My brother won a golden ticket a few years ago and gave it to our family to visit the Nestle chocolate factory. That’s where I met Ruth & Charlotte (not their real names), working the end of the line for one type of chocolate bar. The final machine would pass them each a few dozen bars and they’d quickly grab a dozen, stuff a box, fold, wrap then another dozen, same thing, over and over.
I asked the manager, next to our oompaloopa (yes, we had short-statued, non-talking actors taking us around that day…felt strange) about why some lines had machines and others had people. “Costs” he said. They were saving up to buy the machines to replace the people at the end of the lines but hadn’t saved enough to replace Ruth & Charlotte yet.
Upon thinking about this, I could see the sentimentality of two lovely people working together for years, having had a stable job that didn’t require much of them but also wondered where they would have gone in their lives if the machines had been built sooner. Would they be doing more fulfilling work?
This all brings me back to my work as a business process consultant, finding myself replacing mindless, relatively expensive jobs with software & processes. Is it wrong that I’m reducing mindless jobs and replacing them with jobs where people’s real skills, personality and talents are amplified? In the end I’m continuing a tradition of replacing switchboard operators, cart drivers, water carriers, home milk deliverers and toilet bucket collectors with a type of technology that carries the mindless load and opens new avenues for higher-skilled work.
In some ways change is always hard and work is more than increasing production by an extra unit per unit of human output. Ruth & Charlotte are beautiful people adding value to the world and I hope their next step is one more step up in terms of creativity and skill.
We’ve all been in the situation where someone is speaking in a meeting, sending chat messages or reeling off tasks over the phone. You’re grabbing for a pen, double-tapping to open your notes app or finding anything you can to try and not forget anything. By splitting out your communication into a clear channel, people …
Looking for an easy way to plan out your sales meetings for the week and avoid traffic? One system we set up was using a combination of a route planning app and a appointment calendar app (in this case, Acuity Scheduling) to cut down on the time that sales staff were spending in traffic. The …
If you’re producing unique, useful content on your business website, you want as many people in your industry seeing the content as possible. How do you do this in an automated way? We’ll show you how to post to 13 channels in 13 minutes (might be a little longer for your first one!). 📚 Contents1st …
For anyone looking to register a nice, short .to domain name for your social media sharing, it’s quite simple to: Register to .to name Add to bitly as your default URL shortener Add to Buffer so all posts are set up with your shortener Some examples of names that are currently available include: Delivering.to Shoot.to …
The day a machine replaced Ruth & Charlotte
My brother won a golden ticket a few years ago and gave it to our family to visit the Nestle chocolate factory. That’s where I met Ruth & Charlotte (not their real names), working the end of the line for one type of chocolate bar. The final machine would pass them each a few dozen bars and they’d quickly grab a dozen, stuff a box, fold, wrap then another dozen, same thing, over and over.
I asked the manager, next to our oompaloopa (yes, we had short-statued, non-talking actors taking us around that day…felt strange) about why some lines had machines and others had people. “Costs” he said. They were saving up to buy the machines to replace the people at the end of the lines but hadn’t saved enough to replace Ruth & Charlotte yet.
Upon thinking about this, I could see the sentimentality of two lovely people working together for years, having had a stable job that didn’t require much of them but also wondered where they would have gone in their lives if the machines had been built sooner. Would they be doing more fulfilling work?
This all brings me back to my work as a business process consultant, finding myself replacing mindless, relatively expensive jobs with software & processes. Is it wrong that I’m reducing mindless jobs and replacing them with jobs where people’s real skills, personality and talents are amplified? In the end I’m continuing a tradition of replacing switchboard operators, cart drivers, water carriers, home milk deliverers and toilet bucket collectors with a type of technology that carries the mindless load and opens new avenues for higher-skilled work.
In some ways change is always hard and work is more than increasing production by an extra unit per unit of human output. Ruth & Charlotte are beautiful people adding value to the world and I hope their next step is one more step up in terms of creativity and skill.
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