Don't Just Fix It, Improve It! A Journey to the Precision Domain

In this first installment of the Heroic Change series, James Emery is struggling with balancing his various roles as husband, father, and plant manager for Modern Products Manufacturing. When an accident occurs at the plant, leaving people seriously injured, James feels responsible. He is faced with his own inner demons as the incident brings back memories of a devastating accident that haunts his past.

The accident is the impetuous to drastic changes in both James’ personal life and also his career. He embarks on a difficult journey of Heroic Change, likening the journey to the Holmes poem he admires in which the chambered nautilus, in its silent toil as the spiral grows, leaves the past for the new.

James faces a long road of mistakes and missteps while facing opposition from his subordinates and pressure from his superiors. In his relentless pursuit to create lasting change, James gathers allies by building a shadow network of employees who support his plan for change. James fights to gain respect for his out of the box thinking, while trying to hold his family together as he spends long hours at work. More importantly, he fights to create a safe place for employees to work while satisfying his superiors with improved performance.

James’ struggle is not unlike the mysterious life and death of the nautilus. He uses the nautilus, as well as a shield, as symbols to provide him with inspiration for his own life and spiritual growth as he travels the path to lasting Heroic Change.

Don't Just Fix It, Improve It is a very easy read because it is told as a story. It is also a good reminder of why you can't just focus on planning and scheduling. The really good performers eliminate the defects before they ever turn into work orders. Small problems are seldom left to turn into big failures and big problems rarely happen. The authors hit the nail on the head when they demonstrate through the story that improvement efforts which simply focus on driving the right maintenance work practices bog the organization down with too much work and seldom succeed. Only after building in the defect elimination culture and reducing the defects coming into the system can the organization achieve the best practice benchmarks. The small problems don't clog the CMMS system and the work processes can focus on the big issues. Small problems are taken care of immediately at the source.