2-3-4 Friday: Bangkok garment factory
‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’
1 thought
Over the week, I flew to Bangkok to
meet a client, who happened to run a garment factory with 2000 workers, across Thailand and Myanmar.
He makes clothes for the likes of Patagonia, Jack Wolfskin, and Mont Bell.
We were talking to him about why he chose to implement a software solution that cost hundreds of thousands, when he could have quite simply kept things the
same.
He shared a story of how one afternoon, he had seen 100 workers waiting on the shop floor, because the components upstream had not been completed. The managers in charge of the upstream components kept telling him that it would be done in an hour, but an hour had come and gone.
And still it was not done.
There was wasted productivity on the shop floor. The labour dollars he was paying for were slowly seeping away. He had to find a better solution for him, and his clients.
We have to keep our capability to promise.
It struck me that his upgrades were not meant to do anything fancy. Like robotic arms making clothes,
or having a fully automated factory. All they were for were to improve his reliability.
His capability to promise clients to ship them on time, whenever there was an order. He turned his entire factory from a black box into a transparent factory just so that he could know exactly where a component was breaking down, and improve the promises he made.
Reliability is an understated skill.
Yet in in Botelho, and Powell’s study of 17,000 executives and the factors that differentiated between those who made it to the top, and those who didn’t, one key factor
was reliability.
Reliability was the only factor that increased both the person’s odds of getting hired and his odds of excelling on the job.
CEOs who are known for being reliable are fifteen times more likely to be high performing, and their odds of getting hired are double those of everyone else.
You might look at reliability as a boring skill.
But in a world where promises and commitments are easily broken, those who make them, and keep them, are seen with greater value.
1 talk
Reliability is the understated skill of our
times.
1 tip
Just look at McDonald’s. Or Amazon. You love them because they deliver on what they say they will do.
Food in 10 minutes? Delivery the next day?
Sorted.
How do you become more reliable?
- Make less promises.
- Make promises you can keep.
John
Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love