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54 The PCB Design Magazine • November 2014 DAN: Back in the 1990s when Bob owned a board shop in Canada, the company was go- ing through a bad stretch, as board shops some- times will. Yields were way down and they were losing a lot of boards for stupid reasons, many having to do with carelessness and apathy. Bob tried yelling and screaming, but, not being a naturally gifted yeller and screamer, Bob proved ineffective at this method. So he knew he had to try something new. He thought about it and came up with a bright idea. Knowing that for the most part his workers were inexperienced and not very technical, he decided to bribe them to do bet- ter work. He would offer them something they cared about, something they valued, so that they would in turn care about the boards they were building and try to be more careful in the future. So, he determined his team's true areas of interest and bribed them with booze, food and Loonies (that's Canadian slang for money, named after the common loon pictured on the $1 Canadian coin). I'll let Bob tell the rest of the story: BOB: Dan's right. Before I came up with the bribing idea, I had tried the "big mean boss" ap- proach. I used to gather all of the damaged and non-sellable product made during the month, label the boards with their prices so everyone could see how much they were worth, and put them on tables in the lunch room. Then, on top of each pile of boards I would place a picture of what you could buy with what that scrap was worth. On one table sat a picture of a Mercedes Benz; on another there was a picture of a ranch house and so on. Finally, on one table I just put the amount the scrap was worth, which worked BOB AND ME column by Bob Tarzwell with Dan Beaulieu The Key to Increasing Quality: Bribe Your Employees