Page 32 - Make Work Great

You . . . as the Seed

Tile duplication doesn’t work anymore.” It would have saved a lot of
work. Of course, nobody did that because nobody knew: the tech-
nology had gotten ahead of us. Tiles were still being produced by
the tile makers within the proper specifi cations and shipped as usual
to unsuspecting users. The subtle differences between the duplicates
were unknown to everyone and were not revealed by any standard
measurements. The results only showed up as faulty mosaics—a wave
of bad output with only a vaguely understood relationship to its cause,
and a multimillion-dollar impact to the company’s revenue stream.
Imagine the chaos.
Imagine also that young, green Edward Muzio found himself in
the eye of a storm. Mosaic production experts were sure (and only
grew surer) that the problem lay in the tiles; they asserted the inepti-
tude of the tile shop for both producing useless material and failing to
realize the error. Unable to get their tiles elsewhere, they began order-
ing “extras” and randomly throwing away those that didn’t seem to
work. Tile makers maintained that everything they were producing
was within factory-mandated specifi cations. The factory had to be
doing something else wrong, and the extra orders were crippling the
tile shop. Both sides yelled and screamed about the millions of dol-
lars being wasted, the hundreds of hours being lost, and the lack
of competence on the other side. And both sides vented their wrath
on young, green Edward Muzio—the only person they knew to be
directly connected to the other side—and said, “You had better make
them fi x it and fast!”
It’s interesting what stands out in memory. I remember most clearly
being worried about my career. I remember working long hours, gath-
ering all sorts of information, and enduring abusive comments born
from the frustration of technically brilliant people on both sides of
the problem who had no reason to believe that the fault was theirs. I
remember gathering experts, holding frequent meetings, and arrang-
ing for a seemingly endless parade of material transfer and special-
handling measurement logistics. When we fi nally fi gured out that
the cause was a combination of technical limitations on both sides, I

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