“I don’t have time to think about KPIs,” Marcelo complained. “We have too much work to do around here. I have production quotas to get out the door.”
“How do you know when you have finished a production run?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, we have someone counting units before they go in the box. We build to order. We try to keep finished inventory down.”
“Do you have defects?”
“Yep. Or, so we hear. I always overrun by 10 percent to cover customer complaints. Seems to work out pretty well.” Marcelo gave me that confident look.
“If you were to have Key Performance Indicators, what would they be?” I pressed.
“I told you, we don’t have time for that. If there is a quality problem, that is for the QA/QC department to figure out. Believe me, they will tell us.”
“Sounds like the trilogy, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil?”
“As long as I don’t look for trouble, I rarely find it.”
“So, if you know you are blind, you will figure out a way to see. But if you don’t know you are blind, you will continue to run into the same problems, over and over.”
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-Adapted from Ray Dalio, Principles