Polishing Cars With Flat Tires
As I was driving home from a foundry, I wondered why I’d been called. It was obvious to me that the reason I had been asked to visit was not even close to the primary problem facing the operation. I was searching for an analogy of what was being done when I passed a car on the side of the road with a flat tire. That was the analogy. “It’s like spending your time polishing a car that has flat tires.”
It seemed like a great analogy. Who would waste time polishing a car that couldn’t even move? The logical thing would be to spend the time getting the tires fixed instead of polishing, right?
It then dawned on me; I knew someone who did something that seems, in retrospect, even crazier than that. I flashed back to a picture of my friend Wally polishing a car that didn’t have an engine in it.
It happened a long, long time ago. Back then I raced a sports car for fun. While I was never a serious racer, I had a great team who worked with me to prepare the car and who helped in many different ways at the races.
As sometimes happens with sports
car racing, the previous weekend hadn’t been good for me. I had blown the engine
trying to get a little more out of it than I should. Some of the crew and I had
pulled the engine and were in the process of tearing it apart to get ready for
the next weekend when I noticed Wally was polishing the car.
It made sense then. Everyone knows a well-polished car has less wind resistance, and Wally always polished the car before the races. He was still doing what he could to make the next race as successful as possible. It wasn’t big, but every little bit helped.
However, we didn’t race the next weekend because the car wasn’t ready.
We didn’t race because we didn’t have enough time to get the engine back together. Maybe if we had another set of hands, we could have made the next race, but perhaps not.
I should point out that one of the reasons Wally spent his time polishing the car was that he didn’t know what to do to help with the engine. It wasn’t that Wally was stupid. In fact just the opposite, he was very smart. It was just that other things were more important to him than learning to fix engines. He was doing what he could do to help a friend have some fun.
Maybe working on foundry problems that can be handled instead of concentrating on the more important ones isn’t that bad. Doing what can be done to improve an operation makes sense.
Why not improve those things that can be improved? We all need our victories. It feels good to step back and admire how nice the car looks after you’ve polished it.
The process of continuous improvement is not only admirable; it also works to make better operations as shown by the organizations that have adapted and followed the Kaizen philosophy. Fixing the little things as they present themselves is part of a never-ending improvement philosophy.
There is, however, one significant reason not to be always working on the easy problems that can be solved. That reason is time. We all have a limited amount of time each day, whether it’s our own time or that of the people who work for us. If we use that time to solve the easy problems facing an operation, there may not be enough time to give the significant problems the attention they need.
But, what if you don’t know what to do to solve the big
problems? Isn’t it better off to spend time doing things that you know will
improve the operation rather than stumbling around not knowing what you’re doing
with the big problem?
I suppose it depends on what position you’re in. If you’re in Wally’s position of doing what he can to help a friend with his hobby, continuing to polish the car is fine. On the other hand, if you’re responsible for the success of the operation, you may need to do address the more significant problems. I’m sure that if Wally’s livelihood had depended upon that car being on the track, he would have forgotten about polishing and started doing what he could to learn how to fix the engine or to find someone who could.
I encourage you to ask yourself if all the projects in the foundry are “waxing a car with flat tires” or are they making sure you going to be ready for the “next race”?