Still, you can spend only so much time in airports before you start to go a little loony. The family card I was playing with Ralph was certainly part of the reason I wanted to go back to the Hyler division. But there was more to it from a professional perspective.
Ten years ago, I’d accidentally come across some ideas about how to make things happen. As the saying goes, do a good job and you’ll be rewarded with more work. I had become a lightning rod for the various improvement theories the company wanted to try — Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, and fifty other variations on business process reengineering, all of them coming “just in time.” I’d used my project management skills to implement these ideas in a number of our operations around North America and in Asia. I’d trained literally thousands of our employees in how to apply these methods in their daily life at work.
In the process, I’d started to feel more like an evangelist preaching a spiritual state of mind than someone implementing practical management techniques. I was seeing less and less connection between what I was doing and the actual results we were getting. Even weirder was that I seemed to be the only one who noticed this.
So, in addition to being home with my family, I wanted to get out of what felt increasingly like a snake oil sales racket and back to a real job. Of course, I didn’t tell Ralph that last part.
Ralph let loose a dramatic sigh and looked toward the heavens. “If you want to travel less, then come to Chicago. You don’t need to move to a backwater.”
I tried not to scoff. “Head office people do not travel less, Ralph. The only people in this company who travel more than I do are you and your executive VPs. Plus, you’ve got nothing useful for me to do here. I want to be out in the operation somewhere, working in the business. I’m not a head office type of guy.”
For a moment, I thought I saw a glimmer of empathy in Ralph’s eyes. Perhaps he felt a certain nostalgia for being out in the field, having a hands-on role in running a plant, actually making a product . . .
“Will, you’re an idiot,” he said. Maybe not the kind of glimmer I’d thought. “But only about your career. Otherwise, you’ve done some great stuff for Mantec. You’ve earned the right, at least temporarily, to be a career idiot. I can give you a year back at the Hyler operation. But at the end of the year, things are either back on track, or you’re the project manager for moving the operation overseas and shutting the plant down. Personally, I think that’s exactly where we’re going. But we’ll need someone to do that right.”
Seven minutes later I was hailing a cab for O’Hare. I texted my son.
Home in six hours
I got a reply in about five seconds.
4 how long?
I thought for a second before I texted.
4 good
I hoped I wasn’t lying.
TWO
Home for the Problem Days
RAIN. WE GET a lot of that in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not as if I don’t have experience with it. But when you’re embarking on what you hope is the next great stage of your career, and you’re nervous that maybe you’ve just made a huge mistake, rain can be a real downer.
I watched the fat drops squash themselves on my windshield as I waited to exit the airport parking garage. I thought about how I’d already lied to my son. I’d told him I’d be home in six hours, but that turned out to be how long my flight was delayed departing O’Hare. Traveling through Chicago was something I wasn’t going to miss in my new role.
It was already well after midnight. Since the chances of any of my family staying up to greet me were slim, I decided to take a detour by the Hyler plant on the way to the house.
One of the things I’ve always loved about the plant is that it’s got a twenty-acre lake on the property. The lake is owned by the company, and we use it to test some of the recreational water products we make. But mostly it creates a feeling of calm in the midst of a bustling manufacturing facility. These days, “formerly bustling” might be a better way to put it.
When I worked at the plant ten years ago, Hyler was running three shifts a day, seven days a week, producing small boats, sails, and my personal favorite, the Windsailor. Since then, the plant had expanded its operations significantly, both in scale and in the scope of its products. But the start of the recession in 2008 had changed that. As I drove by the main office and parked in front of Lake Hyler, the place was dark. The only things in the plant at that time of night were the ghosts of better days.
The rain had eased off to a light drizzle, which in the Pacific Northwest we think of as “clearing up.” I got out of my car and walked down to the edge of the water. The dark plant, the dark lake, and my jet lag took me to a dark place in my mind. Hyler’s rise and current slump mirrored how I felt about my own career.
I’d spent the last ten years going from operation to operation making things happen, and ostensibly making things better. But I’d become increasingly focused on the things that didn’t get better. Or that got better for a while, and then went back to how they always had been. It felt like these failures were outnumbering the successes. And it all seemed to come down to the people. They would start off doing things the new, better way, but once the excitement of the change had passed, or maybe more importantly once I left town, they slid back into their old ways. The gains in productivity we’d seen fizzled out. Dramatically better production and reduced accident downtime returned to normal.
I picked up a rock and skipped it across the black water. For all my fancy-sounding projects and all the big changes I’d implemented, I didn’t feel like I was really making a difference. I wasn’t changing the people.
“WELL, WELL, the prodigal son returns!”
It was as if I had stepped out of a time machine. One that was a little screwed up, maybe, in that everyone looked as if they’d aged ten years, so really, more of a situation machine . . . over time . . . you know what I mean.
Sitting around the table was the group I thought of as my old team. Some of them worked for me back when I was at Hyler full-time, some had been colleagues, and one was my old boss. They reminded me of a familiar old sweater — a little threadbare, maybe with the hint of a musty odor, out of style, but still very comfortable. While I’d been off traveling the Mantec world for the last ten years, they’d been riding the highs and lows of things back here at home. We’d all kept in touch. But for some reason I was feeling a bit odd sitting at the table. That wasn’t working with my sweater analogy, but I didn’t have time to resolve my metaphorical misalignment.
“Welcome back!” Stu Barnes greeted me with an enthusiastic handshake. “What the hell happened to your hair?”
There was laughter among the group. I shrugged. “I only wear it this way to be cool — bald is the hip look these days. I can’t believe you haven’t shaved your own head.” Stu, the VP of operations at Hyler, had been my boss and mentor from my earliest days there. Although he must have been close to sixty-five, the bastard still sported a thick head of hair, with only a few patches of gray.
“Luckily, you’ve got just the perfect fat head to make the look work.” That was Amanda Payton, the VP of IT. Amanda had been on the career fast track, a bit like me, until she’d decided that the travel and time away from the family wasn’t quite worth it. It took me a little longer to figure that out.
Also around the table was Mark Goldman, the director of human resources, who’d just been an HR analyst during my time