Realizing that you are old is not an easy pill to swallow, but we all encounter these incidents at some point in time. I will share a recent experience that highlighted how old I am. Hopefully you will share any age-enlightening experience that you have had in a comment to this blog. This dialog could be fun – at least that is what my wife thinks.
Port Aransas Sandfest
Recently we traveled to Corpus Christi, Texas for the purpose of seeing Sandfest at Port Aransas. There were many amazing sand creations; e.g., Willie Nelson
Another example was a sand-castle sculpture:
USS Lexington in Corpus Christi
In addition to the Sandfest, we also visited the USS Lexington in Corpus Christi, TX.
On the flight deck of the USS Lexington, many historical planes were on display. One of these planes was the F-4 Phantom, which had many missions during the Vietnam War.
Realizing that you are old when …
You know that you are old when the products that you helped manufacturer are now in a historical display.
I was raised in a municipality near St. Louis, Mo. During my first two summers when attending the University of Missouri at Rolla for my BS degree in Mechanical Engineering, I worked at McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis. McDonnell manufactured the F-4 fighter aircraft.
During my first college-summer job in 1965, I conducted time studies on the manufacturing of the F-4 fighter, which is consistent with the methodology that we now call Lean. The second summer at McDonald I worked on the creation of zero-defect charts, which is consistent with Six Sigma thinking. By the way, the zero defects program was created by Phil Crosby; ironically 40 years later I received ASQ Crosby Medal for my book Implementing Six Sigma.
Water under the Bridge Thoughts
After obtaining my BSME degree from Rolla in 1968, I started working in product development for IBM in Lexington, KY and was drafted to serve in the Army after one year with IBM. After my two-year duty, I was transferred by IBM to Austin, Texas. In 1975, I received my MSME from the University of Texas and also took a Design of Experiments (DOE) class. The DOE training changed my life – the described application of statistical techniques made a lot of sense to me.
At IBM in the late 1970’s, I was transferred from Development to a Product Test organization where I was actively applying statistical technique under the coaching of great statisticians. In 1980, I requested to be a full-time internal consultant applying statistical techniques. IBM bought into this and for the last twelve years with the company I found my own work. I thought that I had the best job in IBM; however, things at that time were not too healthy in IBM. This was before Lou Gerstner became CEO of IBM and turned things around.
1992 was the year that I took a bridge to retirement after 24 years with IBM. In this same year, my first book, Statistical Methods for Testing, Development, and Manufacturing, was published and I founded Smarter Solutions.
Smarter Solutions has evolved much since 1992; however, it seems like much of the objectives that McDonnell Aircraft was striving to achieve with the F-4 is what we are now working to enhance in companies at Smarter Solutions; e.g., work flows (time studies at McDonnell Aircraft) and enhanced scorecarding (zero defect charts at McDonnell Aircraft). For those who are interested, the enhanced methodologies that we are working with organizations to implement in these areas are described in:
- An article: “Positive Metric Performance & Poor Business Performance – How Does This Happen?”
- A recorded webinar: “From Business Chaos to Competitive Advantage”