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Yeah, all right, I should have known better. I've worked here at Acme Machine Tools for almost 20 years, the last six as corporate director of training and education, so it's not as if the culture of the place suddenly leapt out at me from behind a tree. For whatever reason, I walked right into this mess. Never saw it coming. Call me an idiot, OK, swell.
The nightmare starts when senior management decides we ought to get something going around the idea of teams. You know how everybody is all gungho on teams but no two people ever seem to have the same idea of what teams are or how they work? I guess that's pretty much what my story is about. I wish that were all it's about
Anyway, as I say, management wants teams. So to start the ball rolling, my training staff throws together a one-day teamawareness program for workers and managers. As usual, most of the managers can't make it, so the people who actually show up are almost all workers. But that's OK, we give them the pitch. We tell them we really believe in teamwork here at Acme and blah, blah, blah. It's all generic stuff-nobody could get offended or get the wrong idea. We just say, you know, teams seem like a great idea.
Then we make the fatal mistake. We show them an old Tom Peters video called "The Leadership Alliance."
Ever seen this thing? It was made in 1988. Peters interviews a bunch of workers at Johnsonville Foods, HarleyDavidson, and some other companies that are experimenting with self-managing teams. So here on the video are these hourly production workers talking about going to budgeting class and financial seminars and making more money every time they learn something, and on and on and on. The Johnsonville people, especially, are yakking about how they do their own planning and organizing, their own quality control, their own product testing. They set their own hours, agree on working conditions, and divide up any bonus money that comes along. They even hire and fire their own members.
So our people sit through this video, and when it's over they stand up and cheer. Afterward I try to calm them down,...