to further enhance my ability to deliver reliability to any organization I work within. I obtained my certified maintenance and reliability professional (CMRP) in order to communicate my 35 years of maintenance and reliability experience. This lets others know that besides my experience, I do carry the only ANSI certification in reliability, giving credibility to my experience. I also hold a project management professional’s (PMP) license. Moving an organization from run-to-failure maintenance to proactive reliability is a series of projects and I wanted to ensure I could be effective at leading and managing these projects. Delivering reliability relies on delivering projects on time and within budget. Each successful project builds on the confidence necessary to make these cultural changes. The next certification I pursued was the International Council on Machinery Lubrication’s machinery lubrication technician level one certification. With lubrication being 70% of the root cause of unreliability, it made sense to acquire a certification focusing in this area. As you can see, every degree, certification, or license was achieved to make me a better reliability professional.
WORK HISTORY
After leaving the Navy, I worked my way up the ranks, first at Phelps Dodge Tyrone then P&H Mining, followed by Northrop Grumman, ASARCO, Nyrstar, Empire Southwest, Kraft Foods, and Continental Building Products. I have been a laborer, apprentice, journeyman, front line supervisor, planner, superintendent, manager, and corporate officer, and the most important part of each one of these positions is leadership.
That is why I have written this book. It is my hope that we can turn the tide of organizations looking for shortcuts and immediate gratification, which has eroded the competitive advantage once held in the U.S.: Qualified Reliability Professionals.
I have had the privilege of working with Nathan at 3 different companies. All were in mining and wanted to have a reliability based maintenance program. Nathan is a back to basic type of leader. He knows that to build a good program you start at the bottom and build a good base. That starts with employees. He says you need people that have the skills whether it’s planners, journeyman, and apprentices. Nathan also believed that you must have buy-in from operations and management. Without it you cannot make things happen. I have personally seen his program work and decrease the cost of maintenance and increase safety and retention of workers. If I had the chance, I would work on another project with Nathan.
Bill Cole
Electrical Supervisor
Kinross Gold Corporation
Round Mountain, Nevada
For over 25 years I have had the privilege of observing and working with hundreds of exceptional leaders and specialists in a broad spectrum of business disciplines. My association with Dr. Nathan Wright has been one of the highlights of that experience.
Dr. Wright has a unique grasp of the realities of the business world and the often-perplexing challenges associated with focusing and channeling the energies of leaders, managers and workers within an organization. His insights come from his extensive background in manufacturing, mining, and consumer products, giving him the ability to see the dynamic balance between the policy and process issues of an organization and the people issues that make or break implementation and execution.
As a teacher of leadership skills, he brings the hands-on experience of having turned around ineffective teams by developing both the skill set and the mindset of leadership in those he has coached and mentored. He has a no-nonsense approach to training and development, which stems from a keen awareness of what people need to know and do, and what they don’t need to do, in order to achieve the outcomes demanded in today’s global economy.
Dr. Dennis Deaton
Co-founder and CEO
Quma Learning Systems, Inc. Mesa, AZ
Author, The Book on Mind Management, Ownership Spirit:
The One Grand Key that Changes Everything Else
In his new book: The Death of Reliability: Is it Too Late to Resurrect the Last, True Competitive Advantage, Dr. Nathan Wright takes innovative thinking to a new level. His approach to reliability could be the missing piece needed to complete the maintenance puzzle and bring about the increase in reliability that today’s engineers and managers are looking for, but unable to find.
If Dr. Wright is correct in his analysis of the challenges manufacturing facilities face regarding reliability, then industry is indeed in a very dire position and needs to act quickly before it is buried beneath its own mistakes.
Before Nathan led the maintenance team at the plant where I was working, maintenance was mostly reactive and poorly organized. Within a few weeks, he had begun to introduce the ideas he expands upon in this book which brought the plant uptimes which had not previously been thought possible. It was clear that his rich background in maintenance, reliability and management was a huge advantage to any organization.
I believe Dr. Wright is in fact correct in his analysis, and that his book will be a huge advantage to your organization as well.
Larry Wiskirchen
Reliability Professional,
Vibration analyst, ISO Cat. IV
I have known Nathan professionally for more than ten years. He has a unique combination of journeyman skills and advanced education that is extremely rare and valuable.
I completely agree with Nathan’s views on the exceptional value great reliability can bring to the bottom line. Many of today’s business leaders don’t fully understand the value that great, consistent reliability can bring to the success of a business. And they certainly do not properly value the experience and talent a skilled craftsperson brings in gaining reliability. Journeyman training programs are being replaced with abbreviated technical programs to speed employees into the field where they are unprepared to face some of the complex problems they will be expected to resolve in their jobs.
How we encourage young people to go down this path, which takes real commitment, hard work, and dedication starts with parents, teachers and businesses. If the growing gap and deficit in truly skilled reliability leadership continues as Nathan suggests, there will be a lot of business pain along this long road. But today’s leaders can get a jump start by supporting the certified, comprehensive journeyman training programs for their developing employees.
In today’s business world, we see a huge number of senior executives who have excellent backgrounds in legal, accounting, financial, etc., but lack a basic understanding and knowledge on what truly drives high performance in their business. Consultants are overused as a quick fix, resulting in huge expenses and few lasting improvements in many cases. Nathan is right in that it is this disconnection between many senior executives and “the business” that leads to a lack of support for nurturing and developing strong craft skill sets in the workforce.
I especially liked Nathan’s write-up on Transformational
