American View: When “just get it done!” becomes “oh god please stop!”

Risk Management18 Feb 2025

Have you ever done such a good job that your boss demanded you stop? This happened to a pal of mine last week. Even better, when my pal faithfully obeyed his boss’s orders it caused his entire facility to break down. I think this is an excellent example of a single “load bearing” employee keeping an organisation functional while everyone around them isn’t pulling their fair share of the weight. It’s also a useful parable about the crucial need to identify your organisation’s “essential” personnel before they leave or are otherwise incapacitated.

Here’s what happened: my buddy Angelo runs the scheduling office for a big industrial operation. He makes all the arrangements for lorries to pick up finished products and haul them to buyers. Angelo is responsible for ensuring that as much purchased product makes it to buyers as possible … despite his site’s proud tradition of bumbling inefficiency.

Angelo has had years to learn all of the company’s different information systems, workflows, process maps, and key players. That experience has given Angelo unparalleled insight into every system and process defect that could hold up a shipment. Being a loyal and productivity focused worker, Angelo meticulously experimented with workarounds until he developed a sustainable system for bypassing as many known obstacles as possible.

For example, Angelo knows that the inventory department incorrectly marks racks full of finished products as “unavailable” in the information system that regulates shipping … but fails to make the same entries in the stock control system … which doesn’t talk to either system! These disconnects mean that customers will poll Angelo’s company’s catalogue, see that there are 20 television sets available, and submit a purchase order for 15.

When that order reaches Angelo’s shipping office, though, it can’t be fulfilled. When the inventory team marked the rack where those TVs ware stored as “locked,” it made the products stored there count as “frozen.” That means they can’t be moved, shipped, or returned until a second team clears the lock in the third information system. Angelo isn’t allowed to order the packers to go to the specific rack where the televisions are and load them on a truck … even though there’s nothing wrong with the TVs and there’s an open order for them. Different department, and Angelo has no official authority over other workers.

A weekend spent without rolling some dice is a wasted weekend.

Meanwhile, the inventory people won’t clear that lock because the system that processed the lock passes the status change to a different work management system to create a trouble ticket … that the inventory people won’t receive or work on because they never check ticketing system! So, the pristine new televisions sit, undisturbed, for months on end while order after order gets cancelled and customers get ticked off. “You have what I want; why won’t you let me buy it?!”

Making things delightfully farcical, Angelo’s upper management types are constantly berating everyone at their site to ship as much revenue-generating content as possible. Their profit margins are supposedly terrible so “every sale counts!” Um … okay? If that was true, Angelo mused, then why aren’t those big wigs fixing their bloody process problems?

Regardless, Angelo has his orders. He has no authority, but he’s also not allowed to fail. Damned if you do … So Angelo took it upon himself to override statuses in systems, re-route work orders, countermand supervisors’ instructions, and even change customer orders in creative ways to ensure that customers’ orders are filled swiftly, efficiently, and – most importantly – completely. By phoning specific work leads directly dozens of times a day and yelling at them to get X moved to Y for order Z, Angelo breaks the blockages and gets purchase orders filled. Workers have learned to do whatever Angelo says since he’s almost always right. Therefore, without Angelo going above and beyond, the site would quickly spiral into insolvency.

All this came to a head last week thanks to a memo. Sometime back – maybe six months ago? – a peer asked Angelo how to perform a shipping task that seemed impossible. Angelo cheerfully wrote the requester meticulous step-by-step instructions that included all the unofficial bypasses needed to overcome the system and process errors plaguing the process. That requester was so excited to have a viable solution (for once) that he shared the instructions with another peer … who gleefully shared it with another peer, and so on. Unlike the traditional “game of telephone” where content corrupts through re-telling, this PDF circulated intact, spreading joy and dislodging stuck products all over the company. The memo eventually landed on the desk of a managing director … somehow … and all hell broke loose.

From what I gathered, the MD wasn’t angry that some guy in Texas named Angelo had independently solved a broken process. Instead, this MD was incensed that the broken processes existed at all and that no one had told him they had a problem! Oops!

I’d have paid good money sit in on that meeting just for the schadenfreude.

One thing led to another; managers and directors and other high muckety-mucks got dragged into conference rooms and onto Zoom calls to sort out how this broken process has been left unaddressed for so long. Most of the attendees were forced to admit that they’d had no idea the problem existed. It was doubly embarrassing to admit that an individual contributor in the back end of nowhere had un-[bleep]ed their logistics mess for them without their knowledge.

This led to Angelo’s boss calling him into the big bad boss’s office and laying down the law: “Stop fixing everyone else’s problems. I love what you’ve done, but we can’t identify and address these recurring issues if we’re not aware of them.”

Angelo wisely kept his counsel to himself, and asked only “Are you sure this is what you want?”

His boss said “Yes” so Angelo saluted smartly and drove on. Metaphorically. I think.

Of course, Angelo’s site’s operations immediately derailed. The sheer number of issues Angelo had been “managing” without upper management’s knowledge were far more impactful than anyone with a corner office had imagined. Angelo’s bosses were chagrined to lean that one employee’s initiative and sense of duty had been keeping their entire busted business afloat for so long. I suspect that they also felt the chill touch of doom when they realized how much damage Angelo’s resignation would cause.

“Look, honey! Black smoke means they’ve chosen a new CEO!”

From an outsider’s perspective I find this story hilarious. The more grownup part of my brain recognizes that it’s a horror story with a questionably happy ending: now that Angelo’s company knows how close they came to implosion, they can start addressing their myriad high-risk issues. Hopefully they do; I might need to buy something from them someday.

That said, Angelo’s organisation is an excellent example of a company that desperately needs a stem-to-stern overhaul. They can’t fix their mess until they re-map every process, fix every interface between information systems, design and deploy manual workarounds for tasks that can’t be automated, re-train their personnel on the complete range of their responsibilities and tools, and finally hold their supervisory personnel to account for not knowing where, when, why, and how their workers were failing. This will be a massive undertaking. If they can pull it off, they’ll come through it stronger, smarter, more secure, and far more profitable. “If” is doing a ton of heavy lifting here.

Personally, I think they should give Angelo a deal he can’t refuse to stay and assist the reengineering effort. He knows where most of the problems are and how to fix them, after all. I doubt that’ll happen, though. A company that allowed their situation to devolve so badly that one worker was keeping their entire operation from foundering doesn’t seem wise enough to act in its own long-term interests.