I was meeting with the production team, and they were a bit disgruntled. Actually, they were pissed.

“We had this big meeting last month. The theme was WHATEVER IT TAKES,” Barbara explained. “And they offered a bonus if we met our goals every day this month.”

I nodded, listening. All the faces were quiet, stone quiet, intense.

“We were up to the last day,” she continued. “As we were counting the last batch, on the last day, we discovered a defect, not just one, the whole batch was bad. We had to scrap everything. We pulled the morning’s production run. Same thing. A whole day’s work had to be re-done, and if we were going to get our bonus, we were going to have to stay on past our shift.”

“Did you tell your supervisor?” I asked.

“No, way. He doesn’t have a bonus on the line, we do. So we pulled another batch of material off the shelf. We had to use every last piece. And the team agreed we would stay over until we finished. You see, they won’t pay the bonus if we have to go into overtime, so everybody punched out while we worked.”

“And?”

“And we got it done. Made the quota. Quality passed. High fives all around. At least that’s what we thought. Next morning, though, you would have thought we had set fire to the place. We all got yelled at, and now we hear they are re-thinking our bonus.”