Old Man, Round Two, Not Half Bad

Eternal vigilance is the price we pay for catching others’ screw-ups.

My father owned a printed circuit fabrication company. I apprenticed at that company as a teenager, learning a trade I could always fall back on should more glamorous options vaporize. As an apprentice, I attended many meetings. My job was to listen and learn. My father used to employ an old management trick in those meetings. He would feign confusion when he wanted subordinates to focus on an important subject, or drive home a valuable lesson. Often during a sales review, some hotshot salesperson, in the full-bore naïve flower of heedless youth, would describe a new opportunity in the brightest, glowing-est, most opportunistic, can’t-miss, counting-my-commissions-before-they-hatch terms. If you didn’t know better, you’d visualize the sales hotshot already forking over a down payment on a beachfront condo before the ink had hardened on a meaningless letter of intent. This is referred to in the trade as a triumph of hope over experience.

My father’s scrutiny was agonizing for all concerned, except my father. He would slow everything down. Way down. Down to earth. Delighting in the tension he imposed upon the room. He would methodically regurgitate, word for word, the salesperson’s pitch; except much slower than a young man’s patience or attention span (or ego) would permit. Which was the point. He would often transpose words from the presentation intentionally, forcing the original presenter to be on alert for misinterpretations and be prepared to intervene and correct, where necessary. He would speak in an affected, seemingly confused tone of voice as if to signify he wasn’t fully comprehending – and, by extension, accepting – the nervous young man’s attempt at persuading (in those days, the early 80s, the salespersons were invariably male) all present that he had the inside line on the Next Big Thing. He would force the young man to make corrections to my father’s recapitulation of the opportunity, down to the last syllable. You could almost hear the sound of deflation as the proceedings dragged on mercilessly.

This weekly excursion into verbal water torture was usually held on a Friday afternoon (another old management trick my father delighted in performing regularly), when young men’s thoughts while in captivity tended in the direction of the weekend, and more appealing pleasures commencing with the letter W. Woe betides the poorly prepared salesman: many were dispatched to the weekend in a dark mood with disrupted plans and dents in their personal cashflow projections. My father reveled in these moments; he did not take kindly to pretentious young men.

The ordeal served a worthy purpose, searing into facile brains an unforgettable lesson: by the time the interrogation was finished, the substance of the opportunity was largely eviscerated. By then we often wondered what the original fuss was in the first place. The salesperson, forced to be on the defensive, ejected from the Friday cross-examination, metaphorical tail between legs, learned to make a stronger case, do his homework, and come back thoroughly prepared before attempting another swan dive from the diving board of Can’t-Miss Land.

I took it all in. Being the Boss’s Son, I was not immune to my father’s rhetorical proctology. Indeed, I got more subjective scrutiny than any salesman (or woman, as the benighted 80s transitioned to the enlightened 90s). And, lucky me, I got them at home and at work. My dates got them too. (The woman who eventually became my wife stormed out of a restaurant family dinner one time, after a notably intrusive interrogation. It was a scene. I’m sure daughter-in-law and father-in-law laugh about the episode now, during Happy Hour in Heaven. It was not amusing at the time. I hated every minute of every hour of every day being dragged through those sessions.)

But I listened. And remembered. And took notes. And grew older. And began to see the wisdom in such techniques. I started applying them, in my own way; first tentatively, then frequently. Because they worked.

Forty-five years later, I employ a variant of the same technique.

Call it “I’m confused.” Plant that elementary sentence at the end of an email, and watch consternation spread like waves on water.

Like my father (curiously, the older I become, the wiser he sounds), I employ those two words to sharpen slipshod thought, regroup disjointed or scattered attention, and achieve clarity of purpose, and thus agreement, on some previously muddled subject. That’s the theory.

In our business, we deal with many muddled subjects. This is because of customers; you know, the ones we are drilled to believe are always right. (They are not.) Companies are populated by many muddled individuals, some with agendas, others merely slow movers. They’ve been schooled in euphemism, or acceptance euphemism, as the norm, or as a survival skill. Clear, direct thinking is viewed in some corporate quarters as a threat.

Not to me.

There’s the customer who declares that they want to hire us for a flying probe test of 10,000 boards, starting immediately and ending in a period of 90 days. Such declarations gain prompt attention. Quotes are sent. Credit references are sent back. Indications are that something’s happening. Then nothing. After several weeks of silence, we inquire repeatedly. The answer, after several attempts: the customer’s customer is having second thoughts about “expanded capacity” and wishes to examine several production scenarios before mapping out and making a decision.

Second thoughts? Expanded capacity? Several production scenarios?

Experience tells you what’s going on here.

This is doublespeak for “I don’t like your price, I’m getting other quotes, and will not make a decision until one of those quotes fits my predetermined model.”

I reply to the customer with a simple, “I’m confused.”

Then, in a second email, I elaborate. “You asked for immediate service. We can put two machines on your project immediately, just like you asked. If your customer is fantasizing (Mapping out? Sounds like wargaming.) about nine machines sitting idle and collecting dust, waiting for you to traipse through their door with boards to be tested, you will seek in vain.” The subtext: management had no clue about the cost of this project. More plausible: the price they plugged unilaterally into their cost model bore no relationship to reality. Somebody needs adult supervision.

They don’t reply. I interpret this as tacit acceptance of my argument. Words matter.

Or the customer who had us test a job to revision B, then asked us to quote to revision A.

Huh?

Wait a minute. Doc Control 101 says that B follows A, not the reverse. What’s going on?

“I’m confused.”

Spluttering justifications by the customer, reminiscent of cockroaches bathed in unwelcome sunlight. The customer made some changes, and we mistakenly thought they rolled the revision, but they really haven’t. It’s merely a minor update, and we’re still at revision A. Sorry.

None of the aforementioned changes were documented. We were supposed to find them, forensically, on the boards, once received. Whatever happened to ECOs?

Why not simply admit the truth? Somebody screwed up and got caught. Why the rhetorical contortions?

Or the customer who hired us to perform AXI services on a very large board, only to balk at our price.

Our machine is the only AXI system capable of processing their board. Even so, we have to perform special modifications to the conveyor to admit it inside the machine for scanning. We’re talking void-the-warranty-style actions. The customer took nearly three months to justify paying us, then gave us a go-ahead, then took an additional month to modify board documentation to somehow make it easier for us to process their board. All sorts of big company excuses to obfuscate, push responsibility, and delay, without ever once consulting those of us who actually do the work.

All of their “helpful” pre-engineering was no help at all. In fact, the CAD file they provided was useless. Missing X and Y and netlist information. Also missing was a purchase order. Yet in their minds, we are expected to proceed. They dream.

Only one thing left to do.

Class, let us, as a chorus, join together as one voice, in our now-familiar refrain:

“I’m confused.”

We received the PO the next day, and the correct CAD the following day, after threatening additional charges for manual data entry. People often respond well to threats.

I use the same method in the office, hopefully more in a spirit of benevolence than belligerence. Customers deserve the latter; trusted employees do not. Still, situations arise requiring a sorting, with some guidance that only experience allows. Incantation of the magic words can often cut the chaos and retrieve focus.

The list is long: banking instructions gone wrong; customer files mislabeled; the requested test method misunderstood; shipment instructions misinterpreted; customer details overlooked; order status not clearly communicated to the customer; customer requests being responded to less than promptly; emails misconstrued. Lots of mis-s. Stuff happens.

Some figure it out on their own. Others need to have misalignment pointed out, gently, in the form of a question. Like my father did 45 years ago.

“I’m confused.”

It’s not because I’m confused. Because I’m not.
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Robert Boguski is president of Datest Corp. (datest.com); rboguski@datest.com. His column runs bimonthly.