No One Makes Pasties Like The Cornish *
This is not my story.
I am telling it with permission because I think it is a brilliant showcase of the impact that developed and applied human skills can have in a business context.
Years ago, when I was mostly concerned with teenage dancing until the early hours of the morning, I would regularly pass by my younger brother, like the proverbial ships in the night, as he left for his early morning shift at a well-known Cornish pasty factory. Both of us were usually in a sleepy fog of a different making, but sometimes we shared a few words or a bite to eat before I fell into bed and he disappeared to do whatever it was he did in a pasty factory. I didn’t ever ask him what that was.
Fast forward to the present day, and he is building me a rather splendid covered deck, now that he runs his own landscaping services business, and we chatted about the part-time jobs our respective teenage children are doing, and the skills they are gaining. Of course, that meant doing what lots of parents can’t resist: insisting that young people these days don’t have to work the way we did ‘back then’ with our chamber maiding, night club bartending - and pasty making.
He then told me a story. After working for the pasty company for some months, he had been moved to the pastry making station because the chap whose job it had been for many years was unable to fulfil that role for personal reasons. My brother looked at the instructions he had been given and, in characteristically entrepreneurial style, decided that he had a better approach. The instructions required him to mix ingredients in a large bowl mixer, empty, take to the makers, and start again. This process was to be repeated throughout the shift to a set maximum kg of mix. He checked the capacity of the mixer.
It was at this moment that my brother’s Systems Thinking skill kicked in. Systems Thinking, one of the 14 human skills in Vitruvia’s Matrix, requires a recognition of the system, an analysis of how it works, and an evaluation of that system when organising, planning, problem solving and decision making. Systems Thinking is sadly lacking in some business - and political - decision-making, which, to be colloquial, can get us all in a bit of a pickle. No such issue for my brother.
He realised that the mixer could take double the quantity of pastry mix. He was baffled as to why the previous incumbent had only been half filling the machine, and why the managers had been happy with this arrangement, literally for years. Surely filling the machine to capacity offered a more efficient approach?
Always a person of action, my brother turned his theory into reality with all the confidence of a teenage boy who doesn’t need to check in with his superiors. He produced the quantity of pastry required for the day’s output in record time and spent the rest of his shift eating the produce and enjoying the Cornish sunrises, feeling rather pleased with himself.
Some days later, he had a second epiphany, possibly brought about by a hero complex, also common in teenage boys: he realised he had made himself available to help out around the factory floor. So he set to work filling in the gaps he saw - fetching and carrying, clearing and cleaning, making and mending, to the delight of his co-workers, who showered him with gratitude and praise. He was actually using his Strategic Thinking skill by now, recognising that effective prioritising, planning and turning thought into action happen as a result of strategic thinking - and using the skill of anticipation to make sure he was always in the right place at the right time.
You might be thinking that at some point, the spectre of a member of the management team would make a late entry into this tale of entrepreneurial chutzpah, and it does - but not in the way you might think.
Customers, collecting their orders in person, began to remark on the lately improved quality of the pasties. The pastry was divine, they said. ‘Bootiful’. Sales increased. So many customers reported this feedback that the business owner herself felt the need to appear at the pastry workstation, curious to know what my brother was up to. It turns out that, although doubling the quantity of butter in a pastry mix results in a richer, more unctuous eating experience, recipe changes must be sanctioned from the top. My brother’s heart sank. (Remember that he hadn’t at any point checked in with his superiors.) Instead, he had been gleefully throwing pats of butter into his mixer, effectively changing the company recipe.
What fate then befell this adaptive (another human skill) young pastry maker, you ask? In recognition of his contribution to rising profits and improved efficiency, he was awarded Employee of the Month. He still feels wounded by the lack of a pay rise, but profit sharing wasn’t built into the company DNA.
Employees who use developed human skills are - like pastry is to pasties - the essential ingredient in the modern and future workplace. Employers and Governments have long recognised the importance of what have variously been called soft, employability, essential and life skills, but which we at Vitruvia call human. Developed human skills, applied in the workplace, positively impact every department - from production to sales - and employers needn’t wait for the occasional teenage entrepreneur to show up to reap the rewards.
Cornish pasties are a traditional British pastry dating back to the 1700s and originate from Cornwall, situated at the most south-western point of the British Isles. Historically, they were filled with the cheapest, easiest to access ingredients: swede, onion, and cheese; they served as a lunch for Cornish tin miners. The crimped crescent edge provided miners with a handle to hold and a crust to discard, helping to prevent them from ingesting dangerous mine dust like arsenic.
https://cornishpastyassociation.co.uk/about-the-pasty/history/
