Finding ways to make budgeted tonnes is one of the thrills of production challenges.
Admittedly a well-run operation needs no heroes – with good management process trumping the need to continually bail out production with unforeseen impressive deeds.
Nevertheless, when times must, a resort to some lateral thinking is often a welcome reprieve.
This week Strictly Boardroom had time to read through some old chestnuts from the management bookshelf and found an inspirational anecdote from a 1998 book entitled The Guru Guide – The Best Ideas of the Top Management Thinkers*.
Somehow I missed this one when first reading the text many years ago but it is a gem.
It is symptomatic of the backs-to-the-wall culture that pervades many operations during hard times.
No doubt readers will have their own experiences of overcoming similar challenges at minesites right now.
The author of the piece, Jack Stack, writes that: “It is amazing what you can come up with when you have no money, zero outside resources and a payroll of people all depending on a solution for their jobs, their homes, even their prospects of dinner for the foreseeable future”.
The story hails from a tractor plant in the US faced with tough economic times and an industrial relations climate of frequent strikes and disruptions.
The future of the production plant was already on a knife-edge when there was a strike among local truckers supplying the facility. Closure seemed the inevitable outcome.
The story goes as follows:
“The truckers went out on strike and shut down the highways. We couldn’t get steel delivered from the US steel plant in Gary, Indiana, because snipers were shooting at the trucks. So I brought five of my guys together and I told them this one really had me in a bind. How were we going to transport steel from Indiana to Illinois without getting our heads blown off?
“Someone said: ‘School buses. They wouldn’t shoot at school buses would they?’ Another guy said: ‘It depends who’s driving the buses’. Someone else said: ‘They wouldn’t shoot at nuns driving school buses’.
“So that’s exactly what we did: we rented a school bus and dressed guys up as nuns. They pulled into the steel mill, loaded the steel bars into the school bus and drove it back to our plant.”
Love it. It is a brilliant example of a left-field solution.
Now back to the present day.
Strictly Boardroom has a course to teach in July to MBA students on resource sector management.
Operations management will be covered in double quick time – and I suspect that I cannot do it the justice it deserves (although the students have other operations research courses that will fill the gaps).
If Strictly Boardroom readers could advise of stories along similar lines to the above it will no doubt lighten the load of what can be a dry subject area.
Your anecdotal contributions would be most welcome.
Good hunting.
Allan Trench is a professor at Curtin Graduate School of Business and Research, professor (value and risk) at the Centre for Exploration Targeting, University of Western Australia, a non-executive director of several resource sector companies and the Perth representative for CRU Consulting, a division of independent metals and mining advisory CRU Group (allan.trench@crugroup.com).
*The Guru Guide – The Best Ideas of the Top Management Thinkers – Jack Stack. Boyett & Boyett. John Wiley & Sons, New York.
