Name:	Old Diver -	Reply
Subject:	Listen to Your Workers.
Date:	1/5/2014 10:36:42 AM

An automatic packaging system occasionally failed to insert a tube of tooth paste in the carton. Seeing the problem, management hired an engineering firm, at considerable expense, to design and build a system that automatically weighed each carton to insure it was full. When the system detected an empty carton, the line stopped and the operator had to remove the empty and restart the line. During the first week quite a number of empties were caught. Then the machine stopped detecting any emptied, however, all cartons were full.

  Management decided to investigate and found one of the inspectors who explained that he every time an empty was detected he had to get up, remove the empty and restart the line. He tred of this and just aimed a fan blowing across the line. The light empty boxes were ejected automatically!

Name:	hibill -	Reply
Subject:	Listen to Your Workers.
Date:	1/5/2014 5:58:23 PM

It is a solution that works, as Mr Sam Walton told me once; a tree does not grow from the top down, but the bottm up. The employees in the warehouse and the stockroom know more about going on in the stores than management. I knew Mr. Sam well.

Name:	Old Diver -	Reply
Subject:	Consultants
Date:	1/5/2014 10:02:01 PM

A consultent friend who worked in the foundry industry - it works in others - offered to tell me his secret. He said that he would take the lower management to dinner, buy them a few drinks and ask what are your problems and how would you fix them? He would write it all down and give it to the president. "Brilliant," he would say.

Name:	architect -	Reply
Subject:	Consultants
Date:	1/6/2014 6:15:56 PM

Back in the space race era NASA spent tens of millions of dollars to developed a ball point pen which worked in a zero gravity environment for use by America's astronauts.  The Soviet cosmonauts made do with pencils.