Your Job Exists Because of Theirs I caught someone at corporate talking down to one of my property managers. It made me angry in a way that surprised me. Accounting, HR, marketing, renovations, etc. Good people, all of them. Not one of those jobs exists on its own. Somebody at a site leased the unit, collected the rent, and talked a resident out of leaving. That rent check is the company's main source of income. Everything else we raise, or we borrow. Everything above the site is overhead paid out of that. So I started sending corporate staff to the property. Not for a tour. Put them behind the desk for a day. From twenty miles away, it all sounds simple. Why can't they just return the call. Why is the variance report late again? Stand in that office for six hours, and the picture changes. A resident at the counter is three weeks behind. The phone rings while a tour walks in the door. A tech needs an answer right now, not after lunch. The report somebody at corporate is waiting on is number nine on a list of eight. The gap between what corporate believes is happening and what is happening on-site widens as the company grows. Toyota made a rule out of closing it and gave it a name. Genchi genbutsu. Go and see for yourself, where the work happens, before you form an opinion. Deming said it plainer. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to management. He put a number on it too. In his experience, 94 percent of the trouble in an organization came from the system, not from the people inside it. You cannot fix from a spreadsheet what you have never watched in person. So I told them, straight out, that their job exists because of the one they were just condescending to. Some of them heard it. The ones who spent a day at a property heard it better. It is hard to keep that tone with somebody after you have watched what their job asks of them. The condescension is a symptom. The person talking has no idea what the other one does all day.