Want to find the real talent out there? Seek out the overlooked people behind the scenes

by Kathleen Martin

There is a conspicuous hole in Fast Company magazine's recent list of the 100 most creative people in business, and it's the shape of the Confederation Bridge. Nowhere does the magazine's "snapshot of the range and depth of creativity across our business landscape" mention anyone like Patrick Snider.

Snider is a 28-year-old apprentice machinist at MacKenzie Atlantic Tool & Die in Musquodoboit Harbour, N.S. He recently won a bronze medal in the skilled trade and technology sector at the Canadian Skills Competition, a national event for students and apprentices. Snider created a finely tuned, small-scale replica of a span of the Confederation Bridge.

It's probable, of course, that the editorial staff of New York-based Fast Company has never heard of Musquodoboit Harbour, the Canadian Skills Competition, or the Confederation Bridge. The editors said they sought out "dazzling new thinkers, rising stars, and boldface names who couldn't be ignored." The list is topped by Jonathan Ive (a senior vice-president of industrial design at Apple) and Melinda Gates, and includes a host of media executives, marketers, writers, medical researchers, software developers, musicians, tech wizards, and all manner of designers.

I wish they had dug deeper. Yes, the magnitude of innovative, ballsy, critical thinking by the people on their list is inspiring. But don't we expect this from people in those professions?

Our understanding of creativity in business should encompass people like Snider. Deep in the 7,000-square-foot machine shop where he works, he is cutting and sculpting chunks of metal and plastic into perfectly calibrated geometric shapes. I didn't know much about machining before reading about Snider's win at the skills competition. His boss, MacKenzie Atlantic owner Matthew MacKenzie, patiently explained the crux of the business. A full-service tool-making and machining company, MacKenzie Atlantic has clients in the aerospace, marine, military, and oil and gas sectors.

In tool and die, clients provide a sample of the physical product they want mass produced. Then the tool-and-die team figures out how to make the machine that will mass produce it most efficiently.

In machining, Snider's specialty, the team produces a part from a set of blueprints. Sometimes they use familiar shop tools such as lathes and drill presses. Sometimes they translate the concepts into a computer language. Then they program a machine to do the work at great speed. "There are 101 ways to make the part," says MacKenzie. "No one tells you how to do it. The customer just wants the part that is on the blueprint to the tolerances they give."

Snider recalls the stress of "hitting the tolerances" throughout the skills competition, which was strictly timed. It is the tolerances that make machining truly artistic, like the restrictions of a particular poetic meter. MacKenzie says the general tolerance, or room for error, on a piece is 0.005 of an inch—about the thickness of a hair. "But we also work in tens of thousands of an inch," he says. "That's like splitting a hair on your head into 10 equal pieces and taking one of those."

Snider talks enthusiastically about "interpreting" the drawings he is given. The end product, he says, comes from his hands and his head. "If you set up a job one way, you may find once you start that the way you planned isn't the best." Part of what determines the best approach for Snider is considering how minute changes in his work can increase the productivity of his customer's business. "I'm a maximizer," he says. "I like to continually improve my efficiency. I want to find things I can improve that will cut time for our customer."

In his editorial for the 100 Most Creative People in Business issue, Fast Company's Robert Safian says that "recognizing the difficult yet invigorating genesis of new ideas can have a contagious effect on business practices." If you approach each project in your care as a blueprint that you need to transform into three perfect dimensions, what becomes possible? What changes if your definition of "detail oriented" becomes "a hair's-width" tolerance?

People who create the sometimes tiny, but never insignificant, pieces that make things work are too often overlooked. There is beauty and truth in those details—the mind-bending accuracy, the ability to make drawings come to life. It is this kind of creativity, as much as the brilliance of a Jonathan Ive, that makes the business world thrive.

Kathleen Martin is a freelance journalist based in Halifax. She can be reached at masthead@ns.sympatico.ca.