The Faade of Excellence by John Dyer;

The Faade of Excellence by John Dyer;

Author:John Dyer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)


Teamwork is so much more than putting a group of people in a room and saying, “be a team”

The Story of Jim Brown

Mary Robinson had worked as a production employee for the JED Company for over 10 years. For the first time, she was beginning to feel a glimmer of hope and optimism. Two months had passed since Susan Jones, the director of operations, visited Mary’s workstation to ask her for input on how to improve. True to Susan’s word, she visited almost every day with updates on progress that was being made to implement several of Mary’s ideas. Some of these suggestions did not produce the results she expected, but most of them had a positive impact. In the past, Mary’s process would routinely shut down other areas of the business due to quality and output issues. It had been 14 days since there was an outage and Mary could not be more thrilled to have finally moved the spotlight of ineptitude away from her part of the process. Jim Brown, the new V.P. of this division, even came down from his corner office to thank Mary for her ideas and congratulate her on the improvements. Not everything was rosy by any means. There were still problems that needed to be dealt with, but the extra capacity realized by making the improvements gave her process a chance to catch up before too much damage was done.

A few weeks ago, during one of Susan’s visits, she had asked Mary if she would be interested in attending a training class that covered several process improvement tools and methodologies. She reluctantly agreed. On the day of the training, Mary felt overwhelmed when she entered the classroom and saw several of the company leaders in attendance. “What have I gotten myself into?” she thought at the time. Then she noticed that Jim Brown and Susan Jones were also there. “Wait a minute,” thought Mary. “Are they here as participants?!? Wow! They are taking time away from their jobs to be a part of this training as well. This must be a bigger deal than I thought.” In the introduction ice breaker, Jim Brown had mentioned that one of his hobbies was fly fishing and that he took great joy in tying his own flies. Mary and her husband also enjoyed fly fishing on the river that passed by her mother’s house. At lunch on the first day of the class, Mary sat by Jim and swapped several fantastic fish stories that grew bigger with each tale. The laughter from their end of the table was contagious and the entire class began to listen and share their own fish stories. “I can’t believe what I am hearing,” Mary thought at the time. “Jim, Susan, and the other executives are real people with similar interests. I never in my wildest dreams would have thought that we would have so much in common.”

The class was actually fun and engaging and covered several topics. Mary especially enjoyed the many hands-on activities that brought home all of the key learning points.



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