Norm Howe's blog

Last time I talked about the days before there were any laws regulating foods and drugs; a time when “Let the Buyer Beware” was the law of the land.  But as science advanced and America industrialized, that law was no longer sufficient. 

Industrialization provided employment for enormous numbers of workers who flooded into the cities by the millions.  As businesses learned how to use economies of scale, costs dropped dramatically. 

Last time I talked about the value of delegating the whole job to employees; a piece of work that they will recognize to have intrinsic value.  Now I want to discuss the importance of communicating the scope of the job to the employee.  

Whenever you assign a job, a dialogue must occur.  You have to explain to the employee what the boundary conditions are for this assignment.

Well, let’s say that you’ve bought into the idea that you shouldn’t solve your employees’ problems for them.  That doesn’t, however, mean that you should remove yourself from the conflict resolution process entirely.  In fact, the opposite is true.  The difference is in the manner in which you intervene.

What do you do when you can’t get your department functioning at the level you need?  What do you do when little problems pop up randomly every day?  Could they have the same root cause that seems to manifest itself in a different way every time?  You don’t know.

If this sounds familiar, you’ll know how I felt a few years ago.  My department just wasn’t getting the job done; nothing dramatic, but it felt like the death of a thousand cuts. I tried every fashionable cure that the management gurus were spewing out.  Nothing worked.

When FDA inspected a Heparin supplier, Shanghai No. 1 Biochemical & Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., they thought they were seeing the real plant.  It turned out that it was only a show facility.  The real plant was a shadow plant located somewhere else. 

The US-FDA Warning Letter later stated, “The inspection revealed that the facility was not manufacturing, and did not appear to have ever manufactured, Heparin Sodium USP (or heparin sodium) for the U.S. market."