Novaline - a family business

Fellow Radiophiles:

My dear friend and Novaline co-founder Edward Maddox died peacefully on February 24th 2016. He will be sorely missed as a friend and top class engineer/inventor. I had the opportunity to finally meet all of his six children, all of whom, including his wife, were directly or indirectly involved in the Novaline piano making business. Ed's son Christopher Maddox read the following piece at the funeral service to remember how the Novaline business was a part of his formative years. Christopher also told me that the children of the other co-founder David Ludwig also took part in the Novaline family business.

Thank you Christopher for sharing this.

Regards,

-Joe

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By Christopher Maddox - Novaline employee, son of Edward Maddox - Novaline co-founder.

March 1st 2016

The Novaline Piano Company was, for most of its existence, the definition of a cottage industry.  Pianos were built with the labor of families and friends, spread across the basements and kitchen tables of my family and that of my dad’s partner, Dave Ludwig.  Everybody in the family helped make pianos.  I started when I was 11 or 12 years old.

This sort of skirted the whole illegal child labor thing - we were paid independent contractors.  I was an 11 year old sole proprietorship.  We had to invoice the company for the work we did, and we were paid by the piece, not by the hour.  The company provided the raw materials as well as the machines we used.

Over time, I had a few different tasks in piano manufacturing, but the one I best remember was creating a small part made out of about 3” of stiff steel wire.  One wire thingy hung off of the end of each piano key, and when the key was depressed and let go, it moved a small flexible spring between two electrical contacts.

So we needed one wire thingy for every key, and each piano had either 64 or 88 keys.  That was a lot of thingies, but since saying “thingy” was unbecoming of cutting-edge manufacturers like us, they were known officially as “wireforms”.

We used three homemade machines. A small jig made out of wood with a small pair of wire cutters cut the wire to the perfect length.  Two bending jigs bent the wire to make the three dimensional piece.  The jigs were made of cut-up pieces of copper-clad printed circuit board, soldered together.  All credit to Dad.

I usually did this for an hour or two at a time; we weren’t making millions of pianos.  But I got good enough at it that I could make about $4/hour based on the piece rate.  That was serious coin for a kid in the early 70s.

Many, many years later, I was in business school.  One assignment we had was presenting to the class five important lessons we had learned at a previous job.  Most people talked about past managerial positions, or inspiring Fortune-500 type bosses.  I talked about wireforms. And these were my five lessons:

 

1. When you have a meaningful reward tied to results, you will figure out how do a better job.  Novaline didn’t pay for badly made wireforms that didn’t meet specifications.  I perfected a technique, carefully rejected incorrect pieces, and adjusted my process to improve quality and yields.  This is the essence of continuous improvement, and I did it without Quality Circles, Six Sigma or any consultants at all.

2. You are part of a team; you can’t leave the others waiting or wanting.  We couldn’t make pianos without wireforms.  So I made them even on sunny days when I would have rather been outside playing, or just being a kid.  When we needed wireforms, I was making them.  That sense of responsibility to my colleagues has never left me.

3. Machines have limitations; humans have to accommodate that.  The machines were not indestructible; on more than one occasion, I broke one and production was interrupted while it was repaired.  After that, I adjusted my technique to avoid stressing it in a way that would break it again.  Today, I do my best to take care of tools.  Like Dad, I have an inordinate love of tools, and my wife will tell you that I have a lot of them to take care of.

4. Sometimes outsourcing is smart, but keeping it in the family often has value beyond the initial cost.  Novaline probably could have saved a few bucks by contracting this to "Acme Wireforms”.  But there were benefits to keeping it in-house; they could monitor and control the supply better and develop their workforce.  I still consider this when making a make-or-buy decision.

5. Even when you are making something small, if it contributes to something big, you are making something big.  I didn’t make wireforms; I made pianos.  That was incredibly cool.  Today I’m part of many teams and I always make sure that everyone knows the larger mission to which they contribute.

 

Dad taught us all a lot.  He never wanted to be a manager, but he was a great one, intuitively, and created one in me.  His lessons to us were valuable in anything we chose to pursue.  But the most important lessons he taught us were: to teach ourselves.  To think through problems.  To always improve.  To approach everything with passion.  Above all, to work honestly, work hard, and that it is never, ever just about ourselves.

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