In Any Business Crisis, These Two Magic Words Change Everything

In other words, people need to talk to each other some more, and perhaps drop some egos?

I'd be pissed off to high heaven to learn that my friends or family (or me!) had been in previous rounds of layoffs because some simple math and a couple hours of conversations were too much for management (and previous consultants had been paid big bucks to fire people months earlier).

"Management doesn't like to see people idle". WTF. This reminds me of "butts in seats" thinking, vs looking at real productivity output numbers.

Worked a place years ago where some of us were "upsetting" others on the floor because every so often one of us didn't come in until 10:30 or 11. This 'upset' some of the other folks (call center, marketing, etc) who were always in by 9. It didn't matter that one of us had been on premises from 10pm-3am hours earlier doing a system push/upgrade. They didn't think it was "fair" that every 8-12 weeks someone in my group worked a 'half day'.

The thing I get from this article is that, after a plant has been cost cut until total inefficiency, the thing to do is ask your managers what was taken from them to do their job normally, and giving it to them. Afterwards, you take the credit by claiming it all came down to two simple words: impossible unless...

Really, what I learned from this is that people don't focus on solving problems, but covering their own ideas/interests, which are somewhat misguided. I can change the circumstances (software instead of mining, servers/people instead of equipment) and it looks like any number of situations I've been in before that could be solved, if the people actually wanted to solve it.

Sure, think of the impossible. But really, it's hard to get people to do what they admit they believe to be impossible. Not because it's impossible, but because they simply don't want to do it (and will undermine it at the next possible opportunity).

The words being, "impossible, unless?" when someone says doing _something_ is impossible.

Sometimes, the other department really isn't a bottleneck; the first department just incorrectly thinks it is.

For example, decades ago I had a consulting gig to help an enterprise pick an app dev tool. This was during the period in the 1990s that fat-client run-times were clearly the best choice, yet my clients thought that the security folks were (foolishly) insisting on X-terminals instead.

My solution was to suggest they get security on the phone. It turns out my client department's belief was false. End of problem.