by Martin Kihn
A silence, as you all realize Mitch is not in the room.
“He’s doing rework,” someone says, and the clerestory erupts in peals of laughter. Every face in the place is convulsed in sheer joy but you, in the back, sucking on a diet Coke. You feel as out of place as a spider on a piece of angel food cake.69
“He can rework all he wants,” Tina says, standing out in front, “so long as he keeps delivering like he did on twenty-one-twelve.”
“Delivering rework!”
“Okay,” she says. “I can see some of you came here in the bar car. But seriously—whether it’s number two or whatever, this product launch had a lot of problems and we executed on time. We didn’t hold up day one, we didn’t let down the customer. Ultimately, that says a lot about us, right? Right?”
“Right,” say a few.
“So I’ve got some slides here I put together about the rework—”
And the room gets dark.
Car part manufacturing, it turns out, is a difficult business. Think about it. Cars are designed in some other building by some people you barely know (the customer), who then turn around and give you “specs” for parts of this car, which doesn’t exist yet. You’re supposed to go away and make a bunch of parts which have to (a) fit perfectly, and (b) be ready at exactly the moment they are needed at the big assembly line where the actual car is put together. If you fail in (a) you are worthless and if you fail in (b) you are charged money and make everybody angry.
None of which would be a serious problem except that the customer, apparently, keeps changing her mind. This is extremely common in the car world. Usually because you don’t really know what something looks like until you see it in front of you. In three dimensions. So the part is designed and fits and will be ready with some time to spare, and then the powerful president of the powerful client number one gets around to looking at the mock-up of the car and says, “Hmmmmm.”
“What?” asks Tina, who will be there if it’s one of her projects in the scope.
“Hmmmm hmmmm.”
“What?”
“See that brake light?” asks the president.
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t like it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Could you guys do something—I don’t know—something, like, rounder?”
So Tina rushes off and has her engineers change everything and—well, of course you see how it won’t be round enough, or it’s too round… and after a few go-rounds, so to speak, well, it doesn’t quite fit with the rear fascia70 assembly, which has to be redesigned… but then it doesn’t fit into the well in the body itself anymore, which is quite a major change, which, sadly, will affect the design of the electrical system, which is being done by another company which is perfectly happy with their design the way they have it already and… well, and then you’re looking at being about six months late for the vehicle launch, which won’t happen without nice round brake lights anyway, so you pour everything you’ve got into making this insane deadline… and you miss it by, maybe, two days.
And sooner or later you’re losing money and calling in the consultants, a big team of them, who charge you $1 million per week to tell you how you can cut costs. It occurs to more than a few people in your ailing company that there is at least one easy way to save, say, $1 million per week.
One of these people is Tina.
“Okay,” she says to you over lunch in the cathedral cafeteria, “here’s the plan.”
She’s like your wife—she doesn’t eat so much as vigorously rearrange her food on the plate with a fork and then say, “Boy, am I full.”
“Here’s the plan,” she says to you quietly. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Okay.”
“Have you ever heard of Casanova?”
“He was a lover, Italian—”
“No, it’s a software.”
You admit your ignorance of this piece of code.
“Good, I need you to be objective about it. Here’s what I need you to do, okay?”
And she describes an assignment that seems so utterly ordinary and straightforward you wonder why the air of conspiracy in that religious golfing setting.
“Hierarchical organizations seduce us with psychological rewards like feelings of power and status,” someone once wrote in Harvard Business Review. “What’s more, multilevel hierarchies remain the best available mechanism for doing complex work. It is unrealistic to expect that we will do away with them in the foreseeable future. It seems more sensible to accept the reality that hierarchies are here to stay….”71
Tina had done well in the hierarchy of the failing firm. An engineer, like most of the managers, she ran a small plant somewhere in Canada at a young age and got booted up to headquarters, where she became known as the go-to girl for problems, then big problems, and finally—the biggest problem of all—a disaster known as 21–12. It was a parts assembly for a popular truck that had somehow become about twice as expensive as it was contracted to be, so the company was going to lose even more than usual on this one unless it could be gotten under control… and it was, thanks to Tina and the big, big men in the church.
And she had been promoted to a level just under VP, and there were no women VPs. There were nine men, and no women. But the thinking was maybe Tina could be the first, if, say, one of these nine men were let go (or died) and she could keep that good mo’ going.
Of course she wasn’t the only star in this firm of ten thousand. There was a well-regarded marketing guy named Bill everybody seemed to think a lot about. And there was a slightly younger woman who had rocketed up the ranks in IT and seemed poised to make noise. And so on… oh, and the IT woman’s name was Kelly van Dyne.
Everybody thought maybe Kelly van Dyne could give Tina a run for her money someday.
On your second day, you meet Jerry. Your work stream is essentially self-directed and independent, although you are managed by a guy in England who checks in on the phone from time to time. Long-distance job management. Now, Jerry is an important person to this story—a critical character with the key role in its unwinding, though, like most critical characters in real life (as opposed to reel life) doesn’t look particularly special. They’ve put you in a cube next to a bunch of engineers with flat-panel screens and Jerry ambles over one day and says, “Hi, I’m Jerry.”
Okay. You weren’t expecting a Jerry. There’s no Jerry on your work plan. Tina never mentioned a Jerry.
“Hi, Jerry.”
“I’m a guy you probably need to know.”
“Then I’m happy to meet you.”
“What do you know about the APDS?”
Jerry, in a thick work shirt, has a graying beard and a shambly manner. He’s checking a well-worn PDA as he speaks, poking it so hard with his stylus you think the glass could shatter.
“Nothing, Jerry.”
“Then we need to talk.”
“You first.”
“Well,” he says, moving the stacks of paper off the runty swivel chair you have set up in your cube for visitors, “okay then.”
Turns out he’s an expert—at least he’s under the strong impression he’s an expert—in product development. More specifically, in documenting product development processes. More more specifically, in documenting product development processes relating to the creation of engineered parts for automobiles and trucks. Each new product, from the most humble lug nut to the grandest instrument panel assembly, goes through a process from concept to prototype to testing to refinement to launch, and companies in general like to write down this process in excruciating detail and debate the merits of each step and then rewrite the process and redebate the merits… it’s called the STAGE/GATE process (always capitalized) because there are stages and there are gates, or hurdles, which allows the bean counters and men in suits to get their meaty paws on it and stop it in its tracks or, begrudgingly, permit it to inch along to the next stage until it crashes into the hard wall of the next big gate and
the bean counters and men in suits reappear with their paws retracting looking for a problem… or so you hear…
“APDS,” says Jerry, taking out his wallet, “is a process I put together from scratch here. It’s the [Client] Product Development System—APDS. Here’s a wallet-sized version of it.”
He shows you a card with infinitely tiny text and some slender arrows going to the right.
“It’s fully laminated,” he points out.
As the days go by, and you’re into week two, you find yourself reaching out to Jerry more often than you might have wanted. But the truth is the [Client] Corporation is a bit of a labyrinth, or conundrum. First of all it has about twenty building sites spread all over southeastern Michigan and down into northern Ohio. And everybody’s on the same phone system so you can’t tell from the phone number where a person is. Plus no one’s ever there when you call, and certainly not if you visit. So second of all, the problem is it’s impossible to figure out what anyone is doing.
What are their jobs?
When you find people, they’re sitting somewhere with someone just chatting. There are meetings where chat gets done. There may be slides, there may not be. Nobody looks at them. Meetings are easy to schedule when you can find the schedulee because nobody has any conflicts, not really. It’s like a wide-open day on the prowl for obscurity.
You reach out, as you say, to Jerry. And he’s happy in his role as spiritual adviser to wandering consultants.
“So tell me, Jerry,” you ask him one day in the cafeteria, “what do you know about Casanova?”
He looks up suddenly from his Pop-Tart.
“You know, the software,” you prompt.
“I know it.”
“Do you like it?”
“I can’t say as I’ve ever really used it.”
“How’s the rollout going.”
“They’re just testing it now. Why do you want to know about Casanova?”
“Tina asked me to write up an assessment.”
“An assessment? What for?”
“I don’t know—she’s just, she doesn’t know anything about it and she wants me to talk to the engineers and the program management people and find out what their opinion of it is.”
“That’s what she told you? She doesn’t know anything about it—”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh.”
His Pop-Tart is unfrosted. You’ve never known anyone to purposely select an unfrosted Pop-Tart when a much tastier frosted version is sitting right beside it on the rack. But Jerry, it turns out, is a bit of a closed comic book. He’s also apparently not telling you something.
“What’s wrong? What aren’t you telling me?” you ask him.
“Nothing.”
“Why are people so strange about this Casanova?”
“How strange?”
“Like they’re paranoid why I’m asking them about it. They’re paranoid why Tina would want to know what people think.”
“There’s a lot of political bullshit here,” says Jerry, “you don’t wanna know. Believe me. Plus there’s the whole consulting thing—like, why is this consultant in here asking me these questions? You know—”
“Yep.”
“Like you’re going to lose them their job. Is that why you’re here, by the way?”
“What?”
“To fire people?”
You are surprised by this question, coming from Jerry—but then you realize you never really told him why you’re there.
“I can’t fire anyone.”
“Then why are you here?”
“We’re supposed to find ways to cut costs but we can’t fire people.”
“You have to cut costs but you can’t let anyone go? So how’re you gonna do that—fewer paper clips, fewer team lunches?”
You have no idea what to say here.
“What’s your bogey?”
“Seven hundred and fifty million dollars.”
He shakes his head, smiling. Then he covers up the remains of his Pop-Tart with a napkin, like a shroud.
“Listen to me,” he all but whispers, reminding you of Tina in the golf church with her Casanova. “Do yourself a favor, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Show me anything you do on Casanova before you give it to Tina.”
“What for?”
“Just trust me, Marty. This is something you should do.”
YOU: How was it first presented to you?
PERSON: It was totally oversold in the beginning—in its, in its capabilities. The sessions gave the impression this tool would be the total answer to everything.
PERSON: … and we have to input the exact same info into three places, every week.
YOU: Why three places?
PERSON: Let me put it this way, okay? One of the places is directly tied to the paycheck—it’s how we get paid, putting our time in this system. Then Casanova comes along and says, “Oh, and take another thirty minutes and put the exact same stuff in here too ’cause management wants to be able to keep track of exactly what you’re doing ’cause—just ’cause.” What are you gonna do?
So Tina magically appears in your cube one day during week three and says, “Let’s go.”
This is what your trainer has told you to say to your Bernese mountain dog, Hola, to distinguish it from “Come on,” which is a different command. “Let’s go” means move forward; “come on” means come to me.
So you move forward, following Tina down the hall, the stairs, the skeletal remains of the car in the lobby, and out into the cancerous sun. She drives a silver Expedition and it makes her look quite tiny and ridiculous.
“Follow me!” she shouts out the window, as you scour the guest lot for your Matador Red Ford Taurus. You know it’s here somewhere…
On the road, you listen to a radio station you listened to in high school; it has changed formats, as have you. It’s gotten harder.
You pass the Fairlane town center on the right, which when you were a kid seemed huge and kind of cool and this time around feels like a dangerous Dumpster. It’s very ghetto and the stores are for shit. The bookstore seems to be making a steady segue out of books and into maps, calendars, and theme versions of Monopoly.
It is very flat, southeastern Michigan, like a warm bath with no perturbations.
Where are you going?
Although you are politically opposed to giant cars and personally drive the smallest automobile in the country, you do appreciate one thing about Tina’s Expedition during this particular high-speed rampage through the burbs: It is very easy to see. Even when some lesser cars intervene you can make her out, charging ahead to—
Well, to an office park somewhere in Troy, or Rochester, where Madonna was a baby-sitter many years ago.
She lets you in the building with her pass card and you say, “What are we doing here?”
“Just a meeting.”
So you follow her past new cubicles in a large open room space populated by engineering/computer types who look at her with a kind of horror. You suspect this is not because they actually know her but because they don’t encounter women very often. There are certainly no women here. You are suddenly very thirsty.
She stops outside a corner office and tells a young guy with a satanic beard-scrub, “Tina’s here for Kelly.”
“She’s inside.”
And she is—Kelly van Dyne, the IT woman, the one you’ve heard so much about, there she is at last! It’s always better that these people of mystery and myth are tiny, swallowed up by their big black power chairs. And so she is: a little bitty woman with glasses and a great big smile and short black hair and she stands up, looks right at you, and says, “Who are you?”
Her voice is funny, kind of high, like a cartoon character’s.
“This is Marty,” interposes Tina. “He’s from [your top-tier firm]. He’s helping me out.”
“Oh.”
Kelly sits and so do you and Tina. There is a moment. These two are not friends a
nd not enemies. You kind of feel as though maybe they don’t know each other very well.
“So,” says Kelly. “You wanted to see me—”
“It’s about Casanova,” says Tina, to your surprise.
“Uh-huh.”
“I wanted to—I think you know I’m having [your top-tier firm] take a look at it, just to get my arms around it.”
“I had heard something.”
“But I just wanted to—I wanted to let you know what we’re up to and see if you had any input, like, from the top down. What we’re trying to do is just from a program management point of view, we’re trying to understand this thing—and what it’s going to do for us, how we can… maybe help shape the program or get some clarity into our headsets about it.”
“Let me ask you this,” says Kelly, who strikes you as someone who is probably pretty blunt most of the time. “Are you just fact-finding or are you out to kill the project?”
“Well,” says Tina, “just fact-finding. Right?”
“I’m asking questions,” you say.
“That’s fine,” says Kelly van Dyne, unimpressed. “We’re happy to have a dialogue. It’s a really great idea. Maybe we should do a workshop or something. But I’ll tell you, what I’m concerned about is—I’m concerned when I hear somebody’s going around talking to the engineers and people on the design team, some consultant, and they’re not—maybe they’re not all as informed as they could be. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about Casanova, and maybe we haven’t done the best job communicating. But we’ve been in design mode and…”
And so on. Kelly stresses that your sources are unreliable and she would be happy to give you a list of names, which you take away with you, out into the parking lot, where you catch up to Tina, climbing up into her Expedition.
“What did you think of that meeting?” you ask her, genuinely curious.
She smiles at you. “I think she’s an elf.”
So you call some of the people on Kelly’s list and you put together a short deck on Casanova. It is the middle of week three, and you’re really beginning to settle in here. The guy in England seems tied up with English car parts problems, so he neglects you. Your client is obviously going places. You get your daily call from Jerry, who says, “I’m coming by in an hour, okay? We’ll have lunch.”