The Richwood Report

Coal Prep 2006 is at Lexington Center, Lexington, Ky. Richwood, of course will be there. The booth number is 1216. Our presentation on Combi-Lagg ceramic pulley lagging will be at 10:30 am on Wednesday, May 3.
Richwood is also exhibiting at Electric Power 2006 this week at the Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, GA. The booth number is 654. Stop by and see us!

The English author Samuel Johnson said that the true measure of a man was how he treated somebody who could do him absolutely no good. Every successful person has his own ways to learn the character of another person quickly by observing the small interactions of everyday life. Now a modern CEO has observed the same thing as part of a collection of simple and effective management tools. Bill Swanson, CEO of Raytheon Corporation(one of our customers, by the way!) calls it the waiter rule, or, "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person." An article about the waiter rule, with a list of the 33 rules in Swanson's book, is here. I was impressed to read how many leaders of business had been impressed with the kindness of customers in their early careers and who had also learned about their associates from how they treated subordinates. A further assessment is here. Swanson never published the book but distributes it free on request from the Raytheon website.

An interesting study in business life is here. There is also a copy of the text with some good photographs here. The short version is that Winchester firearms, a brand on the market since 1849 is going out of business. The current company in the plant in New Haven, CT, United States Repeating Arms Co. , is closing the facility as of March 31 and laying off 186 employees.
We can make some observations:

1. A good name only goes so far. Winchester was recognized everywhere, right up there with Harley-Davidson and Marlboro, "The Gun that Won the West". When most people heard "deer rifle" they saw a Model 94 in their mind. There's a reason. Winchester made over six million model 94s. They have been carried on foot, on horseback, in covered wagons, and on motorcycles and four-wheelers as well as in a lot of pickups and SUVs. There is often one in mine. If brand recognition and reputation could keep a company in business, you would not be reading this article.

2. There's no substitute for leadership with a personal concern in the success and profitability of the company. Winchester was like the axe of the farmer who said he had an axe that belonged to George Washington except it had had three heads and ten handles since George had it. Winchester had been sold a number of times, had an employee buyout and belonged to FN Herstal, a Belgian company at the last.

3. No amount of government handout can save a company that doesn't make money. Winchester went out of business owing the city of New Haven for tax breaks and the union for concessions. Winchester had over nineteen thousand employees during WWII. The company brought prosperity and opportunity to the area then. You can only buy business so long.

4. A great product with sentimental attachment to a lot of people can still fail to sell. If the orders don't come in every day, the handwriting is on the wall. We can still enjoy the old movies with John Wayne and all the others who will be remembered with Winchester rifles. (Who could forget Rooster Cogburn and Big Jake? As a matter of trivia, John Wayne used the same big-loop Winchester and 38-40 Peacemaker in his movies.) Good copies of Winchester designs are still available from other manufacturers, some in the USA and some abroad. The patents expired long ago(some of them issued to John M. Browning himself!).

5. Don't miss the lesson of how important mechanical reliability was in the success of the company. You don't sell products that don't work for 140 years. A lot of designs came and went while Winchester was making millions of their rifles that didn't do much except work every time. Nobody buys a firearm because it works pretty good most of the time. The article's description of the innovative design of the Winchester lever action is excellent:

How light it is, how quick to the shoulder, how pointable! It begs to come to the eye. It swiftly finds what's called the natural point of aim, the perfect equipoise between its own grace and its shooter's talent. There, it wants to be fired. It's knobless and trim yet hardly streamlined. It hails proudly from the pre-streamlined world. No ergonomic study went into its design, only the sound trial and error of Yankee genius that finally found the ideal form.

It's weirdly squarish, yet like other classic guns, it boasts an orchestration of lines of unusual harmony, which somehow seem to soothe the eye. The Colt Peacemaker revolver, the Tommy gun and the Luger have the same effect; all are instantly known and knowable. They have a design charisma that transcends their actual usage in the real world.