physical pain. He got up and started to pace. “For the last ten years I’ve been the company improvement specialist. I go in and fix problems, make things better. Or at least, that’s what I’m supposed to do. And I do more than just treat everything like a project. We’ve talked about that — all my training in those other disciplines and techniques. Granted some of them are more fad than substance, but there are still interesting ideas there.”
“I remember, Willie.” I wondered briefly if perhaps we would have talked more if I’d been a little less abrasive. But then where would the fun be in that?
He stopped pacing. “For the longest time, I believed I was making a difference, actually contributing something.” He took a long pull on his beer. “But then things changed somehow. Or I changed. It was as if the rose-colored glasses had come off. I started seeing how, despite all the wonderful things I was putting in place, people pretty much kept doing what they had always done. We dressed stuff up, but once I left town and the project team rolled off, what was really different?”
I blew some air through my lips in an attempt to make a raspberry. Sadly, my lips were getting old, floppy, and dry, so it came out sounding more like paper rustling in the wind. “You’re breaking my heart, Willie, you really are. Sounds like a good old-fashioned midlife crisis to me. Buy yourself a sports car. You’ll be fine.”
He gave me a look like a puppy that had just been kicked, which took the fun out of things. “It’s like I don’t understand people anymore. I thought I was pretty good at that sort of thing — understanding how people’s minds work and using solid logic and rational thinking to help them. I had real success with that. But something feels different now.”
It was my turn to sigh. “Youthful enthusiasm turning to middle-aged cynicism can do that to you,” I said.
He slumped into his seat. “Martha, I don’t understand why people do the crazy stuff they do. It doesn’t make any sense to me!”
I belched loudly. Beer does that to me. Plus, I wanted to lighten things up a little. “I don’t want to be contrary here, but it’s not that complicated.”
He looked at me skeptically. “Maybe not for you. Captain of industry and all that.”
I shook my head. “We can get to that in a minute. But first, why don’t you give me a few more specifics on your problem and why you’re suddenly thinking about it now?”
My great-grandnephew Ethan chose that moment to come screaming onto the porch with Mr. Doodles, my rottweiler. “You be careful with him, Ethan,” I said sternly. “Don’t be too rough.” Ethan is six and weighs forty pounds fully dressed and soaking wet. Mr. Doodles, who was named by my daughter — I wanted to call him Spike — is 110 pounds of muscle and extremely good natured, so my concern was just for show. We watched them romp together on the front lawn.
Will kept his eyes on the two of them as he resumed. “I wanted to come back to Hyler to get off the road, but now I think this disconnected feeling was really at the heart of it. Traveling a lot wasn’t so bad when I was loving what I was doing. I guess I thought if I came back here, everything would all fall into place again.”
“Ah, my buddy Tommy, he said it best. ‘You can’t go home again.’ ”
Will looked confused. “Tommy? As in Thomas Wolfe? You knew him?”
I shrugged. “Don’t change the subject.” I love name-dropping. I got to know a surprising number of people for whom history has reserved space, though I like to keep Will guessing as to what’s real and what’s made up. It so happens that Thomas and I did spend a little time together in the thirties . . . but Will was talking again by then.
“Like I said, it all made sense. The company had a problem, I went there, we talked it through, I had a solution. All the people stuff just fell into place. I always thought the people part worked because the solution made sense.”
“Willie,” I interrupted, “if you tell me something made sense one more time, I’m going to have to hit you with this beer bottle.”
“But that’s the key part of the whole thing. I figured out the right approach, we did it, and it worked. The making sense piece is important, because now nothing seems to make sense, and it’s driving me crazy!” He paused to empty his beer.
“Well,” I said. “Maybe you could give me an example of what doesn’t make sense, and we could use that as a starting point.”
“Fine,” he said. “The union at Hyler. Their actions make no sense.”
“You’ve dealt with unions before, haven’t you?”
“Well, a bit, but that’s not the point. Right here and now, we have a crisis going on at Hyler. Our productivity sucks, the demand for the products we make is soft, and there is a real possibility that in the next year I’ll be closing this place and moving all 500 jobs, 350 of which are union jobs, offshore. So you’d think the union would be at least somewhat interested in making things work, no?”
I wasn’t sure if Will had any Italian heritage, but with the way he was waving his hands around, I was starting to worry for my safety. “I take it you’re finding them less than cooperative?”
He shrugged. “That’s one way to put it. We need concessions on wages, benefits, and pensions just to keep ourselves in the game, and we need serious concessions on the company’s ability to schedule shifts, move people from shift to shift, and have unionized employees be able to take more ownership of the day-to-day supervision of the crews and themselves. We have so much supervisory and employee time tied up in figuring out how the collective agreement applies to the smallest activity, we can’t get any work done. It’s killing us! The shop stewards know it, the union rep knows it, the employees know it, but we’re still stuck in this impasse, spending hours discussing grievances instead of producing stuff.” His hands were waving furiously again, and he paused for breath with what could almost be described as a hysterical note.
“And as if that’s not bad enough,” he continued after a minute, “managing the nonunion staff is even worse. We have this complicated performance management system. For starters, it’s based on a bunch of what we call ‘competencies,’ which are really just fuzzy descriptions of the skills and abilities people in different positions are supposed to be able to demonstrate. The real kicker is that every person gets rated on what is effectively a bell curve. That means that even if you have ten great employees, theoretically you can rate only one or two of them as great, most as average, and you’re supposed to stick a couple of people at the bottom. It’s having bizarre effects, where good people don’t want to be on projects or teams together because it decreases their chances of getting a good rating. Whenever it’s performance review time, people scramble to ingratiate themselves with their performance coaches so they don’t end up on the wrong side of the bell curve. Before the review, there’s horse trading among the managers; they move people around on the curve so it all fits. For employees, the process creates all kinds of suspicion, sabotage, and back-biting, and it encourages them to focus on the short term, not what’s right over the long term for the company. Everyone knows that the system isn’t working, but we sort of make it work by not following the rules completely, which makes it even more confusing. Still, good employees have been trickling out the door for the last three years. Based on everyone’s assumption that I’m just here to close the place, I’m expecting it’ll soon be a flood.”
I clucked my tongue. “Ah, yes, sort of what used to get called stack ranking. Wonderful system for creating chaos and completely undermining the company.”
Will grimaced. “Well, I’m glad you like it, ’cause it’s certainly killing me.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Surely Hyler isn’t the only division that uses this at Mantec?”
He snorted. “We’re not. I’ve run up against it several times, but the other situations were different; we weren’t about to go over a cliff. I basically ignored the system and treated it like background noise, figuring that it would make