It’s the little things that count.

you’re important, highly educated, well paid, in a leadership position, you’ve got it! Nothing can go wrong, right? Well, maybe. A well oiled machine can still break down no matter what you do or plan for. It’s the little things in life that can trip you up.

For instance, I used to work for a large national retail chain, a department store making $375,000,000 a year in gross sales. So management was up to speed on all aspects of running the business.They were focused, good at their jobs. They had a backup plan for everything. Except something totally unexpected happened with unexpected impacts that totally kneecapped the business and brought it to a standstill. A major disaster that cost the company a lot of money and profit, and cost the general manager his job, as well as the district manager His job. Can you even imagine what little thing could do that? Let me tell you.

One department of the store was the warehouse/receiving dock. It’s where all the new merchandise came in, daily, in boxes, and was unloaded onto the dock. There was a warehouse manager, 2 or 3 warehousemen to move the merchandise from the receiving dock to the sales floor where the merchandise needed to be. Lingerie to the lingerie department, men’s suits to the men’s department. And there was one young man at the bottom rung of the warehouse department, in fact the whole store, who was responsible for taking the cardboard boxes the merchandise came in and break them down into flat cardboard, then feed them into the baler where they were strapped together and moved off the dock and loaded onto a truck and shipped off to the recycling center. Not a very glamorous job in a non glamorous department. One day he just walked off the job and never came back. The boxes of merchandise kept coming in, and the warehouse men kept unloading them but never broke down the empty boxes - it wasn’t their jobs. The warehouse manager never told them to do it, it was more important to get the new merchandise to the sales floor. He also never asked personnel to hire a new replacement for the box breakdown man. And so the empty boxes kept piling up in the receiving dock, day after day until the receiving dock was impassable, and there was no room to unload new deliveries of merchandise. Eventually it got so bad that everything ground to a halt. The warehouse manager finally realized how bad the situation was and spoke to personal to hire someone. None of the warehousemen would lower themselves to just breakdown the boxes and bale the cardboard. The store manager assigned department sales managers to come down off the sales floor and breakdown boxes and bale the cardboard, temporarily until a new man was hired for that job. It was ridiculous, the sales managers were mainly well dressed women, pretty nails and hair, well dressed, high heel shoes, not appropriate for dirty, rough hard labor. And they didn’t know how to use box cutters or the baling machine. So the work was slowly getting done, with injuries, cuts, and very unhappy management. And also, their work was not getting done. Sales dropped, meetings were missed. The corporate office noticed, and made an unannounced store visit. The outcome? - the store manager was fired, the warehouse manager was fired, the district manager was retired early in lieu of being fired. Eventually the problem was fixed and the store started making money again. But it just showed that the smallest most insignificant thing could disrupt a big operation.

The next thing I noticed was the Artemis 11 rocket launch to the moon, in April 2026. It was all over the news. The biggest rocket ever made. First manned flight in 50 years, since the Apollo missions to the moon. The rocket cost billions of dollars to make and operate. 3 male and 1 female astronaut in a small capsule for 10 days. The country, if not the world, was watching. And then, disaster! The mission almost had to be aborted ten minutes after lift off…. Because the toilet jammed and would not work. Billions of dollars of high tech sophisticated machinery, and it was a $1,000 toilet that was causing the mission to abort. The captain lept into action and fixed the toilet jam, and the mission was saved. It’s the little things that you have to worry about.