Page 31 - Make Work Great

It Starts with You

encouraged people toward positive results. In this book, I will call
her Emma.
Emma had been around a long time. She’d started with the com-
pany when it was very young and before it skyrocketed; her employee
identifi cation number had more leading zeros than anything else. As

the company grew, so did her formal and informal influence. By the
time I worked for her, she was connected—directly or indirectly—to
many of the influential leaders and performers within our organiza-

tion. She had direct authority over only a small number of people, but
she had the respect and trust of many more high performers.
Enter a young, green Edward Muzio. It was early in my profes-
sional career, and I was excited about the opportunity to serve as a
technical liaison between two manufacturing organizations. If you
imagine a shop that makes ceramic tiles and a factory that uses those
tiles to produce complex mosaics, you’ll have a basic understand-
ing of my position: I worked for the tile shop but was located at the
mosaic factory; I was tasked with making sure that tiles were stored
and handled properly after they arrived and before they were used.
It doesn’t sound like much of a job, but that’s because the simpli-
fi ed analogy misses a few things. Each of the “tiles” required millions
of dollars in specialized capital equipment and tens of thousands of
dollars in materials and labor to produce. These quasi-magical tiles
could only be produced in one shop in the world, one at a time, and
never as fast as demand warranted. The factories that used them
made tens—even hundreds—of different kinds of “mosaics,” and
each kind required dozens of different tile types as well as multiple
duplicates of each type. Not to overinfl ate the importance of my fi rst
position, but storage and handling was sort of a big deal.
Still, I have to admit, the job wasn’t all that diffi cult. Not until
about six months after I started, when it suddenly became technically
impossible to create duplicate tiles at the level of exactness the mosaic
makers needed.
It would have been nice had someone made that announcement. If
someone on either side had stood up and proclaimed, “Guess what?

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