Treachery?:S. Alexander

Surface finishing is an ancient art and mysterious craft. Doubt not that buffers and polishers played critical roles in the earliest ofindustries , from flint-knapping and arrow fletching to amulet-shining and stone-carv ing. In my day, surface finishers perform key steps in the preparation and completion of innumerable objects for industry, tech nology, commerce, medical prostheses, and cosmetology. These articles include ham mers, computer chip boards, credit card im printers, artificial knees, and fingernail buff ers. People who are fond of cooking or eating might be surprised to learn that a good quality spatula like a Dexter, is a very highly engi neered and refined masterpiece ofmetallurgy, plastics technology, woodcraft, machinery design, and surface finishing. Accomplished chefs and expert short-order cooks wouldn't Mr. Alexander owns an industrial surface finish ing supplier, Better Buff Co. in New Milford, Connecticut. He drew upon FEE materials to complete a bachelor's degree in Operations Management at SUNY.

be caught dead flipping an egg without the right balanced, bended, beveled spatula. Such products must meet the demands of the person purchasing them. The demands are seemingly endless! Even when a fry cook will settle for any old spatula in a pinch, he or she still expects one to be available at the closest dimestore or dis count outlet and at a reasonable cost and right now! Purchasers also have at their disposal large numbers of advisers like ad vertisers, experts, know-it-all family mem bers, and trendsetters who shape, influence, and increase their demands. These further demands must be met at a reasonable cost and right now! Rarely will a purchaser settle so easily. Usually a product must be the right size, of the right material, the right quality, durable, clean, and pretty! Of course, it must also be available at a reasonable cost and right now. Superior surface-finishing method is used to prepare objects' surfaces for fit or further processing like electroplating or to make mundane objects gleam and glisten like gems or clear crystals.

Therein lies a great challenge. Despite the notions some technocrats have of our soci ety being able to categorize, quantify, and standardize just about everything, espe cially in manufacturing, I insist it can't be done. I say there are two broad reasons for this inability: 1) long before the process of examination, standardization, and publica tion of approved (licensed?) products and procedures is completed, the initial de mands change, and 2) the human beings who attempt to perform the several tasks of production at any level of capitalization do not do so uniformly from person to person nor individually from hour to hour! I really do believe that the way one person pushes a button is different from the way another pushes the same button, despite the obvious similarities. All this notwithstanding, I daily deal with enterprises which I must not fail to help achieve fabulous finishes measurable to sur face scratches of less than one one-millionth of an inch in depth. Results must be attained consistently and without regard to many 491 492 THE FREEMAN • SEPTEMBER 1994 constantly changing circumstances. If this process does not succeed, I may be sus pected of having behaved treacherously, with having sent the inappropriate abrasive, perhaps through ineptitude, or perhaps to invalidly increase my profit. It's a little scary!

Last Christmas-time, I was able to escape from all that by going gift shopping with my wife, Kathy, to an entire village of shoppes selling crafts-works. I could see that many people are appreciative and receptive of the talents of highly skilled and artistic crafts workers. I could see why those wonderful articles are so treasured. They are beautiful, interesting, reminiscent, unique, whimsi cal-or all of the above. It's almost trans forming to watch a coppersmith fabricate a lamp using no modern tools, or a weaver in jeans, a baggy sweatshirt, or a depression era calico dress staring into the loom and thre~ds and s-l-o-w-l-y widening yardage, each crafts-worker doing his or her best to produce a quality product that will merit some purchaser's trust. As we made our circuit of these specialty shops, in search of unusual gifts, I envied the craftsmen and their products. An ador ing public filled their shops, cooed with love over every misshape, broken warp or woof, or peculiar nick, each prized as proof of quality and precious personality.

Producers in an industrial setting where mass production prevails have essentially the same goal-to produce a quality product their customers will want. But they face a different problem-to produce quality prod ucts in quantity that are uniform. The time factor also presents a challenge; products must be available here and now. Part -geometry -standardization required for mass production (accomplished, hope fully, through capitalization) is perhaps the single greatest accomplishment to meet that challenge. Increased productivity makes for increased wealth. Individual skills and per formance make for individual productivity. Capitalization makes for more productivity. If the people I serve stopped working or were prevented from pursuing efficiency or employing their genius, we'd all need to return quickly to the handcrafts, weaving, and copper tinkering-or starve! My experience pointedly illustrated a fun damental fact of the marketplace: An able buyer buys what an able buyer desires, if, as, and when the desire occurs. No amount of training or "paying dues" in the seller's ex perience is even considered by the buyer.

Somebuyers want whimsy, a marked absence of uniformity. Others want uniform products immediatelythat can only be supplied through mass production-products of the right size, right material, right quality as they see it. So, it was back to the grind; holiday over, I went back to buff-mania! I resumed the fabrication and order-filling of quality fin ishing fixtures and furnishments. I also be gan the compilation and summation of the quarter-end and year-end figures for sales tax, use tax, employment tax, etc. Most manufacturing costs are anticipated. They may be planned for by researching materials costs, labor and facilities costs, and such. Business men and women must know within pennies what their basic costs per hour are. They must have some idea regarding expected selling prices and potential profits. One very large business consideration which unfailingly eludes the most brilliant business minds and mavens is the impact on operations and costs of a governmental regulation amended with little or no advance notice. It isn't unusual to hear cost analysts or business leaders talk about damages in new tax rates or the need to "right-size"

their enterprises according to a newly an nounced regulation which might affect al ready-bought-and-paid-for resources. If a business person has a contract with another business person who arbitrarily al ters the agreement, demands more money, more rapid remuneration, increased author ity with less expertise-well, you get it! Wouldn't this be a betrayal of the prior agreement? A violation of trust? Wouldn't that be treachery? Suppose the government does the same? Suppose it alters a previous regulation, fee, or tax, demands more money retroactively, more rapid payment, increased authority? I leave it to the reader to answer. D THEFREEMAN IOEASON UBERTY How Japan RealizedHer "Impossible Dream" by Toshio Murata E ight months after the end of World War II, in the spring of 1946, I brought my men of the Army Field Hospital in Hang zhou, China, back to Japan. Whenwe got off the train at their home station, we found the whole city destroyed, devastated by some powerful bomb or incendiaries. No build ings, houses, or trees were to be seen. Only new shacks here and there. Ichiro Watanabe of our group, who had lived there with his family and had had a store near the railroad station, was so shocked by the hellish scene that he suddenly started singinga lullaby, a requiemto his belovedchildren. The name of the city was Hiroshima.