January 7th 1999 (Thursday).

Another announcement from Management: Pat Olson is leaving to become assistant to a higher-level manager after little over a year and a half in Chemicals. She's gone, to be replaced by who knows what, or when. She speaks to us in her departing comments of cultures encountered, adjustments made by her, complete with diagrams scratched upon the white boards and copies for all of .

Her conclusions put an end to my thoughts that shop floor folks who had capability should be involved with newly evolving environments within the company.

Instead, any new roles were mostly the result of conformance to requirements "signed up for" by management and resulting in certificates, like ISO 9000 and MRPII.

The thought was, "Who better to address operational conformance issues than management edicts. That’s what’s supposed to be done.

Operations controls and maintains operations and staff and management determine direction and the financial viewpoints that said cut costs, period.

If you can only count heads and reduce people, that’s what you do.

Pat Olson carried that torch, not bothering with details, and rather than figure out how to grow the business and continue capability building within operations (the empowerment thing), she slashed headcount and put the end game into play.

I’ll stand my ground and say, AGAIN, you can’t put accountants in charge of anything but keeping track of and closing the books.