"We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo Possum "We have met the anemone... and he is Russ." Bucky Katt "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate in physics
QUOTE: Originally posted by gabe QUOTE: Originally posted by dldance Calls that the senior management of a company should be fired after a significant event has happened are common. However, those calls are often made without consideration of who would replace them and how do you execute a smooth transistion without further screwing up the company. An orderly, planned transistion of senior management is difficult enough to do while keeping the business operating smoothly. Adding the emotional content of "you're fired" does not make the transistion any easier. Bottom line - a senior management change is underway at UP and in 2 or 3 years we should know if it is an improvement. dd dldance, You raise a good point; but, how many times does one have to drop the ball before the process is “sped up a bit?” Also, though your point can't be seriously disputed, might it be argued that this phenomenon is a bad thing in that it gives the people at the top that much more job security and lack of accountability? For my job, I know if I make certain mistakes, I will no longer have my job--and probably have a considerably more difficult time finding another in my chosen field. Accordingly, I endeavor to not make such mistakes. Do you think, perhaps, it would benefit corporate America as a whole if corporations would try to overcome this obstacle to firing? I am not arguing with your theory—as I think you are correct, I am just curious as to what you think as to my evaluation of the consequences of your theory. Gabe
QUOTE: Originally posted by dldance Calls that the senior management of a company should be fired after a significant event has happened are common. However, those calls are often made without consideration of who would replace them and how do you execute a smooth transistion without further screwing up the company. An orderly, planned transistion of senior management is difficult enough to do while keeping the business operating smoothly. Adding the emotional content of "you're fired" does not make the transistion any easier. Bottom line - a senior management change is underway at UP and in 2 or 3 years we should know if it is an improvement. dd
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
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QUOTE: Originally posted by edblysard Gabe, Your question about NS hireing might be better answered by some of the NS guys here, my railroad dosnt serve them, so I havent seen any of them in person. On the other hand, UP and BNSF are members of the assocation, and I can tell you that the BNSF trains hit the yard running hard, most of them had at least one newbie training with them. The conductors were happy with it, and for the most part, happy with the way their railroad was being run. The UP guys all looked like death warmed over, and were some kinda POed because they told upper management from the get go that a lot of the old heads were going to bail out. Both railroads had outside research done to determine if the new contract would leave them short handed, and both did internal surveys of their T&E employees... Both got the same results from the external sources, not that many would leave. BNSF listend, and guessed a little better than UP, their employees did the math, and figured out that right now was the best time for them, the employees, to get out of it, and they said so to the upper managers. UP's T&E said the same thing, but somewhere in the translation, UP missread what they meant. Part of that is the difference in the SP and UP cultures...UP is basicly a huge extra board, lots of guys excerise their seniority on a regular basis... At SP, above a certain seniority level, the guys pretty much owned their job, they had been there so long in that one slot that even senior guys wouldnt bump them, because all the real old heads already had the job of their choice, and no one wanted to upset the apple cart, everybody already had what they wanted. Along comes the 60/30, and bam! All the old head SP guys packed it in. I think a lot of the old SP guys tended to stick together..we had a lot of crews come in that had worked together for years and years on the SP, and even though the locomotives now were all yellow now, the crews were still Scarlet and Gray... They viewed the UP as bad guys for trying to change "their" railroad, and felt no loyality towards it...and when the chance to leave appeared, they all bailed out at once. One heck of a hard hit for any railroad, having that many of its T&E employees jump ship at once. It was so bad UP took anyone in their employee that held a engineers license and stuck them on a train. We really had guys in slack and ties running transfer trains and yard to yard runs down here....slacks, ties, borrowed work boots and a cheat sheet on signals in their hands. With brand new conductors on top of that. Not that the old SP guys were wrong for what they did, remember, down along the third coast, when you said railroad, you meant SP...they were, and still are a clan of sorts...they cover their backs and the other SP guys backs first. Now, had UP not cleaned house at the SP mid manager level, and had they kept some of the senior SP guys in place, the word would have made its way to the right people about what was going to happen. They didnt, of course, but a lot of that is due to the railroad mentality, "we will do it this way, period, and screw anyone who dosnt like it..."which, by the way, exsist at a lot of railroads, not just UP. Could UP have prevented the loss? Maybe...after all, when BN took Santa Fe, they were smart enought to hang onto senior SF guys, (we jokingly call BNSF the Brand New Santa Fe) so they kept a great deal of talent and continuity in the way they do business. Thats not to say UP is the only road with problems, to a certain degree, every other railroad has had the same screw ups...but because UP is so big, it stands out more. BNSF has had its share of lost business too... You know why I bought both UP and BNSF stock? Because if it moves west of the Mississippi, one or the other will, at some point, handle it. Thats a pretty big piece of the pie. And I am betting on UP getting, and keeping, a little larger slice than BNSF... Ed
QUOTE: Originally posted by LostMTKid I was not surprised to hear that the same trials, tribulations and woes I dealt with are still present at Uncle Pete's Rabbit Ranch (a clever moniker I picked up from a good friend at Pocatello). I chose to leave the UP for a multitude of reasons but mostly because I wanted to put a smile on my face again. I started out as a fresh-faced college kid; eager, ready and ever-willing to do my duty for Mr. Davidson and Country. However, as the years progressed, I found my eagerness and naivety being rapidly replaced with pessimism and indifference. There were many times that the satisfaction I gained from a hard day's (or night's) work could be shattered in an instant by a call from Omaha or Roseville. The entire management culture was something akin to a prison in French Guiana. General Grand Poobahs would come out from Omaha to talk to the troops about winning the good fight and espousing a kinder, gentler style of management. Then, behind a closed conference room door, the Poobah would proceed to reduce the local management (myself included) in to a pile of sniveling and shattered humanity. Then, they would proceed to take us out to lunch at the local Chinese place, all the while with a smile. The arrogance that Mr. Frailey noted knows no bounds and is somewhat understated. It varied from manager to manager in the amount they spewed but really, to survive, you had to act accordingly. You had to belittle and derate your fellow managers in order to keep them from using you as a mat upon which they would wipe their trademark penny loafers. (Penny loafers in a locomotive shop never made sense to me; I preferred steel-toed Red Wings and was the black sheep for it.) The management trainees that were coming out of Omaha were, by far, the worst. It was as if they took an intravenous injection of evil-and-nasty first thing in the morning; they were a strange bunch, to say the least. In the end, I had had my fill. The bloody conference calls, the daily semi-recorded pep-talk from the Grand Poobah in Omaha, the lack of initiative to make the company a better place and the careful maintenance of the status quo; they all came together to form a single straw that broke the camel's back. I had always wanted to work for Union Pacific since I was a 'little' LostMTKid. However, the UP I had dreamed of was long dead and perhaps nothing more than the idyllic dream of a 5 year kid that was carried over into adulthood. I left the UP in Sept. 2003 with no regrets. I abandoned my business degree and decided to pursue a longtime interest in the social sciences. I now have what I would selfishly describe as an all-around good life. I learned alot from my time with the Union Pacific but I would never return (i've had my collective fill of railroading for a living), nor would I ever recommend a management position to another eager and ever-willing college kid. Someone at the shop once told me that there are bigger and better things in this world than the Union Pacific Railroad...and he was right.
QUOTE: Originally posted by farmer03 maybe i've missed the answer to this somewhere so i'll take the lazy way out, but how could UP not have possibly known about SP's supposed 'bad' physical plant? wasn't anything looked at, toured, figured out, thought out? or did UP just roll over out of bed one day and decide "hey, i'm gonna buy the SP" the next day cut the check and later on that afternoon pick up the title. it just seems hard to swallow the excuse of 'no one knew how bad the SP really was'. maybe the answer is indeed the whole corporate culture deal. the cheifs wouldn't listen to the indians. maybe if someone has some extra time, could you explain the post-CNW merge meltdown? i wasn't aware of anything happening then. a preemptive thanks..
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