From: Jasper
Date: 28 May 2008
Time: 07:05:35 PM
Solitairea1 – Don’t want anyone to get the idea that I reached my position on conflicts between honesty and civility by some sort of philosophical exercise. I used the examples I did with my malicious “civility” experiences at Ford because Ford Design and Engineering is where I learned the practical ill-effects of dishonesty ON THE COMPANY in trying to beat the competition. I learned that honesty is a practical tool for finding real solutions to real problems. When I started my career in 1966, I was too ignorant to be dishonest. ............... Any mass produced car or truck you see on the road is the product of a process involving professionals with conflicting priorities. ...............The top priority of most stylists and clay modelers I knew was to make whatever they were working on to look good IN CLAY. If it looked good, they looked good even if it set actual production back by years – which it did when they were successful in hiding their embarrassing mistakes or their deliberate violations of real-world constraints. They could do a lot of things in clay that no one could do in metal, glass, fabric and plastic. The surest way for them to look good was therefore to ignore engineering data that got in the way of their best looking clay models. ................. The top priority of most engineers was to be sure that they could make things work even if their solutions were hideous to behold. The safest answer to why any engineering riddle hadn’t been solved was therefore, “It can’t be done.” ...................I thought that draftsmen were the most honest class of people in the system unless they ran into a problem they couldn’t solve. In the final stages of the product’s development the draftsman’s drawings would be used to make the very expensive production tools and dies, which were used to stamp and mold the production parts. ............ ....Clay modelers had to understand more about the intricacies of styling, drafting and engineering to do their jobs than stylists, draftsmen and engineers had to understand about modeling. That meant the best modelers knew damn well when they were crafting something beautiful in clay that could not be manufactured and when engineers were feeding them false data to avoid the risk of failing to solve a difficult problem. ................I eventually reached the top of my profession chiefly by “doing the impossible” repeatedly and maneuvering myself into positions where I could do it conspicuously. What I really did was only to approach every task with honesty, to find ways of HIGHLIGHTING ERRORS, including mine, instead of hiding them, and to TEST what I was told could not be done. Substitute “civility” for “beauty” or “functionally” and you’ve got what you always get when you put anything ahead of honesty. You get a barrier to the truth, which I discovered at Ford is exactly why it was usually done, and a practical explanation for why I value honesty above all else on this board. –Jasper