Mithapur in 1972 was a place where decisions had to be made on the floor and defended in writing afterwards. The order was not optional, and the lesson took longer than expected to learn.
I had arrived in Saurashtra two years before that — a year of plant familiarisation followed by a year as assistant to the Solvay tower section head, a Welshman called Lloyd-Jones who had been at Mithapur since the war. The tower section was the heart of the plant: ten absorbers stacked in a continuous loop, taking in saturated brine at the top and pulling out sodium bicarbonate as a heavy crystalline slurry at the bottom. The chemistry was, by 1972, almost a hundred years old. The equipment, which dated mostly from the late thirties, looked it. But the process worked, and on a good month it produced eighty percent of India’s soda ash.
I was twenty-six and had been promoted, that summer of 1972, to deputy section head — the youngest the section had ever had. Lloyd-Jones had taken early retirement in May, and the new section head, an Indian named V.K. Iyer, had asked specifically for me. The promotion came with a bungalow on the company colony, a fortnightly visit from the works canteen with a list of household supplies, and the assumption that I would now take routine operating decisions on Iyer’s behalf when he was elsewhere.
What the assumption turned out to mean was this. On any given shift the absorbers might run a degree or two off the optimum carbonation temperature, the brine feed might creep up or down by a few percent, the ammonia loop might develop a small leak that needed catching before it became a large one. Each of these required a decision: to adjust, to wait, to escalate. Iyer was at the Bombay office for half of the week. The shift superintendents, who were experienced foremen with thirty years on the plant, expected to be told what to do. The book — there was an actual book, leather-bound, called the Operating Standing Instructions — gave you principles but not instances.
I learned several things in that first year as deputy. The most important was that a decision made on the floor at three in the morning, by a deputy who had been on the plant for two years, would be defended the next morning in the section meeting by the same deputy in front of a section head who had not been there. There were no secret allies. The shift superintendents would tell you what they thought you should do, which was useful, but they would not tell anyone else they had told you. The decision in the log was your decision. The defence in the morning meeting was your defence.
The second thing I learned was that the writing-it-down was almost as important as the deciding. A decision recorded in the shift log with a one-line reason — “carbonation 88 deg dropping, increased CO2 by 4 percent at 0312, reading 92 by 0345, held” — was a decision that could be reviewed, criticised, vindicated, or quietly forgotten depending on how it had played out. A decision not recorded was a rumour. The rumour might be right and the decision might have been brilliant, but neither could be defended.
The third thing was that authority on a working plant did not flow from the title. It flowed from the willingness to make the decision and put your name to it. A deputy who consistently passed the call up to the section head — by ringing Iyer at home in the colony, or by holding the absorber at a sub-optimal temperature till morning — would be marked, by the shift superintendents, as someone who could not be trusted with the plant. The section head would also notice, although he might not say so for some time.
Iyer told me, in the canteen one evening when there was no one else at the table, that the company had two kinds of senior managers. The first kind made decisions in writing and were sometimes wrong. The second kind made decisions verbally and were never on record, and the company eventually found a way to part with them. He said this as though he were stating a meteorological fact, not giving advice.
I have thought about that observation many times in the thirty-five years since. It applied, as it turned out, well beyond the soda ash plant. By the time I was in the Bombay headquarters in the late eighties — by which point Mithapur was a different place, the Welshman’s old absorbers replaced by a computer-controlled section that did not require a deputy at three in the morning at all — the same principle held among the regional managers and the marketing directors. The willingness to commit a position to paper was the test of whether one was a manager at the plant level or a manager who had taken his career into the company. The two were not the same.
Mithapur in 1972 was a hard place to learn this. The plant was old, the equipment was tired, the night shifts were long, the canteen was institutional, and the company colony was the kind of self-contained world that sustained itself by suspending its interest in any larger world. But the lesson was the right one to learn early, and it was learnt in the right form. I made several decisions on the floor in those years that I could not, today, say were the right ones. I made all of them in writing. The plant kept running, and so, eventually, did I.