If all else fails, ask the people who know your company best.

In 1987, while working for Watties (a New Zealand food producer), I asked its employees for their thoughts on profit improvement.

Through the depressing lens of activity-based costing, management’s options seemed to be limited to discontinuing unprofitable product lines and closing unprofitable factories. But the people at the grassroots, who knew perfectly well that their jobs were at stake, had amazingly valuable suggestions to make.

The company operated a small fishing fleet, for example, and the fishing folk suggested that they could get more for their catch if they sorted it rather than sold it as mixed species. They had plenty of time to do this when returning from the fishing grounds but lacked tubs to sort the fish into. The accountants were loath to spend any money on these aging boats yet, when properly evaluated, the investment paid back in a couple of months.

Someone pointed out that the company still leased expensive peach canning equipment although it ceased peach production several years before. Someone else noted that heavy losses in pears were due to poor stock rotation (a last-in first-out regime) and that high costs in asparagus production were due to pilferage (which the foreman ignored because he did it himself).

Another worker videoed the production line to show how a defective chain in the can cooker was denting one in eight cans and how poor arrangement of pallets in the warehouse resulted in unnecessary damage from fork lift trucks.

Yet another solved the long-standing puzzle of erratic pet food quality: a Maori worker who was not very skilled at counting out the cartons of offal – lungs, hearts, livers, and so on – in the recipe.

Another observed that the Orange Roughy in the chilled, prepared fish dish (the managing director’s bright idea) was worth more than the meal itself.

A lady on a canning machine recommended the use of vegetable oil rather than white paint to prevent the platen rusting (because oil would not chip off and fall into the food).

An illiterate Maori inspector working on the pea line of a remote factory in the South Island precisely (and politely) identified the fatal flaw in the company’s strategy of acquiring meat-producing plant, and so on.

In unlocking all this common sense, management was obliged to recognize a fact it had wanted to ignore: the company was not predominantly white or Western, it was Maori and Islander. Most of its employees didn’t appear on the payroll, simply because they were laid-off at the end of a season and hired back again next year.

Bottom line? To bring health to an organization, connect it to more of itself.