To be honest Mario, I think it's an attitude problem. I have run a small team for over twenty years. We have delivered an ever expanding service providing water quality monitoring equipment for a public sector body. We now service and maintain hundreds of pieces of kit a month. We also design and build remote real time systems accross the uk. The success of the service has depended on one or two people in a team of 12 to 15 really going the extra mile. That's really me and my team leader. My phone is on 24/7. I have told our senior managers that the service doesn't really work and if I ran it as the rest of our organisation is run it would be fail within days. I try really hard to enthuse our staff but very few have any real interest in engineering and it falls to a minority, all over 50 to do,the real technical work. The younger members of the team are all graduates of what were good polytechnics but are now third rate money factory's called universities. They cannot take any form of constructive criticism and will only concede that when wrong they are in fact just slightly less right than you. Our schools,bullying parents and governors have created a nightmare for managers in the real world. There is an overwhelming reliance by managers on policy and procedure rather than knowledge. We train no one properly in the UK and real apprenticeships have long gone. I wonder how long an apprenticeship at Morgan is now. I did three years at CEGB training schools before being allowed on the shop floor for the final year. The old boys did seven years in total. Someone recently posted the how's it made video and some comments were posted about the skills displayed. I didn't see any true hand skills displayed in any stage of construction and that is clearly demonstrated any time you look at the build of the 3W. I did a short two week welding course in 1979 and I can weld better than the chassis manufacturer. I would imagine that Morgan are not immune to these problems and I wonder if they are struggling with staff retention. Low salaries in engineering are still a problem. This is going to be controversial but much of the work Morgan does would be classed as repetitive and semi skilled by any time served craftsman. When I design and build a electro mechanical installation it is over engineered to some degree and it is an intuitive process. Look at some of the wiring from sensors on the 3W or indeed any car. Yes it might be of the correct size to carry the tiny current required but is it sound mechanically. No, a slip of the hand when performing a task adjacent and a broken wire is the result. There is too much lean production in evidence and a 'well that's good enough' approach. I am sure that the meeting was full of managers taking notes. Has anyone else noticed that there seems to be a competition to see who has the biggest notebook in meetings nowadays. What's wrong with the back of a fag packet!!! Sorry for the rant. We should however not forget that Morgan did have the balls to make the dam thing and it's still brilliant with all its faults. Let's look on the bright side it can only get better.
