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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 30 2012 @ 03:55 PM EDT |
About the difference between leaders and managers, I'll try to make this as
quick as I can.
In my youth, I worked as a machinist and one day when I reported to work, I
found a crowd of people around my machine area, mostly management types, a few
engineers, some supervisors and two machine operators. The machine was a heavy
engine lathe, with a six foot swing and a forty foot bed. in the lathe was a
poly covered steel pipe, five feet in diameter and 35 feet long. An electric
motor with four circular carbide saw blades secured to the shaft was bolted to
the tool platform of the lathe.
The job that was going on was grooving the poly covering at a half inch lead, at
a depth of .250 in. around the circumference of the pipe along its entire
length. The carbide blades had broken during the threading/machining work and
the operator took the platform out of gear, detaching it from the worm gear that
draws the tool platform along the length of the lathe bed. He replaced the
carbide blades, but when he re-engaged the worm screw, the blades wouldn't line
up with the tracks of the grooves where the break had occurred.
So there we had the plant manager, the CS manager, the plant engineer and asst.
plant engineer, the shop supervisor, the department leadman and two machine
operators who had spent a total of six hours trying to line up four new blades
in the tracks of the grooves already in the pipe cover, but no one could get it
to work. In multiple starts and restarts, they just couldn't do it.
Me, being the simpleton bohemian that I am, told the department leadman that, if
he could get everyone away from the machine and out of my way, I could get the
blades back into the previous grooves and have the job back on track IN FIVE
MINUTES.
It tool ten minutes of talk between all the college boys involved before they
agreed to take a coffee break and leave me alone with the problem. Five minutes
later, when they all returned, I had the work piece in operation and back on
track for finishing. After the job was done, the whole kit & kaboodle of
them went over the length of that huge piece of pipe and couldn't find where I
had realigned the blades and restarted the work. That was thirty-four years ago
and, to this day, I've never told anyone how I did it, in spite of being asked
to the point of begging by one of the engineers.
Simple. I backed the tool platform out from the cover a good three inches,
reversed it a foot back from the point where the blades had broken, re-engaged
the drive worm to set the motor in motion and, knowing the amount of clearance
between the bolts that held the grooving motor to the tool platform and the
holes in the base of the motor, I used a brass "bumping bar" to force
the motor over enough to align it perfectly with the previously machined
grooves, then inched the blades up to the cover and in to the right depth and
let the machine operator take over.
The lesson? I'm not sure how much money was wasted on executive, management and
supervisory salaries for six hours, trying to get to an engineering solution to
a hardware problem, one that anyone with hardware experience could have, given
the chance, solved in less than five minutes.
Now I'm a network admin for the DoD and I still use the lessons I learned as a
machinist to solve more problems than lessons I've "learned" from
classes in my current specialty. Common sense can't be overrated. Without it, it
really doesn't matter how much training or book learning one has.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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