No More Empty Tubes
Here’s an urban legend I heard once. There was a manufacturing plant that made toothpaste. One year, for some reason, there ended up being an unusually high number of empty boxes being shipped out. In order to stop that from happening, the head of the company hired a couple of engineers to develop a system to catch any empty boxes so they didn’t get shipped with the boxes that actually had the toothpaste tubes in them.
The engineers developed a system that if the box weighed below a certain amount, the system would stop and a worker would have to go remove the box and start everything up again. The person in charge loved the idea and implemented it immediately. And right from the get-go, the number of empty boxes shipped dropped to near zero.
The head of the company wanted to go see the system in action, so he goes and visits the plant one day and notices a huge fan right by the assembly line. Very confused, he asked the plant manager why the fan was there. The plant manager said the workers were tired of stopping what they were doing to remove an empty box, so they just hooked up a fan to blow the empty boxes off the scale before the system recognized it was empty.
The laziness led to a more efficient and cost-effective plan.