Started the day by visiting the nearby Harley Davidson factory in Kansas City. I’m not a bike person, but I appreciate craftsmanship and HD’s ability to gardner customer loyalty.
- all workers who drive HDs park in the very front of the building, there is a lot of pride in showing off their personal machines
- HD managers and factor workers and undistinguishable, they all wear identical clothing (mostly HD gear but it is not required) the only tie I saw was worn by a visitor
- managers and workers use the same dining area and parking
- managers and union leaders share the same office space
- plant workers in different cells are responsible for self-organizing and prioritizing duties
- all workers in each cell are required to switch off every job, every worker knows every duty of the job
- robots are cool, lots of precision robot work is performed, but hand-checked by humans
After the trip to HD, we hunted down a local bookstore (Prospero’s) where Jen found a couple of treasures and then walked around downtown KC. We found the library, which has a really impressive display of large books that decorate the outside of the library’s parking structure.
We also found a neat little market and picked up some fruit.
We headed back to the hotel and walked over to the crown center where we had a really unremarkable lunch. We took and hour or so out to check email and catch up with the outside world.
We headed out to Kauffman Stadium to see the White Sox vs the Royals. It lives in a sport’s complex similar to Philadelphia where there is a baseball stadium next to a football stadium, etc .. It was really out in the middle of nowhere with nothing around it. It felt a lot more like a nice minor-league stadium. Burhle pitched a great game and we had great seats, nothing could have been better.