NAPBIRT

Steve

Steve

Clarinet CE/Moderator
Staff member
CE/Moderator
NAPBIRT is the National Association of Professional Band Instrument Repair Technicians for the advancement of the craft of band instrument repair

They have many technical seminars in which you can learn things to improve your trade.

Next month they are doing something really neat (wish I could attend).
They are having a tour of Conn-Selmer

In their tours they are seeing: (excerpt from the seminar description)

Tour 1 - CWE Plant: This tour will be through Conn-Selmer’s Center for Woodwind Excellence where you will be able to see all steps in manufacturing our USA made woodwind instruments including Spirit by Galway Flutes, Bliss and LBB Clarinets, Avanti Flutes and Selmer Clarinets, Oboes and Flutes. Each tour will be led by a member of our Woodwind Manufacturing Team and will show the many different ways we build our instruments.

Tour 2 - Bach Plant: This tour will be through our Bach manufacturing facility which makes Bach Trumpets and Trombones and Holton Trombones. Here you will see the processes that make the Bach Stradivarius line as unique as it is with the combination of old-world manufacturing like Vincent Bach did himself with some more modern additions. This tour will be led by a member of our Bach Manufacturing Team.



I hope someone from here goes there as I would love to have a good description of the plant. I'm still debating on whether to attend or not.
 
Buzz word...

Whenever I see the word "Excellence" used in a title, I immediately start thinking of pre-packaged training programs used to suck money out of gullible corporate directors seeking an easy way to "take their company to the next level". And then, I have to suppress a shudder...
 
...or empowered your personnel resources to attain their reach goals...

We used to have a Regional Office person (now retired) who was there because she was a) technically competent industrial hygienist who was b) incapable of maintaining a working relationship with any other human being.

She was shoved from Area Office to Area Office for years in an attempt to fit her to a work situation, but one never gelled, so she was made a regional 'Support Person' and pretty much put to work on make-work projects where she didn't have to deal with people.

(Oddly enough, her twin sister was as different from her as night is from day - gregarious, socially adept, and a real looker besides. Go figure...)

This situation went on for years, until the National Office decided that we were all to be "reinvented", having been sold on the process by a consulting firm. So, Heather (the misfit) got stuck onto "reinvention".

This was a top-down, forcible restructuring of the way that we did business. Two Regional Staff were assigned the project of reinventing each Area Office, supposedly a month-long miracle cure for the way that we did business. This was being taught by two people who were either incapable of doing work (the other member of the Regional team), or incapable of communicating with other human beings (Heather).

(Of course, each office also had to keep doing their regular work during that entire month that the process took place. I don't even want to discuss that tragedy...)

Heather, being science minded, loved a systematic approach. She took to the world of empowerment like a duck to water, and had a massive book of overhead slides that structured her approach to the "training" down to the last detail. And, each and every slide was full of "empowerment" words like "reinvention", "process", "empowerment", "thinking outside of the box", "empathy", "transaction-based metrics" and so forth.

In reality, of course, she didn't believe a word of it. She treated the management with deference, the professional employees with distain, and our support staff like dirt. No one was "empowered" unless Heather wanted them to be.

After the third day, we as an office (about three quarters of the whole) developed three means of coping with all of this:

The first was that we immediately launched into an enthusiastic response whenever "audience participation" was required, firing off the required buzz words in the course of doing so. Once the participation started, it invariably went off the tracks as Heather tried to steer the group dynamics in the direction that she wanted them to go. We would continue to follow our evolved route until one of the leaders of the segment would raise a finger, at which point it would all cease and control would revert back to Heather. This annoyed her to no end.

The second was the development of a fifteen by fifteen matrix, with each square filled with a buzz word or term that she had used up to that point. During lunch on the third day, we passed out twenty different versions of this, with the words rearranged randomly in an Excel spreadsheet, this to play "Reinvention Bingo".

The winner was treated to a dinner by the other participants (there was a $2.00 entry fee). Score (marking off each term as it was used) was kept by the Area Director on his "master", even though we all had all of the terms somewhere or other on our card).

Heather never did understand what all the excitement was about as she would utter "performance based metrics" and would overhear a subdued mumbling as everyone marked off another box on their cards. The winner (a trainee, relatively new to the office) suppressed her joy until the next break. (We also framed her card and presented it to her; she hung it in her cubicle with pride.)

But, the thing that really got old Heather going was when several piratical members of the management team (I, of course, would never stoop to such means) would surreptitiously randomly rearrange her overhead slides out of order. (For all of her scientific training, she never bothered to number them in serial order.) The ensuing confusion that would occur was well worth the effort.

Going off the tracks is about how it could be described. She would flounder around for a bit, trying to correlate what she thought was next with what the slide showed. It would take a minute or two of fumbling to bring it all back to rights. Oddly enough, she never caught on.

Such means made our "reinvention" bearable, at the price of driving Heather back to her three packs a day smoking habit (and this for an industrial hygienist, who was supposedly concerned with lung contaminates). Had it not been for the double work issue that it all entailed, it would have been downright entertaining.
 
Sounds like a variation of the Springbuck Bingo used in the military officer courses. We'd randomly arrange the names of the most likely candidates to ask a question in any class with the center going to the one (there always was one) that *always* asked a question. There was always a winner. :cool:
 
Scott Adams (author of the Dilbert strips and several related books) calls it "Buzzword Bingo."

I once worked with a manager that was pretty effective and fairly sympathetic toward all the techs that worked more-or-less "under him." I thought he was pretty kewl until I had to go to a meeting where he spoke. I think I got "bingo" in under 5 minutes.

While I didn't use it to create the phrases I used in my earlier posts, there is the Management Buzzword Generator. Use it at your own risk.
 
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