Blurb about John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, from “Too Big To Fail”…
“In his junior year at MIT, when he interned at Proctor and Gamble, he made a simple but highly significant observation of an assembly line he was supervising. The workers were making Ivory soap, and whenever technical problems forced the line to come to a halt, they would wait for it to start up again before getting back to work. The college boy persuaded the workers that there was no reason to stop – they could keep making soap and stack the boxes on the side until the line came back on. That way their bonuses, which were based on production, would not be affected.”
Ok. So…after re-reading this and having a “fist of fury” moment (as my husband calls them as I really do shake my fist in the air in fury) at the pure unbelievableness of it, I asked myself so it took this boy genius from MIT to convince these workers, whose bonuses were based ON PRODUCTION, to keep making soap and simply stack the boxes to the side until the assembly line was working again so they could load them up? Really? THIS is what the heck people do when left to their own devices? And there was clearly no better supervisor previously to instill this little nugget of wisdom.
This is the type of thing that infuriates me. Mind-boggles me. And makes me NOT sympathetic to the (typically but not always) union worker bee who feels entitled to corporate profits, lifetime pensions and health benefits and whatever else they can get. I guess businesses really do need those highly paid MBA types…that way work can still get done, and workers can make their bonuses, when the assembly line stalls.
Filing under #unfrackingbelievable
