Monday, February 13, 2012

Howard Hughes neurosis and kitchen staff productivity

Reading this post, I couldn't help think about how Howard Hughes' germ neurosis must have affected his kitchen staffs productivity.

Poor Howard Hughes was so afraid of germs that he ended up shutting himself off from the world. He was paralyzed with fear. He wasn't sure how a germ that might end up compromising his life might manifest.
Somehow, he was confident that the germs wouldn't come from his inner world. But he was paranoid of any form of germ infecting him from the external world.

To prevent germs from getting to him, Howard Hughes developed an extensive operating procedure for his staff.  He created an elaborate system just to prevent germs from getting to him. In many ways, Howard Hughes was operating like a network engineer trying to prevent a hacker from getting into his intranet. He was trying to predict all ways that a germ/virus might invade into his system and compromise it's health. Hughes was hyper-vigilant to all 'potential germs' in his system that could bring his system to its knees.
In that way, Howard Hughes was acting like a hyper-alert network systems engineer, afraid of a hackers malicious virus package taking down the system.
Howard Hughes setup a firewall. The firewall was the operating procedure that he was forcing his staff to operate by to prevent virus's from slipping through.
But can you imagine how slowly food must have been prepared because of this elaborate system to ensure a fanatical germ free environment? Productivity must come practically to a halt because of all the procedures that had to be painstakingly followed.

1 comment:

  1. No matter which team is there and what sort of work is being performed,In my Opinion learning how things can be better is what makes sense, agile business is the way for it because its lets us make things better according to the needing.

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