Here’s another piece that caught my eye. This one is a Wall Street Journal article by John Keilman about a Whirlpool factory manager:
CLYDE, Ohio—Ryan DeLand arrives at Whirlpool’s WHR 0.80%increase; green up pointing triangle washing-machine factory at 6:53 a.m., not long after day-shift workers have settled into their stations.
He steps into his office and is greeted by a whiteboard that bears the motto “stable and predictable.” He will spend the day chasing that goal despite a never-ending stream of complications in a plant that is as big as 30 football fields put together.
A lot can go wrong.
The plant has more than 25 miles of conveyors and uses more than 2,000 parts. Robotic and human-piloted vehicles zip through its aisles, while an overhead crane carries huge coils of steel. Going full blast, the factory can pump out 22,000 washing machines in a day, but even a brief mishap can stop production cold.
At 39 years old, DeLand is among the youngest leaders of Whirlpool’s 10 U.S. factories. He has a trim haircut and the brisk, dynamic manner of a football coach—he heads up the St. Charles Centaurs, his 10-year-old son’s team—and he runs the factory like one. DeLand has divided his staff into units such as defense, special teams and, in a fitting touch for Big Ten country, the run game—his term for operations, logistics and maintenance.
“The run game is about grinding out wins,” he says. “My lane is the run game.”
Not mentioned in the article: Mr. DeLand is a college graduate, a mechanical engineer. Based on industry standards he probably earns between $120,000 and $180,000.
Everything Mr. DeLand is doing has been common knowledge in American businesses for 40 years. The difference may be that he’s actually doing them.
Your last sentence says it all. A tear came to my eye.