Being affluent is no excuse for not knowing right from wrong. We are all responsible for our actions.  By Gary Shotton #000188

Click Here to download in audio (.mp3 format)

Click Here to download in video (.mp4 format)

Affluenza

By Gary Shotton

My name is Gary Shotton, and I’m so happy you’re here with me as a part of inspiring better business. Today we’re going to talk about a word is actually a new word affluenza. Wow, what does that mean? Well, I was watching the news. It’s been here about the last couple years that a gentleman young boy, 16 years old, was convicted and arrested for a major crime. And it was determined that by legal process they were trying to claim that he was innocent from the crime because he was so fluent. He had been treated so wealthy. He had been spoiled so bad that he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. And thus he was so fluent, and they created the word affluenza, meaning that that’s a legal reason that he could be found innocent and that he had been spoiled so bad he did not know the difference between right and wrong and committed a major crime. Wow. That is a mess. That is a problem. And I’m telling you that we are all going to be responsible for our actions in business. You’ve got to learn that you’re going to be responsible for what happened inside and for your business. There’s no passing the buck. There’s no turning it over to somebody else. There’s no blaming someone else. If you’re at the top of your business and you’re the owner, you are responsible and you’ve got to take that serious you’ve got to know that that that when something goes wrong, you are not going to pass the buck on to somebody else. You say if someone was spoiled that bad, they have had never had the the discipline in this case by their parents to say I’m responsible and there’s consequences for the wrong or the air or the mistake I made. And and in that case, this poor young man, he has to learn that at some point because as he became of age and and and he made this crime, he’s going to be convicted that didn’t work. He was responsible.

Well let’s talk about my business here. We have situations that not everything comes out perfect. And we have measuring devices, we have disciplines where we’re trying to make sure that every single part every single shipment goes to our customer is 100% accurate. And as designed and as as drawn on the drawing. We try to create those parts to be accepted within the reasonable tolerances. Well, that doesn’t always happen. But when that nothing, something doesn’t happen, like we want it to happen. We dig back in and try to figure out exactly what causes the problem. We don’t start blaming the person right away. We ask them to get involved and say, hey, when we had this problem, tell us what you did. What was your process and your system? How did you approach this? Did you do the things that we asked you to do to prepare for that job? And if you didn’t, let’s make sure you get the training so that you know that how important it is to do things consistently. You see, repeatability is one of the name of the games for what we’re doing here. In our machine shop. We’ve got to be able to know what caused the product, the product to be successful, so that we can repeat it again. But if something doesn’t turn out, right, we’ve got to be able to identify what didn’t work, right. So we can correct that one thing that would now create a predictable, repeatable, good part. And that takes somebody saying, I’m responsible. I’m responsible to dig in and find the answer. I’m responsible to do the training. I’m responsible to hire the right people. I’m the responsible Am I Am I directly overseeing all this? No, but I’m the one setting the tone. There’s nothing worse than having someone pass the buck and blame somebody else and make an excuse. That is just sickening to me. And I want to know that, that in your business, you’re going to need to be that one that will say we’ll I’ll dig into it. We’ll we’ll take the steps to be sure to the best of our ability. This doesn’t happen to them. We call it a corrective action. We make a corrective action, and we document that corrective action. In some cases, we when that job comes around the second time or third time we have a special document that brings attention to the operator, what happened last time, and that would be a corrective action report so that they can see hey, something happened last time we run that far. And now we need to be on guard that that doesn’t happen again. I can give you examples after examples, because we have problems, but we have a great success rate at the same time. Well, I hope this is helpful to you. Whether you’re making a cake at a bakery, where you need the cake to look the same tastes the same, the same weight, same size, then you need to be able to breed produce a system that’s operating in a pattern that’s gonna repeat that same cake. If you’re if you’re doing a haircut you need to know how to how that person wanted their hair last time and create that process. So they’re happy again, with that same haircut. If you’re selling something, you need to know the product line so that you you’re knowledgeable about what you’re selling and make sure you’re giving information more than just the product and so you’re gonna you’re gonna have to dig in and say, you know, this is something that that the buck stops with me I’m responsible. I’m the one to make sure it happens. And then then then take two steps is surround yourself with a team and surround yourself but have like mind in that and you come up with a good solid company. That’s going to be around for a long, long time. Well, I hope this is helpful. Please stay tuned and please share these with other people if you would. Inspiring Better Business. Thank you