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Heavy Metal and Process Improvement

15 May, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

The checklist

It isn’t very rock and roll is it?  Checklists are up there in the train spotting school of management.  The sort of activity carried out by dull earnest people who ought to put their clipboards down and get out a little more.

Tiresome and tedious.

Heavy metal

I’m not big into heavy metal. I’d rather scoop my eyeballs out with a tea spoon — a blunt teaspoon — than listen to: thrash metal, death metal, black metal, doom metal, soft rock or power ballads. I don’t even like Shania Twain, though I’m told that she is Country…

The music is hideous but the behaviour is worse.  Why would anybody want to bite the head off a bat?

Its not big and its not clever

Take the story of Van Halen and the brown M&M’s.  In typical self aggrandising style Van Halen had a contract rider (read wild demand). It stated that they should have fruit, coffee, and munchies available at all times.  The munchies should include a bowl of M&M’s with all the brown ones removed.

Like people haven’t got better things to do with their time than fish about for brown sweets…

On one occasion in Pueblo, Colorado the lead singer of the band — David Lee Roth — found some brown M&M’s in the bowl. He kicked off, causing $85,000 worth of damage to the arena.

What is wrong with these people?

The whole story

It transpires that the story wasn’t that cut and dried.  Van Halen were one of the first groups to take “mega concerts” (their term not mine) to small, second and third level concert venues. David Lee Roth tells the story in his autobiography…

We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

David Lee Roth

The brown M&M’s were a visual signal that people hadn’t followed the checklist.

As for the $85,000 damage in Pueblo…  Mr Roth’s antics caused roughly $5,000 damage. The staging, sound and lighting equipment that the band brought with them caused the other $80,000. It was so heavy it sank through the basketball arena’s floor.

The promotor hadn’t read the contract.

Get your checklist out

If a checklist is good enough for a rock star, it has to be good enough for you.

  • Ear plugs? — Check.
  • Naughty step? – Check.

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Watch David Lee Roth’s explanation

Image by mulder142

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: accident prevention, checklist, devil is in the detail, operational excellence, visual management

About the Author

James Lawther
James Lawther

James Lawther is a middle-aged, middle manager.

To reach this highly elevated position he has worked in numerous industries, from supermarket retailing to tax collecting.  He has had several operational roles, including running the night shift in a frozen pea packing factory and carrying out operational research for a credit card company.

As you can see from his C.V. he has either a wealth of experience or is incapable of holding down a job.  If the latter is true this post isn’t worth a minute of your attention.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.

www.squawkpoint.com/

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