At some point even engineers that run companies have to become acutely aware of costs. Thse companies are not in the business of building cars, they exist to make money. They happen to do so by building cars. If they can’t keep costs in line, they won’t build cars anymore. It’s not an easy balancing act and has led to some ill-advised decisions. Good companies recognize the errors before they become too severe and correct them.
@irlandes
They were more “efficient” with their time than you were. They made themselves look busy while you were “hanging out”. They were also milking the job for all they could, and I can’t say as I blame them either. 
Oh, absolutely. We called it “apparent work effort” and most of our management were not capable of seeing through it. Even then, no one in charge of anything at all, should be that stupid. IMO. A year or two ago, some man wrote a book attempting to explain why most promotions tend to be the least intelligent people. That is what we saw in our factory. If the difference were even just two techs working 40 hours each to do what I did in, um, 5 hours while getting paid for 40, it would have been less outrageous. But, labor costs around 5.5 times greater were inexcusable. The good news is I am retired, and until Soc sec collapses, living a good life in rural Mexico among friends.
“A year or two ago, some man wrote a book attempting to explain why most promotions tend to be the least intelligent people”.
I have seen the same thing at the university from which I retired with 44 years of service. I had attributed the fact that some of the least likely people became administrators with huge salaries to “Creeping Calvinism”. John Calvin believed that there were two classifications of people: 1) the elect; 2) the non-elect. The elect were destined for heaven no matter what wrongs they did here on earth while the non-elect, no matter how much they did for humanity, would never get to heaven. Well, in universities nd probably other organizations, the least competent are the elect and receive promotions and huge salaries. The competent who keep these institutions running will never be promoted.
Bean counters are super-efficient at counting other people’s beans. But bean counters have no idea how to actually GROW beans.
There’s one common thread among all founders of successful companies; they intrinsically understand what motivates the purchasers to purchase the product. Countless companies have failed when taken over by someone who knew numbers but did not kow the product. Often there are “heirs”, and in many cases “board of directors” (banks require a small company to create a “board of directors” of “experienced managers” before giving them expansion loans). It’s been the death-knell of many a company.
The founder and CEO of the company that that is Newberry Comix was on TV recently and emphatically stated that he’s never had a budget meeting. He runs the company (very successfully) based on what his gut tells him customers would enjoy.
Daq, unfortunately I have to agree. Sadly, much of what goes on in universities today, and those things that get one a Dept Chair status (and above), have nothing whatsoever to do with actual learning. The focus is on the administrative structure, the ability to create “relationships” with agencies, regulators, and legislators, the accreditation, and the ability to get grants.
Me, I’m already doomed. I may as well enjoy the ride.
Perhaps the reason the idiots are promoted is that the smart people don’t WANT the jobs. I’ve often joked with my coworkers that I didn’t think I could handle being an engineer, my IQ is too high
“The founder and CEO of the company that that is Newberry Comix was on TV recently and emphatically stated that he’s never had a budget meeting. He runs the company (very successfully) based on what his gut tells him customers would enjoy.”
He’s an entrepreneur. When he dies, the company will either have become professionally managed and continue, it will be sold, or it will fold. Entrepreneurs are not professional managers. In some ways that’s a good thing. Professionally managed companies can be very good at what they do. John Deere, 3M, and GE are some well-managed companies that haven’t been rum by entrepreneurs for many decades.
I don’t have a problem with bean counters actually. As a matter of fact, I would consider them a necessity in a large company as an aid to cost cutting.
When I consider them to be worthless is when they step in and create a procedure or item that goes against common sense and causes a product to be more trouble prone, etc.
In the auto world, one that comes to my mind all of the time is the older model Subaru govenor gear in their automatic transmissions. It’s not hard to see why someone made a decision to use plastic instead of steel.
Injection molding of a plastic gear is cheap and quick whereas steel runs the price up.
The gear was also prone to stripping out and this involved a complete transmission teardown and overhaul when one gave up.
It took them 4 years to figure out that plastic was not the way to go and when they did revise it they made the driven gear plastic so it would strip out the other way.
At least with the latter it was a 15 minute fix… 
"I don’t have a problem with bean counters actually. As a matter of fact, I would consider them a necessity in a large company as an aid to cost cutting.
When I consider them to be worthless is when they step in and create a procedure or item that goes against common sense and causes a product to be more trouble prone, etc."
Gee twice in one day…I agree 100%.
Another case was Ford some 10-15 years ago…I had told this before…It was an article in the WSJ…
A bearing plant was on strike (or maybe it had a fire…I forget)…Ford and Toyota both bought bearings from this plant…But in any case…they could no longer produce the bearings that Ford and Toyota in the same quantities.
Ford’s bean counters decided to buy the bearings from another plant…Toyota decided NOT to because that plant didn’t meet Toyota’s standard…Ford didn’t want to loose sales…Toyota sales dropped that year because they couldn’t build enough cars because of lack of parts. Later that year the bearing plant was back to full production.
Flash forward 4 years…Ford is having well above average issues with engines and transmissions that used bearings from the plant that Toyota refused to buy from.
Unfortunately decisions like that are made every day…
JT, you may be right about what will happen to Newberry Comix when the founder dies. But there’s still hope. Some corporations, Purdue is a good example, are taken over by heirs that were actually weined properly in the business. In those rare cases they succeed and can even grow.
Purdue is professionally managed. The owner happens to have learned his lessons well.
I believe Purdue’s principal officers are all third generation heirs.
Far worse than bean counters are the MBA’s. Trust me on this.
Before we retired, we lived in a rural city of 100,000. In the 19th century, a man started a nice department store. It passed through three generations of sons. The last man’s daughter got her MBA, and when her father was finally forced to retire, she took it over. Very temporarily.
She implemented all the usual MBA mantra’s. Every square inch had to make a minimum income. All investments must pay back in three years.
She did not understand her dad’s very successful business model, which was ONE STOP SHOPPING. He ran the store for the busy, working woman. She could go downtown, enter that store, and leave with almost everything she needed. Well, except for hardware, that store was across the street and was pretty much run the same.
if they didn’t have it, they’d look in their books and order it to pick up next week. They even had a nice cafeteria. My wife would take the little girl and they spent the day in that store, and came home on the bus in the afternoon, all happy and pleased as punch.
They had large areas of the store which were run at a loss, solely so the women could get almost anything they wanted. Downstairs they had a Boy Scout supply area. They lost money on that area, and she shut it down. I once talked to a man there, he needed a $5 Scout thingie, and drove in 62 miles to get it. While he was there buying his $5 thingie, his wife was upstairs buying $500 worth of clothes for the kids at a big profit to the store.
The old man understood this, so he kept all the stuff on hand women wanted, and he made a bundle.
She shut all that stuff down, because it had to make as much money as the other parts of the store. So, instead of a woman going there Saturday morning and spending all day, going home with everything on her list, she had to get in the car and drive around to the malls, looking and looking for the next item on the list, just as the mall shoppers had to do. So, why bother to go downtown at all? They didn’t and she ran it out of business, because her stock was eventually identical to that at the mall stores, anyway.
Let me make it clear. I did not view this as failing because a woman took it over, but because an MBA took it over.
As a coincidence, I communicated last week with a man teaching English in China. When he realized where I had lived, he told me his mom had worked there in a store around 1950. It turned out it was that exact store. Employees were well treated and were happy to work there.
I think the movie “Back to College” starring the late Rodney Dangerfield reinforces the point you are making.
My brother started and ran a very successful technical writing business. His alma mater put in courses in technical writing and asked my brother if he would be interested in the graduates from this program. He said that his answer was “no”. When he was asked the criteria for the people he hired, he said he had two steps:
- he asked the applicant what the applicant had read. If the applicant had read good literature, my brother figured there was a chance that the applicant had seen good writing.
- If the applicant passed step 1, he then asked for a writing sample. He gave the applicant a variety of topics from which to choose, none of which involved technical writing.
If the applicant passed step 2, my brother was satisfied. He could train the person in a couple of weeks how to do the job. One professor at his alma mater, who had never been out in the field, tried to tell my brother how a technical writer should do the job. “If the writer did it your way’”, my brother responded, “the person wouldn’t last a week”.
My son graduated from college and did a year’s service in Appalachian country. In the area he served, if you had gone to college, it was assumed that you could do anything. One family in the church he was serving had a seven year old daughter in second grade that couldn’t read. The parents asked my son to teach her to read. My son had her reading in two weeks. When I asked my son how he did it, he replied “I taught her the sound of the letters”.
I was telling one of my colleagues about this who was in English education and she told me that my son did it wrong–you aren’t supposed to teach phonics. She wouldn’t accept the fact the little girl could now read.
Fortunately for education I retired this past May.
So that’s why there’s tons of people who can’t differentiate between they’re, there and their or your and you’re(and yore?) when they type on the internet.
edit:
I didn’t do very good in English classes because several assignments were in creative writing, and they always counted a good deal towards our final grades. I can do creative thinking, but putting it into words is often difficult, especially when you HAVE TO.
There was a story told around here once about an old man that owned a dry goods store down in Mississippi. His grandson got his MBA and came back to work at the store. He immediately started inventorying everything in the store. When the old man asked him why he was doing that, the grandson said he wanted to see if the store was making a profit.
The old man told him to go to the back of the store and on the top shelf, he would find a partial bolt of cloth. He went on to explain that this bolt of cloth was the first thing that he and his wife bought to start the business, everything else is profit.
My problem with “bean counters” is what I like to call almost as good.
I can think of a lot of what used to be good name brands that fell victim to that. Several well known companies used to have great products. There weren’t cheap but they lasted a long time, had very good quality and were well worth the price. Then you get a bean counter who says, this part is almost as good as this one and it’s cheaper. It lasted almost as long and nobody really seemed to notice. The next bean counter comes along and says this part is almost as good as this one and it cheaper, again nobody seems to notice it doesn’t last quite as long and the quality wasn’t there, and besides it a good brand. The next bean counter, and the next, and so on. Then people start to notice, but it’s still a good brand and even a good brand will have a lemon now and then. Then they start to notice that the quality just isn’t there any more and soon it’s not a good brand, it’s a so so brand and why buy that. Soon everyone knows it’s a bad brand and the company doesn’t seem to know why it lost revenue and market share. And once the company gets a reputation that’s a bad brand it takes many, many years to come back, if ever.
I’ve seen it way too many times; American Airlines apparently saved $100,000 by removing one olive from each salad served in first class. Did anyone really notice, probably not, but if one olive saved $100,000 a year, why not cut out two, or three, why have olives at all, why not just cut out the salad all together? Or better yet, why not charge for the salad and meals in first class, after all if they can fly first class they can afford to spend a few extra dollars on a meal. Sooner or later people will notice and move on. We might be seeing the start of that with the airline industry. I try not to fly anymore, I’m tired of rude people, who only have a job because we the public fly, the insane searches (which have done little or no good), the delays, etc. And if you DARE complain at all over any of it, you could easily find yourself in jail or fined or both. Tick off a rude agent and suddenly you’re a “a security risk” and you’re kicked off the flight. In the case I’m thinking about, although she was declared a security risk, that airline told her to catch another flight on another carrier, so she was a security risk only for that airline and not the other? Personally I’ve started to drive cross county again whenever I can, even if I have to take vacation time to do it.
I have a slight variation on the “almost as good” scenario. It’s the “only as good as you need to be” mentality.
Many years ago, I went to work for a fledgling company with an entrepreneurial owner who believed you should basically ignore the competition and go about your business of making quality products. The rest will take care of itself. When I started there, a $50k order was a BIG DEAL and we had parties to celebrate. When it was sold some 15 years later, we were booking close to $3M A DAY.
The places I’ve worked for since then have had the philosophy that you only need to be as good, or slightly better, than the competition. Constantly surveying the competition landscape and driving cost out of products to be “competitive”. The parent company applied this approach to the original company mentioned above and destroyed it in spite of saying nothing would change- they said “why change what works?” The place was crawling with financial people taught in schools how to run a business (into the ground)…
I remember hearing of one of our bean counters in the plant saying they were going to get rid of the plastic tabs on the wires that helped the assembler plug the wires in; less wear and tear on the fingers when you’re plugging in 3 or 4 wires per unit(times 2k+ units per day).
Word got back to the line that the bean counter told the plant supervisor, or someone higher up, that he “asked everyone on the line” and we all agreed that" we didn’t need that plastic tab on the wires anymore", and getting rid of it would save 20 cents per unit. Sure, that adds up, but the guy never asked me, nor did he ask anyone I work beside.
From what one worker told me what their kid was telling them, is that when they take those engineering classes, they teach you how to lie to others; a while class devoted to it.
like rwee said, you get the people who say that the part is ok, despite having a flaw in it, and it keeps adding up and eventually you’ve dug your own grave before you realized it. When I hear “I’ll buy that”, I just want to say “OK, fork over $500.”