VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [59]
Tom nodded at her and smiled. It was as if she had just passed some secret test of his.
Their crab cakes arrived at the table. They had long thick flakes of crab, were golden brown on the outside with the whiteness of the crab showing through, slightly crispy but moist on the inside, with just enough breading to hold them together. If they were not the best on the Eastern Shore, they were worthy contenders.
Back in the air, they flew through a cloudless sky. Amy sat “up front” in the copilot’s seat, looking out into the blackness. Below them on the dark earth were constellations of light made by cities and towns and the webs of streets and highways. Between the big pools were tiny pinpricks of the light from rural homes and the slow-moving headlights of those traveling lonely roads. Tom touched Amy’s arm and pointed out the blue dot of planet Venus, visible in the western sky.
A few minutes later he touched her arm again and pointed to a small, vague disc of light visible through the windshield on the horizon far ahead.
“That’s Highboro,” he told her.
With that, whatever spell had been cast by the beauty of the night was broken for Amy. For out there, down there, was so much that she would have to deal with.
“Tom … can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask …”
“This morning, you said you knew Lean Six Sigma, that you’d used it in the Marines. But you never told me how well everything worked out with LSS. Did it work?”
He rolled his eyes and then smirked at her. “On a gorgeous evening like this, you have to ask me that?”
“Well, sorry, but it’s important to me! I’m taking my company down the LSS road and there is a lot riding on it – not only for me, but for a lot of other people.”
“When you ask, ‘did it work,’ what do you really want to know?”
“I want to know if you achieved what you set out to achieve.”
“We accomplished a lot of good things using LSS,” he said. “Why are you asking? Do you have doubts?”
“No, I believe in LSS … based on everything I’ve been told. But, well, I’ve never done anything like this, and I was just wondering what your experience has been.”
“Most of my experience with LSS was positive. Lean and Six Sigma are excellent. The trouble is that these are programs, and all programs have a tendency to take on a life of their own. They become the end, rather than the means to the end. People can get wrapped up in making the program perfect, and lose sight of the mission the program is supposed to accomplish.”
She thought about this, and then said, “We’ve been pushing hard with LSS, and I’m just wondering if I push even harder, will I get the results that Nigel wants?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Tom. “One of the things a new pilot has to learn is to read the instruments and trust what they’re telling you. Because your perceptions might be telling you that the plane is flying straight and level and on course, and the reality may be on that you’re on the wrong heading, or losing altitude, or flying too slow. My only advice is that believing in LSS is far less important than knowing what the hell’s really going on.”
Not quite getting the reassurances she so wanted, Amy stared toward the blur of lights, larger and closer now, that was Highboro. Even as she stared, the wine and the rich dinner, the stress of the day, and the lulling drone of the engines overcame her.
“Hey, look,” said Tom a few minutes later, pointing out the window on his side of the plane. “The moon is rising.”
Indeed, a full moon had risen and was shining huge in the eastern sky, but Amy was not awake to see it.
In her office some ten hours later, Amy held a closed-door meeting alone with Wayne Reese. She confided to him the gist of what had happened in New York the day before – not the details; those were too embarrassing. She presented to Wayne “the challenge,” as she put it, that Nigel had laid down to her of finding another 3 to 6 percent of bottom line improvement in addition to the 7 percent