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.
There’s ol’ school advice to move towards working “on” your business rather than working “in” your business. It is true but it often met by the thousand reasons why there will never be enough time in the world to move away from doing your boatload of daily tasks. For any hope at moving towards, perhaps, …
If you’re using ConvertKit for your email marketing, here’s a quick tip that might help you make some money on the side. If you’re embedding a signup form on your website, you’ll copy/paste the code and you’ll see: You can remove the default “Powered By” text but a better idea would be to jump …
Have been looking at digital signage software options that are simple to use and don’t cost the earth. Before checking out the options, I thought that some simple options might be free with a reasonable upgrade cost being around $10 – $20 per screen per month or perhaps a once-off cost of under $200. Let’s …
Automate as many non client facing tasks as possible. Build into your workplace a culture of kaizen, continual improvement and incentive your staff to automate the parts of their job that don’t provide client-facing value. Whether it’s filtering emails, task management automation, automated messaging, helpful notifications or others, create a workplace whether ideas are shared, …
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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