Importance of Professional Value and a Great Story About Charles Steinmetz

I wrote earlier about the explicit and tacit value that an individual brings to the organization. But how do you do value-addition?

According to me, one can add value to the organization by 1) Doing things the way they should be done and finding better ways of doing it 2) Solving critical business problems (technical or organizational)

In this regards, I re-read a great story about the importance of value over at Management Stories blog. I read this story long time back, but I reproduce it here because of its relevance in the current time.

Here it goes –

Charles Steinmetz was once called out of retirement by General Electric to help it locate a problem in an intricate system of complex machines. Having spent some time tinkering with and testing various parts of the system, he finally placed a chalk-marked ‘X’ on a small component in one machine. GE’s engineers promptly examined the component, and were amazed to find the defect in the precise location of Steinmetz’s mark.

Some time later, GE received an invoice from the wily engineer – for $10,000. Incredulous, they protested the bill and challenged him to itemize it. Steinmetz did so: “Making one chalk mark: $1,” he wrote. “Knowing where to place it: $9,999.”

GE paid the bill! Charles Steinmetz was a German-US Electrical Engineer who invented Alternate Current (AC) to initiate electrical era in the United States.

It is when you nurture a particular skill to such a level where you can fix a small component (problem) without losing the sight of the complex machine (organizational perspective) that you start generating exceptional value for the organization. That is my learning from this story.

Here are a few quotes from the same man who raised a huge bill for a seemingly trivial task!

• No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions.
• I have succeeded in getting my actual work down to thirty minutes a day. That leaves me eighteen hours for engineering. (Talks a ton about nurturing a skill).