A senior production manager (I’ll call him “Skipper”) ran a team of production engineers and technicians whose specialty was customizing highly sophisticated navigational systems for vehicles—- mostly for military sea-craft. They had a big order that required review by national security officials because it had military implications.

Skipper explains:

Meanwhile, I should add, Skipper’s team of engineers and technicians was split physically between two production facilities. “Granted they were only a few miles apart, but it just would have been so much easier for me if everybody was in one place.”

Finally, the project received the necessary government approval to proceed, but the approval was contingent on replacing one of the components in the systems with an alternative component that was “less secret.” This in turn caused their customer (the national government of a country in East Asia) to require that they obtain the alternative components from a designated supplier in this East Asian nation.

On top of all that, the language gap required the use of a translator. There were significant delays in getting the alternative components. When the shipment was finally delivered, the components were not right and had to be modified by technicians on Skipper’s team.

Skipper says:

What was going on?

Skipper explains:

This went on for several years. What did Skipper learn? He says:

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ABOUT THE AUTHORBruce Tulgan is an adviser to business leaders all over the world and a sought-after keynote speaker and seminar leader. He is the founder and CEO of RainmakerThinking, Inc., a management research and training firm, as well as RainmakerThinking.Training, an online training company. Bruce is the best-selling author of numerous books including Not Everyone Gets a Trophy (Revised & Updated, 2016), Bridging the Soft Skills Gap (2015), The 27 Challenges Managers Face (2014), , and It’s Okay to be the Boss (2007). He has written for the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, HR Magazine, Training Magazine, and the Huffington Post. Bruce can be reached by e-mail at brucet@rainmakerthinking.com, you can follow him on Twitter @BruceTulgan, or visit his website www.rainmakerthinking.com.