A lesson on how consultants can make a difference in an organization:
Last week, we took some friends to a restaurant, ‘Steve’s Place,’ and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket.
It seemed a little strange. When the busboy brought our water and utensils, I observed that he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket.
Then I looked around and saw that all the staff had spoons in their pockets. When the waiter came back to serve our soup I inquired, ‘Why the spoon?’
‘Well, ‘he explained, ‘the restaurant’s owner hired Andersen Consulting to revamp all of our processes. After several months of analysis, they concluded that the spoon was the most frequently dropped utensil. It represents a drop frequency of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour.
If our personnel are better prepared, we can reduce the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 15 man-hours per shift.’
As luck would have it, I dropped my spoon and he replaced it with his spare. ‘I’ll get another spoon next time I go to the kitchen instead of making an extra trip to get it right now.’ I was impressed.
I also noticed that there was a string hanging out of the waiter’s fly.
Looking around, I saw that all of the waiters had the same string hanging from their flies. So, before he walked off, I asked the waiter, ‘Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that string right there?’
To see why, read on, but feel free to add your own comments to this post or any others.
‘Oh, certainly!’ Then he lowered his voice. ‘Not everyone is so observant. That consulting firm I mentioned also learned that we can save time in the restroom.
By tying this string to the tip of our you-know-what, we can pull it out without touching it and eliminate the need to wash our hands, shortening the time spent in the restroom by 76.39%.
I asked quietly, ‘After you get it out, how do you put it back?’
‘Well,’ he whispered, ‘I don’t know about the others, but I use the spoon.’
Is that Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma or the Five S method?
Yeah, sort of saw that one coming. How does it work for waitresses?
Lol…Thanks Walt for the funny and a Belated Happy Birthday….Blessings
That’s funny, Walt.
I’m off until later today!
They’re glad that they didn’t have to carry forks.
That’s funny Walt. I’m never eating out again.
aw, come on. you can eat out. Just don’t drop your spoon.
Thom Hartmann-Michael Medved Debate on MP3
This debate was Thursday night in Chicago with a 50-50 crowd (at least the tickets were distributed equally from Chicago Progressive Talk and the aptly named Winger station 560WIND!)
At the webpage, right click on “Click Here” and select Save Target As, then save the file to your folder of choice. It’s about an hour and a half long.
You can also access the Chicago Progressive Talk webstream from this page, just click on Listen Live.
Happy listening!
OMG – That was funny and more information than I needed to know.
cats,
It is actually an oldie. It popped into my mind about one AM EDT and I figured to use it for our Saturday open thread. I first heard a variation when I was working at GTEDS on a project directed by Anderson. Both GTEDS and Anderson are extinct now.
Ideally a consultant is brought-in to solve a specific problem, improve a process or to more fully exploit some potential when in-house management and/or staff recognizes a lack of expertise and/or imagination in their own ranks; and the consultant should be honest and impartial.
And ideally we’d all get a pony and look like ‘Brangelina’.
At the ADP help-desk, Tier-1 call volume was up due to increased sales and a major (and unavoidable) nationwide client software upgrade, but the rate of call resolution was static so average wait-times for support were increasing.
What a puzzlement. What to do?
Add staff?
Improve knowledge through training?
Develop a common database of the most time-consuming support issues so that they could be identified more quickly and escalated appropriately?
Extend hours to accommodate West Coast clients? ASK THE SUPPORT STAFF FOR INSIGHT AND SUGGESTIONS?
Nope.
The ‘solution’ was to hire the consulting arm of MCI (the phone company) who recommended a brand new ‘menued’ phone system (coincidentally sold by MCI), a ‘hold threshold’ of no longer than five minutes and a blanket call resolution or call escalation target of 15 minutes.
In other words the help desk’s performance would now be measured by support-call throughput, not actual problem resolution.
So the helpdesk call co-coordinator lost her job to a robot, the Tier-1 technicians were denied learning anything more than they already knew, the clients were forced to Tier 2 support when the 15 minutes were up, and Tier 2 support (who actually served as a middleman between support and the software developers) remained one person.
But the helpdesk manager got to ‘manage’ an expensive ‘productivity’ project and make some pretty graphs and charts with lines and columns that went ‘up’!
In short, incompetent self-serving management provides a market for self-serving consultants in a closed loop of mutual benefit, whilst practical in-house expertise or just illuminating experience is easily and stupidly ignored.
5th,
Over the years, I’ve noticed that it’s always the “guy from out of town” who knows everything — and it’s completely stupid, insulting, and wasteful.
And the cronyism served by hiring these planks from the MBA factories – ‘hey old MBA pal, come and tell us all how to do better and I’ll pay you a bunch’ – also followed up by the ‘hey old MBA pal, how about a VP or marketing job?’
I always thought it was a huge vote of confidence to get some outside prats in to tell your existing people what to do, or to buy another competitor. “We don’t think you can beat this lot, so we bought them.
I left a company after a bunch of private equity vultures showed and started hiring each each to feed off the struggling corpse of the company, awarding themselves VP jobs left and right, and cutting everyone elses pay and jobs…. thinking of the c-word again.