Bethlehem Steel Charpy bar machining workaround

Lesson about supplier relationships: time your machining requests to the foreman's slack capacity to get cheaper bars. Tom presents this as a transferable management insight.

We had a machine shop up at the research labs, but we had to get our Charpy bars — company rules — machined down at the regular big machine shop at the steel plant, because they were doing these bars all the time for test plates. We learned that you'd call up the foreman down there and say, "Are you busy?" If he said yes, you'd send it to him. If he said, "No, didn't have a lot of work," you'd wait, because you didn't want to pay $150 for a Charpy bar. If he was really busy, you might get them for 75 bucks apiece. The guys just wanted to fill up his work book. There's a lesson in that story.