A leader of a web discussion group just asked us to post our favorite photo – not necessarily the one we thought was our best work, but the one that meant most to us. Loved ones and family members were to be excluded for obvious reasons. Friends were ok if something beyond the bond of friendship came through. I know that I’d never give the same answer to a question like that two days in a row, but for today at least, I’ll submit a shot from decades ago of a coworker chewing me out. I think this was my first shoot-from-the-hip stealth shot. I like this photo because it froze a moment of dialog that I wanted to capture as a motivational reminder – rather like those tacky posters go-getters decorate the office with. It played a role in my forcing myself to address the fact that I was in a job I hated, and that continued complacency might result in a lot of regret someday. I’d title this shot:
The Goodyear Aerospace Experience
Sometime in the mid 80s I was in men’s room when the division head of Goodyear Aerospace, Roy Wiseman, looked over at me and asked how I was doing in my new position as Technical Liaison to the Air Force. I said it was going well and that I thought there was a good opportunity to regain much of the spares business that had been lost to bogus parts suppliers. Congress had told the USAF Air Logistics Command to reduce spares cost by competitive procurement of aircraft brake system parts. These were the razor blade parts for which my employer, Goodyear Aerospace, had sold the razor; the ultra-high tech brake systems that safely decelerate the USAF fighters, bombers, and cargo transports. Over the previous ten years, most of the spare parts for the C-141, C-130, F-4, F-104, CH-53, F-16 and F-15 business had been lost, and Goodyear was not even allowed to compete on them. These parts were now in the realm of “Small Business Set-Aside” meaning that big guys like Goodyear couldn’t play.
Goodyear had originally priced most of their aircraft brakes, like the well-known razor, very low, and the break-even point for some of them was never reached due to the set-aside of brake cylinders and disks – the razor blade equivalent in this business. One way to recover the business, while making the USAF a happier customer I reckoned, was to redesign many of those disks and cylinders, adding improvements based on the USAF’s failure data, resulting in new part numbers for detail parts and subassemblies. It would then take years for the small competitors to reverse-engineer the new stuff and get their bids in order.
Great idea, said Roy. Let’s talk about it. So Roy called a big meeting, inviting big wigs from Engineering, Marketing, Contract Administration, and Field Service, including the three or four tiers of management in my own department. Finally I naively thought, my department head, who never recognized me as we passed in the hallway, might cough up more than a token raise.
Meeting day: Roy had studied his information his secretary had taken from me. He explained the whole thing without mentioning me directly, right down to the return-spring subassemblies of the F-4 brake housings. Aircraft count times times assemblies per plane times wear life equals tens of millions of dollars. And Bill Storage, he said, had suggested this approach.
After a few seconds of silence Jim Harry, manager of Marketing, spoke up from the back of the room. There were a few things that needed to be added to this discussion. Surprisingly enough, he said, standing up and walking to the podium, there was a similar initiative being worked by his own department. Roy took a seat and lit his pipe.
In fact, said Jim, if only Bill Storage had come to him with his idea, he would have directed him to Marion Henshaw, who was right now preparing a part-by-part prioritized list of regained sales opportunities, based on records of what we used to sell and no longer do. It now appeared that Roy’s whole presentation was a waste of time that could have been prevented if I had exercised good judgment by not really giving Roy any information in the bathroom when he asked for it. A political blunder they all thought for sure. I should have suggested the idea to my Group Leader, Ralph, who would in time have passed it up, maybe with a slight touch of supervisory improvement, to Section Leader Gary, who would in time get it to Charlie, the sub-head of the Department. He would have transmitted it, by means of my written communication to Ralph, annotated and no doubt corrected, along with a formal cover letter, to Chuck Sackett, my department head. Chuck, in theory, would have seen the wisdom of the idea, if advantageous to his own standing, and formally communicated it to other department heads and the office of Roy Wiseman, division head. Roy would then have taken recommendations from various department heads, including his long time companion, Jim Harry, who had challenged me in Roy’s meeting. Jim would no doubt have cleared it up, ultimately resulting in my being assigned to assist Marion Henshaw in preparing his list of candidates for redesign and regained sales.
Roy dismissed the meeting and I walked straight to Marion Henshaw’s cubicle - straight enough in fact that I got there before Jim Harry could. Marion, I said, let me see your list of candidates for reclaimed sales on the C-141 brake system. Jim Harry wants me to work with you on it.
As those who have lived a part of the movie Brazil might suspect, (or those who have worked in such a place as Goodyear Aerospace will by now know for certain) Marion Henshaw had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. Even after giving him a lot of background, Marion looked at me like I had two heads.
So it seemed to me Jim Harry’s response to Roy’s talk wasn’t a mistake or a small or even large exaggeration. I’ll never know what was in his head, but I could reach no conclusion but that it was pure fiction. This fiction was perhaps born of the same stuff that caused many other lost opportunities for Goodyear, at the stake of a miniscule advantage for insecure workers fallen prey to rivalries at odds with success of the company. Perhaps Jim couldn’t tolerate the prospect that someone might for a second consider that his department wasn’t on their toes. Perhaps to avoid this reflecting badly on him, he sacrificed an opportunity for Goodyear that was worth tens of millions of dollars. Nothing ever came of the idea, except what I could implement piecemeal, under the management radar.
Some time later, Chuck Beatty and I sat in the diner of the Ramada Inn in Ogden Utah, talking about my story, lost sales, and politics at Goodyear. Chuck, a marketing man reporting to Jim Harry, was a sharp guy who seemed to me to be far from another standard corporate robot dweeb. Nevertheless he played the role because he liked being employed. He chided me for my recklessness in giving a straight answer to a division head with no consideration of the five lower levels of butt-kissing management (my wording, not Chuck’s).
“I want you to know something, Bill…” Those were Chuck’s exact words at the moment I snapped that photo. The something was that I might not survive another stunt like that. I printed that photo, taken at our diner talk with a stealthy Olympus XA film camera in my outstretched left hand, and tacked it on the bulletin board in my bedroom. It was a reminder over the next year - though I had nothing at all against Chuck – of all I hated about corporate baloney.
A year later I quit and moved to California, and have never returned to corporate life. I took an independent consultant gig with one of Goodyear’s main customers, McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing). Sensibly, they kept me away from Goodyear for a year or so, but someone there resigned and I was thrust into the role of judging some kind of proposal coming from Goodyear Aerospace. I met Goodyear’s new head of Project Engineering, a man I had only spoken to once or twice in all my time at Goodyear, in a one-on-one at the McDonnell facility. He told me I was a smart guy and that he understood why I left Goodyear. Thanks… maybe so, I said.
Chuck, if you’re out there, give me a call. I want you to know something…
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In 
