“We’ve grown,” explained Edgar. “We have developed systems to make sure our product is consistently made. But we keep running into delivery problems, running behind, backorders, line shutdowns. There always seems to be a problem making sure things get done.”

“Which one person has that responsibility?” I asked.

“Well, that should be the manager,” Edgar replied. “But I wonder sometimes. Have you ever seen someone in the weeds?”

“What do you mean?”

“In the weeds. Like in a restaurant, where the waiter has too many tables. He can go as fast as he wants, but never catches up and every customer stays upset.”

“So, describe your manager’s role? What do you expect from him?”

Edgar paused, “He’s the manager, he’s in charge of everything that goes on out there. It’s quite a big job. We have several assembly lines, lots of machines, each a little different. We have raw material and finished goods inventories.”

“Where does the breakdown occur?” I pressed.

“There are two kinds of problems I see my manager facing. Sometimes he seems to fix the same problem over and over, one band-aid after the another. Other times, he can tweak our system to fix the problem once and prevent it from happening again. I call it a system fix.”

“And?”

“Sometimes, there is too much going on and he can’t study a problem long enough to make a system fix, so he is back to band-aids. And that’s when we get behind.”