CEO gets dirty

On my previous post this morning, I talked about some of the things a CEO did right during a Town Hall meeting.

But I wanted to mention that one the most important thing he did happened after the meeting.

During the Q&A portion of the Town Hall, a woman stood up in the back of the room and said something like this:

'We talk about quality all the time around here, but we don't practice it on the shop floor. Machine 16 has been dripping oil on our heads for a month, no matter how many shop orders we put in to fix it. All we do is band-aid the thing and it breaks again a week later.'

The CEO, not being familiar with that particular machine, passed the question to the branch manager. He, of course, launched into a jargon-laden speech about 'Root Cause Analysis' and other Six Sigma terms.

The CEO listened to it, took back the microphone, and said:

'I won't stand for band-aid solutions. What was the number of that machine?'

The woman told him, he wrote it down, and the minute the meeting was over the CEO stalked out to the shop floor to look at the machine. And you better believe that the days of the band-aid solutions for Machine #16 were over for good.

There used to be a popular concept, back in the 70s and 80s, I believe, called Management By Walking Around (MBWA). Somehow, as executives got busier—and more full of themselves—that concept has gone way, replaced forever by e-mail and teleconferences.

So many problems in so many companies could be solved if executives would get off their asses, walk around, and talk to employees. Don't you think?