Honeywell New Jersey facility morale and management crisis

I'll tell you another story on that respect. I had a student working for — it was a small division of what was Honeywell. They bought a little mom-and-pop operation that made plastic sheet. In the LGO program — back then it was LFM — you have to go and visit the site with a student. I had this woman graduate student, and we went down to New Jersey to visit this little facility that she was going to be working at for seven months. We found that the morale was terrible in this plant. Honeywell had bought it a couple of months before, but all the workmen had their toolboxes locked up, and if they left it unlocked, they'd have their tools stolen by some of their colleagues. The management and the engineers and the hourly union workers hated each other, despised each other.

Have I told you the donuts story from Honeywell? For those of you that might be LGO students, this is in the early days of leadership manufacturing. LGO used to be LFM. Honeywell became part of the program, and Honeywell had bought this little $50 million business down in New Jersey. One of the students had to go do their internship down there, and I was the advisor. So we went down together to visit the site in the spring before she started in the summer.

LFM/LGO student internship in a Honeywell-acquired mom-and-pop plastic film operation. Used to teach the principle that worker dysfunction (extreme: smearing excrement on restroom walls) is a symptom of unheard frustration, addressable through low-cost engagement (donut Fridays, "what can I do to help you?").

I will tell you some stories about some of those hundred dollar bills, and how I picked them up and handed them to other people because they wouldn't let me keep them — that's part of intellectual property. One's about the mad shitter. I had an LGO student, and she was assigned to a Honeywell plant. I shouldn't have said Honeywell, but I said Honeywell. Honeywell had acquired this little business, a mom-and-pop operation, that made plastic film — sort of like the stretch wrap that you might wrap pallets in today. That's not what they were doing, but it was big machines like that. She had been assigned to do her internship at this plant. We went down there, and it wasn't a terrible building. You go inside, they had stacks of bad inventory just going up two stories high, these rolls of plastic. They had this big three or four million dollar machine that could create the plastic film, and you look over the toolboxes and they had big padlocks on them. That's because the workers didn't trust each other; they would have their tools stolen by their coworkers. The management hated each other. And they told us the story of the mad shitter. It's a true story.