About Managing Equipment:
When I joined the Bureau in 1966 I rapidly became aware that most of their equipment was outdated and obsolete. It was hard to miss. A Printer from the 19th century would have felt at home in most parts of the Bureau and would have recognised the equipment there. A large area was given over to hot metal casting, using linotype and monotype equipment which would have been more appropriately placed in a museum.
One morning in spring of 1974 I was just back from coffee break and I was using the urinal in the men’s room when Henry came over to use the adjacent unit. Henry was a very high ranking member of CGPB management, reporting only to the Queen’s Printer. He was ex-military and had a commanding presence. He said “I’ve just received permission to create a position of Equipment Manager for the Printing Bureau.” I said “That’s good. I know you’re facing a major headache with all the new gear coming onto the market.” He said “Yes. It will be in the Organisation and Methods group, level OM4. That would be a double promotion for you. A big jump in salary.” I said “For me? Why me?” He said “Because you’re my new Equipment Manager.” “I’m very flattered, Henry,” I told him, “but I’m happy where I am, and I’m not that keen to take on a project that’s a shortcut to insanity.” He said “Think about it Barry. Take as long as you like, and get back to me tomorrow morning.”
I took until lunch time. I went to Henry’s office immediately after lunch. I said “I’ll do it.” He said “Of course you will”.
About using my Head:
Before I could do anything I had to sit and plan how I was going to approach this. Jackman, the London Head-hunter, had told me that my IQ was up there at genius level somewhere, so where was it now that I needed it? I couldn’t even see the whole problem, it was like looking at a star-filled sky, just too enormous to contemplate. I had to look at it in smaller chunks. The obvious way was to follow the stages in the printing process, so I started with composition.
I decided that I’d waste no time on the Bureau’s composition gear. The current equipment, largely hot metal casting devices, was way beyond any possible upgrading and I consigned it to the scrap heap. Crown Assets Disposal might be able to sell it, possibly to some third world country, but I would suggest they go directly to landfill, or possibly melt down the lot and recycle what could be recycled.
These machines produced ‘beds’ of cast metal type for printing by Letterpress, another outdated process, which could join the hot metal gear for recycling or scrap. In the new order everything would go to the Lithography presses.
I paused for a moment to consider the fact that I had just radically affected the future of close to a hundred trades people, men and women who had undergone years of training to qualify for their positions. Some were middle aged or older and could have great difficulty adapting to the new high-tech equipment which I expected to bring in.
I realised that the key to obtaining new equipment was to specify not what we wanted to buy but what we wanted to do. We didn’t need to send out tenders for a particular make or model, we needed proposals for a system that could handle our specific typesetting needs. By analogy you could go to a bicycle shop and say I want a bike with two wheels, a racing saddle, six gears, two pedals, a bell on the handlebars and it must come in blue. On the other hand you could say I want a machine that is strong enough to carry me, very comfortable to ride, light enough for me to lift and not too hard to pedal up steep hills, then see what the shop has to offer. You might be in for a big surprise; you may not even come out with a bicycle. When we did this for typesetting systems our ‘statement of needs’ included retraining for our existing staff. We were pleasantly surprised when nearly all of our typesetters applied for the re-training program, and most of them eventually said that the new gear made their jobs easier.
The final item I needed to address was the thorny matter of high-speed electrostatic printing machines versus the traditional small addressograph printing presses. This was by far the most difficult and delicate question of all, and printers large and small all over the world were scratching their heads over the issue. The Xerox 9500 was a photocopier in name only; it had the speed to compete with our small presses yet it could be operated by a bindery worker with a minimum of training. The problem here was that a trained press operator (and Union member) made between two and three times the wage of a bindery worker – mostly unskilled or semi-skilled and almost exclusively female. I left it to our Human Resources people and the Lithographer’s International Union to work on a solution to that one, and they solved it by creating a new category with a pay scale high enough that bindery employees would consider it a promotion.
I cracked the question of equipment selection by calculation of crossover points.
Getting a printing press ready to print is called, not unreasonably, a ‘make-ready’. This includes making a plate, fixing it to the press, getting ink and ‘water’ balanced – the ‘water’ is really a chemical solution used in lithography -- and running off a few sheets until the image is clear and crisp. There is actually much more to it, with overhead, utility costs, etcetera but let’s not over-complicate the issue. Let’s say that a full makeready costs $400. Now imagine that you have a document that you want to copy, so you take it to your printer. If he has no other equipment but his litho press your cost will involve the make-ready plus a penny or two for the sheet of paper. Say about $400.02, a little steep for a single copy, which is why the printer keeps a small photocopier in his front office. He feeds your document into the copier and your copy drops into a tray. Cost 25cents per copy. Five copies? $1.25. All copies cost 25 cents, which is what limited the use of the 9500 for longer run printing.
But let’s say you’re running for public office and you want to flood the town with your ‘vote for me’ posters. You want 20,000 copies. This is where the printing press comes in. You have to pay the make-ready cost, of course, but after that your running cost is dirt cheap, say 2 cents a copy. Total cost $400 + 20,000 x 0.02, or $800 total. If you had all week and money to burn you could run them all off on the photocopier for a total cost of $5,000.
The point at which the press becomes cheaper than the copier is called the crossover point. It is different for every combination of machines.
At that time Hewlett Packard had just introduced a powerful hand-held programmable computer. I keyed in full details of operational costs for all CGPB equipment. I updated the program weekly with paper costs, labour costs – any changeable data, and I could then tell you in a few seconds which process was most economical for any given job. The rest was easy, if a bit tedious. With the help of a bright young summer student I examined the workload of every plant in the Bureau, and from that we calculated the best mix of equipment to produce this work most economically.
An unexpected outcome of my calculations was that the small Addressograph presses remained the mainstay of the on-site plants. The presses were adaptable and versatile, and still represented the best buy for a good range of our customers’ print needs.
Done and sorted, and in the hands of the procurement people to put the contracts in place. They didn’t need me for that so I took some time off, the only leave I’d taken in over a year. I was very tired and slept a lot.
Back at work Henry asked what I wanted to do next as I had left new equipment selection in good shape for the next few years and more importantly left them the methodology to use if the situation arose again. For the present, to be blunt about it, they no longer needed me. He said that if I fancied the job I could take over as the Chief of Industrial Engineering. It didn’t take much thought.
I’d hardly had time to get my feet settled under my new desk before Henry had my job reclassified to OM level 5 and promoted me into it. The General certainly knew how to reward his foot soldiers.
Nine years after the interview in High Wycombe in which I’d convinced Zed to hire me as an overqualified lab technician, I was sitting in Zed’s old office and doing his old job.
About being an Industrial Engineer:
Without the ‘R’ in R&IE Industrial Engineering did not present much of a challenge. There was a Time and Methods Group which went around with tape measures and stop watches finding ways to do various jobs more efficiently and a Records Clerk who went around the plant with a stop watch making sure that the workforce managed to meet the standards set by the first group. With all the new equipment now arriving, all of which would need operating standards, my Time and Methods people had years of work ahead of them. The people in these jobs had been in them for years and intended to stay in them for more years. They were competent plodders and good people, and I more or less let them get on with it.
As John Wayne always said just before the arrows started flying, things were just too damn quiet. I began to think that there could be a hidden agenda here. Maybe it didn’t matter if everybody had fallen into the bottomless chasm. Perhaps it was OK that I had turned valuable scientific equipment into worthless electrical junk. Perhaps someone was watching me carefully just to see how well I handled people. After all, my total experience of managing people came down to one assistant technician who pretty much managed himself. If Henry wanted to find out how well I could manage people, he had that right. In fact I was quite interested in finding that out myself. But that left the bigger question: What was it that he had in mind for me?
I thought about taking some management training, and even called the HR people to talk about it but in the end I thought I could wing it. The way to treat people at work, I thought, must be much the same as the way to treat people away from work. Be open, honest, friendly and kind. Especially kind. Have a sense of humour and let it show. Add in ‘make sure you let them know who is the Boss’ and it sounded more like the way to train a dog, but I thought a light touch in that direction might be a good idea.
In the event my philosophy seemed to work well. I ran a happy office, sort of a Fishburns’ lab but not so rowdy, and we all got along very well. Give and take. Late for work? Never mind; put in a little overtime when it’s convenient. Need the afternoon off? Of course you can. You’re a big boy, balance your own books. On the rare occasions when I had to discipline one of my people I tried to play down the ‘big stick’ and use “I know that you want to do your job well, so let’s think about what you did and see if you could have done it some other way, some better way.” I knew that it was working when I overheard one of my staff saying “Even when Mr. Daniels gives you a roasting you still come out feeling good!”
It must have persuaded the ‘watcher’ that I could manage people, because in the spring of 1978 I found out what Henry had in mind for me.
Sideline: Mental Illness:
During my time as Equipment Manager I was working harder than at any time in my life. I was actually using, for the very first time, advanced level physics and maths. I had calculations and probability flowcharts running around in my head day and night. Several issues became clear to me at midnight on a dark stretch of parkway through the Gatineau hills, north of the city; some others while driving past Parliament Hill at 3 a.m. People often had to ask me if I had been listening, and then had to repeat what they’d said. Getting up in the morning was next to impossible, and I was always late for work. (Shades of my father’s warning came to mind). Henry held early morning meetings of his top level staff and invited me to these so that I could brief his people on what I was up to in my cluttered office – but I was never early enough to attend them. In the end he said to me “I suppose that since you’re the only one who has any idea of what you’re doing I’ll have to put up with your tardiness.”
Unfortunately this put to rest the theory that being busy tended to suppress my mental problems. Busier was not necessarily better.
I was at a point where I was ready to admit to being mentally ill. Almost ready. I knew that there was something wrong in my head. I would sometimes sit watching TV in the evening and feel that I was dreaming. My thinking was becoming fuzzy and my ability to focus was waning – the very last thing I needed. I would go from event to event without anything in between, the way time passes in a dream or in a movie. I would be eating supper then I was getting into bed but recalled nothing in between. I put it all down to stress but when it carried over into my new low-stress IE job I thought I should talk it over with a doctor, perhaps get myself some sleeping pills, or some valium to calm myself down. The thought of a trip to a doctor terrified me and I put off going for several months, but eventually I made it. On the point of bolting from the waiting room I was called in to the office.
The doctor gave me my first anti depressant; Anafranil. He told me that if I persevered for five or six weeks I should begin to see a substantial change in my attitude to life. I persevered for three weeks, then, unhappy with the side effects (or because I still couldn’t accept that I was mentally ill) I flushed the rest of the medication down the toilet.
One of the side effects of this episode was that I realised I had to do something about my irrational and now extreme fear of doctors and medical procedures. I had mentioned this to my doctor and he had given me the name of a therapist who could possibly help me with the issue. I resolved to call and make an appointment, as soon as I could find the time.
About the Career Assignment Program:
In 1945, at the end of the second world war Canada found itself with a large number of soldiers looking to reintegrate into peacetime society. Many were senior officers, and under existing legislation they were entitled to jobs at a similar rank in the Civil Service – an Army Colonel, for example, would qualify for position at the Branch Director level, with an EX classification; A Major would be considered for a Division Chief post, a Captain for Head of Section. This program went by the unofficial title of the ‘Khaki Parachute’. By the 1970s many of these men would be at or close to retirement age. In order to have managers ready to fill the upcoming vacancies Treasury Board together with the Public Service Commission, introduced the Career Assignment Program (CAP) in the 1960s. CAP selected bright young men and women for a three year training program designed to equip them for eventual placement in Executive grade positions. A new intake of candidates took place two or three times per year for a total of sixty program places. In 1978 I was nominated to the CAP program 78/2 (bilingual) by Henry and the Queen’s Printer.