Two of the most notable changes made by the A-Team were imposing a strict separation of duties between assemblers and material handlers and the sharp increase in the number of material handlers. They felt we would gain more efficiency by not letting the assemblers more so much as an inch away from their posts to get their materials, and they felt we could reduce inventory by storing it in more places as long as we stored as little as possible at the point of use. Neither of those ideas made much sense, but plant management made it quite clear that these corporate illuminati were not to be questioned on any grounds.

The same plant management has just required the reversal of both of these improvements, melding some material handling functions back into assembly and eliminating a handful of positions altogether. All of the positions eliminated were under P.B., the manager of material handling, and all of the positions moved into assembly belonged to P.B. M.B., the manager of assembly, gained people while P.B. lost people. But M.B. argued with P.B., wanting to choose which of P.B.’s employees he could subsume into his department.

M.B. also chose this Friday morning, just before the daily production meeting, to page P.B. to tell him one of the assembly lines was down for lack of material. It wasn’t, but while P.B. was busy checking on that M.B. gave one of P.B.’s employee’s a thorough questioning about P.B.’s departments–more than this employee had any responsibility for. I have not been so furious in a good long while. Along with S.B., M.B. seems to be paying very close attention to anything that may be an oversight or error in the operation of P.B.’s departments. Now, as far as it concerns S.B., I have never seen anything much in his theory or practice that I could commend; but, although M.B. has rubbed me the wrong way on several previous occasions, his basic philosophies have not struck me heretofore as gravely wrong. If he is engaged in a calculated take-down of P.B., as he seems at this moment to be, then he has a low character indeed.

That would be somewhat ironic. Not in any concrete way, but in realizations of both good conduct and bad conduct. One of the things I have observed most often in M.B. is his ability to keep laughing; when things are going very badly, such as a critical machine breaking down, he shows signs of being upset and tense. But he quickly bounces back and is shortly cracking jokes. This is a crucial survival mechanism. To keep laughing, to keep yourself at a comfortable distance from a situation that is not, in the big scheme of things, really all that bad, will prolong your days and make them more pleasant.

I just get a sneaky feeling he also uses joviality to disguise his more pointed machinations.