Okay, so someone asked me about Pat McPherson the other day, and it kinda threw me back. It’s not a name you hear much anymore, at least not in my circles. But yeah, I had a go with the whole “McPherson way” a while back. Let me tell you how that went.
It was a few years ago. I was running this small workshop, just a couple of guys and me, trying to get a little custom furniture business off the ground. Things were chaotic, man. Orders mixed up, materials running out, deadlines flying past us like nobody’s business. We were drowning, basically. I was pulling my hair out trying to find some system, any system, to get us organized.
Discovering the “Method”
Then, my uncle, who used to work in some old factory back in the 80s, mentioned this Pat McPherson. Said it was some management guru from his time, all about efficiency and no-nonsense processes. He even dug out this dusty, coffee-stained pamphlet. No fancy graphics, just typewritten pages, probably mimeographed. The “McPherson Method,” it was called. Seemed straightforward enough: track everything, every screw, every minute, categorize all tasks with some weird color-coding system. Sounded old-school, but hey, what did we have to lose?
So, I decided to give it a shot. First thing, I got a massive whiteboard. Spent a whole weekend drawing up charts and columns, just like McPherson suggested. We had to log every single task, estimate time down to the minute, and then track actual time. Every piece of wood, every can of varnish, every single screw had to be signed in and out. It was intense.
- We had “Blue Tasks” for cutting.
- “Red Tasks” for assembly.
- “Yellow Tasks” for finishing.
- And “Green Slips” for material requests. Don’t ask me why green for requests, that was McPherson for you.
For the first week, it felt like we were actually doing something. The board looked busy. We were filling out forms, moving little magnetic tags around. Felt like proper serious business, you know? I thought, “This is it! Pat McPherson is gonna save us!”
The Cracks Start to Show
But then, reality hit. And it hit hard. See, McPherson’s system was probably designed for a production line making the same widget a thousand times a day. We were doing custom pieces. Every order was different. The sheer amount of paperwork – or whiteboard-work, in our case – was insane. We were spending more time logging what we were doing than actually doing it.
I remember this one time, we had this urgent order for a bookshelf. Simple enough, right? But trying to fit it into McPherson’s rigid categories was a nightmare. The wood needed a special treatment that wasn’t in the “Blue Task” manual. So, did I create a new category? McPherson’s pamphlet didn’t say. My guys, bless ’em, they tried. But they were craftsmen, not clerks. They’d forget to move their tags, or log the wrong color slip. And the “estimated time” thing? Forget about it. A tricky bit of joinery could take an hour or it could take three, depending on the wood grain. McPherson didn’t account for Mother Nature messing with his spreadsheets.
The Breaking Point
The real kicker came with old Mrs. Higgins’ order. She wanted a rocking chair, a replica of one her grandfather made. Super custom, super sentimental. We were already behind because of all the McPherson faff. I was trying to explain to her, using my color-coded chart, why her chair was stuck in the “Red Task Assembly Backlog” or something equally daft. She just looked at me, bless her, completely baffled, and said, “Dear, I just want my rocking chair, not a rainbow.” That kinda hit home. What were we even doing?
It reminded me of this one job I had ages ago, working in a warehouse. They brought in these “efficiency experts.” Changed everything. We had to walk certain routes, carry boxes in a specific way. One guy, poor fella, got written up because he took a shortcut to the loading bay that was, like, 10 seconds faster but not the “approved pathway.” It was madness. Productivity actually dropped because everyone was too busy trying to follow the new stupid rules instead of just getting the work done. This Pat McPherson thing felt exactly like that – all process, no common sense for our situation.
So, after about a month of this McPherson madness, we had a chat. The whiteboard was looking more like a confused abstract art piece than a planning tool. We were stressed, the guys were miserable, and we were definitely not more efficient. If anything, we were slower.
We didn’t ditch everything. The idea of tracking materials better stuck, but we found a much simpler way to do it, just a basic inventory list. And we started having daily morning huddles to discuss priorities, which was way more effective than any color-coded tag. We learned that for a small, creative outfit like ours, flexibility and communication beat rigid, old-fashioned systems hands down. Pat McPherson might have worked for some factory in the 70s, but for us, it was a lesson in what not to do.
So yeah, that’s my Pat McPherson story. Tried it, didn’t like it, moved on. Sometimes the old ways are old for a reason, you know?
