#547 Perfect Operations-Centered Maintenance: Frank Hess on Turning Industrial Firefighting into Strategic Leadership
Perfect Operations-Centered Maintenance: Frank Hess on Turning Industrial Firefighting into Strategic Leadership
An interview with Frank Hess, hosted by Niels Brabandt
In this leadership podcast and videocast interview, Niels Brabandt speaks with Frank Hess about a subject that many organisations only notice when something has already gone wrong: industrial maintenance. The conversation centres on Hess's book, The Decision: A Business Novel about the Origin of Operations-Centered Maintenance, and on a leadership challenge that affects productivity, reliability, safety, customer confidence and organisational culture.
The interview moves beyond the narrow technical understanding of maintenance. Frank Hess presents Operations-Centered Maintenance as a practical mindset shift: away from maintenance as a self-contained technical function and towards maintenance as an operational enabler. In his discussion with Niels Brabandt, Hess explains why organisations that remain trapped in a cycle of urgency, corrective action and internal firefighting need a clearer sense of purpose, stronger alignment with operations and a more human way of communicating change.
Why maintenance becomes a leadership issue
Niels Brabandt opens the interview by describing a familiar reality for many maintenance teams: constant firefighting, stress and the sense that the organisation is reacting rather than leading. Frank Hess confirms that this is exactly the world his business novel addresses. In maintenance, he explains, firefighting rarely means flames and burning buildings. It means urgency, corrective maintenance, breakdowns, sudden pressure and the operational disruption that follows when equipment fails.
For decision-makers in business, this distinction matters. Maintenance is often treated as an internal technical matter. Hess challenges that view. If machines stop, production stops. If production stops, customers, revenue, delivery reliability, safety and reputation are all affected. Operations-Centered Maintenance therefore sits at the intersection of engineering, operational strategy and leadership.
The Decision: why Frank Hess chose a business novel
In the interview, Niels Brabandt asks whether The Decision is a conventional best-practice manual. Hess is clear: it is not. He describes the book as an entertaining business novel about industrial maintenance. The fictional setting, Eagle Ridge in South Texas, allows Hess to show maintenance challenges through characters, tension, decisions and consequences rather than through tables, charts and dry process documentation.
Hess reveals that the working title was Eagle Ridge Firefighters, a reference to the maintenance teams in the story who are constantly dealing with urgent breakdowns. The final title, The Decision, signals that the book remains rooted in business reality. It is a novel, but it is also a leadership and operations book. It is designed to reach a wider audience than a specialist manual could.
This format is central to the value of the book. Hess argues that a purely technical book on Operations-Centered Maintenance might have become another reference volume that sits on a shelf. By telling a story, he makes the topic accessible to readers who may not come from industrial maintenance, but who need to understand how operational reliability is created.
Operations-Centered Maintenance as a mindset shift
A key moment in the conversation comes when Frank Hess explains the meaning of Operations-Centered Maintenance. Over decades of experience, he developed the concept as a practical model for improvement. Its central idea is not simply to maintain equipment because maintenance professionals are responsible for equipment. Its purpose is to refocus maintenance on operations.
Hess describes the shift as moving from the mindset of 'I am a maintenance person and I maintain my equipment' towards 'I work for production and operations, and my business goal is to ensure the right availability'. This is a major leadership point. The question is no longer only what maintenance does. The more relevant question is why maintenance exists in the business system.
For Niels Brabandt's audience of decision-makers, this is the strategic core of the interview. Maintenance is not merely a cost centre or a repair function. It is part of the organisation's ability to deliver. When maintenance is aligned with operations, it becomes a contributor to resilience, predictability and business performance.
Why now: time, experience and the need for a new format
Niels Brabandt asks Hess why he wrote the book now. Hess answers with unusual candour. He had long wanted to write a book, but his working life did not allow the uninterrupted time required to enter the necessary creative flow. After retiring from his corporate career, he finally had the space to write.
The timing is also relevant because the business world has no shortage of technical material, but far fewer accessible narratives that make industrial asset management understandable. Hess explains that he considered different formats and was encouraged not to write another conventional non-fiction book. A fictionalised business story, he concluded, would be more engaging and capable of reaching a broader readership.
A book for specialists, leaders and emerging talent
Niels Brabandt raises an important question for younger professionals: is The Decision only for senior maintenance experts with decades of experience? Hess rejects that limitation. While he does not claim the book is for everyone in the abstract, he stresses that anyone with an interest in the field can read it and learn from it.
This is particularly important for early-career professionals and team leaders. Hess notes that younger readers have responded positively because the book gives them an accessible introduction to business, industrial asset management and maintenance leadership. The novel format makes the subject less intimidating without stripping it of substance.
The main character, Palina Sawyer, is a young woman leading change in a male-dominated industrial environment. Hess highlights this deliberately. Maintenance and industrial operations have often been associated with older male leadership. By placing a young woman at the centre of the story, the book signals that the future of maintenance leadership must be broader, more modern and more inclusive.
From firefighting to change management
The interview makes clear that Operations-Centered Maintenance is also a change management topic. Many organisations know that constant firefighting is inefficient, costly and exhausting. Yet they continue to operate in that mode because the system rewards urgency more visibly than prevention.
Frank Hess's message is that improvement begins with the right orientation. Maintenance teams must understand their role in the operational system. Leaders must create the conditions in which teams can move from reactive patterns to structured improvement. That requires clarity, priorities, trust and the courage to change habits that may have become normalised over years.
Niels Brabandt positions the discussion in practical leadership terms. The issue is not whether maintenance is technically important. The issue is whether organisations are willing to lead maintenance strategically rather than merely respond when something fails.
Why decision-makers should care
For senior leaders, the interview with Frank Hess carries several implications. First, operational reliability is a leadership responsibility, not merely an engineering concern. Second, maintenance culture affects business performance. Third, storytelling can make complex operational topics accessible, memorable and actionable. Fourth, the future of industrial maintenance depends on leaders who understand the connection between equipment availability, human behaviour and organisational outcomes.
In a business environment shaped by automation, data, supply-chain pressure and rising expectations of efficiency, organisations cannot afford to treat maintenance as an afterthought. The more advanced the system, the greater the cost of fragility. Hess's Operations-Centered Maintenance approach asks leaders to reconnect the technical function with the operational purpose it serves.
The leadership lesson from the interview
The central insight from the conversation between Frank Hess and Niels Brabandt is direct: maintenance leadership is not about celebrating heroic repair after failure. It is about creating systems, mindsets and decisions that reduce unnecessary firefighting and strengthen operational performance.
The Decision offers a narrative route into that discussion. Frank Hess uses the form of a business novel to make industrial maintenance understandable, relevant and human. Niels Brabandt's interview shows why this matters for executives, team leaders, engineers, operations professionals and anyone responsible for building organisations that do not merely react, but learn, adapt and deliver.
For listeners and viewers of Niels Brabandt's leadership podcast and videocast, the message is clear: perfect Operations-Centered Maintenance begins when leaders stop seeing maintenance as a separate technical function and start understanding it as a strategic contribution to operations, resilience and business success.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
Maybe at the moment it's not running too well in your maintenance team, or in the organization, or with everything around that. And maybe you now think, "Yeah, that sounds a bit like—" because there's always a bit of firefighting, a bit of stressful work. However, the question is: how do you solve it? And we have an expert with lots of experience here today. Hello and welcome, Frank Hess.
Frank Hess
Hello Nils. Nice for having me. Thank you very much.
Niels Brabandt
Thank you very much for taking the time. And I'll get straight into the questions. This is the book you've written, "The Decision," a business novel about the origins of operations-centered maintenance. So, am I right, this is not a book where you just share best practices. This is a— this is a story around maintenance and how to do maintenance. Is that correct?
Frank Hess
Yeah, absolutely. You are surprisingly completely correct. It's a business novel, which means it's an entertaining nonfictional story about industrial maintenance. And I gave it a little bit a touch of a fiction— nonfiction book, because the title, "The Decision," sounds not like an entertaining novel, right? Or like a fantasy novel. It sounds a little bit dry, and the title exactly is chosen for that, to say, "Okay, this is also a novel about business."
Frank Hess
The working title, to reveal that a little bit, at the beginning was "Eagle Ridge Firefighters," for the entire— and for those of you who will read— of you who will read the book, you will understand why the title, the working title, was "Eagle Ridge Firefighters." Because the book plays in a location in the south of Texas, and the site name is Eagle Ridge. And these people on that site, they are always in trouble. And in maintenance, you may— mostly you call it firefighting, right? When you have corrective maintenance, something breaks, everything is urgent. So it's not about the firefighting when anything is on flame and a house is burning. It's firefighting from the urgency perspective. Yeah. And this is all about this business novel.
Niels Brabandt
Excellent. So of course I— of course I have to ask one question now. Because— so first, of course, I think— I think— because I know that there are other business novels out there, but I think there is no business novel out there regarding operations-centered management. Or am I wrong? At least I don't know any.
Frank Hess
No. No, that's totally right. And this— maybe you will find a few articles about operations-centered maintenance. That's kind of a model, actually, I have step-by-step developed over the last 25, 30 years. It plays not an important role, but it's a guideline in the novel where people start their improvement journey based on operations-centered maintenance, which means they refocus their focus from "I am a maintenance person, I am responsible to maintain my equipment," into the direction to say, "I'm working for productions, for operations, and my business goal is mainly to make sure that I have the right availability."
Frank Hess
So this mindset switch, this focus back to that why— the question of why. Why are we doing that? What are we doing, and how are we doing that? This is all about operations-centered maintenance. So I'm using that in this book to guide the story a little bit. But it's an— not a nonfictional story, so you will not find that much detail. So you can read that even as someone who has no clue about what means industrial maintenance.
Niels Brabandt
Okay, so it's not one of these dry books.
Frank Hess
No.
Niels Brabandt
Like, "Tell me this is the process, this is the scientific research, this is the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5." So it's not one of these dry books. It's— it's something I can basically read through and learn something from it on the way.
Frank Hess
No, no. It's a small nonfictional book. It has 300 pages, but each page will make fun. And it's a turn pager, I would say, when you start to read it. And it's not 300 pages of a fictional book where you— of a nonfictional book, yes, where you have a lot of tables and references, scientific way. And it's hard to get through, right? And you just look up sometimes, but you never read it in a whole, right?
Niels Brabandt
Yeah. So it's a real page turner here. So of course, one question I have to ask: what was your main motivation to write this book right now, at this point in time?
Frank Hess
There are several motivations behind. So one: I always had the wish to write a book. But, you know, like many people, so nowadays, so we all have not that much time. And once you start— I mean, you can write an article, because that takes you maybe 2, 3 hours. You can give an interview, preparations, all of that. But writing a book, that requires sometimes a little bit more time. And the most important thing: time without any interruption, right? To get in a flow.
Frank Hess
That was, for me, the case. So— and I had experience— so that's not possible. I was always very, very busy as a person during my business life. And now, since last year's summer, I'm retired. And the first idea popped up and said, "Okay, now I have the time to write a book."
Frank Hess
And the story was not there. I was always a little bit thinking about, "So is it more interesting for me to write a business model? Is it more interesting to write a fictional or nonfictional story?" I talked to some people, and every— most of the people say to me, "Oh, don't, Frank. Don't write a fictional— a nonfictional story." So that makes no sense.
Niels Brabandt
Another— another nonfiction book on this one. Probably there are thousands of books out there on that topic, and you're the 1,001st book.
Frank Hess
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then this is titled "Operations Centered Maintenance." It's maybe not a page turner and it just sits on Amazon and nobody will buy it. But a nonfic— a fictional story will be the first one first, and it's more entertaining, and it reaches a larger audience. That's what I believed at the final. And because it's accessible for any person, even my mother, just by the way.
Niels Brabandt
Oh, so that—
Frank Hess
She had a— she read the book and she was.
Niels Brabandt
Very important question here. When now someone says, "Look, I'm just seeing Frank here, massive career in maintenance, 30 years and more of experience," and maybe someone sits there and thinks, "I'm just starting my career. I'm a team lead. I have 7 years of experience. I don't even know if this book is for me." Would you say this book is really for everyone in the— in that interest area?
Frank Hess
I would not say the book is for everyone. But everyone can read it if you just grab the book by just— in the moment you see it, or you get a link to that, and you think, "Oh, that's interesting for me." It's accessible for you. You can read it. And even as a young person. I got some feedback from— I know one person who is also an author, and he was recommending this book to his daughter, and she was reading it and saying, "Okay, yeah, that's interesting. Now I understand what that means in business, industrial asset management. I like it." And I could imagine to do that. So because even for her, this book was in some way interesting and a page turner, and she was going through the book and reading it. Yeah, I think so.
Frank Hess
Especially for young people, I think it's interesting, right? It's positive. And most of the people, the characters in the book, are some young— the main character, Palina Sawyer, is a woman, which is also— you— this business is dominated by men.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah.
Frank Hess
Like me, even older men. And my main character is a young woman. And she is doing the change management. It's also fantastic. And it's a positive character. Yeah. And she's doing very well in the book.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah.
Frank Hess
Like this one.
Niels Brabandt
Brilliant. I think these are the perfect final words. You see, "The Decision," a business novel about the origin of operations-centered maintenance. Not a dry topic. It's definitely a—
Frank Hess
Absolutely not.
Niels Brabandt
Definitely a page turner. And you see, it's a read for absolutely anyone who is interested in any kind of work there. Because we all know— we all have machines everywhere, and maintenance is a huge industry where many of us don't know much about. So even for you, it might be highly relevant. When you work in the field, it definitely is.
Niels Brabandt
So at the end of this podcast and the end of this video cast, there's only one thing left for me to say: Frank, thank you very much for your time.
Frank Hess
My pleasure, Nils. Thank you for that great time. And enjoy your stop in London. Bye-bye.