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I Just Don’t Think You’re Smart Enough—An Introduction
“We keep saying we have no other course, what we should say is we’re not bright enough to see any other course.” —Dan Carlin quoting David Lilienthal, Atomic Energy Commissioner, The Destroyer of Worlds podcast
I’m troubled. It’s more like I’m concerned, really. Honestly, I already feel better for telling you this up front, although I do realize that this is an odd way to start a book. You need to know that I am writing this under duress. No, I’m not in any physical pain or jeopardy. No one is forcing me to write this book. It’s just that I wonder if we are capable of doing what we are being asked to do. After all, we haven’t done it yet and that troubles me. Could it be that we just aren’t smart enough?
I told a friend recently that I had started this book in my head eleven times. “Eleven,” she said. “That seems like an odd number.” “It is,” I responded. I wanted to tell her that eleven was also a prime number, but I didn’t want to seem pretentious (it’s an engineering thing).
The perplexing issue with the process of writing this book was getting my opening salvo just right. I wanted to create the perfect thesis, or argument that would bring the reader in. I wanted that one hook that would result in half of the readers proclaiming, “Oh, hell yeah!” and leave the other half asking, “What the hell?”
The thesis statement is key to piquing the interest of the reader. I think the message in this text is important, and I know this book will help you with asset management at your place and at your pace. The goal is, through typed words, to connect the message to the intended recipient. Let’s face it, a good book that is not read has the same effect as no book at all. I wanted to write a compelling argument. It was the way I was taught and the way I went on to teach others.
Years after attaining my Ph.D., I began teaching as an adjunct faculty member for a few local colleges and universities. My first graduate class was a graduate level research course. Completing this research course was a requirement for students before writing and defending their Master’s Thesis. I told my class that one of the first things they needed to give consideration to was developing their thesis statement. “Have a bold and compelling statement," I told them. “Have a thesis statement that triggers an immediate response from the reader. Nobody wants to read a vanilla paper. Average papers don’t invoke passion and don’t get read. Get your audience to disagree with you or boldly agree."
To get my class in the mindset of writing an awesome thesis statement, I held weekly debate sessions. Just short twenty-minute discussions. Short but impactful.
Each week I would introduce a current event topic and tell the class to be ready to debate it the next week. I divided the class into pro and con groups. When we met again, I said something along these lines, “Guys, I decided to switch you up. If you were the con side of the debate I’m going to ask you to argue ‘for’ the issue, and vice versa.” This went on every single week. It didn’t take my class long to realize that in order to make an effective argument, for or against, you need to be able to argue both sides of the debate. Know your competitor’s stuff better than they know it was my point.
How did the chapter heading of this introductory chapter make you feel when you read it?
“I Just Don’t Think You’re Smart Enough”
If I did my homework, that statement made you a little curious as to what was coming next. Let me tell you where that line actually came from.
One of my first consulting assignments was at a sugar factory in the Deep South. I was there with the president of Marshall Institute, Greg Folts. Prior to this assignment, I had been wrestling with a nagging thought. Remember, I was brand new to the consulting gig. My quandary was, “How does a maintenance manager feel when their boss calls in a maintenance consultant?” I had no experience with this. I had only ever worked with one consultant, and I was the one who called him in.
Through the mastery of his years of knowledge and experience, Greg completely and sincerely laid out a Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) strategy for the potential client. This approach would absolutely deliver what the client wanted and even provided some things Greg knew they would have to have, but they had yet to discover that they would need. On the way out of the plant manager’s office, the maintenance manager lightly grabbed my arm and leaned into me and whispered, “Please help me.”
Here’s what I discovered right then and there. The maintenance manager and the plant engineer almost always know what to do. Their biggest obstacle is convincing everyone else that it is the right thing to do. We are going to get that alignment right during the course and content of the book that you now hold. The twenty-first century is not a time for maintenance versus production. This is a time for asset management, and that means everyone!
Years later and now a more confident consultant, I was alone and pitching a plan to a plant leadership group. The plant manager was clearly not a person who valued teamwork and felt that all things equipment reliability related were solely within the jurisdiction and responsibility of the maintenance department. At the end of my presentation, he said, “I just don’t think we can do that.” Admittedly a little frustrated, I said, “You know, I agree. I just don’t think you’re smart enough.”
That woke some people up.
The plant manager explained that he didn’t mean that they weren’t smart enough to do what I was suggesting, it was more of an issue of ‘his’ willingness to engage production in what was traditionally a maintenance responsibility. He didn’t think production would do what I was asking them to do. Production was not motivated, in other words, and thus, not capable. This was the first group to ever hear my famous “Unless it requires us overcoming the laws of physics—inertia, the speed of light, or gravity— it is all within our capabilities” speech.
After all, it’s not rocket science.
Give that point some serious thought. Unless the solution to our problem requires us to overcome the laws of physics, everything we need to be successful is within our control. It’s often no more, really, than time and money.
If we say we can’t do something, we are really saying that we aren’t smart enough to figure out how to do it.
The epiphany you should be experiencing at this time is to have the metaphorical scales lifted from your eyes and see that almost anything we will be asked to or required to do is within our capabilities. We just need to come together in our organizations and facilities to understand what is being asked, and determine how we are going to respond. The good news? We always seem to have something to practice on because we always seem to be evolving.
Our newest challenge is to understand and implement ISO 55000, Asset Management. ISO is the moniker for the International Organization for Standardization, a global fraternity of national standards bodies. ISO 55000 isn’t new, although with this title it has only been around since the beginning of 2014. Remember that global fraternity I just mentioned a few sentences ago? The birth of this standard, ISO 55000, came from the publication of PAS 55 by the British Standards
