Great day at work, seeing thousands of dollars going to waste.

Today at work I had experience in witch it was obvious that there was a lot of waste of money. I work for a larger corporation with different plants al over the world, and today our plant had the privilege to be visited by our higher management from the head office.

That the are coming to look how everything is going is a greet thing in my opinion. There were also people from a sister plant, what is even better.
I think we can learn allot from each other, the plants are working normally pretty independent, and when we can speak other colleagues we can learn from eats other mistakes and victory’s.

But it wasn’t so kind of day. Somebody had thought up that it would be a good idee to make little presentations per team. The visitors where lead by our management team from presentation to presentation. Because we needed roam the thought it would be a good idee to do these rounds inside our production environment. And I was selected as one off the work floor to do one of the talks.

And it was a great disappointment for every body:

The production environment is load, not a great place to do a talk.
Because of the amount of talks that had to be down, there wasn’t any interaction.
We had made a talk that lasted about a few minutes, for that we had to make a poster, so it became read out.
Because of the preparation there was a large amount of management languages, whit big words of “it was bad” and “now it’s great!”, and now authenticity.

The visitors didn’t like it, we didn’t like it. There wasn’t interaction, now discusion and now moments of learning.

And that there were made wrong decisions is possible, but there were a lot of moments that somebody could have intervene.

But why was there now intervention. And this is the big problem I think:

The visitors didn’t want to be rude and disrupt the planning.
Our leaders didn’t want to show failure to there bosses so the keep on going, even it was on the wrong path.

It’s a shame how many time, money and opportunities are lost in the corporate environment because of work ethics.

Point at the good side, at the and I did speak of our corporate leaders by my self, I just walk up to them and we had a nice discusion about our presentation. The only problem was that my team leader wasn’t as keen of not heaving the control ;-)