Jim,

You have a way of hitting my 'hot' buttons and you did it again in your recent "Nip Impressions".

This past week, my plant has banned two drivers from contract carriers of ours and terminated one of our professionals for poor performance. No fan fare, no major severance pay, no big deal--they weren't delivering what they were hired to do and didn't seem to be much interested in changing m.o, so off they went.

Now take Mr. Nardeli, most recently CEO of Chrysler Corp; what the heck was the venture capitalists thinking? He had just taken the stakeholders of Home Depot to the cleaners, walked away with a pot full of cash (or should I say pushed out on a truck loaded with cash?) only to be picked up to run Chrysler in less than 6 months. Whomever sold Nardeli should be granted Salesman of the Year award across all industries. Of course Nardeli is only one of 100's.

You are correct.

Here in Houston, I'm within 60 miles of three old Champion mills that are dead now. And being a little bit personally familiar with the history of one of them, if enlightened leadership had made some hard decisions 15-20 years ago, 2 of them would either have been shutdown long before they were or would be still running. Sheldon and Pasadena mills had a chance to survive with proper downsizing and modernization; Lufkin was a dead mill (like Detroit) long before it was allowed to stop breathing. Now I'm watching to see what the boyz over at DeRidder are going to pull-off; they've rebuilt the liner machine and kicked its production up and are looking to do the same to the newsprint machine with the idea of moving it to liner or medium as soon as the newsprint market drops enough that they need to move out for good. Seems they think being the next to the last buggie whip manufacturer is an acceptable strategy. Could be but timing and forecasting is critical.

Keep up the challenging words. The problems our industry has are largely the result of the way it has been managed for many years and the reward systems that incented those managers to behave.

Edward A. Turner
Houston, Texas, USA

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Ed. note: Nip Impressions has not verified Ed's comments about DeRidder and accepts no responsibility for their accuracy. NI does agree, however, that Lufkin, Sheldon and Pasadena are down.

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Good stuff, Jim

While not an octogenrian, but over 65 and still travelling on average just under 200K air miles every year, to far off locations, worklife can be intense. But I stop every once and awhile to reflect upon the flexibility the internet and email have given me. Like now, after reading your column.

It wasn't that long ago that I was requesting copies of magazine articles from a staff of overwrought librarians at a former major paper company's technical HQ in order to keep abreast of timely developments. Today it's routine Google, in seconds and minutes to create the airplane reading material and typically the .pdf's and .doc's are stored on the laptop harddrive rather than hard copy. Again, it wasn't that long ago that even data storage was costly.

How would we ever get done what is expected as ordinary daily tasks without these enabling tools today? Even the fax function on my multi-function printer, scanner, fax is underutilized in this ever changing world.

One simple story to illustrate. I had family visitors spend a few days. Father and mother (50ish) flew in. Their daughter and boyfriend (both recent college graduates) drove. When the kids arrived they had a burned out headlamp on their borrowed car but had been unable to change it out on the way due to lack of bulb changing knowledge for that type of auto. Father tried, unsuccessfully, relying upon experience, also without a manual. I Googled and printed the bulb changing instructions for their model auto, handed it to the boyfriend and within 10 minutes, he had performed the task.

If the next 50 years are as change-filled as the last, undoubtably at a faster and faster rate of change, who will survive the adaptation, or better yet be nutured and grow? Toffler's Future Shock premise seems relevant still, even though it was first published in 1970.

John Yolton
California, USA

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