My father spent more than thirty years working on an automobile assembly line. He had a clear, concrete, tangible understanding of many things, including the meaning of the word “management.” To him, “management” was “a kid in a tie.”
He never tired of telling me, and many others, about the day he went to where he was going to be working, attaching a part of the door assemblies to the frame of sixty cars a minute for eight hours. Before the line started up for his shift, he was approached by “a kid in a tie.” The “kid” told my father that they had received a bad shipment of parts, and that he needed to bend each part after he attached it so it would meet the specifications for those cars. My father tried to tell the “kid” that the parts were brittle, and would not bend, and the “kid” replied that he did not want to argue, that he would do the first car on the line, and that my father should just do what he showed him to do.
The assembly line started for the shift, the “kid” attached the first part, and tried to bend it into its correct position, and the brittle part broke. He did not say another word to my father, and walked away.
The significance of the story for me is not what my father did to each car that was made on that shift that day, or that no one ever came back to find out why every single car built during that shift had a defective door assembly. What was most important about that conversation of a few minutes was the way it shaped my father’s understanding of, and relationship to “management” for the rest of his life. It reinforced his attitudes toward “management,” which he passed on to many other people, including his son who went on to go to school and become a “kid in a tie.”
[Image by chuckoutrearseats]
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