ask your developers to ponder this question ahead of time if you are interested in better answers.
- lmilcin 6y agoI guess asking one person rather than 200 is one way of getting less communication noise.
- manquer 6y agoknowing the right person to ask is hard.
- lmilcin 6y agoIf you manage these people, it is literally your job to know.
- manquer 6y agoFor senior management, it is usually it is your job to hire people who know or help you know( a.k.a consultants ) It is not humanly possible to be knowledgable in all the fields of people working directly or indirectly under you. Good managers are not always technically knowledgable . It is useful skill to have, neither it is most important nor is it even essential. While bad managers tend not to have the knowledge, the worst managers are strong technically but don't have other critical skills needed for the job.