During my early years at Sundstrand Hydraulics, I was involved in some joint meetings between the Engineering Department, and the Manufacturing Engineering Department. These were always interesting because they gave us a two-sided view of the problem and led to many successful results. That isn’t to say they were always mutually cooperative. There were times when each side was a little bit stubborn and could slow progress. For the most part they were very professional and yielded positive results.
There was one consistently annoying feature of these meetings, that bothered me. One of the manufacturing engineers consistently dominated a large portion of the meeting. The problem with that was that he spent a lot of time talking about how things could not be done. After a couple of these incidents, I waited until after the meeting to talk with him. I explained to him how much time was being wasted on how not to do things. And in my opinion, he was smart enough to spend his time on how to get them done.
He looked at me like I had hit him up beside his head, and the admitted that he wasn’t aware of how he was doing this. It was an amazing turn around. His contributions after that were always positive, and led to may positive results.
I think we all need to evaluate our contributions from time to time.
