Management

There’s an old story about a Soviet-era factory that made bathtubs. Plant management was measured on the total tonnage of output produced–and valves & faucets don’t add much to the weight, certainly not compared with the difficulty of manufacturing them. So the factory simply made and shipped thousands of bathtubs, without valves or faucets.

The above story may be apocryphal, but the writer “Viktor Suvorov” tells an even worse one, based on his personal experience. At the time, he was working on a communal farm in Russia:

The General Secretary of the Party set a task: there must be a sharp rise in agricultural output. So the whole country reflected on how best to achieve this magnificent aim.

The fertilizer plant serving the communes in Suvorov’s area resolved to do its part:

A vast meeting, thousands strong, complete with brass bands, speeches, placards, and banners, was urgently called at the local Chemical Combine. To a man, they shouted slogans, applauded, chanted patriotic songs. After that meeting, a competitive economy drive was launched at the Chemical Combine to harvest raw materials and energy resources.

The drive lasted all winter, and in the spring, on Lenin’s birthday, all the workers came in and worked without pay, making extra fertilizer from the materials that had been saved…several thousand tons of liquid nitrogen fertilizer, which they patriotically decided to hand over, free of charge, to the Region’s collective farms.

The local communes were told that all fertilizer must be picked up in 24 hours–the factory’s product tanks were full, and if the bonus fertilizer was not removed, production would come to a standstill. Suvorov was the truck driver for his collective, and it was his task to go to the plant and pick up the farm’s allocation. Problem: the truck could only carry 1.5 tons at a time, and a round-trip to the plant would take about 10 hours. The commune’s allocation was 150 tons. There was also a shortage of fuel for the truck. And Suvorov knew that if he didn’t complete his mission, the director of the commune would be replaced. While the man was not to everybody’s liking, his expected replacement was much worse.

What to do?

When Suvorov arrived at the plant with his truck, he saw that the other communal farms had faced the same problem, and had hit on a solution.

There was a long queue of trucks of different makes, dimensions, and colours standing outside the Chemical Combine. But the queue was moving fast. I soon discovered that lorries, which had only a moment before been loaded, were already returning and taking up new places in the queue. Every one of these lorries ostensibly needed many hours to deliver its valuable load to its destination and then to return. But they rejoined the queue in a matter of minutes. Then came my turn. My tanks were rapidly filled with the foul-smelling liquid, and the man in charge marked down on his list that my native kolkhoz had just received the first one and a half tons of fertilizer. I drove my lorry out through the Combine’s gates and followed the group of lorries which had loaded up before mine. All of them, as if at a word of command, turned off the road and descended a steep slope toward the river Dneiper. I did the same. In no time at all, they had emptied their tanks. I did the same. Over the smotth surface of the great river, the cradle of Russian civiliztion, slowly spread a huge poisonous, yellow, stinking stain.

The great fertilizer production drive was undoubtedly marked down in government records as a tremendous success.

Don’t be too smug, though, fellow capitalists. My next example of institutional stupidity comes from the American private sector.

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