Have you ever heard an applause at the back of your head as you finished reading the last page of a book? because thats how good the book was?. :P...
The Journey, written by Stephen J. Thomas was a book about a phd consultant that works in a factory as a realibity and maintenance manager. His main task is the maintenance of the machinery of the assembly line, to meet the demand of customers with the highest production daily. Basically he was frustrated and was almost almost fired, but was transferred instead to a different plant because he could not get over the work culture that was imposed on him by his plant manager. The work culture was so rigid, where his boss believed in "run it hard-fix it fast" attitude. He was only getting paid to fix the machinery but not to run his job as the MAINTENANCE MANAGER. The craziest part was when he was transferred, his current boss was harder on the rigid attitude as compared to the former. the current boss's mentality was "its my way-or the highway" with lots of cursing in between. Lucky for the consultant, the current boss died after 6 months and he had the opportunity to turn the plant around. (BTW how convenient right the boss died? I wonder if this whole book is based on a true story).
Sensing his frustration, an anonymous person started helping him by constantly emailing the consultant, giving him advices on how to run and help the company that he was in. At the end of the final chapter, there will be a hugeeeeeeeeee shock on the identity of the anonymous. No you can try guess it as I did, but it was something out of the blue.
The wonders about this book is it was the summary of my MBA classes between operations and organizational behaviour. Also, funny thing is there were diagrams on how to imposed change on the work culture in a company. I personally believe that could be used as a diagram for my life. Like a structural planning of my life. Starting with a vision, the diagram would branch out to goals, further break down into activities. In order to see if the activities were a success or not, the implementation and outcomes analysis should be done. In turn, there is a Root Cause Failure Analysis, to evaluate the outcome of the activities that was done to be aligned with the vision. I think its pretty useful and could be used for my own benefit, in planning my own freaking life.
This is an excellent book. It connects with the frustration of an employee to the employer by listing the problems, every day issues at work but yet was able to see the positivity in each issue by listing down the possibilities. The book is not draggy and long winded at all. The author in fact injected humor in the tough situations. In addition, it was a book about handling the people around you at work, psychology wise. Its a story of the everyday life of a worker and the worker's interaction with the people that surrounded him at work, from the bottom to the highest level of coworkers. The book felt sincere and real.
I bought this book at Strand bookstore in NYC the day before i left to malaysia, For a BUCK! Its not a bestseller or written by some fancy author, in fact I think it was more of those underground kinda book. Feel free to borrow this book from me if you are interested because it is one great book!
No comments:
Post a Comment