Yes, the story is an urban legend, the budget goes up every time it's told, etc. But I think the important lesson here is not really "line worker outsmarts expensive consultants", its really about incentives. The consultants are incentivized to do good work (they want to keep a good reputation and potentially get more work) BUT they are also incentivized to charge as much as possible ("value-based pricing" is the term the industry loves) which means they will often try to convince you your problem is more complicated than it actually is
Similarly, the line worker is likely (correctly) to believe he won't be paid much more if he works harder, so his primary incentive is to just reduce his overall workload as much as possible and still get paid.
The best solution (and I believe a bunch of research backs this up) is to better incentivize your line workers and reward them appropriately. I know one study in particular that showed broad-based stock option ownership among employees was correlated with stronger company results, while options concentrated just among senior execs was not correlated with business success.
I think another take-away from the story is that the domain you work in will dictate the solution you come up with.
If you are a high-level exec, the domain you have, the levers and pulleys available to you, are asking your direct reports to investigate the issue and come up with a report on the problem and generate potential solutions, which will then be discussed and evaluated in meetings–at a very high level. To somebody on the ground level, the domain of the problem is "what do I have around me to save time? oh, I have a fan, let me use that. Done."
I think your point about incentivizing workers is part of it. This story reminds me of the This American Life piece about the NUMMI plant where Toyota worked with GM to teach them the Toyota way of assembling cars. [1] Part of the Toyota Way is to empower the individuals at the ground level to own the process and to improve it. The interviews are surprisingly emotional for something that's "just work", but I think it shows how empowering people to own and improve their everyday gives them agency.
I think it actually matters that it's an urban legend. If it were a true story the value of its message would be less disputable. But if it's an urban legend that means that the message -- that line workers have valuable and inexpensive insights to offer -- is unsubstantiated and may not be true in the main. (I qualify this with "in the main" because of course there must have been some occasion when a line worker had a big brain idea that saved the company a bunch. The question is how often it happens and whether it's cost effective to detect and implement these cases.)
Parables are dangerous, because they sound good and appeal to common sense, but it turns out that in real life common sense is often not correct. Common sense works best when applied to situations encountered in the ancestral environment and does not necessarily convert over well to systems engineering.
I used to work as a SW developer for an assembly line. Anecdotally, "my" "line workers" were very good at micro optimizations s.a where to place tools, when to duplicate stands, what order of operations makes more sense, alert when a material/part quantity drops.
I was occasionally replacing one of them to QA a SW tool, and was pretty slow and clumsy comparing to them.
I'd say overall their resourcefulness or "practical engineering" did some 1-5% impact on throughput.
My anecdote: a close friend's brother was working as a laborer on a pipeline dig. One day work halted for a couple of hours, during which the construction supervisor and engineer were huddled over some plans.
My friend's brother saunters past, looks over, and says "there's your problem," placing a finger on the plan. Then he walks on.
He had seen a triangle with angles not adding up to 180 degrees. He was right - that's where the problem was.
My guess is that the triangle was drawn correctly, but its interior angles had labels like “55°”, and those labels didn't add up to 180°. So the triangle could be constructed differently from intended, depending on which two of the angles the constructors used for reference.
You might want look in Kaizen, which one of the key basis is that the workers closest to the problem are empowered to stop production when issues arise and have input when approaching problems on the line.
Does it really make a big difference if it’s true or not? Even in the case where it’s 100% certifiably true, it’s just one anecdote. As you point out, you need more data on a trend to take it more meaningful.
That all being said, I think this sort of tale can still be a useful tool to have a discussion around. And then that discussion can in turn produce questions that could later be backed up by research and data.
I can easily imagine a real-life scenario where some quick and dirty fix works, say, 75% of the time. (And maybe that's good enough.) But the expensive process change works 99%+ of the time and, even though there are cheap ad hoc alternatives that work in a particular scenario, you're still better off actually fixing the problem properly.
> line workers have valuable and inexpensive insights to offer
I saw it more as just a lesson about not overthinking things. Another version of the "During the space age Americans spent money developed a special compressed ink pen that could write in space, the Russians used a pencil". I think looking for a simple solution first is always good advice.
That story seems more or less to be a myth, too. And there seems to be a good reason why they used from pencils, which they used in the beginning to pens:
"Pencils may not have been the best choice anyway. The tips flaked and broke off, drifting in microgravity where they could potentially harm an astronaut or equipment. And pencils are flammable--a quality NASA wanted to avoid in onboard objects after the Apollo 1 fire."
Interesting, I had meant to point out that I had no evidence one way or the other if it was actually true, the point is just the idea of keeping it simple.
And your counterpoint about the graphite floating around is a good parable for why seemingly obvious, "clever" solutions often don't actually work, and that armchair critics should not assume the solution team was not smart enough to consider the obvious ideas :)
I heard that's another myth. The pen was developed privately, NASA and the Russians just bought them at extremely reasonable prices, and they worked better and safer than pencils.
The morale of this story is that as a proper consultant, you should be the one to charge that customer $8mio for the $20 fan, because that's what value based pricing is all about.
> The best solution (and I believe a bunch of research backs this up) is to better incentivize your line workers and reward them appropriately. I know one study in particular that showed broad-based stock option ownership among employees was correlated with stronger company results, while options concentrated just among senior execs was not correlated with business success.
It can be also quite easy to make mistakes with these incentivisation schemes, fe in finance I've understood they can quite commonly cause problems.
Pretty much any incentive scheme can cause problems if it’s poorly thought through. You also need people paying close attention to any abuses.
I knew of one company where the Sales team were compensated based on the value of orders booked by a given date at/near the end of each month. That monthly value was unaffected by any orders cancelled from the previous month. What happened, of course, was that they would persuade people to place orders to be cancelled once the date passed. The value of the orders was always decent on the date in question, so the Sales staff always did quite well but the same orders might be placed, cancelled, and placed again multiple times over the year before they properly materialised (if ever).
There's another element where the consultant simply enumerates all of the things that the employees have already been telling management for years. And of course there's an entire spectrum in between.
Some things are only important once a dollar figure is attached to them.
> Outside consultants often end up saying the same thing you do, but are trusted whereas you are not. CEOs listen to the outsiders because they have no hidden political agenda.
The one time in my career that I worked with management consultants, I wasn't all that impressed. The partner and one of the associates were sharp enough. The other associate was not.
That said, they created a big fancy spreadsheet that kept the business planning people happy and basically validated what we had been telling senior management.
I'm not sure that's bad though. Having been, at a later time, an IT industry analyst myself, there's certainly some value to someone coming in with a fresh set of eyes, without the biases and mindset of people within the company, and (as you say) without the motivations to push a project that may not make sense.
I think this case was a little bit of both. Senior management had made up their mind to spend money with McKinsey and we (I was the product manager) rolled our eyes a bit. But they got some fancy spreadsheets out of it and, in all fairness, they did get a trusted outside partner who basically said that our pricing etc. strategy was reasonable.
That's one of the reasons that as an engineer I find Design Thinking and (especially) Human-centred Design so valuable—if done well it forces to you look at the problem from the perspective of human motivations, incentives and there's so much low hanging fruit there.
Digression: another valuable aspects of DT/HCD include: working as a natural extension to Agile/XP, deriving solutions to problems in a data-driven way, ability to find low-hanging fruit more easily due to the application of divergent and convergent modes of thinking, being cheaper in the long term, and finally—giving designers and engineers tools to shut down any pet/vanity projects coming from senior management, by cheaply proving them to be wasteful.
As I understand it, the value is based on the customer’s perception of value. And I believe this is contrasted with hourly-based pricing.
If I try to come up with an example, I might say the postal service has a value price. Mail a letter anywhere in the (continental) US, 0.55
You don’t pay 1.55 if it gets there sooner. Even if you overnight the letter, there is a flat fee. The extra cost for more difficult deliveries versus easier deliveries is a wash; the post office doesn’t charge you more or less.
Hourly consulting, like for a winning advertising campaign—what is that worth?
I don’t understand the remark suggesting value pricing is the more lucrative of pricing structures.
Mail is 55c because it's a simple amortized cost of a unique government service with some margin. The value varies widely.
Value pricing is when different customers pay different prices for substantially the same service, like first class vs economy airline tickets, and app store fees.
Value-based pricing is used to imply that the price of the service should be proportional to the value the customer receives from it, not the cost it took for the consultant to implement the solution.
Of course, with huge corporations, teeny improvements can be worth millions in value. So consultants working with these large corporations will usually prefer a "value-based pricing" model because if they can convince a customer that they can reap $100 million in additional savings or revenue (not unreasonable for a large company), they could easily charge, say, $40 million for it, but they would never be able to charge, say, $5000 an hour if that's what the timing worked out to be.
I take your point, "because...they can convince a customer they can reap $100 million in additional savings or revenue", this 'potential' revenue extends to the 'value' of the service, and the consulting agency should be allowed to take a proportionally larger share of this potential revenue as fee regardless if they are successful.
I'm coming at this from small businesses, who don't usually have resources (MBAs?) to forecast revenue in the way you're suggesting.
Again, my thought of value-based has a customer with a fixed opinion of the 'value'. You can't really get them to spend more money, because they don't perceive more benefit proportional to increasing cost.
I'm asking, is my application of value-based consistent with the term as you use it? And if yes, on what _other concepts_ does the theory turn to distinguish your concept of fees proportional to the customer's potential revenue?
What flips the interpretation of 'value-pricing' from a 'commodity' service, to your 'gambling' argument? If it's the uncertainty burden, then wow, that is some forecasting and salesmanship!
"The worker who'd placed the unapproved fan on the production floor was finally identified. They were counselled and sent to three days of mandatory retraining to ensure they understood that no further incidents of changing procedures outside of the formal change-approval process would be tolerated, and the installation of unapproved equipment was grounds for dismissal. The note on their file blocked any promotion, but the economy meant they couldn't change jobs. Eventually the learned helplessness and bitterness set in and they started amusing themselves by adding things from the break-room fridge to packages being shipped internationally. Five years later, they and everyone else were laid-off when a competitor figured out how to get otherwise unemployed people with cars and phones to deliver things for less than minimum wage."
After reading the problem definition, my reaction was: you'd either weigh it and use a solenoid to kick it into a defect box, or you'd use air to knock the empty boxes from the line.
I've seen both methods in use on production lines; so I assume that this story is something made up by someone trying to sell some kind of consultancy service?
It's not just made up, the story is almost a word for word translation of a story that's been circulating for years in Chinese. Of course people have called bullshit on it before.
If you can read Chinese, you can check the thorough debunking of this myth right here, from someone that actually works in a soap factory: https://www.zhihu.com/question/27132006
In this age of the internet, memes get translated pretty quickly. I'm curious whether you found some definitive source that tracked this meme to its origin in a Chinese story.
for what it's worth, I don't think they claimed that it originated in Chinese, merely that it was translated from Chinese at some point. it's possible that it originated not in Chinese, was translated to Chinese at some point, then translated back into English.
There's a story that has been circulating for years in Chinese. CHECK.
This story is almost a word for word translation of that. CHECK.
What is wrong with that statement? At the same time, A story that has been circulating for years in Chinese would also almost be a word for word translation of this story.
Somehow they've installed sensor but don't know about these. Add "$8 million", "0" cases yet guy "was tired of walking", "three weeks of production use" and only CEO bothered to check.
Obviously an urban legend, and one of a series of legends in which a menial worker comes up with a simple solution to an apparently complex problem. Snopes has details on some of the others:
The one about the expense of adding another elevator reminds me of a similar story where they just install mirrors on every floor and then the complaints about slow elevators stop.
Even as an apocryphal parable to illustrate something about the extravagance of the solutions found by extravagant processes, doesn't this kinda fall short? The $20 solution is only found as a response to the $8M solution, which introduced a measurement and an incentive. I read this as suggesting that (a) workers closest to the situation can offer solutions if (b) measurements are in place and incentives are aligned and (c) they're given enough freedom to deviate from top-down processes.
Your a,b,c stuff was outlined in Wealth of Nations about 200 years ago. Modern capitalist is designed to make HIPPOs feel good - empowered workers highlight that managers don't deserve their outsized pay.
From other comments I get it's a "urban legend" and it's meant to prove a point, but I guarantee anyone who has worked in a bigger manufacturing facility involving people has heard a similar story or has experienced one. Working as a production engineer I heard and experienced several, even though the sums in question were not nearly as big.
When I read the story, my initial thought was that there would be a link pointing to Toyota or Kaizen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaizenPoint Kaizen - It is one of the most commonly implemented types of kaizen. It happens very quickly and usually without much planning. As soon as something is found broken or incorrect, quick and immediate measures are taken to correct the issues
Sorry but this was stupid to me. Most of the weighing systems out there are going to use the bell alarm to actuate a pneumatic arm to push the offending box off the line to a reject pile.
What you actually will find is they will have an over and under bin so you can find out if you are over or under filling. It is a requirement by law that they weigh the product on a "legal for trade" scale if they are claiming it contains a certain amount.
The company would already have the weighing equipment in place, maybe farther up the line where the tubes are filled. They would simply have to move them down to the end of the line and change the weight range to add in the weight of a box and any other things added to the box and toothpaste tube.
I get that it is a thought exercise but wanted to add my 2 cents.
I think there are a lot of lessons here. Here is what I got:
One is that the simple $20 solution was discovered, but it may never have been. There was an element of luck in that. How often has that been the case in software? I see it all the time.
Given there is an element of luck, to maximise luck you want to pull in ideas from many places. Line workers are a great source of ideas. You can then apply a filtering process to decide which idea to try out. The fan idea would be tried out due to it being a low hanging fruit sort of fix.
I would actually posit that it would be less luck than you may think. Using air to blow lighter objects off line is a fairly common tool, even going as far back as separating wheat from chaff, and if you have a guy on the floor with a little experience it probably would have been somewhat obvious to them
To be completely honest, I like to think I would go down to where the problem is and have the people dealing with the problem look for a solution first.
If you approach a third party as "a big company" looking for a "solution", you'll just get "a big solution at a bigger price"
This reminds me of a true story (yes, true not "true" I was there). I was a manager and representing my development area and my boss was there to greet the new client. We were a consulting firm, so of course we were paid to build things. The director of architecture was there, and he comes up with this plan to charge 100k for a solution of various needs. Surprisingly the client said no; they can't afford it, and we didn't get the business. The business was kind of shocked the company said no, then my boss sarcastically pointed out that everything they needed could be solved with Google Drive and 15 minutes on their phones to set it up.
A lot of people of viewing this as a positive story. I’m not sure I do.
Empty boxes are still making their way to the end of the process where a hack is being used to fix the outcome.
The problem of the empty boxes still exists. In fact, it could be many problems down the line.
I saw an interesting comparison of mechanics vs engineers where (no intended slight to mechanics) mechanics will fix the behaviour but engineers will perform Root Cause Analysis.
While I agree that the expensive consultants don’t provide much value, and the solution fix is affordable and nicely and lateral, I don’t think this is what you’re really want.
I draw comparisons to the endeavours that Tesla is making to more efficient manufacturing lines.
Not every problem is worth fixing “the right way”.
The internal cost of wasting a packaging box (a few cents a day) is probably hugely surpassed by the value of increasing quality.
You have to consider the opportunity cost of the Root Cause Analysis and the potential fix, along with shutting down the line to implement it. Compare that to the cost of the fan fix.
Just because you could do Root Cause Analysis doesn’t mean you should go through with it. YAGNI
Although that one is highly incorrect. Nasa did use pencils, Nasa didn't pay for the space pen's development, and the space pen is superior to the pencil (no flammable particles), and Russians also use the space pen and not pencils as a result.
It trivializes actual improvements and glorifies dangerous shortcuts over actual engineering. It contributes to the "haha scientists are dumb" mentality that's plaguing modern politics.
They literally used it in a Blockbuster Hindi movie called '3 idiots' as if it was a real story. A huge section of the population takes these urban legends seriously. But i guess as long as the message is decent , no harm done ?
> But i guess as long as the message is decent, no harm done?
I'm not sure the message is decent and no harm is done, since it seems to be designed to weaken trust in complicated engineering processes with its underlying "look at these idiots".
To the extent that it’s also often not, there are also modern parables about the dangers of corner-cutting. (NASA has three rather famous true-story ones.)
As a result, good engineers have a mental framework to identify both situations.
Right, but the concern isn't its serving as a parable for engineers. The concern is it serving as a parable for uneducated people about why they should rely on 'common sense' rather than experts in a given field. We just have to look at the modern US political landscape to see why that's a problem.
>The concern is it serving as a parable for uneducated people about why they should rely on 'common sense' rather than experts in a given field.
Well, often people should rely on common sense, rather than experts -- which more often than not are mere consultants with expensive solutions to non-problems to sell.
"Trust" is only good in an era of honest experts that don't look for a quick buck over science and rigor -- or that when they do there are functioning mechanisms in play to punish them. And our era has been increasingly getting less that (regressing to pre-50s levels of quackery), with many experts and policy advisors being nothing less than glorified lobbyists and salesmen (and that's despite their good qualifications)...
Like how tons of medical procedures are not needed and dangerous/expensive, but still recommended by clinics for the bucks...
Those lobbyists and salesmen and quacks tout common sense much, much more than they do science. The science is hard to understand, and non-emotional, the common sense is easy to understand, and can be very highly charged.
To take something that isn't currently in the political eye, but demonstrates this well, tobacco. "We believe in freedom. We believe in choice. You are free to educate yourself and decide for yourself; we don't need some nanny state deciding FOR you". Nevermind that it's a physically addictive product, being sold with ads targeting adolescents who are especially responsive to imagery and messages around rebellion, bucking the status quo, etc, and less long term thinking.
As to medical procedures...yes, the perverse incentives are in place to where extra tests = extra money. But the article you link even lists "Patients often insist that a medical provider “do something,” like write a prescription or perform a test." - this is "common sense" overriding expert opinion.
> Well, often people should rely on common sense, rather than experts
Sometimes, probably. It's definitely true that large organizations can overlook simple fixes due to the distribution of responsibilities.
However this story and maybe your response seem to fuel a certain "I won't believe what I can't see" attitude, which is extremely harmful (you'll be able to come up with examples yourself).
This reminds me about one of the topics that has been bothering me along my career as a technical
pm: when is the diverge part of the design process is finished? per my experience, many orgs underestimate the benefits
of “people thinking” and overestimate the benefits of being able to forecast when the solution will be available. And this, imho, is key when talking about startups vs corps... corps worry about the process because they can afford a subpar (8m) solution.
Ofc i’m being pedantic here and things are always more complex but... I have one question. How do you say in a safe way: We need more time because I FEEL that maybe, there is a 2$ solution for
this problem.
Agree with you there. I have seen so many times that people leave meetings without understanding what was concluded and what to do next. I try to be the person that ask questions if I don't understand what is agreed upon or if I "feel" that others don't understand. In the startup I'm in right now we try to build a culture where asking questions and taking a moment to think and talk if someone "feels" something is off is appreciated.
These are the stories that non-engineers like to tell themselves to feel smarter. Especially managers like to think they have more common sense than engineers.
But reality is that engineers are the ones who know most about the subject, they know the details how everything interacts with each other.
I had meetings with managers that thought their common sense could help me, only ending up me explaining the most basic of concepts to them.
Same with the NASA pen story vs pencil.
Most projects fail because of stupid managers that don't trust their experts. Not because engineers can't see the forest through the trees.
On the technical solution level the weight+discard solution is much more reliable. (let's ignore the stupidity that the expensive solution stops the production line. In the real world it would just blow out the wrong ones using compressed air) They have logs from the machine for auditing purposes. They have a very simple to understand knob (the threshold weight) and they can use that to adjust the system to changes in their product. The fan has none of this. If an empty box goes through nobody will know what to change. Maybe the conveyor was a bit stickier that day? Maybe someone set the fan to the lower speed? How to adjust the fan setup when we are making packs of tiny tubes for a hotel?
That's one level of reliability. The other is the organisational reliability. The CEO has the empty box problem. He wants it solved. He can commission an engineering firm who comes up with a solution. It will cost a pretty penny, but if the CEO is worth his salt he can write in performance requirements in the contract. They know they will get a working solution. Alternatively the CEO can go down to the line, he talks with the people there, he tells them about the problem. He offers an incentive for the solution. Let's say $2k. Someone proposes the fan solution, someone proposes to tune the filing machine more, someone proposes to measure the pallet of boxes with the forklift before shipping. How will the CEO know which one to pick? All solutions sounds very reasonable to him. Even after they picked one solution, how does he know it is working as intended? Who does he go to complain when a defect slips through?
There's a ton of these stories around. I think they're great. I don't get all insulted by them; even if they are meant as such.
In my experience, robust is simple. The best code is the code I don't write. The eraser is my best friend.
If I want to write code that has the fewest bugs, I need to write the code with the fewest lines possible.
Every line of code is what I call a "trouble node." That's a place where a bug can happen.
I also need to take the simplest, most straightforward approach possible. Horse sense is valuable, and a lot of my horse sense comes from painful lessons.
When I'm writing code, and I find myself starting to rabbithole one kludge over another, I often have to stop and just wipe the slate clean.
Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
When I was working for corporations, this was never an option, and I (and my team) always paid the price. Since working on my own, I've done exactly this a dozen times over.
I feel that being practical in the engineering is one thing but an overemphasis on practicality could also be dangerous in that it could build up technical debt down the road to the point of no (easy) return. Therefore a balance has to be struck.
Though the top comment's interpretation about the difference between the incentives of consultants and regular workers, and how workers should be rewarded more for good work, is very interesting and definitely rings true to me. The importance of proper incentives/reward mechanism is overlooked in many companies, which is a shame.
I love it, as soon as I read first part, I started over engineering solution. And at the end I was wow, so simple ... someone told me long time ago truly genius things are simple.
I think stopping the line would be the correct thing to do as having an empty box is a thing that should never happen (of course, the upstream issue should be fixed first) and if it does happen chances are something is very wrong and it's better to be safe than sorry.
Stopping the production line is almost never the first choice. Continuous production takes priority. There are second-order metrics that can be applied on top of the individual rejects (N in a row, N out of M rate, etc) and THOSE metrics can be used to determine if production should be shut down.
Source: Have worked in industrial process control (specifically automated QA inspection equipment) for 20 years.
But there will always be some empty boxes no matter how tightly you calibrate the line. You're never going to have perfect tolerances in a mass production line like that. In fact, in this case, the scale is still a better solution than the blower, because not only do you need to not send out empties, but also incorrectly filled tubes.
It's a great anecdote but good manufacturing organizations have long realized that you need engineers, managers and the workforce on the floor to constantly communicate and get everyone to pull together. One big problem is the culture clash between white and blue collar, unfortunately.
And every once in a while outside consultants aren't the bloodsuckers they are made out to be.
Due to the way the production line was set up, sometimes empty boxes were shipped without the tube inside.
Fix the root cause of the issue and you won’t need duck tape and bailing wire everywhere to fix all the proximate problems. Lord knows what the rest of this nightmare environment of “fixes” looks like.
We undermine line workers in Software Engineering world as well. We tag them as "hackers" or "folks who take short cuts" or "don't do good job" when we see an unconventional solution. We need to understand the perfect solution differs from case to case.
I misread the problem definition, assuming the problem was that the boxes were partially filled (e.g. 29/30 items shipped). How would you solve that in another way than a scale?
Reminds me of Daryll from the office. Blue collar innovation. There's talent at every level in corporate hierarchy. What it needs is flattening the hierarchy.
I always wonder... where does this faith in "blue collar thinking" over fancy-pants engineers come from?
Why do people think the engineer wouldn't suggest a fan?
Obviously it's an urban legend... but it just makes me wonder what makes it so repeatable, similar to how everyone's heard the similarly apocryphal story about how NASA invented a million-dollar pen while Russia got away with pencils just fine.
The reason I wonder, is because sometimes I worry that this supposed "faith in common sense" is really just an "anti-expert" bias that is precisely the kind of thing that leads to disbelieving climate change, antivaxxers, not wearing masks, and anti-intellectual populism generally.
Especially in 2020, I wonder if this is a kind of thinking that shouldn't be particularly encouraged... :S
the line worker that came up with the idea probably didn't even know that engineering was spread thin and external firm was hired to find solution. Even if he did, his idea would have been thrown out.
JFTR, Every time I see such titles it curios me: which type of Engineers it directed for: Software, Civil, Social, etc.? It should be clarified in the title, because all of them are different.
I read comments and many are saying "is it urban legend" I do not think so, we underestimate people ability to complicate things and make mistakes.
Does anyone remember story how NASA lost 125 million orbiter because measuring unit mistake>
https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbi...
Similarly, the line worker is likely (correctly) to believe he won't be paid much more if he works harder, so his primary incentive is to just reduce his overall workload as much as possible and still get paid.
The best solution (and I believe a bunch of research backs this up) is to better incentivize your line workers and reward them appropriately. I know one study in particular that showed broad-based stock option ownership among employees was correlated with stronger company results, while options concentrated just among senior execs was not correlated with business success.