Before You Decide ibook

The cord on your plant floor is sacred. Why don't you pull it on yourself?

Walk into any lean manufacturing plant in America and you will find a cord, a button, or a rope that any operator can pull to stop the line. We celebrate the people who pull it. We put their names on the board. We built the whole philosophy on one belief: the cost of stopping is always less than the cost of running bad product.

Then we walk upstairs and sign off on a capital spend without reading the back page. We announce a reorg in the hallway. We terminate someone in reaction. We shoot from the hip and tell ourselves we'll course-correct along the way.

Our parts have systems. Our decisions don't.

Amos McCoy spent fifteen years running concrete block plants before he started helping other people run theirs. In Before You Decide, he hands you the same cord for the decisions you make above the floor - a disciplined sequence of seven checks you can run in under two minutes.

The seven checks:

• Motive - the most expensive thing a leader can be wrong about is their own
• Season - most leadership failure is timing failure, not effort failure
• Control - if your hand is on the wrench, your head is off the bigger problem
• Care - a right decision delivered the wrong way is functionally a wrong decision
• Subtraction - adding looks like progress; removing takes courage
• Tuition - the most expensive habit in manufacturing is paying twice for the same lesson
• Potential - snapshot leaders run today's plant; trajectory leaders build tomorrow's

This is not a book about slowing down. It's about the difference between a pause and a freeze - and why the leaders who look decisive in the retelling are almost always the ones who checked one thing first.

Written for plant managers, supervisors, operations leaders, and the owners of family-held manufacturers. Includes end-of-chapter exercises and seven reproducible check cards designed to live where you actually make decisions.

Stop. Pull the cord. Run the checks. Then decide.