Improvement Insights Blog
The Fab Four and a One-Man Band
Technology has given us the ability to automate tasks that used to be performed manually, and allows one person to perform the work of many. I saw an example of this on a recent trip.
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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“You know, when I was growing up, the big band that came up were the Beatles, and they were also known as the Fab Four. And the Fab Four were kind of the structure of most bands, all right? [They] had a rhythm guitar, John, a bass guitar, Paul, and a lead guitar, George, and a drummer, Ringo. So that was the Fab Four. And a lot of bands were shaped that way. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was him playing lead, and there was a bass player and a drummer; that was three. And Cream did the same thing: lead guitar, bass player, drummer. They didn’t need as many. Now, some bands, like the Stones, have a front man like Mick Jagger. They still have the back four, but they had this lead out there; same thing with Aerosmith. So you might have three, you might have four, you might have five, but in general, that was kind of the shape of most bands, unless you were James Brown and you had a giant horn section and background singers and everything else like that.
“I was out in Maui, and there was a free concert at the local park. I went over there, and it just sounded great. I went over there, and there was one guy with a guitar, and he had a bunch of electronics, and a woman singing, and he had all the stuff so he could put in percussion. He had the ability to record kind of the rhythm parts, and then it would repeat. He had all kinds of technology to be the rhythm guitar, the bass guitar, the drummer, the… whatever it was. He was like a one-man band, and then he could play lead guitar. I thought, “Holy cats, that’s amazing!” They did songs, everything from Paul Simon to Aerosmith to AC/DC, right? And the woman had a great voice and I thought, “Ah, the fab two!” The fab two. I was just kind of amazed by that.
“I think technology is going to allow one person to be a one-man band. I was at a bottling plant and there was one guy sitting in a in a cage looking out. There were cans running on this one line with one kind of brand, it was all flowing in, it was getting down there being bottled and packaged and loaded up and shipped off. And then over here were bottles, and over here was a different kind of can… and it was running like four different production lines from one room, with a bunch of little screens.
“This is, I think, the future of what we’re going to see in a lot of manufacturing things, where one person is really managing all of this stuff and a lot of that’s just being done in an automated way. We have to find a way to do more important work than all these manual processes that we used to do. That’s a little view of what I saw as something strange: from the fab four to a one-man band and a lead singer. It’s amazing.
“So… when you think about it, don’t resist change. Embrace change. You know, I remember back when they thought computers were going to displace everybody. Nah, it just created more jobs. I think everybody’s worried A.I. is going to displace everybody. No, it’s just going to create more jobs, right? But it’s going to be an elevated job where you’re going to do more important things than the manual things you used to do.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve something this week, like how we do business.”
