This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Now Who's the Boss? - Lipstick Leader -- Watching last night's episode of Now Who's the Boss? on The Learning Channel, featuring an executive of Estee Lauder spending time in various roles at one of their subsidiaries, brought up painful memories. One of the experiences he dealt with was working on a lipstick finishing and packing line, totally embarrassing himself with lack of speed and quality in his performance. It took me back over thirty years to when I was a freshly graduated Industrial Engineer who foolishly sat down at a similar line at Lanvin-Charles of the Ritz to prove that a certain job could be done according to the standard I developed.
Big mistake.
'Nuff said.
One disappointment with the TLC show. Unlike it's PBS predecessor, "Back to the Floor," this show seemed to focus primarily on the comfort and discomfort of the executive as he pre-weighed and blended a batch of lip gloss, worked the line, ran a forklift, and applied make-up in a store rather than on meaningful lessons learned. In the PBS show, there was usually a full final segment on lessons learned, feeding back to his "bosses for the day" on the experience, and planning improvements based on what the executive encountered. It was cute to watch last night's subject panic when he had to apply mascara to a model. It would have been more interesting to discuss some 5S initiative to facilitate the finding of ingredients in the first segment and to question the silly, time-wasting punching in and out for lunch at the distribution center.
(By the way, another current show on TV -- Airline, on A&E -- which follows around a group of SouthWest Airline workers in Chicago and LA, has given me a whole new appreciation for what customer-facing service industry people have to face on a day-to-day basis. Somehow they manage to largely maintain a smile and politeness in the face of boorish, irrational behavior on the part of customers.)
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