1960s WORK
0160 My Week & BTR Production Control
Although I would have loved to have avoided the BTR moulding shop and its problems, it dominated my life. In particular, for one morning each week, I and the production controllers sat down to schedule all the work on the shop. It was a nightmare, since there was so many different machines which could only handle certain of the orders. We literally spent three to four hours in a sitting, with half a dozen of us involved, to pencil in the production plan for each machine for each day of the following week. I learned more about production scheduling in that time in than I have ever learned since, though I later became one of IBM's experts in production control.
My job was ideal for a workaholic. The one-time we actually recorded our activities, in special diaries - because BTR wanted to see how it could improve our productivity, I recorded 85 hours work during the week; and that was a slow week for me! I used to get in first thing in the morning, not long after seven o'clock, and would then have various formal meetings with groups of managers through until nine o'clock. I would then continue with informally scheduled meetings through until five or six o'clock at night. I used to work over lunch, having sandwiches brought into my office. In between times, in my limited amount of free time, I used to walk around the factory seeing what was going on and general interfering! The best time was after five o'clock at night. Suddenly everything went quiet, as everyone went home. I was only then able to relax and then get on with the real work of the day - my paperwork and reports - putting in another four hours of work. In this way I typically worked from 7am until 11pm on weekdays. At the weekends the pace was much slower. I worked from nine until five, on both Saturday and Sunday. I was much more productive at weekends, since there was no one around to interrupt -- except for the few managers I called in for special meetings.
I had been very determined to run an egalitarian management system. Thus, I had come down from Cussons having produced a set of flip charts which gave my history and my objectives. I presented these to my managers on my first day in office. In retrospect I suspect they thought I was mad -- since they knew BTR and I didn't. But I genuinely wanted them to be involved in the management at the organisation.
The problem was that life wasn't like that. BTR was a very hard-nosed hire and fire company - as I found out to my cost later on. It was also a very high-pressure company, and increasingly I started to fire from the hip.
Later on I realised that in many meetings I had simply issued orders, and I had no longer involved the other participants in my decisions. It's something you eventually become proud of. You have got so little time to do anything, that you grow to be proud that you can take instant decisions; and bark orders at subordinates.
I guess that this came to head with our visit to Italy. We had a relationship with an Italian company in Turin. They were very similar to ourselves, and we decided to exchange technology. This meant I, and a team of around a dozen managers, had to fly across to Turin for three days; to go round their plant. The idea was that would go and see what we could pick up in terms of help for our own operations -- since they operated in very much the same field, being immersed in the Turin car industry.
My great coup was to work out that a bank holiday gave us three days without actually intruding on our normal working time. Accordingly I took my managers across for the whole bank holiday. I didn't occur to me, until years later, that they probably would not have been as keen on this as I was. But for me it was ideal. I didn't lose a single working day.
Incidentally, I flew across with my factory manager, Hamish. As we were about to take off I noticed him gripping the arms of his seat and looking very nervous. I said “...don't worry about anything. This is no problem I have flown dozens of times”. He then told me that he had been navigator during the war, on a Lancaster which had been converted as a VIP transport. It flew, with various generals on board, landing just behind the front line. It was incredibly dangerous. He had been in three planes which had literally disintegrated around him as they crashed, and significant numbers of the crew were killed. For me flying meant that I stood one chance in the million of crashing. For him, based on his previous wartime experience, there was one chance in a half a dozen or so! It put my own flying experiences into perspective.
It was an interesting visit to Turin -- though the hotel was not air-conditioned and my bedroom, overlooking the main street, suffered considerable noise from the volume of street traffic. This carried on all through the night and – with the window open to counter the heat - I couldn't get much sleep. The factory, though, was very interesting in the way that it was managed. Although it was engaged on exactly the same work as ourselves, it was somehow very different -- almost having an Italian accent!
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