The Irving Effect and the "Innovative Manufacturer" 

The Pony Express closed two days after transcontinental telegraph lines arrived in Salt Lake City.

Less dramatic but equally alarming to those who perceive that their jobs are threatened is the simple march of progress: the line worker replaced by the robot; the stenographer replaced by word processing; the newspaperman replaced by the World Wide Web. But progress is inevitable, and rather than fearing what can’t be changed, employees need to go with the flow and expand into new roles and capabilities… while employers have to remember that change for its own sake must be tempered by the value of what works well already.

At NCMS we’ve been kicking around concepts for what we call the “Innovative Manufacturer,” an organization that represents the best of all possible worlds in the 21st century knowledge/manufacturing economy. An Innovative Manufacturer needs to be culturally self-aware in a way many companies aren’t. Innovative Manufacturers should know who they are, who their people are, what roles they fill (both on paper and otherwise), how the team works together, and what unexpected circumstances and events can conspire to realize significant, even unpredictable, results.

The Vienna Beef Company was founded in 1893 in Chicago. Its craft sausages and hot dogs (not those squishy pink tubes in a can, that’s a different Vienna Sausage) were peddled around the city on horse-drawn carriages, and, later, more traditional hot dog stands. The company’s products helped many Americans through the Depression – Vienna’s Chicago Style Hot Dog could still be had for a nickel at any street cart. And the company thrived, slowly growing its original facilities until it owned an entire labyrinth of buildings encompassing a single block.

By 1972, Vienna Beef had outgrown its aging facility and moved to a new, state-of-the-art plant on the other side of town. One employee, an older gent named Irving, elected to retire when the company moved, because he didn’t want to make the cross-town commute.

Irving’s job had been to deliver racks of unsmoked sausage from a cold storage area to the smokehouse, where they’d get their final Vienna touches. Given the way the company had grown, at the old facility this trip required Irving to thread his way through a Winchester house-like maze of cooking tanks, hanging and drying areas, packaging facilities, boiler rooms, and finally up an elevator to the smokehouse. It took him almost a half hour; not precisely the most efficient route… and one of the many reasons why the new facility would be such a boon to the company.

But something was wrong. Almost immediately people started noticing that Vienna Beef’s sausages were different. They lacked a subtle snap you used to get when you bit into them. And their color was lighter, not their trademark bright red.

For more than a year, Vienna Beef employees tried to figure out what was different. Was the water on Chicago’s north side different from that on the south? Were all the ingredients precisely the same, coming from the same suppliers? Did the new smokehouse’s temperature match the old one’s exactly? There was nothing. The cause of the odd change in the sausages was conspicuous only by its absence.

Irving was also conspicuously absent; he’d been well-liked at the company and people missed him. Then, finally, one day the light bulb went off. Irving’s 30-minute trek through the old facility, while inefficient (and kind of unsanitary, if you think about it), also allowed the sausages to warm up a little before going into the smokehouse. In the new facility the cold storage room was right next to the smoker, so they went in cold. And they came out… not as good.

What’s the moral here? Irving’s journey across the Vienna facility was hardly a torchbearer for Lean production, but it did make a difference, one that would probably never have been identified if people hadn’t been missing Irving.

More than the powerful executives, more than the kitchen scientists, Irving directly correlated to the fondness customers had for those snappy red sausages.

The Innovative Manufacturer recognizes that no part of their machine is trivial; no role is insignificant. Wisdom can be gained from the Irvings as well as the advanced new tools and the march of progress. Smart manufacturing tools are never going to replace the Irvings of the world, because they’re all part of a codependent ecosystem. The Innovative Manufacturer leverages tools and talent equally, recognizing the value of both.

Technology, talent, and infrastructure coexist. Each supports the others, and true innovation lies at their intersection. Tools alone can’t innovate. People can’t innovate without tools. And the mechanisms for innovation are useless without tools and people to occupy them. This crossroads is the true nativity of innovation, and American manufacturers who approach their culture and strategy from an Innovative Manufacturer’s standpoint will find that their opportunities grow alongside their competitiveness. The Innovative Manufacturer is a new kind of business, for a new century, and a new kind of economy.