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Soon after Yumi started at an entry level position at a Hitachi Silicon wafer fabrication plant in Japan, the management was reviewing a proposal to close the plant due to a defect wait some 20% higher than the norm. Riding into work one day on her bike, Yumi noticed that a passing train caused her handlebars to vibrate. Armed with this Discovery, she suggested to the plant manager that perhaps there was a link between the high defect rate and passing trains. He was sceptical about Yuni’s theory, but he passed her idea to Hitachi’s corporate quality engineers, who conducted a vibration test, but came up empty handed. Yumi didn’t lose faith in her Idea. She did more research and discovered that some low frequency vibrations could escape detection, but still have a negative effect. Yumi convinced management to try building a moat filled with water between the train tracks and the plant. A group of employee volunteers took on the project over a weekend. To almost every one’s surprise, the idea worked and the plant was saved from the wrecking ball.

Excerpted from ‘1001 Ways to Take Initiative at Work’ by Bob Nelson