Preface
IN SEPTEMBER 1983, I started my second year of studying sciences at university. My courses comprised predominantly math, chemistry, and physics, but for my one elective I chose a psychology course, in the hope that it would add very little to my workload.
In one of the first classes, I watched a short film documenting some guy named B. F. Skinner working with a severely physically and mentally disabled young girl. The girl was about four years old, and due to her challenges she had never walked. Over the course of five hours, using only a clothesline and ice cream, Skinner taught the little girl to walk on her own.
I was mesmerized. What magic was this Skinner fellow working? And how could I learn to do it? My throwaway elective soon became my favorite course, and that class kicked off my lifelong fascination with understanding why people do the things they do. Over the years, I learned just how much real science there was related to this topic and I discovered the large body of knowledge that can assist us with what we sometimes refer to as performance management.
So, why write a book about it? As the old saying goes, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” During my consulting career, I’ve had the opportunity to translate elements of the body of knowledge about performance management into practical tools and techniques that I, and the teams I’ve worked with, have used to help people and organizations improve their situation with regard to real problems. The translation from theory to practice is not always straightforward, but this book is intended to provide some useful perspective on how to make that transition. Written as a novel, this book offers a realistic depiction of some situations we all face and illustrates in a practical way how to apply some basic principles to improve them.
Mackenzie Kyle
Vancouver, British Columbia
September 2015
ONE
Changes
MY PHONE BUZZED. It was Jake. Again.
When r u coming home?
People today don’t like to talk. We text, we tweet, we BBM, we Facebook, we iMessage. If we’re really old school, we send each other emails. These days, that’s pretty much the technological equivalent of sending a letter via the post office. But we don’t call each other. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that an actual conversation takes more time than we think we have.
I sound like a grumpy old man when I say that, but first of all, forty-three is far from old, and secondly, it’s really more of an observation than a complaint. I’m not saying that all these new ways of connecting are inferior to talking; in many circumstances, I think they lead to more communication, rather than less.
Case in point: my teenage son. Jake is fourteen. When I was that age, my friends and I would only grunt in the general direction of our dads if we happened to find ourselves in the same room. And generally we’d avoid being in the same room.
Now, I text with Jake ten times a day. With my fifteen-year-old daughter, Sarah, it’s probably twice that. Maybe it’s not talking, but it’s a lot better than grunting.
My phone buzzed again.
?
The downside of all this communication? Sometimes there’s guilt attached. I texted him back.
I’ll tell u in 20 min
IN THE MORE than ten years I’ve been working for him, Ralph Borsellino has remained almost irritatingly youthful. The stress of being the CEO of a ten-billion-dollar company apparently agrees with him; if anything, he looks younger today than he did when I first knew him as the president of a small manufacturing operation in Oregon. Although I didn’t know it back then, his decision to turn me into a project manager would change the course of my career, cause my hairline to recede, and tie my rise in the corporate world to his. And ultimately, lead to those texts from my son.
I can’t say that I actually like Ralph, but I do respect him. Even though he can be a real bastard.
“I don’t get it, Will,” he complained as he stared at me across the table. “This isn’t a step forward. This isn’t even a step sideways. It’s Hyler. Yes, we still own the place, but it’s hardly a jewel in the Mantec crown. Plus, you’ve done that. And it’s in Oregon. Why do you want to go there?” Ralph’s rise to CEO at Mantec had long since meant his relocation to Chicago, which is where I seemed to spend a lot of my time.
“First of all,” I told him, “I know you have a hard time remembering this, but Oregon is actually my home. Once in a while I even get to visit. It’s nice. Turns out that’s where my family lives.” I watched the inevitable eye roll. The word “family” does not make a regular appearance in conversations with Ralph; he believes the whole concept is an inconvenient infringement on all those extra hours in the day when you should really be working.
“Second,” I continued, “Hyler is not the same place it was when you left. They’re building a whole range of products now. It’s close to a $500-million-a-year operation.”
“And shrinking by the minute,” he said. “It’s got technology problems, a bad union environment, and a range of products the American public isn’t so keen on these days. And what the public does want to buy, we should be making in one of our plants in India. Or Indonesia. If you go back to Hyler, you might be the guy who ends up turning out the lights on the whole operation. Is that what you want for the next stage of your career?”
That part was true. The downturn in 2008 hit the recreation industry pretty hard, and more than a decade of significant growth at the Hyler plant had first gone flat, then backward. For Mantec overall, Hyler’s fortunes were only a blip. The corporation had shed its underperforming forestry division and most of its consumer products businesses well before the crash and had gotten heavily into oil and gas, not to mention various industrial products supporting that very same industry. Hyler had become the black sheep of the corporate family, and lately it had been transforming into the redheaded stepchild from three marriages ago.
But as I told Ralph, Hyler was also home. And that was a place I hadn’t really been in a long while.
I guess all this requires some explanation.
A long time ago, in a place far away from Chicago, a young man named Will Campbell came to fame within the Mantec world by bringing a new product to market for the company. This product, a unique take on windsurfing and sailing, proved to be a major hit for the corporation and propelled a guy named Ralph Borsellino from president of a relatively small division in Oregon to a VP job for the West Coast division and eventually to the top job in the whole damn company. Some still say Ralph “Windsailored” his way to the top. But not to his face.
The product propelled Will along quite the path as well, although a different one. Based on his success with the Windsailor, Will started going from plant to plant in the Mantec world, taking on increasingly large and complex projects while developing a reputation for delivering results. He gradually branched out from new product launches to implementing IT systems, and then into the realm of “operations improvement.” He was trained in the philosophies of W. Edwards Deming and statistical quality control. He became a black belt in Lean. He learned all about Kanban and Agile. He turned into a certified performance improvement guru, and his project work expanded to include fixing just about any serious problem that existed across the Mantec universe.
Ten years passed, and Will woke up one day to discover that he had super-elite frequent flyer status on four airlines, that he was a President’s Club member with six different hotel chains, and that he no longer knew his wife or his kids.
Sounds dramatic, right? I know. It’s not 100 percent true, but then when you see the movie version of my life, you’ll find the actor who plays me is also much better-looking than