TAMARACK INDUSTRIES By David J$.$ Cherrington, Brigham Young University marack Industries manufactures motorboats primarily used for water skiing. Students are hired during summer months to fill in for permanent employees on vacation. In past years, students worked alongside permanent employ s$,$ but a few staff complained that the students were by the college students. The Geek Team often met duction schedules with time to spare at the end of the pro$-$ for goofing around. It wasn't uncommon for som look for materials, just to make demeaning co the shorter production runs and began to retaliate with the Geek Team to go to another line pretending to inexperienced, slow, and arrogant. In general, permanent The experienced workers resented having to perform all staff disliked the students' behavior, such a s listening to music with earphones while working. This summer, the sabotage. They would sneak over during breaks and hide company reorganized all permanent employees into three tools, dent materials, install something crooked, and in production teams $($they usually have four teams, but other small ways do something that would slow produc $25$ percent are on holiday at any given time$)$ and assigned the $16$ summer students to their own team on the fourth tion for the Geek Team. Dan felt good about his decision to form a separate crew college students, but when he heard reports of sabotage and rivalry, he became very concerned. Because of com production line The supervisor, Dan Jensen, decided to try a different strategy this summer and have all the college students work on the new line. He asked Mark Allen to supervise the new crew because Mark claimed that he knew every$-$ thing about boats and could perform every job "with my eyes closed:" Mark was happy to accept the new job and participated in selecting the student hires. Mark's crew was called "the Geek Team," because all the college students were savvy with computers, unlike most of the perma plaints from the experienced workers, Dan equalized the production so that all of the crews had similar production runs continued to finish early and flaunt their pe front of the other crews. The rivalry, however, did not stop. The Geek Team One day the Geek Team suspected that one of the semblies was going to be sabotaged during the lunch break by one of the experienced crews. By skillful deception they were able to substitute experienced line for theirs. By the end of the lunch pen an assembly from the other Mark spent many hours training his the line running at full production. The college students the Geek Team was laughing wildly because of learned quickly, and by the end of June their production ception, while one experienced crew was ve student team to get ry angry w te was up to standard, with an error rate that was only slightly above normal. To simplify the learning process, Dan Jensen assigned the Geek Team long production runs c that generally consisted of $30$ to $40$ identical units. Thus tween the different crews would the training period was shortened and errors were re duced. Shorter production runs were assigned to the expe rienced teams. the other one. Dan Jensen decided that the situation had to be changed and announced that the job assignments ees were told that when they appeared morning, the names of the workers assigned to would be posted on the bulletin board. The announce By the middle of July, a substantial rivalry had bee n cre$-$ment was not greeted with much enthusiasm, an Mark su spected ated between the Geek Team and the older workers. A first, the rivalry was good$-$natured. But after a few weeks, the older workers became resentful of the remarks made Allen decided to talk Dan out of his idea. that many of the college students w was broken up$.$