It's a new age in corporate America

One of the advantages of a reduction in non-value-added activities during the economic downturn is my company’s cutback of training initiatives. It might be surprising to hear this from a trainer, but I’m writing from the perspective of one who has to sit through someone else’s training, not as the one delivering the training. Being a trainer is fun and fulfilling because you get to tell other people what to do and what to think. Sitting on the other end of the equation as the trainee can be very unnerving, especially when the message being delivered is corporate psycho-babble.

The training I deliver is information about skills that are actually used to produce a product. The other variety, which has appeared in several mutations during my nearly 30 years in the business, deals more with human interaction and motivation. It’s not how to make a widget, it’s how to think, feel and dream about making a widget.

Some examples from a checkered career:

• During the recession of the early 90’s, the company “right-sized” by cutting about 5% of the workforce at the particular location I was working. This included the two inspectors who worked for me in what we called the “quality assurance department”, but what was actually an abandoned though still sizzling electrical closet where we picked through boxes of printed material until we found unmarred samples. The new corporate “Way”, as it was called, was to build quality into products instead of tacking it on with inspection at the end. Sounds good enough, but combining a layoff with this new Way’s acronym – Focus on Innovation, Reliability and Excellence, or FIRE – was an unfortunate combination, especially for those who were in fact being fired. We had a suggestion program called SPARKS (I’ve forgotten that convoluted acronym) that included stuff like “let’s get new water coolers ”, quality-improvement teams that spent most their time enforcing the hare-brained paperwork they came up with, and a chili cook-off. The best legacy I have of that effort is a pretty cool t-shirt.
• Around the mid-90’s, as the economy had recovered, the FIRE facilitation team was sent on a weeklong trip to Washington to learn how to be ISO auditors. ISO, as some may recall, was a certification program that basically required companies to document their processes and prove to an outside auditor that they followed these processes. We were learning to be these outside auditors, even though we’d be auditing on the inside. The rigorous 14-hour-a-day sessions were conducted by Lloyd’s of London, who had given my company a reduced rate to fill up the final three spots in this particular class. We were harangued with British accents for four days, then put through a practice scenario where we had to audit our trainers (who “pretended” to be the uncooperative subject company), then given a final exam. We were informed by mail about a month after the training was done that all three of us hadn’t even come close to passing the course.
• About six years ago, the entire plant was put through “5S” training. This was another corporate fad based on the Japanese theory that a clean and well-organized workplace was a productive and well-run workplace. I can’t even recall what the 5 S’s stood for now; maybe sort, sweep, standardize, sabotage and sing? But what it boiled down to was basically a spring cleaning project on steroids with a label-maker. Nothing was allowed to take up precious workspace unless it existed at all work stations and could be clearly identified. Thus, we went around the office putting labels on things like “staplers” and “pencils” and “white-out” and “paper clip dispensers”. Cleaning out long-neglected drawers, someone found a cache of sweet-and-sour sauce, which triggered a debate about whether to create a “condiments” label or simply to throw it out. The height of this lunacy came at the end of each shift, when the kind of high-energy disco music you hear at NBA games would be blasted across the room as everyone stood up, grabbed a bottle of Windex, and began wiping down all available surfaces. “Wouldn’t it have been easier for the company to hire janitors and train them to be document processors than the other way around?” commented one cynic.
• The silliest and most recent experience, which took place about four years ago, was called “Foundations” training. I still have the workbook from this two-day offsite jerk-a-thon that claimed to be “transforming the business” with the bright idea to “be here now” while you were working. Mixed among vaguely appropriate quotes from the likes of Socrates, Galileo, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and Willie Mays (?!) were the variety of typical encounter group exercises I hadn’t done since freshman orientation at college in 1971. There was a testing and categorization of personality types, something called the “broken squares game”, and a listing of the qualities of a good leader (I wrote “patience” in my workbook) versus a bad leader (“impatience”). But the overriding theme throughout was this need to “be here now” or, as the workbook put it “Be Here Now™”. My notes in the final exercise of the second day – called “insights and action steps” – reveal the depths of bitterness to which I had sunk:
  --“I will assume good intent”
  --“I will look at situations from different perspectives”
  --“I will be here now”
  --“I will be someplace else later”
  --“Next week I will be on vacation”
  --“Tomorrow, I will be here now, but it won’t be now, it will be then”
  --“The ‘now’ is all we have now; later, we will have the ‘later’”
  --“I will be here now even if I’m laid-off later”
  And finally, to the strains of tinkling new-age music, I referenced the “broken squares game”: “The broken squares can be equated to the broken lives we lived before Foundations training”.

In the corporate world of the early 21st century, it was all in a day’s work, or lack thereof.