A popular approach used within the industry to identify and manage bottlenecks for their lamenting is based off what we call the Theory of Contrition. The approach itself starts with you finding the bottleneck that is keeping you from either eliminating failures or getting your promotion.
Most humans feel some sort of contrition when they choose to mow over the people who get in their way. If this is the case for you, there is a high probability you will never be successful. Success generally comes from burying your conscience to plow through at whatever the cost. Here are a few recommendations to use in order to plow through.
If you want eliminate the bottleneck of eliminating failures, I recommend the following. Under TPM (totally poor management), there is a pillar called Anonymous Maintenance, where nobody has anything to do with failures; rather, all of a sudden something just doesn’t work. (Anonymous Maintenance implementation is normally owned by operations.)
With Anonymous Maintenance, you can blame no one and move on. This is a highly successful tactic – here are examples:
- The fire alarm gets pulled, but no one did it.
- A machine self-adjusts on an HMI that crashes another machine.
- An electrical cabinet fills itself full of water to cool off.
- An anonymous forklift rips an overhead conveyor out of the sky.
- Every bollard and wheel chalk on the shipping dock is missing.
- An overhead door is smashed by an imaginary comet.
If you want to eliminate the bottleneck around getting your promotion, may I recommend a FEMA, or Failure Effects of Man Analysis. It is a great tool to use to blame other people in order to promote yourself to the top! Need a promotion? Someone smarter and more qualified in your way? Develop a FEMA to get them out of the way!
First, you must remember the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states: “People will be promoted to their level of incompetence.” Not to fear, you already have been, but will the next promotion hurt? I think not!
Second, don’t worry about doing any work. You need to spend your time documenting all of the failures of those in your way. Not seeing any failures on their behalf? Not to worry: Keep track of their successes as well. Do what you can to show up to their meetings and put in your two cents. That way, when they are successful, you can take credit! Not so hard, is it?
However, if you do not get invited to their meetings and have no opportunity to steal credit, then you must take the success and make it look like a failure to others. How, you say? Let me show you.
Captain Unreliability is a satire of the state of the manufacturing industry in ’Merica today and is written by an industry professional known for using humor to get the point across. Stay tuned for more useless advice, and if you have topics you’d like to see covered or questions you’d like The Captain to weigh in on, contact The Captain directly at [email protected] or follow on Twitter @CUnreliability.
How much do you know about your boss? What are your boss’s hobbies? Kids’ birthdays? Their birthday? Grandma’s birthday? Spouse’s birthday? Pet’s birthday? When is the family reunion? Do their kids play sports? Can you smell the color yellow? What does a rainbow taste like?
Once you have answered some of these questions, use them to your advantage. Suck up as much as possible. Buy them all gifts. Your kids not in water polo but your boss’s kids are? Make your kid join water polo. That way your boss can’t escape you. Get them to like you as much as possible. Earn their trust. Then use that trust to crush that bottleneck of a person in your way!
If you are familiar with these examples or know of others as to where things happened but nobody did anything or it was found to always been that way, congratulations! You are an Anonymous Maintenance facility. If you can blame others while moving your way to the top, then you have successfully implemented FEMA.
If you have participated in these scenarios or similar ones, further congratulations! You will be lamenting your way to success (if you still have a conscience).