Some people rate a blog of their own.
DoCo's IainB rates an entire wiki!
Good Lord! That last post is gonna take a little time to read and fully digest.
So ok...I guess I've got my next coffee break planned.
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@IainB: thanks for mentioning W.E. Deming. I've pretty much read his entire corpus and found 99% of his thinking spot on. His "seven deadly diseases" of business still rings true despite them being so widely ignored.
The 7 Deadly Diseases
The "Seven Deadly Diseases" include:
- Lack of constancy of purpose
- Emphasis on short-term profits
- Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
- Mobility of management
- Running a company on visible figures alone
- Excessive medical costs
- Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees
"A Lesser Category of Obstacles" includes
- Neglecting long-range planning
- Relying on technology to solve problems
- Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions
- Excuses, such as "our problems are different"
- Obsolescence in school that management skill can be taught in classes[27]
- Reliance on quality control departments rather than management, supervisors, managers of purchasing, and production workers
- Placing blame on workforces who are only responsible for 15% of mistakes where the system designed by management is responsible for 85% of the unintended consequences
- Relying on quality inspection rather than improving product quality
I had high hopes for a while in the late 80s and early 90s when Deming enjoyed a brief renaissance in US management circles. Unfortunately, that got torpedoed when talk about the so-called "new economy" started gaining traction. That's when many in business started believing in magical worlds where success could be achieved via high expenses, no actual sales, and a work force that did whatever it felt like doing - and where "having
pfun" was considered the absolute measure of success.
W.E. Deming (and Eliyahu M. Goldratt) need to be on every would be businessperson's "must read" list
