is your knowledge profound?

Profound Knowledge of what your core competence is, helps you see things in a different light than others. It is of no use to your employer if they do not utilize it the right way with creating the right environment for its usage. In a book written by an Industrial Engineer, he had just joined a new company, somewhere in the Midwest of United States.

His job was to come up with improvements in the manufacturing floor. Time and work studies have been used for a long time to "improve" productivity and drive costs down.

This Industrial Engineer had the good sense to make friends with the people on the production floor that had "profound knowledge" of their floor,production process, materials and their machinery. One of these guys was a worker with about 35 years of experience doing the same thing in the same factory.

When he saw the new industrial engineer struggling to collect data in an effort to improve the process, this older worker pulls him aside and tells him "I will show you a way in which I can do this better driving up my productivity but you need to promise me to go talk to management about not penalizing me for producing more".

It appears that the incentive pay for production is set in such a way that producing more would have meant less take-home pay for him personally. So he has been resisting making any changes to his routine for years and years causing the company probably a lot more money they could have made than would have cost them in additional pay!

All because he had profound knowledge but the metrics and measurement inhibited him from using it.

I am sure every one of us can come up with examples of where someone doing the work had profound knowledge but was prevented by management. company, metrics, whatever from doing the best they can.

What a shame!

Profound knowledge comes from actually doing stuff and learning to separate the good methods from the bad or over-hyped and being able to select the right tools and approaches for the job.

It is about having a longer term view of things and balancing quick results vs being a little more patient but trading off longer term success and durability.

The Internet bubble was caused by a lack of profound knowledge about how business and technology worked with each other in the longer run notwithstanding hype in the shorter term.

Whether you are in software development or managing servers or hooking up networks of systems, profound knowledge of what works in practice and what does not is probably making you successful every day.

If employers can harness this and let you use your profound knowledge and create the right environment for it to be used, everyone wins. Otherwise everybody just muddles along.