Napoleon Hill and a Guy From Jersey

Napoleon Hill 

Napoleon is my absolute favorite success guru. For those of you who don’t know him or his work here is the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Hill 

 Here’s a short version of who he was: 

He was born in 1883 in a one room cabin in Appalachia, using his wit and intellect he began writing and eventually enrolled in law school, while in law school he paid the bills by writing articles for various publications. On an assignment he interviewed Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie believed that the process of success could be outlined in a simple formula that anyone would be able to understand and achieve. Carnegie was so impressed with Hill that he asked Hill if he was up to the challenge. Hill accepted and Carnegie, through letters of introduction began Hill on his journey to interview over 500 people about what made them successful. Hills interviews and research became the famous book “Think and grow Rich” 

Over the years I have read and listened to many different adaptations of this work but my favorite is available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Science-Personal-Achievement-Napoleon-Hill/dp/0671869965  

For a good Overview of the 17 principles: http://thepdi.com/17%20principles%20of%20success.htm 

The Guy From Jersey

Napoleon Hill’s Science of Personal Achievement has 17 principles. I use all of them in the process of planning and executing an outage. My list of principles is as follows 

• Make the plan (usually by yourself it’s the easiest way) 

• Get everybody to comment on the plan (prepare yourself lots of people need to let you know how smart they are) 

• Finalize the plan (incorporate everyone’s comments) 

• Get everybody to review the plan and agree to it (you will be surprised how many people change what they had said before) 

• Once agreed to (they will always be dissenters so a majority rules) beat the plan into everyone’s head as often as possible 

• Once the outage starts, only follow the plan if it works. During the outage do what works only no matter how silly or off plan it may be. 

You have to play the game you are in and “The Plan” was conceived before the outage so it may or may not be correct. 

The Point:

Are you happy with the performance you are getting? What happens if the performance gets 10% better? What happens if the performance gets 20% better? You get the idea. Now how to get that improvement 

Napoleon Hill interviewed over 500 people each with a great success story. When I ran a plant I would send our personnel out to other outages within the company. You’re already doing everything you know so to get improved performance you have to do something different. I found that the best place to find new things is either in the classic “Improvement Ideologies”, watching a bunch of different ways of doing something or like the saying goes “standing on the shoulders of giants”. In regards the each of the above three ways over the course of this year I will share with you each of the “Improvement Ideologies” I have found useful. I would suggest going and seeing as many different outage as you can, I myself have planned and executed over 250 outages and seen a bunch more. As far as “standing of the shoulders of giants”, that is what this blog is all about, almost everything that comes out of my mouth is some version of something that was taught to me by someone else but those gentlemen are long gone unfortunately. 

The Story:

 Doing something different, although this story is not an outage story it exemplifies this point. It was 1999 and we were on our fourth and final attempt in developing/designing a process that would become Zone Maintenance™. One particular mechanic, let’s call him grumpy, thought the process was just ridiculous. In Zone Maintenance™ mechanics are responsible for certain areas of the plant. Grumpy’s area was the cranes and this plant was a mass burn waste to energy facility, so the cranes worked all day. When grumpy took over the area we were changing cables on the crane about every 4 days, grumpy came to see me and tell me how dumb it was. I responded to him “It’s been that what for years, what are you going to do about it” with a shrug of my shoulders. Grumpy to his credit did not accept my answer he called the cable manufacture and had him come in and look at what we were doing.

Grumpy found out that by cutting the cables mechanically instead with a torch would extend the life, so even though it meant each cable change would take longer he did it. Cable changes went from every 4 days to every 8 days; it was a big win on something that nobody though could be improved. Grumpy was not satisfied, he hated cable changes, and he came to me and said the reason for so many cable changes was because of the operators. I responded “What are you going to do” again with a shrug of my shoulders, he stormed off “I’ll show you.”

A week or two later the operations manager came to me, complaining that Grumpy was making the crane operators change the cables. I went and saw grumpy “are you making the crane operators change the cables” Grumpy responded “Damn Right, they broke em’ they’re going to fix em’ how else are they going to learn.” Grumpy had been right before so I told the Operations Manager let it ride for a while and let’s see what happens. Well cable changes went from every 8 days till a change about every 2 to 3 weeks again a huge win. 

Grumpy had improved something nobody thought could improve, we had to do something different but the rewards were great. Cables cost us around $150,000 per year and Grumpy’s ideas brought that down to around $50,000 per year not to mention all the time saved from not doing cable changes.