management at your place and at your pace. The goal is, through typed words, to connect the message to the intended recipient. Let’s face it, a good book that is not read has the same effect as no book at all. I wanted to write a compelling argument. It was the way I was taught and the way I went on to teach others.
Years after attaining my Ph.D., I began teaching as an adjunct faculty member for a few local colleges and universities. My first graduate class was a graduate level research course. Completing this research course was a requirement for students before writing and defending their Master’s Thesis. I told my class that one of the first things they needed to give consideration to was developing their thesis statement. “Have a bold and compelling statement," I told them. “Have a thesis statement that triggers an immediate response from the reader. Nobody wants to read a vanilla paper. Average papers don’t invoke passion and don’t get read. Get your audience to disagree with you or boldly agree."
To get my class in the mindset of writing an awesome thesis statement, I held weekly debate sessions. Just short twenty-minute discussions. Short but impactful.
Each week I would introduce a current event topic and tell the class to be ready to debate it the next week. I divided the class into pro and con groups. When we met again, I said something along these lines, “Guys, I decided to switch you up. If you were the con side of the debate I’m going to ask you to argue ‘for’ the issue, and vice versa.” This went on every single week. It didn’t take my class long to realize that in order to make an effective argument, for or against, you need to be able to argue both sides of the debate. Know your competitor’s stuff better than they know it was my point.
How did the chapter heading of this introductory chapter make you feel when you read it?
“I Just Don’t Think You’re Smart Enough”
If I did my homework, that statement made you a little curious as to what was coming next. Let me tell you where that line actually came from.
One of my first consulting assignments was at a sugar factory in the Deep South. I was there with the president of Marshall Institute, Greg Folts. Prior to this assignment, I had been wrestling with a nagging thought. Remember, I was brand new to the consulting gig. My quandary was, “How does a maintenance manager feel when their boss calls in a maintenance consultant?” I had no experience with this. I had only ever worked with one consultant, and I was the one who called him in.
Through the mastery of his years of knowledge and experience, Greg completely and sincerely laid out a Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) strategy for the potential client. This approach would absolutely deliver what the client wanted and even provided some things Greg knew they would have to have, but they had yet to discover that they would need. On the way out of the plant manager’s office, the maintenance manager lightly grabbed my arm and leaned into me and whispered, “Please help me.”
Here’s what I discovered right then and there. The maintenance manager and the plant engineer almost always know what to do. Their biggest obstacle is convincing everyone else that it is the right thing to do. We are going to get that alignment right during the course and content of the book that you now hold. The twenty-first century is not a time for maintenance versus production. This is a time for asset management, and that means everyone!
Years later and now a more confident consultant, I was alone and pitching a plan to a plant leadership group. The plant manager was clearly not a person who valued teamwork and felt that all things equipment reliability related were solely within the jurisdiction and responsibility of the maintenance department. At the end of my presentation, he said, “I just don’t think we can do that.” Admittedly a little frustrated, I said, “You know, I agree. I just don’t think you’re smart enough.”
That woke some people up.
The plant manager explained that he didn’t mean that they weren’t smart enough to do what I was suggesting, it was more of an issue of ‘his’ willingness to engage production in what was traditionally a maintenance responsibility. He didn’t think production would do what I was asking them to do. Production was not motivated, in other words, and thus, not capable. This was the first group to ever hear my famous “Unless it requires us overcoming the laws of physics—inertia, the speed of light, or gravity— it is all within our capabilities” speech.
After all, it’s not rocket science.
Give that point some serious thought. Unless the solution to our problem requires us to overcome the laws of physics, everything we need to be successful is within our control. It’s often no more, really, than time and money.
If we say we can’t do something, we are really saying that we aren’t smart enough to figure out how to do it.
The epiphany you should be experiencing at this time is to have the metaphorical scales lifted from your eyes and see that almost anything we will be asked to or required to do is within our capabilities. We just need to come together in our organizations and facilities to understand what is being asked, and determine how we are going to respond. The good news? We always seem to have something to practice on because we always seem to be evolving.
Our newest challenge is to understand and implement ISO 55000, Asset Management. ISO is the moniker for the International Organization for Standardization, a global fraternity of national standards bodies. ISO 55000 isn’t new, although with this title it has only been around since the beginning of 2014. Remember that global fraternity I just mentioned a few sentences ago? The birth of this standard, ISO 55000, came from the publication of PAS 55 by the British Standards Institution. This new standard has some history of application and success and almost nothing in the documentation can be argued against, although we may try. The paradox is that it all makes such common sense. As we know, common sense isn’t always that common.
But haven’t we seen this movie before?
I purposefully started this chapter by mentioning that I was troubled and concerned. I went further to reveal that I was writing this book under duress. Let me explain.
I’ve been in maintenance for a long time, and I have the hairline to prove it. In fact, I would put my bona fides up against anyone’s to prove that I am confident in what I say and do. I spent eleven years as an aircraft maintenance officer in the United States Air Force, sixteen as a plant maintenance manager or plant engineer, and seven as a reliability consultant. I believe I’ve consulted or worked in every industry you could name and on almost every continent. No, I take that back. I’ve never worked in the whaling industry in Antarctica. But I’ve been around.
Throughout my thirty-four-year career in maintenance and reliability, there has been a common thread. This thread ran through the military, private industry, and almost all the plants and facilities I’ve consulted in. What is this common denominator? Constantly convincing operations and organizational leadership that we need help with equipment maintenance and reliability. We need access to assets to perform proactive and corrective maintenance. We need money and resources to do our jobs. We need production to stop running equipment into the ground. Why doesn’t anyone else care about the state and the upkeep of the company equipment? Why isn’t anyone listening?
Imagine the surprise of all professional reliability and maintenance experts when they realize that all we needed to do was to publish an international standard to get people hopping to our rescue! Read that last sentence with a dramatic eye roll and as sarcastically as possible.
I asked earlier, haven’t we seen this movie before? You don’t have to go as far back as W. Edwards Deming to begin to see the concept of asset management taking shape. Seiichi Nakajima alluded to our combined interest in asset performance and reliability